Lets say you spot a shoe sitting on the floor in an art gallery. There's no artist statement next to it, no placard, no author's name, and so on. You might wonder if somebody just happened to leave it there. You might not guess that it was strategically placed there by an artist, nor that it's made entirely out of fiberglass and acrylic. If, after the fact, you were told that it was meant to serve as an art piece, your opinion of it might change. You'd return and look at it differently, wonder at its execution and...then what?
Here's where the food fight begins. On the one hand, volumes could be written about the assumptions and paradigms at work in this simple interaction. The artist could be seen as an insightful commentator on our complicated cultural ties to art. Or the artist could be seen as passé (just google Duchamp's "Fountain" if you don't know it). Or the artist could be seen as a practical joker. Or all of the above. What we can be sure of is that the debate itself, which I tend to call a judgment debate, happens entirely outside of the piece itself, even if the piece itself provokes, sustains, and finds all of its significance within that debate.
One might compare this phenomenon to listening to music that's meant to be played with lyrics. Or reading lyrics meant to be sung to music. Either way, the experience can sometimes feel a bit anticlimactic. You sense that something's missing. You may even feel the urge to fill in the blanks in your head. You see a shoe on the floor and you might imagine a narrative that led to its placement. My point is that you sense its incompleteness, that there's a blank aching to be filled. Otherwise, it's just a floating non sequitur. In the case of the shoe piece, the blank is filled first by the intention and philosophy of the artist as summarized possibly by his statement and/or those of a school or movement he might swear allegiance to (Concept Art, Performance Art, Experience Art, etc.). Secondly, that blank is filled by the debate over its validity which, in our fame and controversy-oriented culture, can serve as validation enough. What we can agree on is that the shoe itself is simultaneously important and irrelevant. Important because it provokes this much thought and debate. Irrelevant because the debate is more important than the piece, and because the debate does not change whether this shoe is hypothetical or real, whether it were red or blue, a woman's shoe or a man's. Essentially, it's the only idea of the shoe that matters. And so, if this line of thought weren't confusing enough, the shoe's irrelevance is part of its significance.
Before I get too far along in this line of thought, let me say that I think this is a perfectly legitimate form of expression, if it can be called that. It's tricky to think of what to call it, which of course is part of the point. There are many who prefer this type of "thought art" to any kind of physical or representational art. More power to them. It's philosophical, intellectually challenging, and can sometimes lead to some original questions on culture and perception. As Oscar Wilde put it, a work of art can be practically anything so long as it isn't boring. This is where I have to admit as an art enthusiast and an artist who works predominantly with representational forms, I have very rarely encountered a work of that kind that didn't bore me. I have heard people say the same about all representational art. So, grain of salt and all that.
Back to the shoe. What we can also agree on is that both the shoe's purpose and significance are not self-evident. You need someone to frame it, set it on a pedestal and give you the occasion to think of it as an aesthetic display rather than the accident of a lost shoe. You need someone to talk about it, write essays about it, and thereby contribute to the canon of judgment debates. Another way to say this is that the statement, the criticism, the words, tend to matter much more than the piece.
My argument is that much of today's artwork is designed to work only in conjunction with its treatises, manifestos, artist's statements, and its schools of criticism. Without all that stuff, the work loses most if not all of its power. In that way, it’s fair to say that such literature is actually a part of the artwork itself, if not its centerpiece. This brings me back to the defense of representational art, which, as the argument goes, speaks for itself precisely because its purpose and its effect remains relatively the same whether there are any accompanying articles, statements, or manifestos. It has the air of self-sufficiency. It’s said that the purpose and significance of a Vermeer, for example, is self-evident precisely because it enchants us. You don’t have to be briefed on Vermeer, his background, philosophy, or aesthetics in order to appreciate his work. All that stuff is icing on the cake, so to speak.
But I want to examine a few assumptions here, including my own. First of all, these ideas of "defense" and "debate" imply that there is some sort of war over how we view art and, by extension, what kinds of art get seen. While I deeply understand what's at stake in these debates, ie the livelihood of many artists, I wonder if debate is even necessary, given what seems to be at the heart of these sort of debates. I see two very opposed traditions: Fashion on the one hand, and Ought on the other.
