Antoon Van den Braembussche, Thinking Art, An Introduction to Philosophy of Art, DOI: 10.1007/978-1-4020-5638-3, © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Antoon Van den Braembussche Thinking Art An Introduction to Philosophy of Art Antoon Van den Braembussche Free University of Brussels Pleinlaan, 2 Avenue A. Buyl 12, 1050 Brussels, Belgium [email protected] ISBN 978-1-4020-5637-6 e-ISBN 978-1-4020-5638-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009927089 © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2009 Denken over Kunst. Een Inleiding in de kunstfilosofie. Countinho. 1994 (First Edition). 2006 (Fourth Edition). Translators: Michael Krassilovsky. Rutger H. Cornets de Groot. Dick van Spronsen The translation of this book was made possible by a publication grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) Joseph Kosuth, Passagen-Werk (Documenta- Flânerie), 1992 (© Joseph Kosuth, Passagen-Werk, c/o Pictoright Amsterdam 2009) There are instances where we have been unable to trace or contact the copyright holder. If notified the publisher will be pleased to rectify any errors or omissions at the earliest opportunity. No part of this work may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the Publisher, with the exception of any material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on a computer system, for exclusive use by the purchaser of the work. Printed on acid-free paper springer.com Foreword Antoon Van den Braembussche rightly observes at the beginning of this admirable book, available for the first time in English, that the philosophy of art is a burgeoning field. Not only is its literature expanding rapidly, but so are the perspectives of its practitioners. This is not surprising. The philosophy of art exists because art exists, and for more than a century now art has been unfolding at a dizzying pace. Indeed, its development continues to accelerate, and it is no exaggeration to say that in recent decades the art world has witnessed an unprecedented explosion of new movements and forms. Against this background, someone coming to the philosophy of art for the first time needs an introduction, and an introduction of a particular kind. But what should such an introduction include, and how should it proceed? It is hard to imagine a better place to look for answers to these questions than Thinking Art. One might start by noting that the philosophy of art is a peculiarly challenging field to introduce. For one thing, its subject matter is elusive in comparison with other areas of philosophy. In the theory of knowledge, for example, we do not have to look far beyond ourselves to find the target of reflection: we all perceive and think and claim to know things, however we may interpret these activities philosophically. Philosophers of art, on the other hand, are not only confronted with the established arts - painting, sculpture, music, and so on - but with a variety of objects that are not readily classifiable and even create entirely new categories. If Marcel Duchamp purchases a snow shovel in a hardware store and displays it in a gallery, what is it? A performance? A sculpture? Is it art at all? The subject matter of the philosophy of art assumes such myriad forms because it is a cultural phenomenon issuing from the creative freedom of the artist. It is this complex and unstable reality that aesthetics must master. An effective introduction to the field must therefore go as far as it can toward matching the breadth, depth, and complexity of its subject. Unlike a casual social introduction, which at best offers the bare condition for becoming better acquainted with someone later on, the aim of a philosophical introduction is to leave the neophyte with a genuine knowledge of the field, and, ideally, to provide those already initiated with fresh ways of looking at familiar things. There are various ways to accomplish these ends. One could take a largely historical approach and discuss in serial fashion what this or that philosopher has said about art, or one could take a more thematic or issue-oriented approach with a minimum of history. Both paths can yield good results, but the exclusive pursuit of either runs the risk of giving an impoverished picture of a field that embraces a rich array of themes evolving in a fascinating history. The author wisely takes a middle course. He gives the reader an excellent sense of the history of aesthetics, but without making his discussions of particular aestheticians occasions for displays of historical erudition for its own sake. He is doing philosophy, not writing chapters in the history of ideas. His point is to make the account of pivotal figures in the history of aesthetics come to life in terms of the issues and themes that have occupied and still occupy philosophers who think about art; or, from the other direction, to show that the issues on which aestheticians reflect can only be seen clearly through the lens of historical efforts to address them. He is not interested in engaging in flashy (or tedious) conceptual acrobatics carried out in some ethereal region far above the artworks themselves. His thematic and historical investigations are tethered firmly to art itself. One