Review of Daniel McClean, ed., The Trials of Art

The Art Book, 2008

2018

Art is always about "something hidden. " But does it help us connect with that hidden something? I think it moves us away from it. During the first million or so years as reflective beings, humans seem to have created no art. As Jameson put it, art had no place in that "unfallen social reality" because there was no need for it. Though tools were fashioned with an astonishing economy of effort and perfection of form, the old cliche about the aesthetic impulse as one of the irreducible components of the human mind is invalid. The oldest enduring works of art are hand-prints, produced by pressure or blown pigmenta dramatic token of direct impress on nature. Later in the Upper Paleolithic era, about 30,000 years ago, commenced the rather sudden appearance of the cave art associated with names like Altamira and Lascaux. These images of animals possess an often breathtaking vibrancy and naturalism, though concurrent sculpture, such as the widely-found "venus" statuettes of women, was quite stylized. Perhaps this indicates that domestication of people was to precede domestication of nature. Significantly, the "sympathetic magic" or hunting theory of earliest art is now waning in the light of evidence that nature was bountiful rather than threatening. The veritable explosion of art at this time bespeaks an anxiety not felt before: in Worringer's words, "creation in order to subdue the torment of perception. " Here is the appearance of the symbolic, as a moment of discontent. It was a social anxiety; people felt something precious slipping away. The rapid development of the earliest ritual or ceremony parallels the birth of art, and we are reminded of the earliest ritual re-enactments of the moment of "the beginning, " the primordial paradise of the timeless present. Pictorial representation roused the belief in controlling loss, the belief in coercion itself. And we see the earliest evidence of symbolic division, as with the half-human, half-beast stone faces at El Juyo. The world is divided into opposing forces, by which binary distinction the contrast of culture and nature begins and a productionist, hierarchical society is perhaps already prefigured. The perceptual order itself, as a unity, starts to break down in reflection of an increasingly complex social order. A hierarchy of senses, with the visual steadily more separate from the others and seeking its completion in artificial images such as cave paintings, moves to replace the full simultaneity of sensual gratification. Lévi-Strauss discovered, to his amazement, a tribal people that had been able to see Venus in daytime; but not only were our faculties once so very

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2015

ABSTRACT This thesis is based on my extensive practice in making and teaching art, and consists of my theoretical reflections concerning what I believe to be fundamentally true about what art, artmaking and teaching art are. Those considerations are backed up by- and make reference throughout the text to my own works, and also in annex to a book representing a large portion of my artistic production to date, including articles about that work by recognized authorities in my field. A selection of some recent works will also be exhibited during the discussion of the thesis. Making art, understanding its history, or engaging in theory about it are different practices. In fact, this text argues, they are very much more different than we currently seem to imagine. If Nature could speak words to us, what would they tell us about our understanding of her? How, for example, would one of her creatures, let’s say an elephant or a donkey, both act and appear to us if they donned our clothes? These questions are treated in the text as highly analogous to how an artist would explain his practice when following the same procedures prescribed for historians or theorists of art when they discuss their practices. Discussed and demonstrated will be that considerable difficulties arise. Consistent with the adage: “Form follows Function”, the text takes and defends the position that art doesn’t follow the same paths that are both characteristic of- and necessary for other practices. Logic forms both the essential tool and the desired product of many practices, whereas the position is taken that this is fundamentally not so in the practice of art. There, very differently, it is Emotion that constitues both its vehicle and objective. A decidedly associative route is taken in the text, to give physical form to the argument that following linear paths alone when defining- or engaging in the practice of art is quite literally irrational. Key Words: Art and Science, Art education, Subconscious, Logical and Emotional Processing, History of Art

Today there are many trials in approaching art! Many approaches never come within the proximity of artistic experience or artistic inspiration. Indeed, many people are suspicious of inspiration which can lead to its marginalization in any investigation of art. Our lives are tremendously varied and complex. Within this complexity of experience, art and imagination have a particular power. Movies, music, literature and pictures take root in all manner of human lives and suddenly leaf out into moments of profundity, mystery and harmony. These subtle, yet powerful, experiences are not limited to culture.

The Nordic Journal of Aesthetics, 2010

The paper argues that something is art only if (i) it belongs to a special kind of internal history and (ii) needs to be understood and appreci ated in the light of such history. This goes against both the traditional view that art has a timeless, ahistorical essence and the historicist view that there can be no ahistorical perspective for understanding art. The paper draws on Hegel's view that art needs to be understood through its history, but rejects the idea that the history of art has an end in the double sense of a goal and an end point. It also rejects Arthur Danto's Hegelinspired claim that the ahistori cal essence of art is revealed at the end of its history and opens the door to a natural alliance between philosophers of art and art historians.

