TY - JOUR
AU - Winters, Edward
AB - Abstract This paper considers the line drawn between art and the everyday; and some attempts to erase it by artists and art theorists. We look at the sensibility of artists who notice and make work from everyday experience. In modernity the conscription of everyday materials and objects to collage and assemblage develops this sensibility within an aesthetic conception of visual art. Looking at Duchamp’s readymades, we consider his claim that these objects are chosen with indifference to their aesthetic properties. We then consider the aesthetic requirements of a medium that directs response to works of art. Briefly, with our conception of a medium in mind, we deliberate upon Modernism, Minimalism, and Conceptualism; and the border between the poetic and poetry. We conclude with a lesson to be drawn from Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film, Paterson. Along the way, we cling to some of Kant’s insights concerning the fine arts. I Art is a way of life to the Bohemian, so it is difficult to separate art from life. They make it. They sell it. They barter it. They inspire it. They find it on the street, on the beach, in the Dumpster, in the stars. They burn it when it gets cold.1 A feature of some Modernism is its ability to look at small things and to make them wondrous in representation; thereby to breathe life into everyday objects or situations. Morandi’s bottles and jars, Euan Uglow’s Lemon, Seamus Heaney’s ‘The Conway Stewart’, Erik Satie’s furniture music, and Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson bring such life into being. Each, in its way, turns our attention to that which we might otherwise overlook. In so doing it invites an experience of savouring the quietness of everyday things: the look of bottles and jars that clutter our kitchens, seen as persons, brought together in some social composition; the colour required to render the two-dimensional painting of a lemon into a volumetric shaded lemon with a waxy, knobbly surface; the spluttering of a pen drinking up its first fill of ink in the shopkeeper’s hands; Satie’s ambient music, pitiful but soothingly mild, reassuringly insignificant—against, say, his contemporary Wagner and the immensity of his Ring Cycle; and the cyclical repetition of Paterson’s life as a bus driver. (He is also an amateur poet living in a small U.S. city, Paterson, New Jersey.) In this way art instructs us in our humility, the better to feel fit for our aimless wandering. And yet (…) It brings us to see what is delightful, even profound, in the everyday. Other artists have collaged, assembled, or otherwise constructed works out of everyday flimflam. Arte Povera, Dada, Surrealism, Constructivism, and Conceptualism have all proceeded by agglomerating found objects and images, recombining them into new works. In the process of assemblage, they have been stripped of their everyday function, thus revealing their (bracketed out) phenomenological aspect. These commissioned objects offer up their visual interest in and of itself. In 1912 Picasso incorporated oilcloth printed with the pattern of chair seating into his cubist painting, Still Life with Chair Caning. The American ‘outsider’, Joseph Cornell, fashioned assemblages in small boxes from materials bought in penny arcades or from second hand book stores or flea markets. No longer representations, the everyday objects were conscripted to the status of material. So, under this second conception, ‘everydayness’ was promoted from aesthetic theme to aesthetic object—the compositions might call for aesthetic control, but with freely available tickets, posters, bottle and packet labels, newspaper and magazine images, bobbins, glass marbles, test tubes, corks, and watch springs, the aesthetic of the everyday object now played its own part in the construction of images. The line between the visual fine arts and the everyday visual world became porous—permeable. Apollinaire would call “an internal frame,” … the projection of the outside into the inside of the work so that art and reality would change places and the observer would not know where one began and the other left off. This was the principle Apollinaire saw in collage, with its structural condition of mise-en-abyme: a hall of mirrors in which the real—the bit of newspaper—becomes the “ground” for a “figure” that in turn becomes a figure of the “ground.”2Christopher Green, expanding the notion of the internal frame, writes of the moment Apollinaire identified two innovations recruited by the Cubists to the art of painting: In the section [Apollinaire] devoted to Francis Picabia (b. 1879) he tackled Picabia’s habit of writing his titles on his paintings. They must, he said, “play the role of an internal frame, as do authentic objects and precisely copied inscriptions in the pictures of Picasso.” In that moment in March 1913, the poet-critic pinpointed two factors newly introduced into painting which were to have devastating effects: the object and the word.3In yet a third conception of the relation between the everyday and art, Marcel Duchamp’s “readymades” introduced us to shop-bought hardware that were proclaimed works of art by the artist, and were exhibited as such; stunningly naughty, and after a time of reflection, cunningly knotty. ‘Is this Art?’ Duchamp asked, and provided an answer: ‘It’s Art if I say it is.’ Modern theory built an edifice to house the institutional theory of art. In turn the institutional theory accommodated anything and everything declared to be art by anyone with a front door key to the institution. Art and aesthetics arrived at an amicable separation, often to be seen in each other’s company, but also to be seen around and about independently. The work of some artists became intellectual and positioned itself against aesthetic ambition. Liberated, aesthetics roamed freely, enjoying what it would, unencumbered by the confines of artistic tradition. II If art of the modern world climbed down from its office of illustrating religious and historical epic to make contact with the world, the mood had spread to include modern philosophy. “You see, mon petit camarade,”[Raymond Aron’s] pet name for [Sartre] since their schooldays—“if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!” … Now they saw its interest: it was a way of doing philosophy that reconnected it with normal, lived experience.4No wonder Arthur Danto would be encouraged to bring philosophy to bear upon the new art. His paper, “Artworks and real things,”5 focuses attention on the line to be drawn between the world and those parts of it somehow quarantined off into a separate realm: art. Art, according to the ancients, provides us with the world in imitation. As such, Danto suggests, art has been thought ontologically inferior; a mere copy of the real thing. Danto locates the original diagnosis in Plato’s famous attack on artists. “Bedness” is an ideal bed, the one and only bed, toward which beds-in-the-world approximate. Each instantiated bed in the world is a shadow of that ideal bed. An artist’s representation of a bed is a shadow of a shadow of the ideal bed. And so, “artists have sought a way towards ontological promotion, which means of course collapsing the space between reality and art.”6 If mimesis is the correct theory then we are led to a dilemma: “Art fails if it is indiscernible from reality, and it equally if oppositely fails if it is not.”7 The way forward “is to make non-imitations which are radically distinct from all heretofore existing things. Like Rauschenberg’s stuffed goat garlanded with a tire. It is with such unentrenched objects, like combines8 … that the abysses between life and art are to be filled!”9 That paper was developed into the first chapter of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.10 Rauschenberg’s combines belong to the second conception of the everyday in art. In the development of Danto’s thought on Duchamp, we move onto the ground of the third conception. There, Danto argues that there could be indiscernible objects, a number of artworks, that have to be distinguished not by perceptual properties but by their respective interpretive histories. He asks us to suppose nine indiscernible red squares. In each case the square is the same colour red, spread evenly across a uniformly sized canvas. We are to imagine, (i) The Red Sea, a history painting, described by Søren Kierkegaard; (ii), a portrait of the philosopher entitled, Kierkegaard’s Mood; (iii) a landscape painting of Moscow, entitled, Red Square; (iv), a minimalist painting; (v), a metaphysical painting entitled Nirvana; (vi), a fauvist painting entitled, Red Table Cloth; (vii), a canvas primed by Giorgione but never executed; (viii), a square red canvas painted for no particular reason but included for philosophical purposes; and finally, (ix), an artist, J, paints a red square and demands its inclusion in the exhibition of red squares. J says his work is about nothing—it is not a picture—but it is a work of art. These canvases are introduced by Danto as an ingenious thought experiment. It is meant to persuade us, (a) that there could be a number of works of art we couldn’t tell one from another; and (b) there could be works of art with nonart counterparts we couldn’t tell apart. Consider (a) the indiscernible works of art. We are to believe the difference between each work of art in the exhibition has to be located in a conceptual space beyond that of mere perception. It is not the look of the pictures which is constitutive of their differences as works of art, for they are, ex hypothesi, indiscernible. What makes the difference is the context within which each work of art is embedded. However, we need to know how the content of the supposed works, in each case, gets fixed to the canvas at which we look. How are we to ‘see’ that content? No detail that could decide whether this one is a table cloth or this one an expression of a metaphysical outlook shows up on the canvas. Is the sea calm after or before the crossing of the Israelites? How might a critic begin to compare Red Sea with Nicolas Poussin’s, The Crossing of the Red Sea? How does the coloured square articulate Kierkegaard’s emotion so we might learn of its specificity; so that we might empathize with the doleful Dane? What has the phenomenology of looking at Red Square got to do with looking at, from a certain position, Red Square in Moscow? In each case we are at a loss; because none of the pictures are plausible examples of what a work might be as a painting. That is, the proposed ‘content’ is found to be only accidentally connected, if at all, to the surface in front of us. The relation is irredeemably external. If Rauschenberg and his contemporaries sought ‘ontological promotion’, Minimalism, in fact, goes in the other direction—and achieves ontological relegation. Artworks become mere objects—for there is nothing but painted surface. The dissolution of the medium returns the work to mere objecthood. It is just a bit of the world; and the world is not enough. The flat painting really is an object—its ‘objecthood’ comes to the fore. The ‘painting’ just is a three dimensional object amongst others. There is no longer a kind of ‘seeing’ that might be called upon in order to ‘get into’ the picture. We now come to a consideration of those red squares we grouped under (b) above. We look at the red square, not considered a work, but included for the sake of philosophical reflection; and at J’s red square. J demands its being hung with the others as a work of art. The square is about nothing at all. These last two taken together are analogous to the ordinary snow shovel in the hardware store and Duchamp’s In Advance of a Broken Arm; and his Bottlerack, the first readymade. The ‘ordinary world’ red square is not, and