The Fashion tradition encourages us to view history as a discrete series of epochs. It also tends to view history progressively, describing it as a positive movement ever upward, exhausting each epoch and its defining characteristics and then moving on to bigger, better ones. We saw this sort of thinking very often at the turn of the century, and also in the postwar era. Bolstered by innovations and discoveries in industry and science, the Make It New ethos has, at worst, shown great interest in abandoning traditions and rejecting so-called received wisdom. The best of this was revolutionary, but the majority of it privileged mere novelty.
The Ought tradition holds that there are absolute ways in which one should and shouldn't view and create art. This relates to notions of usefulness and personal betterment. It also connotes a "We're all in this together" philosophy that tends to resist a diversity of opinion and expression. It also contains a belief in objective truths. Any argument that states that one style or approach of art is somehow more worthy of our attention than others contains some of this Ought-style thinking.
So those who decry representational art often do so because it's passé and must have exhausted its objective usefulness. To a strict anti-representationalist, making and viewing new representational art is sort of like attending the Medieval Fair. It's fun to play dress-up but really there's nothing to experience or learn that hasn't already been done and surpassed by centuries of progress. One of the proofs of this is the fact that there isn't as much to say about a contemporary realist painting, at least not as much as there would be to say about a staged shoe on the floor of an art gallery. This is particularly true if, as it is with most representational art, the goal is something so unintellectual as Beauty. If we are to better ourselves, we ought to be doing more worthwhile things with our time. The trouble painters find with this approach is that it becomes increasingly difficult to find novel things to say in your artist statement as well as in your criticism, and, by extension, it becomes more difficult to create novel works of art. I'm using the word "novel" pejoratively here because newness alone is not a virtue. This does not mean that newness is a bad thing, per se. It can be quite refreshing, even revelatory. But without real content, it is merely, as I put it, a novelty. One of the several reasons some say that painting is dead is that if you're constantly in search of the new at the expense of the good, eventually even art itself will seem passé.
What are the assumptions of representational artists? As one of them, I've had to struggle a little to draw them out--a fact that, I would imagine, bolsters the arguments of many non-representationalists, namely that we are engaging in a thoughtless practice, one that does not challenge preconceptions. I argue, however, that the issue is not a lack of thought, it's this art "speaking for itself" business. Not only does it speak for itself but it speaks its own language, one we intuit but for which much is lost in translation. So, in light of that, a better question might be, if (good) representational art speaks for (justifies) itself, what is the nature of its language?
We can be sure that this language is not one that can't reflect the traditions mentioned earlier, Fashion and Ought. Representational art has its fads too, as well as its dogmatic adherents. In a larger sense, referring to intent, we can also say that this language is dedicated to Beauty and Pathos. In Beauty, we can add a very long list of subsets, ranging from "rich" to "joyful" to "haunting" and even "disturbing." There's a lot I can say about what's Beautiful but I'll leave it at that for now and follow up in a later post. Suffice it to say that I distinguish Beauty, which can refer even to a gruesome slaughter house, from mere "Prettiness," which is a facile and ineffective symbol for what amounts to a marriage of convenience between Beauty and Goodness. Though both are subjective, like Beauty, we know Prettiness when we see it.
Furthermore, I'd have to say that I've never seen art that I considered to be excellent that wasn't in some way beautiful. I know that sort of comment makes many artists and enthusiasts cringe but I'll say it again: it's Beauty I'm interested in, not Prettiness. If you're inclined to believe that Beauty's been done to death and it's time to move onto other topics in painting, my answer would be to question whether Beauty is in fact a "topic" in art at all, as opposed to a fundamental part of what makes art tick. This isn't the only way to look at art, of course, but I'm hard pressed to see value in art that doesn't in some way address it. In that light, I'd have to say that is where my "Ought" lies. I do believe in Beauty as an objective truth. Though we do not view and interpret it universally, eye of the beholder notwithstanding, I do believe Beauty is a pervasive and ever-present force in all good artistic expression. Even its absence is a statement. However, I do grant that there are many who, while they may recognize Beauty, do not value it, or at least do not see it as very important, and see other kinds of expressions as more worthwhile. I have no problem with that.