To My Wife most modern scholarship has made available, the idea behind the whole work must (as M. Faure himself explains in the preface to the new edition before cited) be tinged with the personality of the writer and by the character of his time. "The historian who calls himself a scientist simply utters a piece of folly." In these matters judgment is inevitable, for to write the history of art one must make one's decisions as to what it is. The writing of it is in itself a work of art-as the style of Élie Faure is there to prove. Only one who feels the emotions of art can tell others which are the great works and make clear the collective poem formed by their history. It is precisely because Élie Faure is adding something to that poem that he has the right to tell us of its meaning.

2002

"Stories of Art" is an answer to E.H. Gombrich's "Story of Art." "Stories of Art" is a look at ways people have told the history of art outside the West, and outside the bounds of Gombrich's narrative of naturalism. The book is meant as a gadfly, an accompaniment to Gombrich's ubiquitous volume. Chapter 1, "Intuitive Stories," is about an exercise I have found very useful in seeing how people visualize the history of art. The exercise is to draw the history of art as a landscape or some other kind of picture, and label the parts of the landscape with the periods, artists, and styles that you feel most comfortable with. I have tried this with students at all levels, and with faculty; I've tried it throughout the U.S., and in Europe and China. The results are always fascinating. It is the opening chapter of the book because it's intended to help readers find their own sense of the shape of art history before they explore other people's ideas. Originally published as Stories of Art (New York: Routledge, 2002).

As we work along our various ways, there takes shape within us, in some sort, an ideal – something we are to become – some work to be done. This, I think, is, denied to very few, and we begin really to live only when the thrill of this ideality moves us in what we will to accomplish! In the years which have been devoted in my own life to working out in stubborn materials a feeling for the beautiful, in the vortex of distorted complex conditions, a hope has grown stronger with the experience of each year, amounting now to a gradually deepening conviction that in the Machine lies the only future of art and craft – as I believe, a glorious future; that the Machine is, in fact, the metamorphosis of ancient art and craft; that we are at last face to face with the machine-the modern Sphinx-whose riddle the artist must solve if he would that art live – for his nature holds the key. For one, I promise "whatever gods may be" to lend such energy and purpose as I may possess to help make that meaning plain; to return again and again to the task whenever and wherever need be; for this plain duty is thus relentlessly marked out for the artist in this, the Machine Age, although there is involved an adjustment to cherished gods, perplexing and painful in the extreme; the fire of many long-honored ideals shall go down to ashes to reappear, phoenix like, with new purposes. The great ethics of the Machine are as yet, in the main, beyond the ken of the artist or student of sociology; but the artist mind may now approach the nature of this thing from experience, which has become the commonplace of his field, to suggest, in time, I hope, to prove, that the machine is capable of carrying to fruition high ideals in art – higher than the world has yet seen! Disciples of William Morris cling to an opposite view. Yet William Morris himself deeply sensed the danger to art of the transforming force whose sign and symbol is the machine, and though of the new art we eagerly seek he sometimes despaired, he quickly renewed his hope. He plainly foresaw that a blank in the fine arts would follow the inevitable abuse of new-found power, and threw himself body and soul into the work of bridging it over by bringing into our lives afresh the beauty of art as she had been, that the new art to come might not have dropped too many stitches nor have unraveled what would still be useful to her. That he had abundant faith in the new art his every essay will testify. That he miscalculated the machine does not matter. He did sublime work for it when he pleaded so well for the process of elimination its abuse had made necessary; when he fought the innate vulgarity of theocratic impulse in art as opposed to democratic; and when he preached the gospel of simplicity. All artists love and honor William Morris. He did the best in his time for art and will live in history as the great socialist, together with Ruskin, the great moralist: a significant fact worth thinking about, that the two great reformers of modern times professed the artist. The machine these reformers protested, because the sort of luxury which is born of greed had usurped it and made of it a terrible engine of enslavement, deluging the civilized world with a murderous ubiquity, which plainly enough was the damnation of their art and craft. It had not then advanced to the point which now so plainly indicates that it will surely and swiftly, by its own momentum, undo the mischief it has made, and the usurping vulgarians as well. Nor was it so grown as to become apparent to William Morris, the grand democrat, that the machine was the great forerunner of democracy. The ground plan of this thing is now grown to the point where the artist must take it up no longer as a protest: genius must progressively dominate the work of the contrivance it has created; to lend a useful hand in building afresh the "Fairness of the Earth." That the Machine has dealt Art in the grand old sense a death-blow, none will deny. The evidence is too substantial. Art in the grand old sense – meaning Art in the sense of structural tradition, whose craft is fashioned upon the handicraft ideal, ancient or modern; an art wherein this form and that form as structural parts were laboriously joined in such a way as to beautifully emphasize the manner of the joining: the million and one ways of beautifully satisfying bare structural necessities, which have come down to us chiefly through the books as "Art." For the purpose of suggesting hastily and therefore crudely wherein the machine has sapped the vitality of this art, let us assume Architecture in the old sense as a fitting representative of Traditional-art, and Printing as a fitting representation of the Machine. What printing – the machine – has done for architecture – the fine art – will have been done in measure of

Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2001