does not become, considered a work of art. Seeing the red square and knowing it to be a ‘mere red square’ consigns it to nonart. It is not awaiting interpretation. However, J’s red square, whilst it is about nothing—it has no content—is considered a work of art because J’s status as an artist confers upon him the authority to conscript the square into the ranks of artworks. Why is J able to do this? Danto tells us, It cannot be simply because J is an artist, for not everything touched by an artist turns to art … a fence painted by J is only a painted fence. This leaves then only the option, now realized by J, of declaring that contested red expanse a work of art. Why not? Duchamp declared a snowshovel to be one, and it was one; a bottlerack to be one, and it was one.11Richard Wollheim responds to Danto’s gallery of indiscernibles by weighing up the nature of the thought experiment to which we have been invited.12 The essay is an exercise in philosophical methodology. We are reminded that there are two sorts of experiment, designed to cope with two sorts of concept. The first is to deal with determinate concepts, such as ‘red’ and ‘triangle’. Could there be a surface that was red all over and that was simultaneously green all over? Is it the case that all plane figures with exactly three internal angles have three sides? Given our concept of colour, the answer to the first question is ‘no’ and accepting Euclid’s axioms, the answer to the second is ‘yes’. However, thought experiments, of the kind Danto has asked us to consider, get us to scrutinize an indeterminate concept; and for such concepts there might be no definite answer. Rather, we should be looking at general assumptions for the application of the concept under view. Such assumptions and attendant expectations might have exceptions but these rare exceptions will not, in general, require the revision of the assumptions in place. Wittgenstein asks, Could someone have the feeling of ardent love or hope for the space of one second—no matter what preceded or followed this second?—What is happening now has significance—in these surroundings. The surroundings give it its importance. And the word “hope” refers to a phenomenon of human life. (A smiling mouth smiles only in a human face.)13We are asked to consider some phenomenon and to make a judgment upon whether it is, given our assumptions and expectations, possible or not. No conclusion is determined by the question as it is in the case of Danto’s experiment. What Wittgenstein asks us to do is to think of this extraordinary case and to see if that clarifies our conception of love or of hope. Elsewhere, Wollheim has leaned on the notion that artists work within a conception of the specific kind of art they practice. A preliminary point is that the fact that paintings and poems belong to the categories they do is not simply an observational fact—though it is also that … . The truth is that Verdi composed his operas under the concept ‘opera’: the concept was regulative for what he wrote, and I shall express the point by saying that it formed part of the ‘artist’s theory’ which governed his creativity. This point may be generalized, so that we may think of the artist’s theory under which each artist works as containing a concept of the kind of work of art he is engaged in producing, and this concept will necessarily include reference to the category to which this work belongs … .14For each art, I take it, there is to be some characterization of what constitutes its practice, and, by extension, what constitutes its appreciation. And if Wollheim’s preliminary point is correct, we should expect each art’s characterization to reveal for us the assumptions that should, in the most general way, set limits to the thought experiments we make concerning the arts. Concerned with the art of poetry, T.S. Eliot writes of the constraint upon modernity exerted by tradition.15 Each artist must fit herself into the history of her particular art. In so doing, she adjusts that history, renewing it, refreshing it and readjusting it. Her work is thereby situated. In painting, by analogy, the spectator’s willed experience includes attention to features of the paint surface in her achieving her aesthetic experience. Those features would be excluded from, masked out of, her experience were she to direct it toward another pictorial ambition. It is here we recognise Eliot’s claim that artists situate their work within tradition in such a way that spectators can appreciate their contribution. The viewer’s imaginative experience of the work places it within or against other works and thereby sees it as striking an attitude to those other works. It is as if each work gestures toward other works and that recognising these gestures affords one dimension along which meaning in the arts can be developed and appreciated. Wollheim and Eliot together provide ample resources for an account of the importance of assumption and expectation in our appreciation of works of art within a specified medium. J declares his square a work of art. First, J does not claim that what Danto must include is his painting. It is now submitted under the broader kind, work of art. Remember Danto urging that Duchamp declared a bottle rack a work of art “and it was one.” However, Danto now uses precedent in place of argument. If we can wonder (and we did) whether a minimalist ‘painting’ is a painting, then surely we can wonder if the readymades are works of art. Wollheim’s claim that artists work under a theory of art, the particular art whose medium they seek to exploit, makes no room for a work to be a work-of-art simpliciter. To be a work of art, on Wollheim’s view, is to belong within the framework of a category of work, where the category specifies the medium in which it is worked. This matters. Danto’s institutionalist theory claims that for something to be a work of art, it is sufficient