Capacity

The History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism

Thomas McEvilley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781134946983
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Historia del arte

G. Roger Denson brings singular insight to Thomas McEvilley's writings. As an art writer he has explored similar territory, but from the point of view of a nomadic ideologist. His approach matches that of his subject. He addresses the issues of pragmatism, historicism, and cultural relativism. In so doing, he effectively dismantles the need to establish a master narrative. The contrast and agreement between these two writers constitutes a mapping of the terrain of contemporary culture. What sets Thomas McEvilley apart from other critics in art and culture is his direct knowledge of the newest art and theory, and his comprehensive understanding of classic art and ancient civilizations. It is rare to find a writer equally fluent in the production of modernist aesthetics, the anti-aesthetics of post-modernism, T'ang Dynasty Taoist painting, the doctrines of the Tantra, Platonic mysticism, and Aristotelian logic. This vast knowledge has enabled him to produce some of the best-conceived and eccentric

Section One
History As Context: Expanding Modernist Form

Commentary by G. Roger Denson

History as Context: Expanding Modernist Form

Essays by Thomas McEvilley

Heads It's Form, Tails It's Not Content

Seeking the Primal Through Paint: The Monochrome Icon

To many postmodern critics, the ancient issue of form versus content seems outmoded and surpassed by the more capacious issue of art's context. Defined as the intersection of cultural circumstances and environmental conditions variously giving rise to specific thought and production, context is thought in general today to determine how form and content will relate in each given case. This really isn't that new an idea; the form-content debate goes back at least to Plato, and something akin to the notion of context has been raised at various times in that legacy through the use of ordinary words like "intention," "circumstances" and "conditions," or special connotations of "history," "culture," "nature," and "the environment." But though these terms referred to the ways that an object is made or interpreted, they rarely if ever implied, as context does today, a relativistic determination of the ways in which form and content relate to each other. For form and content were thought to be governed by absolute and universal principles.

For the relativist, context has taken the place of the universal principle or the objective world. It is the arena in which all the people of the world project their subjective interpretations of form and content and receive the projections of others onto those interpretations. Context is the arena that links subjectivities, not in an objective frame, but in an overlapping and ever-permutating procedure that has no definite shape or metaphor with which to describe it. Context, then, is intersubjective: it is the product of the vague but commonly understood agreements of how to define the world and of what subjectivities overlap significantly enough to function in—and be represented as—conventional reality.

This view of context is, of course, shared by only a small minority of the world. But the importance of context as a mediator of form and content has been promoted and assimilated even in models that purport to have an objective and stable framework. In the objective model, context simply represents a slice of the objective world that is experienced in one way by some and in other ways by others; even here it functions relativistically, as it is the part of the world that defines, or is defined by, a local population at a specific time. The important thing to know is that context is generally agreed to determine the way that form and content become manifest.

In this assurance, at least in the world of art criticism and aesthetics, context has become our new conceit, much the way that the notion of universal quality was the conceit of earlier generations of artists and art critics. Because of the widespread recognition of context, many critics have come to assume that the old form-content debates have been solved or explained. I once held this view too, though now I believe they have been merely sidestepped. The reason I've changed my mind has much to do with the work of Thomas McEvilley, particularly that which sought to put to rest the old form-content debate waged by Clement Greenberg and the mid-twentieth century formalists. For McEvilley entered the postmodernist discourse on context by trying to show that the form-content breach was invariably the result of the projection of false claims for universality onto the artwork. And though he too believes that through an examination of the circumstances and issues surrounding the production of art the formalists' problem with content can be terminated rather easily, his hindsight allows him to identify and break down the problem farther.

The formalists' problem with content, McEvilley indicates, stems from the same problem that most modernists had with principles in general: they tried to root all specific events and behaviors in a universal ground that was unchanging and absolute. For McEvilley, the relationship of form to content cannot be explained by universal principles because that relationship is different from case to case and thus requires a relativistic and practical approach to the interpretation and analysis of each case. The formalist, meanwhile, instead of measuring the values that form and content take on within a given cultural framework, tries to find a science that will describe the precise ways in which form and content conform to the harmony of universal principles. This creates a slippage between the way that the components of form and content are seen working in the art and the way that the analysis of it offered by the formalist is described. While many observers sensed this slippage was there, few could explain it as well as McEvilley.