of the chief virtues of the work's historical dimension is the scope and depth with which it covers the thinkers it discusses. The author may not have intended Thinking Art to be a history of aesthetics, but it can serve as one, since it considers - perceptively, sympathetically, but also critically - many of the key figures in the field. A difficulty in introducing the thought of particular aestheticians is that the positions they take on art are usually rooted in their general philosophical outlook, which means that grasping the former hinges on understanding the latter. This puts a double burden on the writer, who must give an accurate account of the philosophical underpinnings of a given thinker's aesthetic position and then of that position itself. The author of Thinking Art meets this challenge in exemplary fashion. A case in point is his discussion of Kant. One can write on Kant's theory of knowledge in the Critique of Pure Reason without so much as mentioning his aesthetic theory as it is developed in the Critique of Judgement, and many have done just that; but one cannot understand Kant's aesthetic theory without having a grasp of Kant's theory of knowledge and even of his moral theory in the Critique of Practical Reason. The author presents a remarkably concise and intelligible exposition of Kant's general position (it could stand alone as a brief introduction to Kant's thought), and then of the Kantian aesthetics grounded on it. Equally effective is his treatment of Hegel, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, all philosophers whose aesthetic views are inseparable from their ontological and epistemological positions. In reflecting on the themes aestheticians have promoted and engaged, the author takes a sophisticated and critical path. His discussion of the venerable topic of mimesis illustrates this nicely. One could introduce mimesis with a simplistic presentation and then subject it to a dismissive criticism, which is common enough in texts on aesthetics. The author's approach is more interesting and nuanced. He addresses mimesis in its complexity and depth. He does round up the usual suspect (Plato) and discusses the usual reading of mimesis as the imitation of sensuous appearances; but he also develops its broader meaning, which turns out to be expansive indeed. Through a fascinating discussion of Giacometti, he shows convincingly that even the notion of imitation as the copying of perceptual appearances still has a viable life, filtered, in Giacometti's case, through his struggle to capture the human form. True, the sculptures that we identify as Giacometti's signature works - elongated, roughly modeled figures of women, dogs, and men - are hardly trompe l'oeil works. In the artist's estimation, however, they were imitations of reality, which suggests that the naive trompe l'oeil conception of mimesis hardly exhausts the notion. The author goes on to observe that there are three senses of mimesis in aesthetic theory: as imitation of sensory appearances; as depiction of emotions and ideas (giving mimesis a place even in expressionist theories); and as the representation of a higher, ideal, reality. Since it has so many forms, the author argues, mimesis can be found in such varied aesthetic theories as expressionism, formalism, Neo-Marxism, and post-structuralism. Typical of the author's adventurous and revealing approach is his argument that Hegel, while vigorously critical of the trompe l'oeil version of the mimetic theory, still left room for another meaning of mimesis. The point is that the philosophy of art excludes mimesis from its battery of insights into what art is and does only at its own peril. The introduction of such a seemingly unlikely figure as Giacometti into the discussion of mimesis is the kind of link to the concrete that makes Van den Braembussche's approach effective and illuminating. Something similar occurs in his treatment of the Collingwood/Croce version of expressionism. Expressionism, in its rudimentary form, typically holds that the work of art expresses the artist's emotion. In the Collingwood/Croce version, emotion is less important than the claim that the work of art resides in the artist's mind as a creative idea whose material realization in the world is not essential. Expression of the idea within the mind is all that is needed. This conception is likely to strike a reader as odd, to say the least. The author's criticisms of the view are fair and to the point. He reminds us, for example, that the Collingwood/Croce version of expressionism “grossly underestimates the importance of the medium and of the resistance that it offers.” At the same time, his discussion of Joseph Kosuth shows how a significant contemporary artist subscribes to just such a view, at least in modified form. In Kosuth's case, what is expressed is not the artist's emotion but an idea, and it is essentially the idea that is the work of art. The introduction of Kosuth again shows the connection of a classical doctrine, in this case, expressionism, to the contemporary art world, and specifically to conceptual art. Indeed, such connections between art and philosophy, and between philosophical views, run throughout the work, weaving a rich