Art, Research, Philosophy

Clive Cazeaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317654810
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Art, Research, Philosophy explores the emergent fieldof artistic research: art produced as a contribution to knowledge. As a new subject, it raises several questions: What is art-as-research? Don't the requirements of research amount to an imposition on the artistic process that dilutes the power of art? How can something subjective become objective? What is the relationship between art and writing? Doesn't description always miss the particularity of the artwork?

Thisis the first book-length study to show how ideas in philosophy can be applied to artistic research to answer its questions and to make proposals for its future. Clive Cazeaux argues that artistic research is an exciting development in the historical debate between aesthetics and the theory of knowledge.The book draws upon Kant, phenomenology and critical theory to show how the immediacies of art and experience are enmeshed in the structures that create knowledge. The power of art to act on these structures is illustrated through a series of studies that look closely at a number of contemporary artworks.

This book will be ideal for postgraduate students and scholars of the visual and creative arts, aestheticsand art theory.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorandfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315764610

1

The theories that wedge art and knowledge apart

In his study of the history of the relation between word and image, W.J.T. Mitchell argues that the point is ‘not to heal the split between words and images, but to see what interests and powers it serves’; in other words, the point is not to heal but to historicize (Mitchell 1987: 44). The broader interest served by this point, for Mitchell, is the affirmation of a ‘dialectical pluralism’ wherein contraries have to exist by ‘structural necessity’ as the forces through which political and ideological conflicts are played out (Mitchell 1987: 207). While I would endorse Mitchell’s claim that there is no single, essential difference between word and image, only differences as they are driven by the political and ideological values within a particular culture, I would not want this view to be translated into the claim that we have to accept, by ‘structural necessity’, the contrary between art and knowledge. Without wanting to deny that art and knowledge are determined by institutional forces or wanting to appear naïve by suggesting that artistic research might operate independently of them, I think philosophy has the resources to challenge the ‘structural necessity’ that impels us to regard contraries as opposites, and can suggest frameworks in which contraries are arranged in more complex or varied ways. The point is to acknowledge contraries or differences but not to leap to the conclusion that they are antithetical or binary opposites. Difference can be articulated or pictured in various ways, with the potential for alliances, interminglings and transformations that are more suggestive in terms of implication and future direction than binary opposition. Some of these non-binary frameworks are explored in this book.

In this chapter, I set out some of the theories of art and knowledge that have been responsible for wedging art and knowledge apart. My aim is to draw attention to the small number of concepts and images that underpin claims regarding the distance between art and knowledge in the history of ideas. I disclose the tendency to think in binary oppositions, such as ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, ‘reason’ and ‘sensation’, and ‘reality’ and ‘appearance’, and show how the oppositions prioritize art or knowledge in such a way that the possibility of a relationship is always precluded. I demonstrate some of the problems inherent in the binary models adopted, and set out some responses from the history of philosophy.

The integrity of art

The first view I want to consider is the anti-artistic research position: the idea that art is distinct from and wholly other to knowledge, and that the emergence of research culture is detrimental to art practice. The central claim is usually that art or sensory experience has a unique, distinctive nature that thrives in and for itself, and any attempt to bring it into relation with a theoretical, epistemological or administrative framework is a contamination or reduction of the experience, or a threat to its production. I call this ‘integrity’ in the sense that art or sensory experience is understood to function as a self-contained whole with a distinctive nature that thrives on its own terms. Relationships with other subjects or domains are resisted in case its distinctive nature is compromised or lost. The anti-research view is usually presented in terms of art being constrained by academicization in the form of either institutional requirements, for example, the research degree as a new and arguably unnecessary qualification for those who want to teach in higher education (Baldessari and Craig-Martin 2009), or textual requirements, as in the stipulation that artworks have to be accompanied by critical, verbal commentary to be recognized as research (Thompson 2011). The specific, disciplinary demands of art, according to Candlin, put artistic researchers in the position of having to produce work that not only satisfies aesthetic criteria but also has to be validated according to the standards of academic knowledge-production (Candlin 2000a). ‘By moving the right to legislation from the practising artist to the academic’, she argues, ‘a different series of institutional norms, professional and pedagogical practices are brought into play. It is this overlap between art practice and academia that potentially makes students, staff and management anxious’ (Candlin 2000a: 4).