for it to be elected and endorsed as a work of art by a large enough sample of participants in the artworld. No medium is required and, if that is so, works of art are untethered from their specified art kinds. It is a permissive thesis and was designed to be so. In the face of the readymades, art theory and aesthetics were challenged to give an account that would accommodate these new pretenders. The institutional theory relieves the burden of explaining features of the work that secure its candidacy for arthood. Instead, it focuses upon the external institutional networks that hold the artworld together: artists, collectors, professors, art students, gallery owners, critics, historians, amongst others. It is the conference of art status upon a candidate by some such group that establishes inclusion. Nothing more. The status of ‘work-of-art’ is structurally similar to ‘birthday present’. There is no feature of an object or event that makes it ‘essentially’ a birthday present. All there is to that status is for an object or event to be deemed so by the giver; and perhaps its recognition as such by the receiver. There is a social institution in each case that has the authority to confer these various statuses. III Recently, an attempt has been made to rescue Conceptualism from the clutches of the institutional theory designed to accommodate it.16 Dominic McIver Lopes resuscitates the view that all works of art belong to an art kind. By doing this he anchors our understanding of works of art to the medium in which they are fashioned. Our understanding, thus anchored, proscribes unsecured works that would otherwise float freely upon the tides of art. There are no ‘free agents’, no such flotsam. He tells us: The buck passing theory is correct if it is viable and more informative than its competition. It is more informative than its competition if it is no less systematically informative, if it better grounds empirical art studies, if it better grounds art criticism, and if it deals more effectively with the hard cases. It is viable if it answers … the free agent objection. While it is no less systematically informative than buck stopping theories, it better grounds empirical art studies and art criticism, and it answers the … free agent objection. Most importantly, it deals more effectively with the hard cases than does its competition. Ergo, the buck passing theory of art is correct.17It is a deficiency of the institutional theory that its one virtue, its carte blanche promiscuity, licenses just anything (and everything) to be a work of art. Having established that anything can be a work of art, it lacks the critical resources to say why one thing, rather than another, is elected to such status. We can still ask, Why has the institution declared this a work of art? Whereas the theory that each work belongs to an art kind brings with it a tradition in which the teaching of an art’s practice and the criticism of works within that practice follows as a matter of course. That our interest in art is aesthetic is explicable in these terms. We ask ‘What is a work of art?’ and we are told it is a work made with the intention to afford aesthetic experience. That answer does not thereby define what art is; it merely ‘passes the buck’ to each of the individual arts to explain how our engagement with the medium of that practice, with its traditions and concomitant expectations, furnishes such experiences. I cannot move from aesthetic appreciation of painting (through my understanding of its medium) to an aesthetic appreciation of music without first (and independently) coming to an understanding of the medium of music. Nothing about my proficiency in confidently grasping painting as an art will thereby furnish me with an appropriate level of expertise in music. Hence, ‘the buck-passing theory’. Lopes places demands upon theories of the arts. If there is a medium of ceramic art, we must be able to say how it is that Grayson Perry’s vase, Who Are You?, is a work of art whilst my coffee mug is not. We need a concept of medium that can allow the one to be a work of art in the medium of ceramics whilst the other remains a mere piece of the world, albeit a ceramic piece of the world. Lopes identifies this as the ‘coffee mug objection’. To answer the coffee-mug objection we have to say more about the medium than that it is to be identified with mere stuff. There is a difference between Nicolas Poussin’s A Dance to the Music of Time, and a depiction of a wanted man nailed outside the swinging doors of a wild-west saloon. The former is, whilst the latter is not, a work of art. Wollheim’s notion of a medium is, as we have seen, sensitive to this. Lopes argues that Conceptualism has the resources of an art kind. There is a medium it exploits. He calls upon the nonmaterial aspects of the medium of conceptual art but maintains that such nonmaterial features of the art are nevertheless acceptable as features of a medium. Duchamp’s bottle rack and snow shovel are then recruited retrospectively as prototypical works of Conceptual art. New art kinds are permitted just so long as we find them capable of sustaining the medium that develops around them. Traditions start somewhere. Why not here? Performance art is not theatre. Installation art is not sculpture. Photography is not painting. Yet each of these arts can be said to have relations with the established art mentioned. We find our feet in the new media because we know where we stand with the established media with which we are able to compare them. Conceptual art is developed out of the visual arts and is particularly clarified when seen against the backdrop of Greenberg’s Modernism. Thus, part of the assumptions and expectations against which conceptual artists mutinied was a certain form of aesthetics propounded by Greenberg. It is within the medium of painting that the scene is set for the new art. Moreover, given