I think I am at the point where I can approach Saul's proposed view if not fully understand it. I'm aware of the tremendous confusion in the art school curricula today. I've read the transcript of James Elkins' most recent Stone Theory Institute (of which Saul was a Fellow member), and I've read other texts on the current state of art schools, namely: Rethinking The Contemporary Art School (edited by Buckley and Conomos) Elkins' own Artists with PhD's, and his Why Art Can't be Taught, Kovecses' Metaphor (2nd edition) and Cazeaux's Metaphor and Continental Philosophy. Finally, I've just read Thierry de Duve's Greenberg Between The Lines. I am trying to digest all of these texts and still others read earlier while also working in my studio every day.
In plain language I do get it that art has evolved toward the social sciences and even the hard sciences and away from the traditional humanities and certainly away from skill-centered studio practices. It has also all but abandoned its formalist heritage going back to at least the early Renaissance. That means that a formal approach to art history, the evolution of style or form, is also abandoned in favor of cultural contexts (authority, patronage, taste, societal values) that were never absent but mostly subservient. This shift has affected what we usually have in mind when we speak of art and beauty, aesthetics, the aesthetic experience, and so on. It has cast these notions into the waste-yard of metaphysics, and isolated feeling, subjectivity, and pure intuition. Many of the strongest advocates of the new view, what I'll call the art as social science view, expend a lot of energy disparaging formalist modernism, high modernism, and traditional art practice (skills and visuality). It's as though they can scarcely wait until they have the chance to identify modernism as "decor" or socially and politically unengaged, and the like. I am wondering why this is so. There's nothing in the new art as social science regime, as far as I can tell, that excludes form-centered aesthetics. In fact, it's far easier to approach the new regime as a form of journalism, loosely constructed social-science case-studies, illustration, advertising tropes, etc. Even so, I am prepared to accept the new regime because I am open to expanded boundary-breaking art. To expand art's territory does not require giving up what it already holds. So for now I deny Saul's willingness to abandon any art paradigm, no matter the contradictions exposed. Progressive linearity can't be renamed as the new path any more than the reductive linearity of high modernism can be sustained as vital. What's really behind all this effort to redefine art as akin to a social science? In a way it began with Greenberg's reductive positivist aesthetic as much as it began with Duchamp's de-defining art and allowing for the "anything can be art " realization. Greenberg helped to academicize art by declaring its purpose as examining what is essential and thus not transferable to a medium. For example, with Greenberg painting should exclude illusion because illusion is a matter of light and shade on volume, something belonging to sculpture. And what is essential to painting is flatness, the acceptance of the picture plane and surface, something alien to sculpture. This is precisely how academic fields are defined in the university: determining what is peculiar and necessary to each field. The mode of determination is research. Research seeks quantifiable data to measure the nature of a field and the problems intrinsic to it. Once art entered the academy as a field or discipline, then the issue became how to identify its research. But if art is undefinable and subjective how can there be a quantifiable way to achieve it? That is the problem today. One way to overcome it is to redefine art by excluding subjectivity and enabling a research methodology that somehow conflates method with result to produce a quasi-concrete or objective instance of art. This creates a new metaphor: Art is research; the artwork is the particular research that is pursued. In the same way, society is the quantified research or measurements that proclaim it. Never mind that the defining concepts are subjective and therefore shape the quantified concept a-priori, as, I believe, Kant and a host of other thinkers, say. Once art can employ a research methodology that is analogous to the methodologies in the social sciences, then its status as an academic discipline is affirmed and artists, with PhDs attained by that research, are home safe and sound in the corporations of higher learning where they will be suitably tamed and made into collaborators of a self-sustaining system. Then what will have happened to the iconoclastic artist, the fault-finder, the breaker of rules and normative standards, the quizzical, intuitive rascally outsider? Gone. Or, I dare to hope, a sudden redux of 19C anti-officialdom. What could be worse for creativity and art than to see them both swallowed whole by a corporatized, monetized, good-for-you-good for us sedating institution? There is a path through this hell. I think it is by means of a new conceptual basis in metaphor. That's a whole new topic but it may provide a way to join the fully abstract with the conceptually concrete. Yes, I want to go back to my "as-if" metaphorical realm where one concept -- amorphous, abstract, ungraspable, art, -- is taken as another which is taken as real or namable. The linguists call this the relation of a source domain metaphor to a target domain metaphor. The source domain metaphor provides concrete "mappings" for the abstract domain metaphor: For instance, I've just finished a ptg. I will title Templar. The linguistic associations of Templar involve the historic warrior knights of the Crusades and their good and evil aims. With that title in mind, some otherwise very abstract shapes and colors in the painting can be construed as an attacking knight on horseback (but almost certainly not without the title; a different title may evoke other associations). What may then be seen as eyes, of both knight and horse, also look like targets (the target metaphor, and other associations). The painting is ultimately regarded as a double metaphor: art is a Templar; the Templar is art (a formal idealization of make-believe, and aggrandizing aggression) What is true of the Templars in history, all of it, is also, I claim, true of art (in this instance). In this work I have mapped the undefined concept of art with the concrete attributes of the historic Templars, claiming that all of the attributes of the Templars stand for the the attributes of art and vice-versa. Is this ptg. really art? I can't say. WC ----- Original Message ---- From: Saul Ostrow <[email protected]> To: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> Sent: Tue, April 13, 2010 9:18:26 AM Subject: What if we took this view The logic that leads to the conclusion that art is now is a socio-cultural laboratory and a mode of engagement and means of reformation, depends on our abandoning a taxonomy premised on the need to privilege one term within a dichotomy over another, and instead adopt one in which we embrace the Derridean notion of deference (differentiation and deferral). After Modernism demonstrated that there could no longer be a clearly defined class of objects that count as art, it is no longer necessary to differentiate art as being either an objects that produces special experiences (as in Kantian and phenomenological aesthetics), or as a particular system of symbolic representations (as in Hegel, Cassirer, and Goodman.) Likewise it is no longer necessary to assert that works of art are received in a purely subjective manner (as Hume suggests), as opposed to providing an objective content because the ontological status of an artwork tends to be bound to the particular way it is interpreted (Danto). Primarily this notion of the work art as a conflicted self is a result of art's thematization of art itself in modernity in which the link between art as signifier and signified came to reconciled in the act of critical analysis and interpretation. Must This resolution was a consequence of an ongoing attempt to determine what role art may play in a secular culture committed to abandoning metaphysics and ideology. Within this post Modern project increasingly there have been attempts to employ art as a means to provide a corrective to instrumentality (as Merleau-Ponty and Adorno argue), by reflecting upon and transforming our logics and as such is thought to be essential for the education of sensibility and judgment ( as advanced by Dewey.) As such artworks are a primarily playful character (Gadamer) while supplying a basis for historical and cultural identities (in Hegel's sense.) Thought of in this manner art comes to have a genuinely political dimension (Benjamin, Rancihre) be it is somewhat in effable and emergent in its forms and content representing and open-ended process that cannot be contained (Derrida) within our increasingly instrumental society art preserves just enough autonomous so that it by it very nature may be thought of defacto politically engaged and at times a tool of subversive. Premised on this conclusion and the fairly general hypothesis concerning the development of an integrative, and indexical vision of art and its attendant discourses, we return to our initial subject that the underlying assumption which is that this ill-defined territory called art can be used to to intervene in the established inter-change of embodiment/awareness/knowledge and produce within the context of our becoming human a new range of experiences, thoughts and reflections upon.