Theories of the integrity of art are a product of modernism. While only one of the theories (Dewey’s) addresses the question of art as knowledge, they all nevertheless affirm that art must be understood and appreciated for the way it operates on its own terms (Dewey 2005). However, this idea of ‘own-ness’, I think, poses difficulties for artistic research. ‘Modernism’ here is understood as the artistic and cultural reaction to the technological and social changes created by industrialization in nineteenth-century Europe and, in particular, the avant-garde or revolutionary nature that art develops as it seeks to counter the values and objects of mass production and to carve out an autonomy for itself in the face of these values. But while the quest for autonomy leads to the notion of ‘art for art’s sake’, it has the unfortunate consequence of promoting concepts of purity, internalism and self-containment in art, which unwittingly act against the idea of art as a force that has impact beyond its own realm. This can be found in a number of theories of modern art. Both the English critic Clive Bell and the American critic Clement Greenberg propound theories of formalism which disregard the representational property of art, i.e. its capacity to be about the world beyond art, and identify the value of art in its own terms, although the terms differ between Bell and Greenberg (Bell 1992; Greenberg 1992). Bell’s ambition is to solve what he takes to be ‘the central problem of aesthetics’: to identify ‘the essential quality in a work of art, the quality that distinguishes works of all from all other classes of objects’ (Bell 1992: 113). No matter what form art takes, e.g. pictures, sculptures, buildings, textiles, etc., he reasons, it always provokes ‘a particular kind of emotion’ which he calls ‘the aesthetic emotion’. The quality common to all kinds of art that provokes this emotion, he declares, is ‘significant form’: ‘lines and colours combined in a particular way, [in] certain forms and relations of forms, [to] stir our aesthetic emotions’ (Bell 1992: 113). This means that, in Bell’s words:

To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions. Art transports us from the world of man’s activity to a world of aesthetic exaltation …

To appreciate a work of art we need bring with us nothing but a sense of form and colour and a knowledge of three dimensional space.

(Bell 1992: 115)

The essence of art, for Bell, therefore, lies in the capacity of its formal properties of form, colour and three-dimensional space to stimulate aesthetic emotion. An artist who has to reinforce the emotional power of their work by representing an aspect of the world, and the emotions that are associated with that aspect, e.g. an execution (Bell’s own example), he describes as ‘feeble’ (Bell 1992: 115).

Representation is similarly criticized by Greenberg. The problem with representational painting, such as an ‘Old Master’, he asserts, is ‘that one tends to see what is in an Old Master before seeing it as a picture’ (Greenberg 1992: 756). In other words, one’s eyes pass through the status of the picture as a picture to dwell on the scene or objects depicted, when, for Greenberg, it is the status of picturing as picturing that is key. The value of modernist painting, he declares, is that it is painting that explores and tests its own condition:

The essential norms or conventions of painting are also the limiting conditions with which a marked-up surface must comply in order to be experienced as a picture. Modernism has found that these limiting conditions can be pushed back indefinitely before a picture stops being a picture and turns into an arbitrary object; but it has also found that the further back these limits are pushed the more explicitly they have to be observed.

(Greenberg 1992: 758)

While one can choose to view any painting, Old Master or modernist, first and foremost as a picture, before dwelling on the people and objects depicted, the success of modernism, Greenberg asserts, is that it ‘imposes it as the only and necessary way’ of viewing a painting (Greenberg 1992: 756). This, he adds, ‘is a success of self-criticism’ (Greenberg 1992: 756). His inspirations for the value of a practice concentrating upon its own conditions are science and the eighteenth-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Scientific method, Greenberg writes, ‘asks that a situation be resolved in exactly the same kind of terms as that in which it is presented – a problem in physiology is solved in terms of physiology, not in those of psychology’ (Greenberg 1992: 758). Kant is ‘the first real modernist’, he claims, on the grounds that his philosophy introduces the concept of immanent criticism, that is, ‘the use of the characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself’ (Greenberg 1992: 754–755). This is a reference to Kant’s critical philosophy in which he examines the scope and limits of our cognitive powers, and demonstrates the necessary application of reason within experience and the errors in thinking that are created by exercising reason beyond the limits of experience (Kant 1929).

Although Bell addresses all forms of art, while Greenberg concentrates on painting, their arguments nevertheless share a commitment to the autonomy and distinctiveness of their respective domains. As such, their theories do not deny art or painting as knowledge. If anything, their arguments could be interpreted as the reaffirmation of art and painting as disciplines, as domains with their own specialist histories and methods and, therefore, as bodies of knowledge. However, it is the idea of something working on its own terms, of ‘own-ness’, that is the problem, and that turns these theories into obstacles between art and knowledge. The problem occurs in general terms with regard to the notion of ‘disciplinarity’, and in more specific terms arising from the appeals made by Bell to significant form and Greenberg to painting as an exploration of its own condition. The history of disciplinarity is complex. As Shumway and Messer-Davidow indicate, the origin of the term is a confluence of meanings derived from the authority that is contained in widely accepted empirical methods and truths (as opposed to abstract doctrine or the writings of an individual), and from ‘the “rule” of the monasteries’ and ‘the methods of training used in armies and schools’ (Shumway and Messer-Davidow 1991: 202). While referring to a subject as a discipline implies the positive qualities of rigour and legitimacy, Michel Foucault’s recent analyses of the power relations that operate in knowledge-construction also present disciplinarity as a ‘system of control in the production of discourse’ (Foucault 1972: 224; quoted in Shumway and Messer-Davidow 1991: 201).