Greenberg’s formalist aesthetics, it is understandable for the conceptualists to regard Duchamp’s readymades as prototypical works in an art kind around which they sought to make sense of their new work. A pertinent worry, however, is that Duchamp claimed the readymades were chosen precisely because they had no aesthetic qualities: A point which I want very much to establish is that the choice of these “readymades” was never dictated by esthetic delectation. This choice was based on a reaction of visual indifference with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste … in fact a complete anesthesia.18In this case there is undoubtedly a visual experience of the work, but Duchamp claims that it is aesthetically indifferent with respect to its visual phenomenology. On painting, Duchamp has said, “painting should not be exclusively retinal or visual, it should have to do with grey matter, with our urge for understanding.” His turning against the “exclusively retinal or visual” is surely what the conceptual artists were doing when they rebelled against Greenberg. What Wollheim has had to say about painting is enough to support the view that no painting is exclusively retinal but that painting as an art is exclusively visual. That is no contradiction. But if Duchamp’s work can be seen to advantage as a prototypical conceptualist work in a medium which is not necessarily visual, then we must wait upon critical and historical evaluation to pass judgement. IV Lopes introduces the notion of an ‘appreciative kind’; and this ought to help us with our consideration of those things we appreciate but which we do not consider works of art. So, according to Lopes, the range of appreciative kinds is broader in spectrum than is the collection of the individual arts, which it nevertheless includes. Moreover, by attending to appreciative kinds we can compare individual art kinds with other art kinds, as when we compare the novel with verse, intaglio printing with drawing, drawing with painting and with sculpture. But we can also compare appreciative kinds where one of the kinds is an art and the other is not. We can, for instance, compare dance with ice-dance, the novel with biography, architecture with building. Appreciative kinds, that is, permit us to move from our understanding and appreciation of the arts across to our appreciation of nonarts; and we can have an aesthetic appreciation of the latter as well as the former. A warning note, however, Yuriko Saito has argued passionately for an expansion of our interest beyond the arts to include the stuff of everyday life, which is ‘a treasure trove of materials for investigation’. Some worry that the strategy is dangerous … . The minute it makes sense to compare something to art, it is tempting to treat it as art. The danger is that it denatures the stuff of everyday life to treat it as art.19Nevertheless, we can be clearer about what is at stake in attending to art kinds on the one hand and nonart appreciative kinds on the other. Art kinds require attention to their constitutive media. Lacking any such media, appreciative kinds, beyond art, are to be attended to, appreciated, outwith the conjoined restriction and permission offered by any specified medium. However, appreciative kinds beyond the individual arts stand in need of explanation that cannot rely upon medium explication. The various fine-art media were identified as the correlative bases for aesthetic appreciation in the arts. If a nonart practice could be provided with a medium description sufficient to require its products to be aesthetically appreciated, that practice should be, thereby, considered a candidate for art-kind status. (It might well be that ice-dance is promoted to art-kind status, or that it is sufficiently developed to be included in the art kind, dance.) V Kant systematized the arts, each of which had its own character and rank, with poetry at its highest. If anything unified the individual arts it was that each had the capacity to promote genius. Genius belonged only to the arts. The brilliance of scientists, philosophers, footballers, and statesmen was to be acknowledged as a different kind of achievement. The mark of genius is originality—a feature unrequired by science, philosophy, sport, and politics. The genius makes a work that exhibits originality but that looks natural—as if second nature to the artist. The work of genius sets a standard for others to follow—a rule which itself follows no rule. We can only marvel at such works, as can the artists themselves, for not even they know how the work originated. Kant, however, thinks that whatever the rule introduced by the artist, it legislates practice within that art kind. Within the individual arts, the genius works her medium to effect. Each art permits the formulation within it of an ‘aesthetic idea’. Aesthetic ideas quicken the mind. An aesthetic idea is a presentation that cannot be formulated using concepts of cognition; or else we could exhaustively spell out the meaning of a work and its beauty would evaporate. For Kant, the fine arts are a means of communicating aesthetic ideas. There can be no adequate conceptual content that will suffice to describe what it is that is given in a work of fine art. The work will always outstretch the conceptual content provided by any description. And so, in considering the fine arts we must look for their success in communicating aesthetic ideas in such a way that our minds are enlivened by a work’s ability to demonstrate a feeling appropriate to the matter communicated. And in this we grasp the rule by which a work can be measured. Our minds are ‘quickened’ by the work. Without contesting this claim for the arts in general, Roger Scruton has called into question its place in a theory of architecture. [It is not] tenable to think of architecture as a ‘fine art’ on a par with other forms of intimate expression, directed