Quite simply, McEvilley redefined the terms in which we spoke about art in the 1980s and 1990s by denying validity to the notion of universal form and content. After bringing the issue down to earth, he placed emphasis on the changing nature of value judgments in its place: "it's a matter of the framework shifting around the act of judgment," he said of the value judgment in an essay entitled "Revaluing the Value Judgment" (included in his book, Art and Otherness: Crisis In Cultural Identity). Although he doesn't always discuss context as such, it is implied when he speaks of a consensus of opinion built up over time and persisting through history as a received wisdom, and when he opines that all changes in value are made in reference to this received wisdom. Seeing the form-content debate in the light of context, we see that the different ways that form and content recombine do not imply that they must reconcile with some guiding and universal standard of harmony, but rather that they will come to terms with the contingent values and functions established for form and content by general consensus.

To show how this mediating context works, McEvilley refers usually to history and geopolitical terrain. But the histories and geopolitics McEvilley cites aren't restricted to the West's Plato-via-Kant-to-Greenberg aesthetic model, nor to the Giotto-via-Manet-to-Warhol model of painting that most Western art critics cite. All cultures and calendars offer rich rewards in his analysis. For example, in tracing back the nascence of the painted monochrome, McEvilley doesn't stop in Europe, as many art historians do, say, at the point in the 1840s when Turner's seascapes deliquesce into effulgent color. Rather, McEvilley goes back to the Tantric paintings of seventeenth-century Asia (see "Heads It's Form, Tails It's Not Content" and "Seeking the Primal Through Paint: The Monochrome Icon"), in which the embodiment of absolute unity is represented with a single field of color. No world civilization or precivilization is considered unworthy of citation alongside the formidable Western canon of masterpieces and modern contexts so long as the comparison seems relevant and respectful to both contexts. In this capacious exploration, the articulation of the form's relationship to content is shown to be handled with astonishing variety.

As McEvilley's background in the classical and tribal literatures and productions of the world enable him to reread the formalist notion of pure form as a manner of "selective seeing," similarly, his background-in logic enables him to see through and dispel the modernist myth of "art for art's sake" as no more than a variation on the Law of Identity. According to McEvilley, the Law of Identity, which states that "Everything, insofar as it is anything, is itself and is not not itself," is a proposition which is true of the identification of all things. Hence, when it is applied to art, as it was by artists like Ad Reinhardt and Joseph Kosuth, the Law of Identity denies art's special status, a side effect that most of those who invoked it throughout modernism's tenure might find undesirable. The myth of "art for art's sake" may have become unfashionable before McEvilley scrutinized it, but his logical analysis sounded the death knell of the modernist myths of the primacy of form and the displacement of content.

McEvilley's recourse to history also makes him keen to the issue that there has been a succession of "modernist" and "postmodernist" movements extending back to die Greeks of the sixth century B.C.E. and probably before. From this inference, McEvilley proceeds to compare the golden ages of the Egyptians, Sumerians, Greeks, Romans, and Indians with the activities of Duchamp, Picabia, Schwitters, and Warhol. By conducting his discussion of artistic production within a span of millennia rather than a few decades or even centuries, McEvilley easily sees the omissions of the formalists— Clement Greenberg, Michael Fried, Sheldon Nodelman, Susan Sontag, Suzi Gablik, and the early work of Rosalind Krauss—who together represent the claim that mankind had never before the mid-twentieth century so perfectly realized such pure, abstract form. McEvilley wages a powerful argument against this claim, citing the producers of imagery in the Paleolithic, Neolithic, and Bronze Ages and, millennia later, the artists of Tantric and Islamic systems, as having successfully eliminated representational elements from their production; he thus exposes and weakens late modernism's implicit conceit that abstraction and formalism were the intellectual pinnacles of a linear and progressive Western civilization.

Even more formidable is McEvilley's argument that content is implicit in all abstraction, citing how the ancient traditions were comfortable with reading content in abstract form and that, besides being a reality in itself, abstract form is an alternate language about reality, McEvilley argues that the formalist criticism that dominated the 1960s now seems autocratic and self-aggrandizing in comparison with the more ancient knowledge. In fact, McEvilley charges that critics like Clement Greenberg were disseminating a cultural prejudice that had disguised itself as a natural law when in actuality it operated like an absolute, theological doctrine. From his lead we see that the formalist critics were themselves divided on the metaphysical status of art, or that the language they used to impel their arguments was inconsistent to the point that the metaphysical aspects of their thought were tacitly pointed to in the very writings that were supposed to refute art's metaphysical underpinnings. In one instance, McEvilley finds the discrepancy glaring in Greenberg's thought, and he accuses him of resorting to "theological diction" when, in speaking of art's formal status as an absolute, he is ladling his argument "with hidden transcendental implications."