While systems of control might be active in policing the boundaries of a discipline, its walls are not hermetically sealed. In none of the above definitions is there the suggestion that disciplines are pure or self-contained or constituted by only one kind of knowledge or practice. Rather, disciplines are hybrids, with knowledge sets that may have very specific application in that disciplinary area, but which also draw their methods and definitions from other disciplinary domains. This is evident as soon as one considers, for example: the role of statistics, whose home province is presumably mathematics, in the physical sciences; an archaeologist’s reliance on the chemical analysis of artefacts; the place of visualization in science which, as several studies have shown, quickly undermines any simplistic art–science distinction (Elkins 2008; Galison 1997; Lynch and Edgerton Jr 1988); and the contribution that writing makes to all forms of knowledge, although, as Collini observes, recognition of the contribution that writing makes to knowledge-production is one factor that tends to divide the arts from the sciences (Collini 1998: lix). The problem is that, by Greenberg’s lights, disciplinarity is equated with singularity or purity. He needs an immanence or discipline-specificity in order to create a space in which culture can survive in the face of capitalism, and where avant-garde art can be something other than kitsch.

It is worth noting that a comparable claim for the integrity of the aesthetic is made by the American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey. The idea of art being distinct from knowledge is central to his aesthetics (Dewey 2005). Pragmatism seeks to avoid the metaphysical oppositions that lead to conflict or stalemate within philosophy, e.g. scientific versus religious values, truth as an absolute versus truth as a construct, often with the recognition that the application of philosophy to practical concerns introduces particularities that get philosophical thinking out of its conceptual dead-ends. Art’s contribution to life, for Dewey, stems from the fact that it transcends knowledge, but his theory struggles to explain how something transcendent can apply at ground level. In Art as Experience, he argues that, in the production and perception of art, ‘knowledge is transformed’ and ‘becomes something more than knowledge because it is merged with non-intellectual elements to form an experience worthwhile as an experience’ (Dewey 2005: 302). Whereas ‘reflection and science render things more intelligible by reduction to conceptual form’, aesthetic experience takes the ‘tangled scenes of life’ and makes them more intelligible ‘by presenting their meanings as the matter of a clarified, coherent, and intensified or “impassioned” experience’ (Dewey 2005: 302). The key element here is what Dewey understands as ‘an experience’, and why he defines ‘art as experience’ (after his book title). ‘Experience’ here does not refer to any experience, or to the empiricist notion of a discrete, sensory impression of an external world. Neither does it designate the Kantian idea of experience as a state of awareness that has been shaped and organized by a concept. Rather, it is a ‘distinctively aesthetic’ state with its own ‘integrity’ or ‘dynamic organization’:

I call the organization dynamic because it takes time to complete it, because it is a growth. There is inception, development, fulfilment. Material is ingested and digested through interaction with the vital organization of the results of prior experience that constitutes the mind of the worker. Incubation goes on until what is conceived is brought forth and is rendered perceptible as part of the common world. An aesthetic experience can be crowded into a moment only in the sense that a climax of prior long enduring processes may arrive in an outstanding movement which so sweeps everything else into it that all else is forgotten.

(Dewey 2005: 57–58)¹

‘An object is peculiarly and dominantly aesthetic’, he goes on, ‘when the factors that determine anything which can be an experience are lifted high above the threshold of perception and are made manifest for their own sake’ (Dewey 2005: 58–59). Thus, art or the aesthetic – the terms, while not synonymous, are closely linked for Dewey (2005: 51) – is an experience in Dewey’s heightened sense of the term because it involves an ‘incubation’ of elements that lift it above any interest, description or conceptual judgment that would otherwise contain it or incline it towards an end or purpose. The emphasis once again is on aesthetic experience existing ‘for its own sake’, and previous aestheticians are criticized by him for producing theories that ‘superimpos[e] some preconceived idea upon experience instead of encouraging or even allowing aesthetic experience to tell its own tale’ (Dewey 2005: 286; emphasis added).

But there is a problem for Dewey’s position. If aesthetics wants to tell its own tale, which language would it use? How does something that exists for itself meet with or adopt more general, shareable terms for communication without surrendering some of the distinctive properties that make it an aesthetic experience? Dewey distances his theory from those accounts that present the aesthetic as a form of escape from the world, namely, theories in which art offers imitation rather than reality (Dewey 2005: 286–287) or ‘induce[s] cerebral reveries’ in the individual (Dewey 2005: 302), but he does not explain how his own theory offers anything more than reverie in and for itself. According to Alexander, Dewey’s concept of experience is central to his pragmatism, and signifies ‘the shared social activity of symbolically mediated behaviour which seeks to discover the possibilities of our objective situation in the natural world for meaningful, intelligent and fulfilling ends’ (Alexander 1992: 119; original emphases). But most of the words italicized by Alexander, e.g. ‘shared social activity’, ‘symbolically mediated behaviour’, refer to elements that have to exist outside the experience in order for it to be shared or mediated, and so work against the idea of an experience existing purely for itself.

The theories from Bell,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The theories that wedge art and knowledge apart
• 2. What is artistic research?
• 3. We need to talk about concepts
• 4. Writing as rupture and relation
• 5. Insights from the metaphorical dimension of making
• 6. Does ‘art doctored’ equal ‘art neutered’?
• 7. Drawing with Merleau-Ponty: a study in the constellation of concepts
• 8. The aesthetics of research after the end of art
• Conclusion
• Index