aesthetic tapestry. The author does not restrict his introduction to classical theories such as expressionism and formalism. He opens it up to views, particularly those of Hegel and Danto, that attempt to come to grips with art's historical dimension and with the ambiguous notion of the “end of art.” The latter theme has had considerable resonance among recent artists and critics, many of whom would consider themselves to be members of the postmodernist camp. The author has much of value to say about postmodernism and poststructuralist thought. Among postmodern thinkers, philosophy of art shifts in the direction of cultural criticism. Traditional aesthetics explores the nature of aesthetic experience and the work of art, what the work is and what it accomplishes, and how it is related as art to other things - to the world, to history, and so on. Postmodern thinkers, on the other hand, tend to focus on art's external relations (to economic life, for example) and on what such relations have done to art (made it into a commodity, and the like); they focus, that is, on art's fate within a certain set of cultural and historical circumstances. Pushed to an extreme, particularly under the lingering influence of the Marxist notion of superstructure, such an approach may have unfortunate consequences for aesthetics. It's as if one had a philosophy of the automobile but never got beyond discussing the advertising and marketing of cars, their role in class relations, and so on: all very interesting, but utterly uninformative about the automobile itself. On the other hand, one can certainly argue that economic and social circumstances are in fact important aspects of the context in which we experience art. Important too, if perhaps wrongheaded, is the claim of some postmodernists that art itself has virtually dissolved into such relations, and that any effort to define art in the sense of capturing the essence that distinguishes it from other things is bound to fail, precisely because art is not, in fact, fundamentally different from other things. Like them, so the argument goes, it derives its meaning from the web of social, cultural, and economic relations in which it is only one strand among many. If clarifying the nature of art is the principal challenge facing the philosophy of art, clarifying the nature of the discipline itself poses its own difficulties. The author examines the ways in which the philosophy of art differs from scientific approaches to art, from the sociological or the psychological, for example, which reach their conclusions on the basis of empirical investigation. While aesthetics should be firmly rooted in the reality of art, its claims are not inductive generalizations. Nor should its statements be confused with particular aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic judgements are always about some specific work or artistic event. Statements in the philosophy of art, on the other hand, are intended to be universal claims. They represent efforts to get to the essence of art. They should be supported by argument and be alert to the dangers of one-sidedness. This does not mean that there cannot be “cross-fertilization” among the philosopher, the artist, and the critic. Philosophicalviews may be implicit in the aesthetic judgments of the critic, as the author's discussion of reactions to the work of Luc Tuymans shows, and artists may make what are in fact philosophical claims. This is perfectly innocent, unless the artist or critic naively turns such claims into limiting prescriptions about what art ought to be. Prescriptions are normative and exclusive. In the case of the artist, advancing them usually means nothing more than setting forth a program for artistic action. There is nothing wrong with manifestos and motivating theories, provided that they are not confused with philosophy or used to stifle creativity. In the case of the critic, however, the adoption of a one-sided aesthetic position as a criterion for aesthetic judgment may have the unhappy effect of closing the mind to all art that fails to pass the prescribed theoretical test. Perhaps the key lesson of this book lies in its stance against exclusion and narrowness in the philosophy of art and in the realm of art generally. The philosopher, in order to do justice to art, should be accommodating and generous. The spectator and the critic should be equally hospitable in their judgments about particular works. This is captured in the author's claim that a “well-balanced” aesthetic judgment should take into account the work's mimetic and expressive aspects, its formal and symbolic possibilities, and its social and historical dimensions. The art work demands it. Art, then, should have the first word and the last. Philosophy comes in between, and its worth is measured not by the creation of bold new theories but by the degree to which it achieves insight into the nature of artistic phenomena. The author wisely echoes Hegel at the end of his epilogue: “…art is always ahead of philosophy. When thinking about art, the understanding only comes afterwards, when philosophy - like the owl of Minerva - spreads its wings in the silence of night.” John B. Brough Georgetown University July 9, 2008