An Excursus on Aesthetics
The relevance of Arnheim for contemporary art is a big and controversial topic, which is reserved for this excursus, so that the website's content may remain streamlined. While the reader can skip to the individual chapter ideas from Art and Visual Perception, some of the assumptions will only find their defense here. In general, it is argued here that Arnheim himself was quite open to all kinds of art and the nature of art when he was writing caused him to de-emphasize certain aspects of experience. At the same time, there is a genuine way in which after after the 1960s did change, and that Arnheim would have to adjust his criterion somewhat to accommodate it.
This website is about creating new dialogues between Arnheim and contemporary art (we take it for granted that his ideas are just as applicable as ever to standard images, advertising, etc.). If one held fast with his principles, one would have to repeat his disappointments with Pollock, Minimalism and Conceptual Art. Of course, one could also seek out art that is highly preoccupied with perceptual effects, like Op Art, or the Light and Color California school. But the ambition here is not to cherry pick examples amenable to his analysis but instead to deal directly with disjunctions between a perceptualist approach and the concerns of art that have predominated over the last fifty years.
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Principally, Arnheim believed in what we can call, after Nelson Goodman, an art that is syntactically "dense;" each mark created by the artist has significance and the results of such "visual thinking" result in the masterpieces by Picasso, Klee, and others that he adored. Art after the 1960s, instead, has unhooked meaning from syntax. In works like Warhol's serial productions, the meaning resides somewhere beyond the silkscreened surface, invoking our notions of consumer culture and modernity.
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Arnheim's view of art can stand for a certain kind of concentrated, visual expressiveness, a kind of "poetic" mode that in Roman Jakobson's words, places emphasis upon the message "for its own sake." What we can call post-modern art has extended this mode even further. It is an art less about communicated meaning than about meta-meanings. While it has left the realm of the expressive, it is all about intelligence and thought. In what can be called a "tip of the iceberg" theory, post-modern art tends to present to the world a pseudo-form, often an attractive shell that disguises much deeper meaning. Warhol's silk screens are often quite appealing, decorative, but the content says otherwise as he explores our fascination with disaster or fetishism of commodities.
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It is true that one cannot address Warhol with the tools of Art and Visual Perception or The Power of the Center. The same would be true apparently of works by Duchamp and others that through the late twentieth century and twenty first century explored issues of affectlessness, boredom, formlessness and abjection. Nevertheless, the popular idea that after Warhol art was exclusively anti-retinal, purely conceptual, and marked by ironic distance and self-referentiality is losing its grip. A number of scholars have addressed artists for their aesthetic concerns, seeking to overcome narratives of pure criticality with considerations of materiality, presence, and interest in phenomenal effects. For just one example Kaja Silverman has reconsidered the works of Sherry Levine in light of Douglas Crimp's early fixation of their meaning on appropriation and canon critique [1].
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[Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, Tate Gallery, London]
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Much art after the sixties came under an iconological fixation, where the meaning was supplied by the political intent. Reduced to flatness in illustrations, one didn't need to see the object to understand a Barbara Krueger graphic. However, as much art moved into sculpture and installation, formal factors came immediately into play with the layout of materials in space. If we suspend our ideas about scale and medium, we find that much comes under the purview of perception if not Arnheim's specific model. To expand his model we would have to ask him to think more expansively and create a kind of social psychology of art.
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The potential of Arnheim's approach for post-modern art is easiest to demonstrate with Arthur Danto's example. Danto argued that Warhol's Brillo Boxes defeated a perceptualist definition of art because a real and a Warhol Brillo Box were indistinguishable, bearing no different perceptual features. But Danto was displaying a kind of physicalist fallacy when he identified the boxes as identical in each case, because the "Brillo Box" coincided in both cases with the delimited physical box. In phenomenology, Edmund Husserl wrote of the perceptual "horizon" in experience, the hidden features of experience that we are aware of. These can be "internal" in the sense of the back of a cube that we do not see, but also "external" like the spatial context and background beliefs as to the durability and affordance of an object. Walking into a gallery and seeing a Brillo Box presented as if it is art is part of the overall "gestalt-contexture" (Gurwitsch) of the experience. The object is different in both cases.
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Following the "tip of the iceberg" theory, it is clear in cases of post-modern art that the role of the external horizon has become much more important. How much, it is difficult to say. Some philosophers argue that a work of art conceived as a thought experiment to demonstrate the sufficiency (in Dantoan fashion) of the external Artworld to sustain arthood is not really art. To be sure, if we define art in terms of definitions rather than functions, we are liable to get caught up in the art, non-art game.
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But in any case it is not necessary to define expressive meaning with perceptual features in a one-to-one manner. Moving away from physicalism again Arnheim would not require that any artistic message be composed of retinally present marks or stimulation. Because experience is disassociated from stimulation in the Gestalt epistemology and the "constancy hypothesis" is rejected, anything that is a part of experience can be symbolized, that is, made into art. Post-modern works of art attenuate the relationship between any stimulation at all (witness Conceptual Art) and resulting experiences but that does not mean that it is missing. If anything, it is probably that the very point of post-modern art is the juxtaposition of discordant things, which nevertheless have a meaning. We may have more difficulty pointing to the perceptual fundaments of that meaning - try to locate the "wit" in a work of art - but it is still there.[2]
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What we arrive at is an invitation to look at new kinds of works of art with the same search for visual intelligence but mobilized in perhaps unfamiliar ways. One thing that is certain is that the search for these new forms is not limited by medium, because experience is blind to the exact source of stimulation of that experience, and also blind to format: Arnheim can just as easily look at an installation as a classic modernist tableau. Taking the work of art as a kind of being, the invitation is to look through the stock-house of Gestalt theory that Arnheim knew but didn't find relevant to use in his writing. As works of art have moved into performative and relational dimensions, new opportunities turn up to check the works of Solomon Asch, Fritz Heider or Kurt Lewin for inspiration.
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But how then do we analyze a prototypically postmodern work? If Arnheim showed how to analyze the manifest artifact, we have to learn to analyze what is turned inside out of it. For a work to be successful today, it has to align a number of extrinsic factors together, just as the modernist aligned formal factors. We have to account for this alignment. Arnheim traced phenomenal vectors across a canvas. Today we have to trace those vectors into the world, to the various semantic nodes that give the work its meaning.
["Life-World" analysis of Warhol's Marilyn Diptych]