at those with an ear or an eye for their particular product. The aesthetic constraints on architecture, I argue, are part of an ‘aesthetics of everyday life’ which makes demands that are to a large extent independent of personal tastes and individual expressive aims.20If the individual arts are conceived as appreciative kinds, characterized by their individual media evolved to foster brilliance in the expression of genius, then architecture is an appreciative kind that forgoes such brilliance, it seeks not to foster new and original experience, and presumably forgoes the medium specificity that encourages it. Scruton, so to speak, relegates architecture. Rather than grant architects the status of ‘fine artist’, they should be regarded as journeymen, able to direct the building of municipal works in accordance with pattern books passed down through the ages—just as the law is bequeathed from one generation to the next. So, architecture is an art that requires no genius, for the purpose of architecture is communal and homely—requiring no novel experiences but rather preserving the conditions under which our feeling at home can be comfortably framed. Scruton writes of an “aesthetics of everyday life” but in fact he identifies architecture as an everyday art. Other everyday arts might include storytelling, jokes, photography, biography, travelogue, and memoir—all of which are capable of presenting their audience with aesthetic experiences, if not aesthetic ideas. Perhaps it’s the mark of an everyday art that it should have this profile. The idea of home, of well-observed manners, and of settlement all get to found the idea of a communal art. Unlike nature, such an art is entered into and not merely contemplated. We find ourselves at home in architecture; indeed, we make ourselves at home in it. Scruton has written on beauty and uses the meal as an image of such a project. Here he considers the hostess laying a table, The jug alludes to a certain form of life: the Mediterranean life in which rough wine is in plentiful supply, and in frictionless relation to both work and play. That is why the hostess chose a jug of naively decorated earthenware, and why she put it in the middle of the table, signifying the easy-going use of it in which we help ourselves. These may not be conscious choices.21It is a feature of aesthetics, as I have sought to describe it, that it is captured by phenomenological descriptions. There is always ‘something it is like’ to undergo aesthetic experience. In seeking aesthetic experience we want those experiences that are richer than merely perceiving the world. We want, in our experiences, our imaginations to be engaged. In her book, At the Existentialist Café, Sarah Bakewell writes of Heidegger’s conception of human life as being like the creation of a clearing in a forest, where we can become ourselves and let other beings emerge into that clearing to be themselves, to ‘unhide’ themselves. And she tells us, Death, [Wollheim] wrote, is the great enemy not merely because it deprives us of all the future things we might do, and all the pleasures we might experience. It takes away the ability to experience anything at all, ever. It puts an end to our being a Heideggerian clearing of things to emerge into. Thus, as Wollheim says, “It deprives us of phenomenology, and, once having tasted phenomenology, we develop a longing for it which we cannot give up.” Having had experience of the world, having had intentionality, we want to continue it forever, because that experience of the world is what we are. Unfortunately, this is the deal we get. We can taste phenomenology only because, one day, it will be taken from us. We clear our space, then the forest reclaims it again. The only consolation is to have had the beauty of seeing light through the leaves at all: to have had something, rather than nothing.22Everyday aesthetics looks as if it has soft if not permeable borders along its frontier with the fine arts. However, the appearance of easy migration between the two constituencies ought to encourage us to look for the aesthetic in all areas of life—as artists do when furnishing their homes. We snoop around the homes of artists, now bequeathed as visitor centres or museums and we notice how finely these artists have chosen the objects that make up the environment in which they lived and worked. Their furniture and their kitchen utensils take on a significance for having been chosen by them. VI It seems to me natural to think that art is more deeply rooted in human nature than morality, and I am surprised that philosophers make little of the fact that, though good art is more likeable than bad art, virtuous people do not enjoy this same advantage over those to whom we are drawn primarily for their charm, or their gaiety, or their sweetness of nature, or their outrageousness.23 Wollheim writes of the privilege aesthetics enjoys in comparison to the world of morality. The warm charm of the aesthetic trumps the cold glare of the moral gaze. But what does it mean for aesthetics to be more deeply rooted in human nature? After seeing Jim Jarmusch’s 2016 film, Paterson, I had the opportunity to talk about it with the poet, George Szirtes. I have edited these comments from his facebook page, The way Paterson’s poems work (they are actually by Ron Padgett)24 is that he perceives something or other he feels to be of value but doesn’t know what it is so he rambles on in the least poetic way possible until he thinks he is in sight of something that he doesn’t understand and thinks best not to understand, then he stops … . And there is, after all, something persuasive about [Padget/Paterson’s] poetry. What I am saying is that, at this level, the film is actually about poetry, or rather a specific kind of poetics regarding the way poetry comes about. Such poetics reject all rhetoric and all the usual poetic devices: they seek poetry in the fully colloquial and rambling non-poetic. They are rather Zen in this way and it is no surprise that the one surprising character to turn up at the end is a Japanese poet. It is about saying something like: ‘Hey, look at the way that brick is leaning against that other brick. Cool!’ I like it. I find it moving. Not so much in its form and shape as an object—it has hardly any interest in that respect—but as the record of a process whereby we discover spiritual value. The ordinary is the poetry, it suggests. It is what I wrote about in the poem ‘Allotments’ What we learn once—that life being ordinary is the extraordinary thing—sticks with us like clods of soil trapped in the treads of our shoes. It is the plastic bags and shopping baskets we carry to and fro, those bags of manure, compost and refuse, the well-worn crust of the mysterious that wastes itself and comes round again … .25It’s the transition from noticing the small things in the world to bearing witness by making art out of them, by stabilizing the experience in a form that has grown into an art in which assumptions and expectations help to fix our attention onto the framed object. There is, as Szirtes suggests, a continuum between a sensitive observation and its development into a work of art that helps to further shape our way of looking at the world. Paterson, the movie, operates within its own mis-en-abyme. The driver, Paterson, (played by Adam Driver) drives his bus through the city of Paterson (home of William Carlos Williams, one of whose collections is entitled Paterson). The bus has as its destination board, “Paterson.” The city is populated by various identical (indiscernible) twins—like rhyming couplets. Twins provide a human comparison for Danto’s indiscernibles. They look exactly alike, yet each is an individual personality. (There is more to each of us than how we look, even if the way we look can be genetically explained.) Jarmusch and Padgett were both students, more than a decade apart, of the poet Kenneth Koch at Columbia University. The connections between the New York School poets, including Koch and Padgett, and Williams go back decades.26The two Columbia students were at the same university at which Danto was professor of philosophy. Surely one or other, or both, would have come across Danto’s ‘gallery of indiscernibles’, or his twin texts.27 Among Danto’s lesser-known works, though, is a brief but incisive essay piece he wrote about the collaborations of Kenneth Koch. In 1994–1995, the Tibor de Nagy gallery held a wonderful exhibit devoted to Koch’s collaborations with a wide range of artists, including Nell Blaine, Joe Brainard, Red Grooms, Alex Katz, Alfred Leslie, Roy Lichenstein, Fairfield Porter, and Larry Rivers. Danto contributed a little essay, entitled “The Koch Collaboration,” to the exhibition catalogue. (Danto taught at Columbia University for many years, where he was a longtime colleague and friend of Koch.)28The recurrence of the sets of twins in the film points to Diane Arbus’s work. Several scenes are shot outside or inside Paterson’s favourite bar. The scenes could easily have been taken from Barbet Schroeder’s 1987 film Barfly, the biographical film of poet, Charles Bukowski. That film opens with shots of a number of bars around and about Los Angeles—each a small independent neighbourhood bar; each a place for congregation away from the working day. In Paterson’s bar a love affair between two customers is going hopelessly wrong, the barman plays chess with himself and complains that he is taking a beating. A pair of African-American twins, Sam and Dave, are playing pool. Nothing happens. And that is what is so wonderful about the film. Paterson unobtrusively observes, before making art of these unobtrusive observations. VII The whole afternoon, gathered in convivial loss, Time was served glass by yellow glass, siftings Liquid, long past a time of reckoning or romance; The jukebox the only nightingale, the tray of ash The only convent for a sacred heart; the morning Began the amplitude, noon was a second start, so By evening, as the less regular advanced to chairs And tables maculate with burns and coasters … .29The public house, the bar or lounge, is a place of congeniality and it is a constant resort of the aesthetic. In the hard winters following the German occupation of France, Parisians met in the bars and cafés to drink, keep warm, and converse. The existentialists gathered in Café de Flore in Saint Germain. Living in cold cheap hotels, the cafés were their living rooms. It is appropriate to think of these gatherings as salons. The French House in Soho, London, was the centre for the Free French during that occupation, de Gaulle holding meetings with resistance members there. In the fifties it was a short step, a couple of hundred yards, from there to the Colony Room, a drinking club for artists, writers, prostitutes, journalists, politicians, and assorted members of the underworld. Its original owner, Muriel Belcher, was a lesbian whose partner was a black getaway driver. She paid the unknown painter, Francis Bacon £10 per week to bring ‘interesting’ people to the club. (Wollheim once confided he had wasted too many afternoons there in the fifties.) I was once drinking in the French on a Monday lunchtime with a friend who was sipping whisky whilst pondering the Times crossword, when another joined us. I knew of him: Colin; a nice fellow but notoriously boring, and Michael, my friend, didn’t introduce us. “Hello Michael,” Colin said, “How are you?” “I’m well, I’m well… How are you?” “I’ve just got back from the weekend. I drove up to Ipswich; well, not exactly Ipswich but a little before, you know, you take the A37 out of London through Essex, out through Harlow, Braintree and Colchester. Takes a couple of hours. Then you take the B427 a couple of exits this side of Ipswich. If you drive along there for about seven miles you come