From this point, McEvilley proceeds to show how the "blank" left by the "annihilation of content" is filled by "a thinly disguised deus ex machina," such as Sheldon Nodelman's "higher centers of consciousness." With great relish, he describes the muddled thought as befitting "a mystery cult or oracle," and likens Nodelman to initiates of the astral plane. His wry conclusion that formalist criticism is not on the whole rational criticism severely weakens their points, as they are all edified on the same rationalist principles used from the Enlightenment on to secure thought (vainly, it seems) from metaphysical encroachment. McEvilley goes further, perhaps inspired by Derrida's exposure of the logocentric conceits and inadequacies of rationalist writings, to say that, "In fact, much interpretation masquerades as description, and much avowedly formalist criticism contains hidden references that can't escape content."

Many who read his earlier work regard McEvilley's use of formal logic to refute the arguments of his opponents to be one of his most effective stratagems against formalism. Although logic is standard fare in philosophical discourse, it is infrequently used by art critics. But the true ingenuity comes with his logical extension of the somewhat flawed writings of Ad Reinhardt and Joseph Kosuth, in which he shows the two artists don't go far enough in their use of logic. When their propositions are logically analyzed, the consistency of their arguments break down. For instance, Reinhardt's dictum that "art is art and art is not not art" was (and still is) heralded by many critics as a radical conclusion to the formalist argument for reduction. But McEvilley adeptly shows how Reinhardt's "radical formalism" is nothing more than Aristotle's Law of Identity restated, which "applies equally and alike to all things in the realm of discourse." In other words, everything, insofar as it is anything, is itself and is not not itself (A = A and A ≠ −A), a law which does not confer special status to art, but rather "demonstrates that art exists on the same ontological footing as anything else." McEvilley then relentlessly shows that "recognition of the Law of Identity does not mean that we have come to the end of a line of reasoned thought, but we are now ready-to begin thinking." In other words, after logic, the stuff of life proceeds and relevant meanings are born.

Setting his sights on the most hyperbolic text of late Modernism, McEvilley proceeds to deconstruct excerpts from Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag's early lapse into formalist criticism. Among Sontag's careless propositions McEvilley cites: "it is possible to elude the interpreters by making works of art.. . whose address is so direct that the work can be . . . just what it is," and, "The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means." Here McEvilley takes the analytic realist's position that Sontag begs the question, for "just what it is" has not yet been established. Sontag's erroneous departure point leads her to form a faulty chain of reasoning, for she fails to see that what a thing is is equivalent to what a thing means; in other words, all things are what we deductively, and through the use of language, define them as.

To my mind, the modernist's wrongdoing wasn't a covert elevation of phenomenal experience to transcendentalist fiction, but rather the confusion of the subjective nature of such a transcendental elevation with an objective reading of its expression. From this conclusion, McEvilley seems to assume that transcendental experience isn't valid at all, and perhaps he confuses logical propositions of consistency with a proof for the nonexistence of the transcendental experience. But there is no known continuity in the subjective space of individuals, hence it is not even appropriate to use logic to represent it. McEvilley in other essays shows an inclination to believe that the subjective experience is the only experience (see "Penelope's Night Work: Negative Thinking In Greek Philosophy") and even that the transcendental experience is viable at least as an expression or experience of art (see "Seeking the Primal Through Paint: the Monochrome Icon").

Transcendentalism is not an objective or universal condition, of course; it is even doubtful that much of its experience can be shared linguistically and symbolically through description. But it cannot be argued that it is not an experience that is real to the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Preface
• Foreword
• One History as Context: Expanding Modernist Form by G. Roger Denson
• Two The World and Its Difference by G. Roger Denson
• Three The Self and Subjectivity by G. Roger Denson
• Four Reincarnations and Visitations: Modernism and Postmodernism All Over Again by G. Roger Denson