Pathos. Strictly speaking, it's the power to evoke compassion in some way. A better word than compassion in this case would be empathy. When you paint a portrait of someone, you intend for your audience to feel some emotional connection with the face you are depicting. This doesn't mean you like that face, so to speak, but it evokes some understanding.
When it comes to Pathos in representational art I'm thinking of something similar to what Coleridge referred to in the Biographia Literaria, when envisioning a work that would "transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith." There's much to unpack in that. Essentially, a bit of realism captures your audience's attention and, in turn, their empathy. People are more likely to open themselves to an experience if they feel that there is a "human interest and a semblance of truth" in it. And when they are open, an artist is more likely to elicit a profound emotional response from her audience. (Note, in this mention of truth, the echo of my earlier description of the Ought tradition. Yes, even Pathos is complicated!)
It's this particular approach to Pathos that I believe gets at the heart
of this idea that a representational work of art speaks for itself. It
does not approach us intellectually or linguistically, per se. It
approaches the imagination through our suspension of disbelief, which
is to say that it accesses our own creative faculty, so that it is as though we
were re-creating an actual experience. To indulge in a mystical term, it
does its work on us by way of enchantment.
While I'm very secular in my thinking I do have to wonder at times whether the decline in popularity of representational art has something to do with the rise of secularism. After all, Coleridge made his reference to the suspension of disbelief as a means to deal with an audience that was increasingly disenchanted with magic and characters like goblins and fairies. The new age had taken hold and it was a cynical one. One wonders if enchantment itself has become unpopular in the venues of "serious" art.
On a side note, I'd like to mention that labels like "representational art" and "abstract art" can get very messy very fast. I have used them here for the purposes of distinguishing art that speaks for itself and art that does not. But this is not to suggest that only representational art has this quality of speaking for itself. And it is also unwise to assume that all representational art speaks for itself.
For instance, if I took a printout of one of those automatic photos that get taken when someone runs a red light, and I put that up on the wall and called it art, one could argue that that was representational because it depicts seen realities. The difference between that and a Vermeer, however, would be very simple. In the traffic photo, very few if any subjective choices were made. In that way, it's quite inhuman. We do not detect enough here, typically, to cause a suspension of disbelief. In that way, it's more significant as an idea than as an object, specifically because of the questions and judgment debates it brings up. Similarly, photographers have taken pictures of fine works of art and put them up on the wall just to challenge beliefs about authorship and so on. This is not a shockingly unusual thing. Again, though a representational image is on the wall, its function is still more that of a "thought piece" than anything else.
Conversely, a close-up photo of the inside of a green pepper might seem to be abstract. But because the function of the photo could be to capture and interpret lights and darks, curvature, convergences, soft and hard edges in such a way that they all seem almost sensual and dreamlike, then the photo is more significant as an visual object. In this light, it's abundantly clear that Beauty in art does not belong solely to the realm of representational art. For instance, there's something about Rothko's paintings, simple as they are, that is pleasing to the eye, particularly about the ragged, smoky edges between colors. So we must acknowledge that the world of non-representational art is not homogenous and that neither is the world of representational art. I'd argue that much finer distinctions can be made when one speaks of art languages.
When perspective was first employed in Western Art it was seen as a cheap parlor trick, a funny sort of illusion. Some may refer to much of representational art today as a parlor trick, a primitive predecessor to photography. The flaw in this argument is in the assumption that the intent of at least most representational art is simply to represent (as in reproduce) a seen reality, whereas its primary function is actually not reproductive, it's interpretive. Take John Singer Sargent as an example. Aside from being one of the greatest figure and portrait artists, he was also a very accurate draftsman. He had the ability to create an image that was as precisely realistic as any photograph. But there are no cameras or software, as of yet, that can create an original Sargentesque painting. The difference is in the very subjective and personal choices he made in each stroke, as well as the choices he made in what to show and what to obscure. Photographers make similar choices and when they do it is not mechanical or objective. It is interpretive. While there are many guidelines and rules of thumb that both photographers and representational artists heed, their choices, ultimately, tend to be idiosyncratic, arising out their subjectivity. It is that very subjectivity that we are after, as communicated to us through the language of art.