to a roundabout with a petrol station between the second and third exits. You take the turning just after the petrol station and follow that winding road about two miles till you come to a little country pub, the George and Dragon, I think it is, and then a little way after that … .”On and on he went for about twenty minutes until eventually he began to run out of steam. After a little silence—Michael had been staring at the crossword for some time—he ventured, “And what about you, Michael? What did you do for the weekend?” Michael put down his pen, picked up his whisky, took a good slug, and drew breath. Then he started speaking in his buzzy voice through slightly clenched teeth, “I drove up to Ipswich; well, not exactly Ipswich but a little before, you know, you take the A37 out of London through Essex, out through Harlow, Braintree and Colchester. Takes a couple of hours. Then you take the B427 a couple of exits this side of Ipswich. If you drive along there for about seven miles you come to a roundabout with a petrol station between the second and third exits. You take the turning just after the petrol station and follow that winding road about two miles till you come to a little country pub, the George and Dragon, I think it is, and then a little way after that… .”Colin, by this stage, was looking both panicked and confused. “But I’ve just told you that story,” he said. Whereupon Michael said emphatically, “Yes.” He sighed heavily, and went on slowly and deliberately, “And now you are going to listen to it.” There is no doubt that much is to be made of Michael’s rehearsal of the ‘twin text’, indiscernible from that delivered by the hapless Colin. The retelling needed imagination, whereas the telling did not. It is enough, for now, to observe that difference; and to notice that such afternoons, away from the world of commerce and expediency, profit and speculation, performance targets and projected outcomes, are the breeding grounds of aesthetic experience even when they do not yet belong to art. Colin’s drivel is redeemed from fire by fire. We are drawn to intoxication, to art, and to its appreciation because the imaginative landscape is, thereby, illuminated; because, without drunkenness, art, and its appreciation, the world is not enough. Footnotes 1. Laren Stover, Bohemian Manifesto (New York: Bulfinch Press, 2004), 188. 2. Rosalind E. Krauss, “Dime Novels,” in her The Picasso Papers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 218. 3. Christopher Green, Art in France 1900–1940 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 128. 4. Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café (London: Chatto and Windus, 2016), 3. 5. Arthur C. Danto, “Artworks and Real Things,” Theoria 39 (1973): 1–17. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Ibid., 4. 8. Rauschenberg referred to his works that incorporate painting, sculpture, and assemblage as ‘combines’. 9. Danto, op. cit., 4–5. 10. Arthur C. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), chapter 1. 11. Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, op. cit., 3. 12. Richard Wollheim, “Danto’s Gallery of Indiscernibles,” in Mark Rollins, ed., Danto and his Critics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993). 13. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1963), paragraph 583. 14. Richard Wollheim, “Are the Criteria for Works of Art Aesthetically Relevant?” in Art and its Objects, 2nd edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 171. 15. T.S. Eliot, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, ed. Frank Kermode (London: Faber and Faber, 1975). 16. Dominic McIver Lopes, Beyond Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). 17. Ibid., 22–23. 18. Marcel Duchamp, “Apropos of ‘Readymades’,” in The Essential Writings of Marcel Duchamp, ed. Michel Sanouillet and Elmer Peterson (London and New York: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 141. 19. Lopes, op. cit., 121–22. 20. Roger Scruton, “A Guarded Response,” in Andy Hamilton and Nick Zangwill, eds., Scruton’s Aesthetics (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 298. 21. Roger Scruton, “Everyday Beauty,” in Beauty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 92. 22. Bakewell, op. cit., 299–300. 23. Richard Wollheim, The Mind and Its Depths (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), x. 24. I note in passing that Ron Padget translated Apollinaire and that a collection of Padget’s poems is entitled, In Advance of a Broken Arm. 25. George Szirtes, “Allotments,” in Bad Machine (Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2013), 79. The facebook page was sent to me by Szirtes after our conversation. 26. Kevin Crust, “Jim Jarmusch, Ron Padgett and the Sublime Poetry of Paterson,” Los Angeles Times, http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/movies/la-et-mn-paterson-poetry-20170102-story.html. 27. In Transfiguration, op. cit., Danto uses his favourite case of twin texts, the two Don Quixotes, one by Cervantes, the other by Borges’s hero, Pierre Menard, which faithfully transcribes some part of Cervantes’s text, and both of which are said by Borges to be a distinct work of art. 28. Andrew Epstein, “Arthur C. Danto, ‘The Koch Collaboration’,” https://newyorkschoolpoets.wordpress.com/2013/11/26/arthur-c-danto-the-koch-collaboration/. Andrew Epstein, Attention Equals Life: The Pursuit of the Everyday in Contemporary Poetry and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 29. Todd Swift, “The Afternoon Drinkers,” in Mainstream Love Hotel, (Luton: Tall Lighthouse, 2009). © The Author, 2018. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - The World Is Not Enough
JF - The Monist
DO - 10.1093/monist/onx038
DA - 2018-01-02
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-world-is-not-enough-r4atsAulzW
SP - 83
EP - 98
VL - 101
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -