Journal of Visual Art Practice - Volume 5 Number 3: Editorial Board Editor

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Journal of Visual Art Practice – Volume 5 Number 3
The Journal of Visual Art Practice (incorporating Drawing Fire – the journal of the
National Association for Fine Art Education) is a peer-reviewed publication which
will publish scholarly research and informed commentary on all aspects of visual
art seen from an educational perspective. It welcomes contributions from scholars,
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Editorial Board Editor

lain Biggs (University of the West of England, UK) Chris Smith
Mary Anne Francis (Brighton University, UK)
Sir John Cass Department
Ken Freidman (Norwegian School of Management, Norway)
Jill Journeaux (Coventry University, UK)
of Art, Media and Design
Judith Mottram (Nottingham Trent Universify, UK) London Metropolitan University
Krishna Neidderer (University of Herfordshire, UK) Central House
59–63 Whitechapel High Street
Editorial Advisory Board London E1 7PF
Jale Erzen (Middle Eastern Technical University, Ankara) UK
Mick Finch (Ecole des Beaux-arts de Valenciennes, France) e-mail:
Henk Slager (Editor of Lier en Boog, Amsterdam) <c.d.smith@londonmet.ac.uk>
[More members to be appointed. The role of members is to suggest contributors to the
<http://www2.ntu.ac.uk/ntsad/
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should contact the Editor.]
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Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 5 Number 3 © 2006 Intellect Ltd

Editorial. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.123/2
Editorial Introduction
Aesthetics and its objects – challenges
from art and experience
Francis Halsall Limerick School of Art & Design
Julia Jansen University College Cork
Tony O’Connor University College Cork
The history of aesthetics is a disputed one. Even when philosophers and

aestheticians have rigorously interrogated criteria of artistic activity, art-
works and the aesthetic; their questions invariably seemed to recoil back on
them. This has further challenged the presuppositions, claims and proce-
dures originally at stake.
For a long time, however, there had been at least one relatively uncon-
tested parameter for aesthetics. Ever since Hegel’s influential doctrine that
the business of aesthetics was art, most aestheticians could rely on know-
ing the object of their analyses. What took away this last constant was not
so much theoretical discourse but art itself. When art transformed after
modernism, art practice made it unapologetically clear that art objects
were far from being easily definable, straightforwardly given entities.
Minimalism, Fluxus, Arte Povera, Conceptual Art, Land Art and numerous
other movements since 1950 acted against much of conventional art his-
tory and aesthetics in order to experiment with materials, media and gen-
res. These experiments are reconfigured by the complex contemporary
practices of performance art, new media art, etc. Artists have produced a
plurality of artworks that challenge the traditional distinctions, criteria and
boundaries that had long supported the (self)recognition of aesthetics as
a unitary discourse. Among the traditional distinctions shed by art after
modernism were the specifications of genres and media. This condition of
‘post-modern art’ has been given different names such as: the ‘dematerial-
ized art object’ (Lucy Lippard); ‘Intermedia’ (Dick Higgins) and the ‘post-
medium condition’ (Rosalind Krauss). Above all, however, the distinction
between art and non-art lost its apparent necessity as was made clear by
Arthur Danto’s famous ongoing puzzlings over Warhol’s Brillo Box and the
‘end of art’. The loss of this last distinction between art and ‘life’ meant a
corresponding loss of certainty about what the rightful object of aesthetics
actually was.
Philosophical aestheticians in particular initially failed to react to this rad-
ical move by artists. They often ignored contemporary art practice and
instead turned to traditional artworks that could still serve as examples or
illustrations for their theories of art. Increasingly, this led to an uneasy rela-
tionship between aesthetics and both art practice and its history and theory.
JVAP 5 (3) 123–126 © Intellect Ltd 2006 123

This meant that it became very difficult for aestheticians to reconcile contem-
porary art practice with any established philosophy of art. Artists and cura-
tors, on the other hand, turned away from aesthetics towards sociological
theories (Marxist, institutional, gender, etc.) where they found explanatory
models that seemed to resonate with their own experiences or practices.
More recently, however, aestheticians have begun to pay some attention
to new art forms, such as conceptual art, new media art, etc. which chal-
lenge them to rethink traditional concepts and paradigms of aesthetics. At
the same time, artists have begun to treat aesthetic aspects of sensuous
experience (Matthew Barney) and even beauty (Olaf Eliasson) in a way that
seemed impossible even ten years ago.
What all this teaches is that there is likely to be an inevitable and ongo-
ing tension between art practice and its aesthetic theorization. Artists con-
tinually re-invent art practice, whereas the discourse of aesthetics follows
on in a slower and more deliberate manner. Nonetheless, at last, it seems,
aesthetics is rising to the challenge mounted by contemporary art practices.
The papers in this issue of The Journal of Visual Art Practice respond,
albeit in different ways, to the many tasks that arise for contemporary
aesthetic investigations.
Susan Best, Anna Dezeuze, Riikka Haapaleinen and Toni Ross explicitly
address the ways in which art practice has challenged traditional aesthetics.
Best looks at Minimalism, Dezeuze at Fluxus, Haapaleinen at Pistoletto’s
Art Project and Ross at post-modern art of the 1990s (e.g. Mark Dion).
All four provoke a discussion on how these new art practices require
and motivate what might be called a ‘situated aesthetics’. Minimalism is
situated in a close relation to its perceiver; Fluxus art is situated in life;
Pistoletto’s work is situated in a shared public space of display (museum,
gallery, etc.). Here, art institutions become more than mere conditions of
production and display. They become one of the factors that create new
venues for relations among different practices and viewers; they are both
‘frame’ for the work, and part of its medium. The ensuing ‘relational aes-
thetics’ thus radically reconceives both the purposes and effects of art prac-
tice and an understanding of art objects. This reconceived understanding
locates art in a network of relationships between art and: its environment,
its viewers and art discourse.
As soon as it is recognized that the objects of aesthetic discourse need
not be tied to a specific art object anymore, it becomes possible again to
extend aesthetics beyond art altogether. Andy Hamilton reminds us of
Kant’s notion of natural beauty and questions the Hegelian equation of aes-
thetics and philosophy of art. This means that the question of the object of
aesthetics must be conceived even more broadly than before.
William P. Seeley investigates this question from a very different angle.
Although we might have to extend the notion of an aesthetic object to so-
called ‘ordinary’ objects, this does not mean that the aesthetic object is
simply identical with the object of ordinary perception. There is more to an
object’s aesthetic effect than just the mere perception of it. Seeley provides
a careful critique of different neuroscientific aesthetics and shows how they
must necessarily fail because they attempt to explain the way in which art-
works generate aesthetic interest by analyses of the perceptual practices of
artists and viewers alone.
124 Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor

Joana Lowry reminds us that the question of medium or media is inex-

tricably linked to the question of the aesthetic object. Art after modernism
often uses a plurality of media with only fluid definitions. This not only
ended the uniformity of the art objects but also broke with the uniformity of
medium as a direct challenge to the narrow modernist fetishism of the
specificity of media (as is found in Greenberg’s and Fried’s familiar
accounts of modernism). This opens up the issue of how different media
relate to each other, which Lowry investigates by reference to the complex
relationship between photography and painting.
Finally, Jeremy Spencer’s discussion of the supposed radical materia-
lism of some of Paul Cézanne’s late paintings documents how new devel-
opments can retroactively influence our understanding of artworks that
predate the post-modern practices that challenged aesthetic concepts and
distinctions. Also, the close link between aesthetics and art history is
revealed by the rethinking of old models and conventions, which include art
before post-modernism.
What is revealed by this ongoing debate between art practice, art history
and aesthetics and by the papers in this volume, is the need of a new aes-
thetics; one whose explanatory and creative potential does not depend on a
unitary object, a uniform medium, genre or style, or an individual subject
(not even one that goes beyond art as its rightful domain and instead ques-
tions the supposed autonomy of art against life).
At this point, however, it is important to be mindful of the possible dan-
gers of such a ‘liberation’ of aesthetics. For example, Nicolas Bourriaud’s
use of the concept of relational aesthetics attempts to substitute the notion
of the situated public for the individual viewing subject of art. But here the
resultant notion of a sociability that somehow either replaces or comp-
ensates for the fragmentation of the subject of contemporary society is pro-
blematic. It has the potential to totalize individual subjectivity under the
rubric of a mass aesthetic experience, or as the imagined unity of social
experience.
Such concerns open up the question of the political horizon of aesthe-
tics. For example, what are the consequences of sacrificing the autonomous
subject under the rubric of a shared social aesthetic experience? Or is it
necessary for art to separate itself from life to retain its critical power of
opposition and resistance?
It might not be coincidental that the late 1960s was the last time there
was a perceived need for new aesthetics. The politicization of discourse dur-
ing the time of the Vietnam War, and of contemporary activist social move-
ments for peace and equal rights coincided with artistic practices and art
discourse that was, if not explicitly political, then at least critical, self-reflexive
and self-conscious. Today again – in times not only of war and terror but
also of vast social changes related to globalization – one can feel the neces-
sity for a certain political awareness of our activities in all spheres of cultural
and social life. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that this has repercus-
sions outside of politics narrowly construed. There is the need, again, for
explicit criticism and critical self-consciousness. And, a question posed by
Walter Benjamin in times of fascism is at least suggested by contemporary
debates on aesthetics: whether it is vital to ensure that our rights are not
exchanged for a mere ‘chance to express ourselves’.
Editorial Introduction 125

References
Benjamin, W. (2002), ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility’,
Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3 (1935–1938), Cambridge, MA: Belnap
Press of Harvard University Press, pp. 120–21.
Burgin, V. (1969), ‘Situational Aesthetics’, Studio International, Vol. 178, No. 915.
Goldie, P. and Schellekens, E. (forthcoming) (2006), Who’s Afraid of Conceptual Art?
London: Routledge.
—— (eds.) (forthcoming) (2006), Philosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Hansen, M.B.N. (2004), New Philosophy for New Media, Boston, MA: MIT Press.
Higgins, D. (1984), Horizons, the Poetics and Theory of the Intermedia, Champaign,
IL: Illinois University Press.
—— (2005), ‘Intermedia’, in D. De Salvo (ed.), Open Systems Rethinking Art c. 1970,
London: Tate Publishing (orig. 1966).
Krauss, R. (1999), A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium
Condition, London: Thames & Hudson.
Lippard, L. (1997), Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to
º
1972 , Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Newman, M. and Bird, J. (eds.) (1999), Rewriting Conceptual Art, London: Reaktion
Books.
Osborne, P. (1999), ‘Conceptual Art and/as Philosophy’, in Michael Newman and
Jon Bird (eds.), Reaktion books, pp. 47–65.
—— (2002), Conceptual Art, London: Phaidon.
Spielmann, Y. (2001), ‘Intermedia in Electronic Images’, Leonardo, 34: 1, pp. 55–61.
Contents
Susan Best, ‘Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-aesthetic
Tradition in late-modern art’
Anna Dezeuze, ‘Everyday life, “Relational Aesthetics”, and the “Transfiguration of
the Common-Place”’
Riikka Haapalainen, ‘Contemporary Art and the Role of Museum as Situational
Media’
Andy Hamilton, ‘Indeterminacy and Reciprocity: Contrasts and Connections
between Natural and Artistic Beauty’
Joanna Lowry, ‘Putting Painting in the Picture (Photographically)’
Toni Ross, ‘Aesthetic Autonomy and Interdisciplinarity: A Response to Nicolas
Bourriaud’s “Relational Aesthetics”’
William P. Seeley, ‘Naturalizing Aesthetics: Art and the Cognitive Neuroscience of
Vision’
Jeremy Spencer, ‘Body and Embodiment in Modernist Painting’
126 Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor

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Article. English Language. doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.127/1
Minimalism, subjectivity, and aesthetics:

rethinking the anti-aesthetic tradition in
late-modern art
Susan Best University of New South Wales
Abstract Keywords
Minimalism, Subjectivity and Aesthetics: Rethinking the Anti-Aesthetic Tradition minimalism
in Late-modern Art. anti-aesthetic
Minimalism is routinely interpreted as anti-subjective, anti-expressive and aesthetics
anti-aesthetic. This paper challenges this interpretation by closely examining subjectivity
two accounts of minimalism: Rosalind Krauss’s article of 1973, “Sense and Merleau-Ponty
Sensibility,” and Thierry de Duve’s amplification and refutation of aspects of phenomenology
Krauss’ argument in his 1983 article, “Performance Here and Now.” Each
believes that minimalism presents a model of subjectivity, and each produces an
account of subjectivity that is both embedded in the work and yet produced by
the viewer’s interaction with it. Krauss and de Duve do not agree on the theory
of the subject that Minimalism enacts, despite agreeing that a model of subjec-
tivity is what is at stake in minimalist art.
One can clearly see here the revival of Hegel’s claim that the task of art is to
“present man with himself” as well as a renewed focus on the nature of aes-
thetic reception. It is my contention that aesthetics allows us to see more clearly
what is at stake in the refiguring of art that these two groundbreaking accounts
of minimalism trace. Thus, although minimalism is often argued to mark the
beginning of an anti-aesthetic tradition in art practice and art criticism, its radi-
cal achievements are best understood through aesthetics.
This crucial link between subjectivity and late-modern art has been all but
lost in the subsequent literature. A phenomenological approach to minimalism,
such as Krauss’s, is now simply shorthand for attending to the motile and per-
ceptual experience of art and its context. This approach is then neatly histori-
cised and believed to be dispatched by subsequent art with a more politically
attuned concern for context. To resuscitate her theoretical concern with models
of subjectivity, as De Duve does, upsets this foreclosure, while also creating an
opening for other ways to trace the progress of late-modern art—the overall aim
of my paper.
In a recent round table discussion on conceptual art and the reception of

Duchamp, Thierry de Duve asked the following provocative question: ‘Does
anybody really believe there is such a thing as the elimination of subjectivity
[in art]? (October 1994: 140) Immediately prior to this question, Alexander
Alberro had been explaining how the minimalist artist Donald Judd con-
tributed to the dismantling of the time-honoured link between subjectivity

1 Anna Chave’s and art. According to Alberro, Judd eliminated, among other things, the
provocative work also ‘transcendental investment from the work of art’ and this, Alberro argues,
challenges the anti-
subjective reading of was ‘an important step in the process toward the dismantling of subjectiv-
minimalism. Her ity from the work itself.’ (October 1994: 140) This idea that minimalism dis-
work, however, shows mantled subjectivity, or eliminated it from the work of art, is a very familiar
how minimalism can
still be interpreted interpretation of minimalism and one which closely accords with many of
through an the statements made by the artists themselves.
expressionist theory of These artists aimed, we know, to break with the expressive theory of art
art. See Anna C.
Chave, (1991: 116-40 and to thereby block the typical egress from the work of art back to the
& 2000: pp. 148–63) artist and his or her intentions or feelings. Various strategies were adopted
to cut the usual filial tie from artist to work. The deliberation of composi-
tion was deposed by the industrial logic of artless sequence: ‘one thing
after another’ as Donald Judd so famously put it. (Harrison and Wood
1992: 809-12) There is no specific artistic personality arranging materials
according to this conveyor belt logic. Industrial methods, materials, and
readymade modules are deployed to disable the traditional aesthetic ques-
tions of expression, design and purposiveness.
Or where design remained an aesthetic problem, it was opened out to
include the contingent and incidental features of a site. As Robert Morris
explained ‘the better new work takes relationships out of the work and
makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of vision. The
object is but one of the terms in the newer aesthetic.’ (Morris 1995: 15). The
aesthetic mingles here with the nonaesthetic so that design, and the inten-
tion that must be seen to drive it, is not so much negated, as radically dis-
persed.
The work is not only dispersed, it is orphaned: no one and nothing is
behind it—‘What you see is what you see’ as the painter Frank Stella said of
his own work (Stella 1966). And all you see in Stella’s stripe paintings,
according to Carl Andre, are stripes: ‘There is nothing else in his painting’
he insists. (Andre 1959), Stella, Andre continues, is not interested in expres-
sion, sensitivity, or symbolism; just stripes. The meaning then is in the
work, right there on the surface, as Stella further explains: ‘all I want anyone
to get out of my paintings, and all I ever get out of them, is the fact that you
can see the whole idea without any confusion.’ (Stella 1966) Leaving aside
the strange paradox of intending to have no legible intention, these various
strategies, and their clear articulation by the artists themselves, indicate
that the subjective qualities of art were fairly systematically attacked.
De Duve’s question radically breaks with this way of thinking about min-
imalism.1 By questioning the elimination of subjectivity he also seems to
sheer away the whole philosophical armature that has collected around this
movement in support of this particular reading. This is not the first time he
opposed the standard reading of minimalism as anti-subjective. In 1983, in
a little known article called ‘Performance Here and Now: Minimal Art, a
Plea for a new Genre of Theatre’ he set out to investigate the theory of the
subject proposed by minimalism. In this venture, he is partly retracing
the steps of Rosalind Krauss in her groundbreaking essay of 1973, ‘Sense
and Sensibility: Reflections on Post 60s Sculpture,’ an essay which supplies
Alberro with the structure for his argument that minimalism is anti-
transcendental. While Krauss does indeed claim that minimalism suspends
the a priori or transcendental sense of space, she does not present minimalism
128 Susan Best

as dismantling subjectivity, rather, as we will see shortly, her argument dis-

places a transcendental subject by way of a phenomenological one.
De Duve amplifies aspects of Krauss’s argument while disputing others.
What they share, however, is the belief that minimalism is something like a
sensuous theory of the contemporary subject. In other words, minimalism
can be understood as setting forth or generating a particular model or the-
ory of contemporary subjectivity. Krauss and De Duve do not agree on the
theory of the subject that Minimalism enacts, despite agreeing that a model
of subjectivity is what is at stake in minimalist art.
I will return to these differences and commonalities at end of the paper,
what I want to emphasise here is that this crucial link between subjectivity
and late-modern art has been all but lost in the subsequent literature. A
phenomenological approach to minimalism, such as Krauss’s, is now sim-
ply shorthand for attending to the motile and perceptual experience of art
and its context. This approach is then neatly historicised and believed to be
dispatched by subsequent art with a more politically attuned concern for
context. To resuscitate her theoretical concern with models of subjectivity,
as De Duve does, upsets this foreclosure, while also creating an opening
for other ways to trace the progress of late-modern art—my overall aim in
this article.
To begin this task, I want to question one of the key ways in which the
progress of late modern art is traced, namely, the anti-aesthetic tradition
which sees minimalism as the ‘first step’ in the dismantling of the subjec-
tive dimension of art. This may seem a rather controversial claim, particu-
larly given the artist’s stated aims, however, much depends on how we
understand aesthetics, on the one hand, and the subjective dimension of
art on the other.
Subjectivity in art is most often associated with feeling and more partic-
ularly the signs of the artist’s vital feeling, hence minimalism—which, in
the early literature, was associated with inhuman coldness, severity and
austerity—seems an unlikely vehicle for the investigation of subjectivity.
What Krauss and de Duve demonstrate in their analyses of minimalism is
that there are other ways of thinking about subjectivity in art. By retracing
the complexity of their arguments, their explicit (and the implicit) refigur-
ings of subjectivity in art can be more clearly seen.
Aesthetics has suffered an even worse fate than the idea of subjectivity
in late modern art history. It comes into play primarily as a set of ideas that
are negated in this period: the autonomy of art, taste, beauty, visual plea-
sure, sensuousness, the expressive genius and so forth. While I certainly
don’t want to dispute that some of these ideas are questioned in this
period, I do want to question the assumption that these ideas represent the
complexity of aesthetics. In what follows, I will be arguing that to assume
minimalism is simply a rejection of traditional aesthetics is to miss crucial
aspects of its refiguring of aesthetic problems.
The aesthetic innovations of minimalism are not missed by Krauss and
de Duve; however, they do not identify them as such. This curiously posi-
tions their work as intersecting with the traditional concerns and questions
of aesthetics, despite the fact that this theoretical framework is not explicitly
deployed. Before proceeding to their analyses, then, this methodological
issue needs some clarification. I want to very briefly outline how their work
Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 129

2. Gyorgy Markus’s contributes to aesthetic debate, in turn, I will argue that the achievements
succinct and useful and limitations of their arguments are uniquely illuminated by aesthetics.
summary of classical
aesthetics was
presented in an hon- 1 Aesthetics and the Anti-aesthetic
ours course on the These two accounts of minimalism represent highly innovative theoretical
history of aesthetics
taught in the interventions into late-modern art history: that is, they refigure the function
Philosophy of art and the terms of its engagement and, perhaps even more remarkably,
department at the this is done in accordance with challenging historical shifts in practice
University of Sydney in
1991. He has used this itself. One could say that these achievements are what one would expect
schema in two of his from aesthetics rather than art history. The better contributions to aesthet-
published texts on ics usually reflect, or can account for, the dominant art practices and theo-
aesthetics: (Markus,
October 1996: ries of the time, while the best contributions are able to operate beyond
pp. 7–26 & and 2003: their immediate historical period by identifying key or recurrent aesthetic
pp. 7–24) problems and issues.
To give an example of the latter, Gyorgy Markus argues that German
Idealist aesthetics can be regarded as classical precisely because it inaugu-
rates three key approaches to aesthetics. Most aesthetic theory can still be
accommodated within this schema. Markus divides German Idealist aes-
thetics into three moments, each characterised by the central aesthetic
problem addressed: an aesthetics of reception (Kant), an aesthetics of pro-
duction (Jena Romanticism) and an aesthetics of the work (Hegel).2 This
schema will be used throughout this article to track and contextualise the
way in which Krauss and de Duve work within the framework of aesthetics.
It will come as no surprise that de Duve’s analysis can be framed in
terms of aesthetics. His work is distinguished on the contemporary scene
by the dialogue he maintains between aesthetics and art history, although
this early essay is certainly not as explicitly engaged with aesthetic theory as
his more recent work. Krauss, however, is more usually positioned within
the anti-aesthetic tradition that characterises much recent American criti-
cism of late modern and contemporary art.
This tradition has, as it were, two arms: on the one hand art practices
deemed to be anti-aesthetic and, on the other, a mode of criticism that
embraces and validates this approach. In post-war American art practice,
the anti-aesthetic tradition is commonly seen as beginning with minimal-
ism, as Alexander Alberro’s comments make clear—although neo-Dada,
Fluxus, and Pop Art can equally be aligned with this general tendency. In the
art criticism that parallels and thematises these practices, aesthetics is gen-
erally presumed to only explain art outside this tradition, for example, art
before minimalism (in particular, Abstract Expressionism), or, more
recently, contemporary art that is argued to oppose the anti-aesthetic tradi-
tion. The recent American studies of what is referred to as ‘the return to
beauty’ make this latter point quite explicitly. For example, Bill Beckley
posits the return of beauty in contemporary art as a rejection of the anti-
aesthetic tradition which he characterises (or caricatures might be more
accurate) as a mordant rejection of sensuousness and pleasure. (Beckley
and Shapiro 1998: xiv).
Aesthetics in the anti-aesthetic tradition, then, is rejected twice over,
first by certain post-war art practices and then by the critics, such as Krauss,
who seek to explain these practices. While an anti-aesthetic stance may be
the self-conscious positioning of the critic herself, and in this instance the
130 Susan Best

artists she studies, this does not mean that the concerns of aesthetics have 3 Christine Battersby
thereby disappeared. I am reminded here of Jacques Derrida’s cautionary has noted that
aesthetics is a ‘dirty
note that, one ‘always inhabits [the structures one wants to destroy], and all word’, particularly in
the more so when one does not suspect it.’ (Derrida 1974: 24) feminist and left-
Aesthetics is precisely one of the structures of thought that art history oriented approaches
to art history and film
inhabits, but one that in recent times has been not only neglected and mis- theory. Christine
understood, but also positively maligned.3 Following Derrida’s logic, the Battersby, (1991),
vehement rejection of aesthetics, foregrounded by the very term anti- ‘Situating the
Aesthetic: A Feminist
aesthetic, should alert us to the ongoing pertinence of this domain of Defence,’ Thinking Art:
knowledge. Beyond Traditional
Certainly, the framework of classical aesthetics allows us to see more Aesthetics, (ed. Andrew
Benjamin and Peter
clearly what is at stake in the refiguring of art that these two ground-break- Osborne, London:
ing accounts of minimalism trace, and, in particular, one of the unnoticed Institute for
but interesting by-products of it—the entanglement of beholder and work Contemporary Arts,
p. 35
of art. This entanglement, and the anthropomorphic work of art it pro-
duces, are the central concerns of this article. Anthropomorphism is han- 4 As Barthes put it:
“The reader is the
dled differently by each critic: in Krauss it is inadvertently embraced to space on which all the
maintain the integrity of the work of art, in de Duve it is the nub of mini- quotations that make
malism and why it represents a new genre of theatre. up a writing are
inscribed without any
of them being lost; a
2 Relocating Subjectivity: The Rise of the Spectator text’s unity lies not in
Taking their cue from Robert Morris’s work in particular, both Krauss and its origin but in its
destination.” (Barthes,
de Duve locate art’s subjective dimension not at its point of production but 1977: 148)
in reception. It is the spectator who is now ineluctably bound to the work,
5 While Kant considers
not the artist. The spectator, perhaps as never before, is crucial for com- the production of art
pleting the work of art, as indeed Michael Fried noted as early as 1967. in his concept of
(Battcock 1968: 116-47). This shift towards the spectator and the suppres- genius, his aesthetics
is much more
sion of artistic expression led Hal Foster to say that minimalism embodies concerned with giving
the principles of Roland Barthes’s infamous essay ‘The Death of the an account of
Author.’ (Foster 1986: 173) But here the reader has not displaced the author; reception or
judgment. The fact
the author has already ceded the ground. Moreover, the viewer is not the that the work of the
point of the work’s convergence—the reader’s function in Barthes’s text— genius must meet the
the viewer is incorporated into the work itself. (Barthes 1977: 148) 4 The requirements of taste
(or judgment) and
spectator is built into the work: space, light and objects only become a work thus serve as an
when we add the spectator’s field of vision. exemplar for other
This shift from an aesthetics of production to an aesthetics of reception artists indicates that
even production is
poses a conceptual problem, for while the artist is a distinct individual, the linked to reception.
spectator is not. We have no access to this peculiar abstraction, ‘the spec- Genius, he says,
tator,’ no means to know, as Kant so fully foresaw, that this figure will share should be used “in a
way that can stand the
his or her aesthetic experience with others.5 We have, then, in this shift to test of the power of
the other pole of aesthetic experience something like a circling back to what judgment.”
Hans-Georg Gadamer dismissively called Kant’s subjectivisation of aesthet- (Immanuel Kant,
1987: 178)
ics. (Gadamer 1979: 39-73) Which of course can lead to the idea of aesthetic
relativism, that everyone can have their taste, to phrase this all too current 6 For Kant, the central
problem, or antinomy,
problem in Kant’s more precise terms.6 of taste is that we act
Neither de Duve nor Krauss really stress this shift from the organising as if everyone should
trope of production to that of reception, or certainly it is not put in these agree with our taste
(universal voice),
explicitly aesthetic terms. But then this move towards reception flows despite the fact that
quite logically from the rejection of a particular account of expression both we also know there
on the part of the artists and these critics, namely that expression is the

can be no agreement transmission of the feelings or inner state of the artist. Once this kind of
about taste as it is not expression is barred, the emphasis shifts to reception, as indeed it should,
based upon concepts.
As he says “the if the shift in practice minimalism inaugurates is to be properly understood.
universal voice is only This emphasis on reception is coupled with an analysis of the way in
an idea.” (Immanuel which the work of art relates to the general condition of subjectivity, in other
Kant, 1987: 60)
words, Hegel’s contribution to idealist aesthetics is also at work here.
7 Hegel cited in Hegel’s claim that art ‘presents man with himself’ is reinvigorated for a
Gadamer, Truth and
Method, p. 45. postmodern age.7 Indeed, de Duve delivers an almost word for word reprise
of this Hegelian account of aesthetic function: ‘one of the functions of con-
8 One of the very few
references to this arti- temporary art’ he says ‘is to construct models of the contemporary subject.’
cle I have found is in (De Duve Summer/Fall 1983: 259)8
Michael Fried’s recent Now we get to the heart of the knotty problem of entanglement. Krauss
reevaluation of his
own contributions to and de Duve oscillate between locating the theory of the contemporary sub-
this debate. See Fried, ject in the work itself and yet at the same time tracing its temporal and spa-
Michael (1998), ‘An tial unfolding through the spectator’s interaction with the work. Their
Introduction to My Art
Criticism,’ Art and theories of the subject are, as it were, both immanent in the work and yet set
Objecthood: Essays off by the interaction of the subject with the work; which is to say that the
and Reviews, Chicago: spectator both completes the work of art and that they realise it. In what fol-
University of Chicago
Press, p. 41. lows, I will mainly concentrate on Krauss’s account of this theory of the subject
because her analysis puts in place this way of thinking about minimalism.
3 Krauss, Merleau-Ponty and the Space of Experience

In the first instance, Krauss’s analysis locates the theory of the subject in
minimalism itself; it is the dynamic agent that generates a modality of con-
sciousness, or of reality. (Krauss 1973: 44) For Krauss, this model is akin to,
if not identical with, Merleau-Ponty’s early phenomenology. Krauss cites his
idea that ‘the self is understood as completed only after it has surfaced into
the world’ and then applies this idea to Minimal sculpture which, she says,
is ‘a metaphorical statement of the self understood only in experience.’
(Krauss 1973: 49)
Krauss demonstrates this argument with reference to Robert Morris’s
Untitled L-Beams of 1965-7 (Fig. 1). According to Krauss, we know the L-
Beams are the same shape—if nothing else the title tells us so—but it is dif-
ficult to actually experience them that way. We can’t immediately apprehend
their sameness both because of their deliberately confusing arrangements,
and their scale. They are larger than life-sized—8 foot by 8 foot—and thus
too large when arranged in a small space to see all at once. Krauss argues
they escape easy apprehension partly because they ‘suspend the axiomatic
coordinates of an ideal space.’ (Krauss 1973: 50) The ideal space of
abstracted geometry would render them equivalent but only at the cost of
experience. And according to Krauss they are situated firmly within the
‘space of experience.’ (Krauss 1973: 50) This shift to the spectator’s experi-
ence of the work, makes such works, for Krauss, ‘fully non-psychological’
(Krauss 1973: 48) and ‘completely post-Expressionist’ (Krauss 1973: 51) that
is, the experience unfolding in the real time and space of the viewer voids,
or renders irrelevant, any recourse to prior artistic intention as it simultane-
ously delivers the model of subjectivity that minimalism contains.
This model proceeds from the suspension of ideal space. By suspend-
ing ideal space, according to Krauss’s argument, the L-Beams suspend a
traditional model of consciousness. The model that seems to guide her
132 Susan Best

9 In the Critique of Pure

Reason, Kant’s
account of the
transcendental
aesthetic is about sen-
sibility in general, not
the engagement with
art in particular. In a
footnote, he actually
opposes the now
accepted usage of the
term aesthetics, and
indeed the usage he
later adopts in the
Critique of Judgment.
(Kant, Immanuel,
1933: 66)
Figure 1: Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1965–7, fibreglass, 244 3 244 3

61 cm, installation view at Green Gallery New York, 1965 showing two of the
three L-Beams, © Robert Morris Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2006.
analysis, but which is not specifically identified as such, is the Kantian idea
of a transcendental aesthetic, that is that our innate senses of space and
time are the conditions of possibility of sense experience in general.9 It
is this priorness of space and the self that her version of minimalism ques-
tions. These works, she says, don’t present us with ‘a fixed, internal arma-
ture that could mirror the viewer’s own self.’ (Krauss 1973: 50) If they mirror
us at all, it is to show us our inner emptiness, while their outer form, which
is the chief concern of Krauss, reveals only the unstable and fluctuating
appearances that surround us. These shifting shapes nonetheless entrain
or ‘magnetise’ the bodily self, to use Merleau-Ponty’s terms (Merleau-Ponty
1945: 293). The body is aligned with their various arrangements, and is
thereby externalised or anchored by them in that space and at that
moment, allowing what Krauss calls a ‘sense of coalescing in experience
and of a realisation of the self as it achieves externality.’ (Krauss 1973: 50)
But how do the subject and world coalesce? And what kind of self is
capable of having this experience? Given that there is no inner armature, no
prior sense of space and time, what ‘occult act’ to use Merleau-Ponty’s
terms again, allows us to coalesce with and elaborate our environment?
(Merleau-Ponty 1945: 328) On these points Krauss is silent. However, her
concern, on one level, is precisely with this strange moment of meeting of
self and world that the L-Beams uncover—the space of experience. Krauss
uses this expression, the space of experience, in a Merleau-Pontian manner.
She says, somewhat enigmatically, it is: ‘the space to which one’s own body
appears, if it appears at all.’ (Krauss 1973: 50) This makes perfect sense,
however, if we look at Merleau-Ponty’s idea of primordial spatiality.

10 See James Meyer’s For Merleau-Ponty, the primordial space of experience is not the mun-
reading of Krauss in: dane experience of everyday life, what he terms the ‘already familiar world’
Meyer, (1998), ‘The
Uses of Merleau- (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 327). It is an underlying level of spatiality that is only
Ponty,’ Minimalisms: brought to conscious awareness when the familiar world recedes in dreams
Rezeptionsformen der or disintegrates in pathological conditions, or as Krauss puts it, when ideal
90er Jahre, Ostfildern:
Cantz Verlag, space is suspended. He calls this primordial experience of space a ‘blind
pp. 178–89 adherence to the world.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 339). For Merleau-Ponty,
11 My point here is that such experience is aligned with pre-personal bodily being, a communication
the call to take into with the world more ancient than thought, it is prior to abstract space, to
account different ideation, but makes them possible. In effect, he starts with the same ques-
kinds of spectators
does not present an tion as Kant—how is the already familiar world possible—but answers it by
entirely new problem reversing Kant’s argument: experience becomes the condition of possibility
for an aesthetics of of space, not the other way around. But this oneness of man and world,
reception, the impos-
sibility of ‘the Merleau-Ponty says, ‘is repressed by everyday experience.’ (Merleau-Ponty
universal voice’ is 1945: 296). Here the bedrock or basis of experience is made very strange,
already acknowledged primordial spatiality is not, one might say, ego-syntonic. In other words, pri-
as the central
problem. Slavoj mordial spatiality does not support or shore up the integrity of the subject.
Žižek’s solution to Blind adherence is perhaps a better description of the coming into
this problem is to being of the subject of minimalism than Krauss’s notion of the self under-
argue that each partic-
ular reading should be stood only in experience. Blind adherence captures the fact that Krauss’s
made in the name of model of the subject is never visible in the work of art itself. Despite her
the universal, or to claim that the work is a metaphorical statement of this theory, this state-
put this back into
Kant’s terms, each ment cannot be presented as such. In other words, we can’t actually see
subject should appeal this model; we can only enact it. The self thus cannot be understood in the
to the idea of the uni- actual experience, we can only assemble a theory of co-constitution after-
versal voice, (Žižek,
1998: 988 – 1009) wards, this is precisely Merleau-Ponty’s point and maybe it is Krauss’s too.
For Merleau-Ponty, blind adherence emphasises not our coalescence in
experience but rather our fundamental contingency; that is, we are pro-
pelled bodily into the world without prior constitution, without an innate
sense of space. This is echoed in Krauss: the spectator is plunged into an
encounter with a work that refuses to give reassuring orientation and
anchorage. Divested of ideal co-ordinates, the spectator must feel some-
thing like the giddiness that Merleau-Ponty says is our awareness of our
underlying contingency (Merleau-Ponty 1945: 296). Certainly Krauss is
understood by later commentators to be promoting precisely this radically
contingent subjectivity.10 By stripping away the transcendental aesthetic
which served to unify experience we are, then, left rudderless, radically con-
tingent and decentred. This is the familiar subject of postmodernism, the
one that Alexander Alberro believes minimalism inaugurates by denying the
operation of a facilitating transcendental.
Contingency, however, should not be confused with radical subjectivisa-
tion, although it is true that the shift to an aesthetics of reception exacer-
bates this risk. Indeed, it is now customary to entrench this problem of the
unknowable reaction of the spectator still further by appending the quali-
fiers of race, sex or class, as Hal Foster does in a commentary on Krauss
(Foster 1986: 170-1).11 But the essential problem of an aesthetics of
reception, the privacy of meaning, is precisely what Krauss wants to
avoid. For her, private, enclosed, possibly incommensurable, meaning is
to be tempered by public meaning—the shared horizons of language
and embodiment. Nonetheless her work has opened the way for such
134 Susan Best

subjectivising analyses insofar as her account of the minimalist subject is 12 Meyer (2001: 25)
anti-foundational. states that ‘the appeal
of a Judd or Morris
For Krauss, however, subjectivisation is forestalled because while the cube was not the
subject is contingent, the meaning of minimalism is not. She doesn’t pre- unbridled subjectivity
sent her reading as if it is one among many—nobody does, despite post- of a drip canvas, but
its lack of affect.’
modern pieties about pluralism—she presents it as if we should agree with
her. For her, the work has a particular meaning, an intention perhaps—this
would probably not be overstating the extent of the anthropomorphism—
and in conformity with it the spectator acts. There is no contingency here,
no room for relativism. She suggests the work has certain perceptual prop-
erties that should produce a similar reaction in all subjects. We know the
work is in some way about our experience and perception because, as
Merleau-Ponty indicates, we become aware of perception only when there is
some ambiguity, and we would surely agree that the L-Beams are ambigu-
ous. We know the work is not about the feelings of the artist, because the
tone of the works is cool, even affectless as one commentator put it.12 And
in any case, if there is any doubt one can refer back to the artists’ reco-
rded intentions, which are in fact regularly consulted despite the exaggerated
news of their death. This is not to say that everyone will seamlessly move
from minimal affect and perceptual ambiguity to a theory of the subject
unaided, but Krauss’s argument is certainly very compelling.
And it is compelling because her reading is grounded in the expressive
dimensions of the art itself, despite her protestations to the contrary. The
account of expression I am using here is that of the philosopher Edward
Casey. He explicitly rejects the idea that expression is the direct communi-
cation of the artist’s feelings—the predominant understanding of expres-
sion in art history, including that of Krauss and de Duve. By questioning the
elision of expression and communication, he loosens the stranglehold
Expressionism seems to have on this particular term, and offers another
way of thinking about it.
For Casey, expression is not about the production of art, nor is he con-
cerned with the problems of reception; expression is an attribute of art con-
sidered as a phenomenon. His phenomenological approach is best
understood as an aesthetics of the work. He argues against the idea that
expression is a hidden, or private, meaning. In this rejection of hidden
depth, the phenomenologies of Casey and Krauss converge. Expression, for
Casey, is the ‘aesthetic surface’ of the work which can be broken down into
three components: the affective qualities of an aesthetic object, its percep-
tual qualities, and its import or meaning. (Casey 1971: 198). To focus on
such properties and their publicness is not to suggest there is one mean-
ing, we would be well and truly out of the aesthetic domain if this was the
case, but it does curb the worst excesses of postmodern voluntarist criti-
cism unleashed by a too close adherence to the ideal, rather than the idea,
of contingency.
Krauss, on the other hand, may in fact be too closely wedded to such an
account of expression: the publicness of the work and its observable, verifi-
able properties are favoured over the spectator’s less predictable interac-
tion with them. Her analysis thus puts into play an interesting tension
between an aesthetics of reception and an aesthetics of the work, however
in the final analysis she folds reception back into the work. Her reference to

13 In the reworked analy- the spectator becomes only an elaboration of the work. The tell-tale signs
sis of Morris in are there in the idea that the work is a metaphorical statement of the theory
Passages in Modern
Sculpture, Krauss of the subject, even though this doesn’t quite fit with the ultimately anti-
places far greater optical trajectory of her work on sculpture.13 In other words, the work
emphasis on what we should only come to life at the moment of coalescence—this would faith-
cannot see, namely
the sameness of the L- fully follow Morris’s idea of aesthetic dispersion—but for Krauss this is also
Beams, sameness is what the work intends. The problem that plagues her analysis is the return
argued to be an ideal of intention, of priorness, in short her failure to include the question of
structure that is prior
to experience. It time.
seems to me that this It is precisely the temporal dimension of minimalism that is made
emphasis on opacity explicit by de Duve. His analysis, as his title should indicate with ‘its plea
or invisibility better
serves the idea of the for a new genre of theatre’ reworks aspects of Michael Fried’s analysis of
work enacting a theory minimalism, and in particular Fried’s criticism of its temporal nature. In the
of the subject, process, de Duve also addresses some of the contradictions in Krauss’s
however it thereby
also reintroduces account, produced precisely by an absence of time.
Kant’s transcendental
aesthetic. (Krauss, 4 De Duve, Anthropomorphism and Time
1977: 266–7)
De Duve reads the geometric shapes of minimalism not in terms of a space
14 Fried, ‘Art and of experience as Krauss does, but as about the conflict of different temporal
Objecthood,’
(Battcock 1968: orders. The space of experience is the ‘immediate being-there’ that he
116–47) argues our century has discovered is always harbouring representation. For
him, then, geometric shapes, such as the cube or the L-Beam, do not sus-
pend ideal space in favour of the space of experience; rather these types of
spatiality are distinguished temporally. The time of ideation—the cogni-
sance of geometric shape—is immediate, whereas the perceptual experi-
ence needed to verify this takes place over time. In other words, the idea of
the shape, and the actual exploration of it in time, are out of sync. The con-
flict of the faculties—apprehension and reason—is a conflict of time.
Minimalism, de Duve concludes, signals not the loss of the Kantian a
priori—essentially Krauss’s argument—on the contrary it shows the posi-
tive recognition of this loss. The spectator, he explains, is compelled to pro-
duce a posteriori the conditions of experience already completed. So we
have something like the layered spatial experience of Merleau-Ponty, but
here the distinctions are made in time. The dissolution of self and world,
personal and public, that Krauss’s argument constantly risks but forestalls,
become for him distinctions enacted in time.
De Duve also concedes the anthropomorphism that haunts Krauss’s
account. He says, there is ‘an anthropomorphism º º
in all art The ques-
tion is to know which anthropomorphism.’(De Duve Summer/Fall 1983:
250) To discover what is distinctive about the anthropomorphism of mini-
malism, he argues, the questions to ask are: ‘Which kind of human repre-
sentation does Minimalism put into play, which heuristic model of man
does it propose?’ (De Duve Summer/Fall 1983: 250)
De Duve rejects Fried’s famous claim that the hollowness of minimalist
works is what makes them ‘blatantly anthropomorphic.’14 He turns instead
to Fried’s notion that the minimalist work of art is incomplete without the
spectator and that the work confronts the spectator like a ‘surrogate
person.’ From these acute observations, de Duve begins to develop his
alternate account of minimalist anthropomorphism. He builds on the idea
that minimalism is an encounter where the spectator is essential and
136 Susan Best

reinterprets the personhood of minimalist sculpture to mean that the work 15 Hinshelwood (1989: p
functions as a metaphor for the self. 365) uses this term
specifically to explain
He tracks the features of this encounter and the oddly ambivalent introjected internal
demands minimalism makes on the spectator: it addresses the spectator, objects, the breast in
includes them as an inhabitant, and yet also reduces them to an object, the tummy, whereas
I’m using it to think
while also spatially distancing and embracing them at one and the same about how an
time. Minimalism, he says, using Fried’s terms, ‘extorts’ complicity from unpleasant feeling
the spectator. Where he departs from Fried is that relations of complicity tie might be thought to
be caused by
the spectator to the surrounding architecture, not to the minimalist scul- something outside. In
pture. In this subtle move, de Duve takes some distance from the idea that Klein, inside and out-
the anthropomorphism of minimalism is the attribution of agency to the side are often
interimplicated in
sculpture, that this ‘surrogate person’ addresses us, and has specific highly complex ways,
demands. she states: ‘Even if
‘Demands,‘ ‘addresses,’ such terms are routinely used in art history to objects are felt to be
external, they become
describe the accommodations a receptive viewer makes to the exigencies of through introjection
different art practices. These terms, and our constant recourse to them, internal persecutors.’
clearly indicate the ingrained and unavoidable nature of anthropomor- (Klein, 1988: 5)
phism. But Fried’s term ‘extorts’ is in a slightly different register: there is
both violence and unwillingness implicit in this term. Indeed, Fried’s
response to minimalist works, such as Tony Smith’s Die, makes manifest
an extreme form of anthropomorphism and a more profound entanglement
of spectator and work (Fig. 2).
Fried has a decidedly paranoid reaction to the anthropomorphic work: it
impinges upon him, crowding him out of the room like a person would.
The work is not only animated in his account, it is accused of ‘aggressive-
ness’ and thus given something like an inner state. This reaction could be
understood in psychoanalytic terms as situated in the domain of part-object
relations and projective identification. That is, the feeling of persecution is
attributed to the object; the object causes the feeling. Melanie Klein’s work
tracks such confusions of inner and outer sensations, the sense of which
we can quickly grasp in expressions such as the ‘hunger-causing-object’.15
Hunger can be experienced as if an object provokes it, rather than being an
endogenous sensation: for example, the breast causes hunger. And at one
level it does, the smell of the lactating breast may indeed regulate the
infant’s appetite. Some truth about the object is found in paranoid projec-
tion: it is not simply a confusion of inner and outer, it is also the precondi-
tion of their meeting
Similarly, Fried’s paranoid reaction foregrounds the anthropomorphism
of minimalism that de Duve’s analysis finally concedes. De Duve’s anthro-
pomorphism, however, is very different. While he concedes the coercion of
the beholder that Fried identifies, for him this is not the crux of anthropo-
morphism. Coercion is not attributed to the bullying presence of an aggres-
sive object, instead it describes the way the beholder is positioned by the
minimalist installation: according to De Duve, beholders are forced to see
themselves as part of a ‘created situation.’ It is how they then perform in
this created situation that is the key to de Duve’s notion of minimalist
anthropomorphism.
This relocation of anthropomorphism in the actions of the spectator
may seem somewhat puzzling. It flows, however, from de Duve’s general
definition of anthropomorphism, which is a radical departure from the

Figure 2: Tony Smith, Die, 1962, steel, 183 ⫻ 183 ⫻ 183 cm © Tony Smith
Licensed by VISCOPY, Australia, 2006.
conventional understandings of this term. For him, anthropomorphism is

not about the attribution of human qualities to inanimate objects, it is a
more general question about how subjectivity is presented and constructed
in art. Anthropomorphism, then, is not something that can be avoided by
making non-expressive art, it is linked in his analysis to the central function
of art, namely to provide models of the contemporary subject. Fried’s analy-
sis is turned towards this end or purpose. He uses Fried’s analysis almost
symptomatically as though the points of tension and criticism Fried identi-
fies—the necessity of the spectator, the work as surrogate—indicate the
components necessary to think through the model of subjectivity minimal-
ism offers. De Duve is ultimately somewhat equivocal about this model,
however, his most sustained and striking example of the minimalist model
of subjectivity is the black box.
Hollow forms, such as Tony Smith’s Die and Black Box, prompt de
Duve to argue that cybernetics’ black box provides the best model of ‘what
man is to man’ today. (De Duve Summer/Fall 1983: 252) Here he follows
Krauss and the rejection of private, interior meaning, and proposes a sub-
ject knowable only through surface exchanges ‘with the world and others.’
The minimalist work is then, as it is in Krauss, a metaphor for the self, and
138 Susan Best

yet a metaphor or model that can only be fully realised by the spectator’s
actions. He departs from Krauss, however, in his understanding of these
actions.
The motile spectator apprehending the different aspects of the work
does not coalesce in experience, rather he or she is divided by these differ-
ent views. As de Duve puts it:
º when the spectator turns around the object and grasps it in its differences,
he is attending his own differentiation, a becoming-other which is not the
sudden astonishment in front of an alienating mirror, but a passive process
resulting from his own actions.
(De Duve Summer/Fall 1983: 251)
The spectator in this account must accept the work as a metaphor of the
self such that the differences of the work become his or hers. It follows
then that if these perceptual differences cannot be synthesised into a
whole, so too the self that takes this voyage around the object, or
objects, cannot attain unity either. If Krauss’s analysis strives for the
moment of co-constitution of spectator and work, de Duve’s analysis
traces instead their mutual failure to cohere, their unraveling through
performance. The black box subject is then simply the sum of such per-
formed actions, or as de Duve puts it: ‘the human subject would define
himself as the integral of his performances.’ (De Duve Summer/Fall 1983:
253) In other words, the beholder in the “created situation” enacts this
definition of subjectivity.
Having developed one account of the model of subjectivity, de Duve
ultimately concludes by arguing that the philosophy of the subject of mini-
malism is yet to be written. The model is not phenomenological, as Krauss
contends, or rather it is not Heideggerian. He states:
We no longer have confidence in the Kantian model of transcendental subject,

constituted by the a priori of space and time. But we no longer trust distrust
either; we do not think any longer of ourselves according to the model, say,
Heideggarian, of the existential subject for whom his Da-Sein is above all an
irremediable absence to himself and to the world.
(De Duve Summer/Fall 1983: 259)
De Duve’s argument by embracing the anthropomorphism of minimalism,

and showing the need to move beyond the radical contingency of Krauss,
points the way towards thinking again and more deeply about the shifting
nature of subjectivity in art. But in his reworking of anthropomorphism—its
primary location in the actions of the subject rather than the demands of
the art object—we also lose sight of the strange and interesting conse-
quences of the refiguring of reception. In other words, by aligning anthro-
pomorphism with the performative aspects of reception—the spectator
enacts the theory of the subject—the peculiar power of these works to mag-
netise the body, or demand this performance is diminished. Minimalism
becomes the arena for the staging of a new genre of theatre—the drama of
the contemporary subject—but the consequence is that minimalist objects
melt into the background as props.

16 See James Meyer’s How do we reconcile this account of minimalism with the claim that
account of this these works anticipate or regulate the viewer’s movements, as Krauss does,
tradition in Meyer,
(2000) ‘Nomads: or that this new power can be experienced as aggression as Fried does? The
Figures of Travel in primary locus of meaning is clearly very different in these two ways of
Contemporary understanding the anthropomorphism of minimalism. Putting the spotlight
Art,’ Site-Specificity:
The Ethnographic Turn, on the performance of the viewing subject, is at the expense of the mini-
de-, dis-, ex-, 4: pp. malist objects, and in turn, emphasising the object’s power to entrain the
12–15 subject is at the expense of the subject’s agency. The entanglement of
beholder and work of art, however, is clearly present in both accounts, but
figured differently: in Krauss it turns on the subject’s blind adherence to the
work’s intentions, in de Duve the subject blindly performs the work’s
meaning.
Considered together, these largely incompatible accounts nonetheless
reveal the labile quality of subjectivity in late modern art. They generate fur-
ther questions about both the uncertain location of subjectivity and the new
role of the spectator. Such questions are alive in much contemporary instal-
lation practice. The complicated entanglement of viewer and work that min-
imalism launched is celebrated in the idea of immersive video installations
and interactive work. In art history, however, these questions are lost, or
rather they have been occluded by the particular way in which minimalism
has been historicised.
To conclude by returning to where I began, in Alexander Alberro’s state-
ments we can see the effects of this process of historicisation. Minimalism
is reduced to an ‘important step’ in the evolution of certain anti-subjective
or anti-expressive art practices; and, in this reduced form, it is a crucial
touchstone for evaluation and judgement. More specifically, it is commonly
used to determine which practices qualify as ‘advanced practices’ in late-
twentieth and early twenty-first century art. Minimalism is then positioned
(erroneously I believe) as the beginning of an anti-aesthetic tradition.16-
Here, I am not disputing the fact that minimalism effects a radical break
with certain aesthetic ideas, nor am I claiming it was easily accommodated
within the critical vocabulary that was then available. What I do want to
question is the idea that a critique of some ideas necessarily puts into doubt
the pertinence of a whole body of philosophical thought.
To calibrate the achievements of minimalism more precisely we could
say that minimalism questioned the expressionist theory of art, but not
expression in toto. It questioned one account of the subject, but not subjec-
tivity in general. It questioned the focus upon the artist’s hidden thoughts and
feelings, but not the whole question of intention. And these various moves
have important consequences, one of which is the shift of focus away from
production and on to the work and its reception. In turn, one of the curious
results of this shift is the transposition of traditional aesthetic questions
about production, such as intention and expression, to the work of art
itself. Aesthetic problems seem to have a hydra-like indestructibility so that
when they are curtailed in one place, they reappear in another.
There are no simple solutions to the rise of the spectator and the anthro-
pomorphic work of art and what they mean for the assessment of art, but to
fully engage with the implications of these changes requires the broader view
of aesthetics. We can certainly conclude that the tension between Krauss and
de Duve’s anthropomorphisms flows from the shift away from production
140 Susan Best

as the primary locus of meaning and the uncertainty this produces. Without
the anchorage point of the artist and his or her intentions, both expression
and subjectivity are unfixed from their traditional locations. An aesthetics of
the work, such as Krauss’s, favours their reinscription in the work. An aes-
thetics of reception, such as de Duve’s reinscribes them in the dynamic of
performance. Whether these different aesthetic approaches can be recon-
ciled is a question for the future. It is only within the framework of aesthet-
ics, however, that we can fully appreciate such radical changes in art practice;
changes, which de Duve rightly insists, we have not finished interpreting.
References
Round table (1994), ‘Conceptual Art and the Reception of Duchamp’, October, 70,
pp. 127–46.
Andre, C. (1959), ‘Preface to Stripe Painting’, in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (eds),
Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings,
Berkeley, 1996, p. 124.
Barthes, R. (1977), ‘The Death of the Author’, Image—Music—Text (trans. Stephen
Heath), New York: Hill and Wang, pp. 142–8.
Battersby, C. (1991), ‘Situating the Aesthetic: A Feminist Defence’, in Andrew
Benjamin and Peter Osborne (eds), Thinking Art: Beyond Traditional Aesthetics,
London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, pp. 31–43.
Beckley, B. and Shapiro, D. (eds) (1998), Uncontrollable Beauty: Towards a New
Aesthetics, New York: Allworth Press.
Casey, E. (1971), ‘Expression and Communication in Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, pp. 197–207.
Chave, A.C. (1991), ‘Minimalism and the Rhetoric of Power’, in T.H. Day (ed.),
Power: Its Myths and Mores in American Art 1961–1991, Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, pp. 116–40.
—— (2000), ‘Minimalism and Biography’, Art Bulletin, 82: 1, pp. 148–63.
De Duve, T. (Summer/Fall 1983), ‘Performance Here and Now: Minimal Art, a Plea
for a new Genre of Theatre’ (trans. D. Guilbaut), Open Letter 5–6, pp. 234–60.
Derrida, J. (1974), Of Grammatology (trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), Baltimore:
The Johns Hopkins University Press.
Foster, H. (1986), ‘The Crux of Minimalism’, in Howard Singerman (ed.), Individuals:
A Selected History of Contemporary Art, 1945–1986, exh. cat., Museum of
Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1986, pp. 162–83.
Fried, M. (1968), ‘Art and Objecthood’, in Gregory Battcock (ed.), Minimal Art: A
Critical Anthology, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 116–47.
—— (1998), ‘An Introduction to My Art Criticism’, Art and Objecthood: Essays and
Reviews, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 1–74.
Gadamer, H.-G. (1979), Truth and Method, London: Continuum International
Publishing Group.
Hinshelwood, R.D. (1989), A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, London: Free
Association Books Ltd.
Judd, D. (1965), ‘Specific Objects’, Art in Theory 1900–1990 (eds. Charles Harrison
and Paul Wood, Oxford, 1992), pp. 809–13.
Kant, I. (1933), Critique of Pure Reason (trans. Norman Kemp Smith), London:
St Martins Press.
—— (1987), Critique of Judgment (trans. Werner S. Pluhar), Indianapolis: Hackett
Publishing.

Klein, M. (1988), ‘Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms’, Envy and Gratitude and
Other Works 1946–1963, London: The Free Press, pp. 1–24.
Krauss, R. (November 1973), ‘Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post 60s
Sculpture’, Artforum, pp. 42–53.
—— (1977), Passages in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
Markus, G. (October 1996), ‘Hegel and the End of Art’, Literature and Aesthetics, 6: 1,
pp. 7–26.
—— (2003), ‘The Paradoxical Unity of Culture: The Arts and the Sciences’, Thesis
Eleven, 75: 1, pp. 7–24.
Meyer, J. (1998), ‘The Uses of Merleau-Ponty’, Minimalisms: Rezeptionsformen der
90er Jahre, Ostfildern: Cantz , pp. 178–89.
—— (2000), ‘Nomads: Figures of Travel in Contemporary Art’, Site-Specificity: The
Ethnographic Turn, de-, dis-, ex-, 4, pp. 10–26.
—— (2001), Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties, New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Morris, R. (1995), ‘Notes on Sculpture, Part 2’ (1966), Continuous Project Altered
Daily, Cambridge, MA, 1995, pp. 11–21.
Stella, F. (1966), ‘Questions to Stella and Judd by Bruce Glaser’, in Kristine Stiles
and Peter Selz (eds), Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook
of Artists’ Writings, Berkeley (1996), pp. 117–24.
Žižek, S. (1998), ‘A Leftist Plea for Eurocentrism’, Critical Injury, 24: 4, pp.
988–1009.
Suggested citation
Best, S. (2006), ‘Minimalism, subjectivity, and aesthetics: rethinking the anti-
aesthetic tradition in late-modern art’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 5: 3,
pp. 127–142, doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.127/1
Contributor details
Susan Best teaches in the School of Art History and Theory, University of New South
Wales. She is currently working on a book titled, Affect and Expression in Late
Modern Art: Lygia Clark, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Eva Hesse, Ana Mendieta. This
project is funded by an Australian Research Council grant. Contact: School of Art
History and Theory College of Fine Arts, University of New South Wales, O Box 259,
Paddington 2021 NSW, Australia.
E-mail:s.best@unsw.edu.au
142 Susan Best

JVAP 5.3_03_art_Dezeuze.qxd 12/11/06 3:31 PM Page 143

Everyday life, ‘relational aesthetics’ and

the ‘transf iguration of the commonplace’
Anna Dezeuze University of Manchester
Abstract Keywords
This essay addresses the ways in which the relation between art and the everyday everyday in art
life has been discussed by authors Arthur Danto (in The Transfiguration of the transfiguration
Commonplace, 1981), and Nicolas Bourriaud (in Relational Aesthetics, 1999). relational aesthetics
While both studies are significant attempts to grapple with the new relation Danto, Arthur
between art and life explored by successive generations of artists (in the 1960s and Bourriaud, Nicolas
the 1990s), I argue that neither are able to tackle the specificity of the everyday in Certeau, Michel de
art because they take definitions of the ‘everyday’ or ‘commonplace’ for granted. Fluxus
In contrast, I suggest ways in which reference to studies of everyday life such as
Michel de Certeau’s Practice of Everyday Life can help complement aesthetics’
focus on definitions of art. Such a focus on everyday life, I argue, can shed light on
1960s works by Pop and Fluxus artists as well as contemporary ‘relational’ prac-
tices such as those by Rirkrit Tiravanija’s.
The old ‘art and life’ chestnut

‘Art is what makes life more interesting than art.’ Such was the apt definition 1 This essay was first
provided by Robert Filliou, a French artist who was affiliated to the Fluxus published under the
title ‘Transfiguration
group in the 1960s.1 The relation between art and life has long been a recur- of the Commonplace’
rent trope of aesthetics and artistic practice of various kinds, and the 1960s in Variant, 2(22):
was a period when artists seemed particularly concerned with this issue. 17–19, Spring 2005.
This often quoted
Robert Rauschenberg, for example, famously said: ‘Painting relates to both
º
art and life (I try to work in that gap between the two)’ (Rauschenberg
definition is cited for
example by Jouval
2003: 8.
1959: 58). Allan Kaprow, the inventor of ‘happenings’, stated on his part that
‘the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct,
as possible’ (Kaprow 1966: 188).
If it is by now widely acknowledged that the opening of art to life in the
1960s radically changed the definition of art, these three statements alone
serve to point to the important differences amongst the forms that this rela-
tion between art and life can take. Acting in the gap between art and life like
Rauschenberg does not imply the same kind of activity as creating works
which, according to Filliou, somehow serve as marginal tools to make life
more interesting than art. And surely there is quite a substantial distinction
between keeping a line fluid, and blurring boundaries altogether, even if
Kaprow tentatively aligns one with another.
My contention is that the reasons why these differences are, more
often than not, neglected by art historians and philosophers alike is that
discussions tend to forget the other term of the relationship. Instead of
asking ‘what is art?’, shouldn’t we be asking: ‘what is life?’ This question is

2 For more about obviously much too general to be answered by any one single person, and
Brecht’s Three Chair could indeed be considered as the main question of philosophy and other
Events, and his work
as a whole, cf. forms of enquiry. When it is posed in a specific context, however, a more precise
Robinson (2005). focus can be singled out for discussion. In the cases of Rauschenberg,
Kaprow and Filliou, for example, it is clear that their concerns lay specifically
in the realm of everyday life, and in particular the everyday life that had been
excluded so forcefully by the abstract expressionist generation of painters
and Clement Greenberg’s formalist criticism.
In order to explore the relations between art and what has variously been
called the everyday, the commonplace, the ordinary, the banal, I will be referring
in particular to two texts: Arthur Danto’s landmark work, The Transfiguration of
the Commonplace, and a more recent book by the French curator and critic
Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics. While sketching out the ways in which
these two authors responded to the emergence of the everyday in artistic
practices ranging from Andy Warhol and Fluxus to 1990s contemporary art, I
will also examine their ideas in the light of theories of everyday life, in particular
Michel de Certeau’s 1980 Practice of Everyday Life. Specific artistic practices will
be the guiding thread in this discussion, for it is artists who pose the questions
that aesthetics struggle to answer.
The conditions of transfiguration

º
Between art and everyday life, there is no difference . The difference between
a chair by Duchamp and one of my chairs could be that Duchamp’s chair is
on a pedestal and mine can still be used.
(Brecht 1965: 71)
One of Danto’s greatest achievements lies in his analysis of the sudden

visibility of the everyday in 1960s art. Danto has often recounted how
seeing Warhol’s Brillo Boxes at the Stable Gallery in 1964 was the trigger
for his reflections on the differences between artworks and everyday
objects. The Warhol Boxes, he explains in the introduction to The
Transfiguration of the Commonplace, ‘so totally resemble what by com-
mon consent are not art works’ that they ‘make the question of defini-
tion urgent’ (Danto 1981: vii). Analysing key notions of illusionism,
mimesis, belief, interpretation, style and expression, Danto develops
the argument that one of the differences between a Brillo box and the
new ‘Brillo-box-as-work-of-art’ is the fact that the artwork takes the non-
artwork as its subject matter and simultaneously makes a point about
how this subject matter is presented. The mode of representation thus
creates a surplus meaning which prevents the two objects from being
equated one with another.
‘Make a salad.’ This 1963 Proposition by Alison Knowles is cited by
Arthur Danto in a recent essay on Fluxus as one of many examples of the
group’s engagement with everyday life. In this discussion, Danto also
quotes Brecht’s statement (cited above) about the difference between his
chairs and Duchamp’s readymades. Brecht’s contribution to the 1961 exhi-
bition Environment, Situations, Spaces (Six Artists), at the Martha Jackson
Gallery in New York, was the placement of three different chairs in various
parts of the gallery (Three Chair Events).2 Since viewers had no indication
144 Anna Dezeuze

that these chairs were part of an artwork, some visitors sat on them without 3 Ching Yuan, Zen
a second thought, much to Brecht’s satisfaction. Buddhism: Selected
Writings of D.T. Suzuki
In the same essay, Danto extends to Fluxus his earlier discussion of Pop (ed.). D.T. Suzuki
art, revisiting specific ideas from The Transfiguration of the Commonplace quoted by Danto
which, indeed, seem to fit Fluxus like a glove. In particular, Danto points to (1981: 133, 2002: 31).
the fact that in the 1960s he shared with Fluxus an interest in Zen, and he 4 For such an analysis
reproduces a quote by Zen Buddhist Ching Yuan which he had included in of these different
aspects of Warhol’s
The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: works, cf. Buchloh
(1989).
Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains and
waters as waters. When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the
point where I saw that mountains are not mountains and waters are not
waters. But now I have got to the very substance I am at rest. For it is just that
I saw mountains again as mountains and waters once again as waters.3
The idea that there is nothing internal to these three experiences which
distinguishes them obviously from one another was in tune with Danto’s
preoccupations with the absence of differences between artworks and
mere things. What, indeed, is the difference between performing
Knowles’s instruction and the act of making a salad that many of us regu-
larly perform? As in the case of Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, Danto concludes:
What Fluxus helped us see is that no theory of art could help us pick out
which were the artworks, since art can resemble reality to any chosen degree.
Fluxus was right that the question is not which are the art works, but how we
view anything if we see it as art.
(Danto 2002: 31)
In their critical study of Danto’s aesthetics, Horowitz and Huhn have dis-
cussed the conditions required for this ‘transfiguration’ of the everyday into
art. The question they ask is the following: does Pop according to Danto
allow the everyday to take over art (‘a return of the everyday in art’) or is it
rather a moment in which art seizes the everyday for its purposes (‘a return
to the everyday by art’) (Horowitz and Huhn 1998: 31–32)? If Pop marks a
return of the everyday in art, then it means that there is no possibility of its
redemption, since transfiguration can only occur when there is a distance
that allows the everyday to be presented as art. Pop et al. conclude that
there needs to be a return to the everyday by art in order to remain art. If
Pop artists did embrace the everyday, then, in contrast with abstract expres-
sionists before them, they nevertheless kept a critical distance from it by
using it for other purposes than presenting the raw everydayness of their
material – in order, for example, to comment simultaneously about the
state of art, the accelerating production and increasing sophistication of
packaging and advertising.4 When Danto claims that Warhol and Fluxus
question ‘how we view anything if we see it as art’, he is thus implicitly
positing this distance from the everyday. As Horowitz and Huhn suggest,
the experience which allows the viewer to bind art and the everyday can,
according to Danto, only function if this distance is introduced even before
any artistic process takes place: in order to make the everyday available for
aesthetic experience, the artist, and the viewer, need to have detached one
Everyday life, ‘relational aesthetics’ and the ‘transfiguration of the commonplace’ 145
specific aspect of the commonplace (its novelty, its aesthetic qualities, its
º
strangeness ) from its original ‘rawness’.
While I agree that this ‘pre-aestheticizing’ process operates in Pop, I would
like to argue Fluxus works such as Brecht’s Three Chair Events or Knowles’s
Proposition shrink the distance presumed by Danto, in order to explore the raw-
ness which aesthetics seeks to exclude for the sake of transfiguration. In order
to maintain this aesthetic distance, Danto, like Pop artists, sought to eliminate
one particular aspect of the everyday’s rawness: its relation to use and habit.
Brecht has recounted how once he tried to sit down on the chair included in
Rauschenberg’s 1960 combine, Pilgrim, only to be stopped and told that he
could not. Recalling his frustration, Brecht explained: ‘After all, if it’s a chair
why shouldn’t you sit in it?’ (Brecht 1967: 80). Unlike Brecht’s, Rauschenberg’s
chair can no less revert to its initial function than Warhol’s painted wood Brillo
boxes. By shifting the emphasis from object to performance, Fluxus works
emphasize use and habit, and thus establish a radically different relation to the
commonplace. Fluxus picked up another aspect of Zen: the full embrace of
everyday activities such as eating, drinking and sleeping. For, whether Ching
Yuan saw mountains as mountains or whether he saw mountains as not
mountains would never have prevented him from climbing one of them when
he wanted to go for a walk. In doing so, he may have been performing a Fluxus
score by Takehisa Kosugi (Theatre Music, c. 1963) which simply reads: ‘Keep
walking intently’.
Relational aesthetics
I started to make things so that people could use them º [My work] is not
meant to be put out with other sculpture or like another relic to be looked at,
but you have to use itº
(Tiravanija in Kraynak 1998: 36)
Thirty years after the birth of Fluxus in 1962, artist Rikrit Tiravanija presented
Untitled (Free) at the 303 Gallery in New York, a work in which he decided to
put all the things he found in the storeroom and office into the exhibition
space, to use the storeroom to cook Thai curries for visitors, and to leave the
leftovers, kitchen utensils and used food packets on display in the gallery when
he was not here. This work is typical of what Nicolas Bourriaud has called a
new ‘relational art’, which requires a new kind of ‘relational aesthetics’ in order
to account for its emergence and to describe its characteristics. Relational art,
according to Bourriaud, is characterized by the fact that it takes ‘as its starting
point human relations and their social context, as opposed to autonomous
and exclusive art’ (Bourriaud 1998: 117). Relational aesthetics, hence, must be
‘an aesthetic theory consisting in judging artworks in terms of the inter-human
relations which they show, produce, or give rise to’ (Bourriaud 1998: 117).
Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics could be seen as an alternative to
Danto’s transfiguration of the commonplace because it seems to focus pre-
cisely on the terms which the latter excludes. Bourriaud, for example, explains
that contemporary works such as Tiravanija’s should not be considered as
spaces to be walked through but instead as durations to be experienced,
where the performative aspect of the work is more important than either
objects to be viewed in space or the space of the gallery itself. Focusing on
146 Anna Dezeuze

the relations between the artist and the gallery visitors, the interactions
between the guests, and the atmosphere created by Tiravanija’s cooking,
obviously shifts the emphasis away from the finished object towards the
process, the performance, the behaviours which emerge from the artist’s
everyday intervention. It is much more difficult to define what the form of
the work actually consists in. Whereas Danto systematically tried to define
Fluxus and Pop works as ontological entities, Bourriaud is content with
describing ‘form’ as nothing more than a ‘coherent plane’ on which hetero-
geneous entities can meet; it must be unstable, open to exchange and dia-
logue (Bourriaud 1998: 115).
Instead of an opposition between art and the everyday articulated in the
transfiguration of the commonplace, Bourriaud describes art as a ‘social inter-
stice’. Bourriaud borrows the term ‘interstice’ from Marx, who used it to
describe exchange spaces which can escape from the dominant capitalist
economy (barter is one of his examples). For Bourriaud, artworks exist in such
a space, a space that is part of the global system but nonetheless suggests the
possibility of alternative exchanges. Bourriaud singles out in the global capital-
ist system one particular aspect of everyday life which art can resist by multi-
plying new social interstices: the commercialization and spectacularization of
interpersonal relations in everyday life.
Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics emphasize events, performance, behav-
iours and alternative modes of exchange over unusable, commodified
objects, while privileging flexible notions of form instead of trying to define
art – they thus seem to be much better placed than Danto’s theories to
describe the nature of the everyday in works by Tiravanija and Fluxus alike.
Yet, if Danto’s aesthetics may be too restricted to encompass the variety of
relations between art and everyday life, Bourriaud’s ideas, for their part, suf-
fer from not being precise enough. There are many obvious reasons for this:
Bourriaud is a critic rather than a philosopher, an advocate rather than an
analyst of relational aesthetics, and he is clearly implicated in the commer-
cial and institutional art world (he is the co-director of the Palais de Tokyo,
which was founded in 2002 as an institutional showcase for contemporary
art in Paris). Perhaps there is even a deliberate decision on the part of
Bourriaud to elude, for the sake of packaging a new generation of artists, the
crucial questions of how exactly interpersonal relations have become com-
mercialized and spectacularized, and how getting together to have a curry
with Tiravanija somehow resists this state of things. What I would like to
underline here is that, despite his apparent embrace of the everyday,
Bourriaud, like Danto, seems to take for granted a universal definition of the
commonplace. Only by retrieving the specificity of the everyday can the
works discussed by Bourriaud and Danto be extracted from the rhetorical
uses to which they have been subjected.
Describing the everyday

If [Michel de Certeau’s] Practice of Everyday Life is seen as attempting to reg-
ister the poiesis of everyday life through poetics, then it is a poetics that
articulates activities rather than expresses identities – a poetics of uses
rather than users.
(Highmore 2002: 156)
Knowles’s proposition to make a salad relates to an act that we perform in

our daily life, and the form it takes evokes very directly a familiar everyday
object: the cooking recipe. In her study of cooking as a practice of everyday
life, Luce Giard explains that:
In every language, cooking recipes compose a kind of minimal text, defined by

its internal economy, its concision and its low degree of ambiguity et al.
Knowles’s Proposition is certainly presented in a concise and minimal for-

mat, but it does not, however, provide any of the information which is con-
sidered to be indispensable in a recipe: it states neither the ingredients nor
the utensils and techniques to be used, and the name of the prepared dish is
generic rather than particular, leaving the whole process as ambiguous as
possible (Knowles says ‘salad’ rather than ‘Greek salad’, or ‘salade niçoise’,
for example). Thus, while we can conclude that Knowles’s piece is actually
totally useless as a recipe, we can also see how it uses the format of the
recipes to explore key characteristics that are relevant both to Fluxus and to
cooking. Four of these dimensions can be briefly outlined here. Firstly,
authorship for recipes is usually collective, if not anonymous. Similarly,
Fluxus as a group explored ways of undermining the highly personalized tra-
ditional notions of authorship both through collective production and an
increased reliance on reader/spectator participation. Secondly, recipes can
be transmitted orally as well as through publications, which is also the case
for many Fluxus scores: you do not need Knowles’s book to own Proposition.
Swedish folklore specialist and Fluxus artist Bengt af Klintberg highlighted
the relations between these two aspects of Fluxus as he explained that they
‘reacted against the pompous image of the artist as a genius with a unique,
personal style’ by creating
simple pieces filled with energy and humour, pieces without any personal
stylistic features, pieces that could be transmitted orally just like folklore and
performed by everyone who wanted to.
(Sellem 1991: 69)
The third aspect of recipes which Knowles’s Proposition brings to the fore
relates to the complex relations which recipes set up between process and
result. Any cook knows that sometimes, for practical reasons, you may need
to replace one ingredient by another, but of course, if you replace too many
ingredients, then it becomes a whole new recipe. In Fluxus pieces, which
emerged from the context of experimental music, this relation between the
specific and the general is akin to the relation between a musical score and
the ways of performing it. How badly does a score by Mozart need to be
played before ceasing to be a Mozart piece? This complex question is central
to any study of musical performance. The performative dimension of the
recipe is closely linked to the fourth, and final, characteristic which I would
like to list here. The recipe is one tool among others within a process, and
cannot be considered as an isolated object: it is necessarily part of a wider,
more complex, network which includes ingredients, implements, spaces,
family life, tradition and innovation, to cite only some of the terms analysed
by Giard.
148 Anna Dezeuze

Thus, viewed from the perspective of art, Knowles’s work questions tradi- 5 For more about the
tional notions of authorship and the status of the artwork, but if it were to be general and the
specific in Fluxus
encountered in a recipe book, for example, it may be read as a way of liberat- scores, cf. Blom
ing the reader. For Knowles’ generic invitation effectively frees cooks from the (1992: 216).
stringent demands of the recipe, which dictate a type of behaviour and
emphasize the finished product, to be judged according to absolute criteria of
quality. Everyday life becomes a practice to be explored, rather than a boring
routine waiting to be transfigured by art.
The term ‘practice of everyday life’ is a translation of the title of Michel de
Certeau’s 1980 L’Invention du quotidien (literally the ‘invention’ of the every-
day), and it was in the second volume of this book that Luce Giard’s analysis
of cooking was included. In Relational Aesthetics, Bourriaud actually referred
to Certeau and the ‘invention du quotidien’ when he wrote about relational
practices such as Tiravanija’s in Relational Aesthetics. For example, Bourriaud
claims that the practice of everyday life is ‘not an object less worthy of atten-
tion’ than ‘the messianic utopias’ specific to modern art (Bourriaud 1998: 14).
In this opposition between everyday practices and messianic utopias,
Bourriaud followed Certeau’s distinction between ‘tactics’ and ‘strategy.’
Strategy, according to Certeau, is a means of calculation and manipulation in
order to gain power over another, in situations where the distinction between
one’s own space and the other’s is clear cut. In contrast, tactics describe
actions which take place solely within the ‘other’s space’ because it is impos-
sible to isolate the two spaces from each other. The interstice occupied by
relational art according to Bourriaud seems to be the very space of everyday
life in which Certeau places tactics, those everyday ruses with which some
members of society ‘tinker’ with the dominant social order for it to work in
their favour (Certeau 1990: xxxix). The question of whether relational art is
politically radical or not is thus closely related to the general issue of whether,
as Certeau claims, certain tactical practice can effectively subvert the everyday
life in which they are embedded.
Certeau’s considerable contribution to the study of everyday life has
been not only to highlight the complexity of everyday practices such as
cooking, walking or inhabiting living spaces, but also to reflect on the very
methods required for studying these practices. As Ben Highmore has
explained, Certeau sought to create a general poetics of everyday life
which aims at achieving the generality of a science without loosing sight
of the singularity of the actual – an issue that resonates with Fluxus event
scores which oscillate between the extreme generality of the instruction
and the inevitable specificity of each individual performance of its terms.5
Certeau’s poetics successfully captures the singularity of everyday life, but
encounter problems when trying to theorize the political, subversive
potential of its practices. This issue, which is one of the central problems
of studies of everyday life throughout the twentieth century, plagues
Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics as well. To analyse Bourriaud’s text, it
would thus be useful to start by unpacking the models of everyday life to
which he is referring. In the process, one would find that he seems to be
combining Certeau’s non-oppositional theorization with references to
Situationist thinkers such as Guy Debord and Henri Lefebvre, who came
from a Marxist tradition obviously bent on a transformation of capitalist
society.
6 Another cogent The tension between conflicting models of the ‘critique of everyday life’ is
critique of Tiravanija’s arguably inherent to the very works acclaimed by Bourriaud. Janet Kraynak has
work and Bourriaud’s
relational aesthetics is aptly criticized discourses such as Bourriaud’s which describe Tiravanija’s
developed in Bishop work as generous offerings providing an alternative exchange logic to com-
(2004). modity fetishism (Kraynak 1998).6 Tiravanija’s art, Kraynak argues, occupies an
ambiguous position which exceeds simplistic celebrations of an apparent
return of the everyday in art. On the one hand, she explains, Tiravanija’s work
embraces the shift in the new globalized economy from the production and
exchange of material objects to that of an equally alienating ‘symbolic capital’.
On the other hand, however, it simultaneously reveals the increased homoge-
nization of cultures as they enter the new symbolic order of global capitalism.
Where Fluxus could still dream of a decommodified everyday life based on col-
laboration, participation and other modes of ‘folkloric’ exchange, relational art
in the 1990s marked an embrace, rather than a rejection, of the museum, as
well as a return to traditional modes of authorship – Tiravanija’s presence,
as Kraynak points out, is by now acknowledged to be a necessary aspect of
his work.
Conclusion
Both Danto’s Transfiguration of the Commonplace and Bourriaud’s Relational
Aesthetics are significant attempts to grapple with the new relation between
art and life explored by successive generations of artists. While Danto’s reflec-
tions successfully highlight the importance of the everyday in works by Warhol
or Fluxus, I have suggested that his ontological enquiry is restricted by the
static polarity it sets up between art and a commonplace which, in essence,
designates nothing more than everything that is not art. Bourriaud’s defini-
tion of relational aesthetics introduced post-structuralist, Deleuzian notions
of flow and dynamic forms that are more amenable to capture the nature of
practices by Fluxus or Tiravanija. Nevertheless, as I have shown, the kind of
everyday practices which Bourriaud celebrates remain general, as he refuses
to address the ways in which they participate, or resist, a dominant social
order. Studies of everyday life such as Certeau’s, complement enquiries such
as Danto’s or Bourriaud’s by disrupting reductive descriptions of a universal
everyday and looking at the specificities of the practices with which specific
art practices stand in dialogue.
Filliou’s quip about art being what makes life more interesting than art may
suggest that art should become less interesting. Indeed, works such as
Knowles’s Proposition, Brecht’s Three Chair Event or Tiravanija’s meals, deliber-
ately ask to be dismissed as unremarkable occurrences which exist in the same
time and space as everyday activities, in a way that neither Rauschenberg’s
‘combines’ nor Warhol’s Brillo Boxes could ever dream of. At the same time,
what is most important about Filliou’s definition of art is that it exists as a
dynamic, reversible movement, in which the artwork can make life more inter-
esting not because it is as boring as life, but because life is at least as complex
as art. It may seem paradoxical to conclude that we may need simple, often lit-
eral, forms of art to tell us about the complexity of everyday life. And it may
seem rather pathetic that we need to be told that everyday life is complex in the
first place. Yet the question of whether, and how, the everyday can be studied is
in fact a complex topic in itself – a topic that requires further discussion, over
a salad or a Thai curry, it goes without saying.
150 Anna Dezeuze

References
Bishop, C. (2004), ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, MIT Press,
Vol. 110, pp. 51–79, Fall.
Blom, I. (1992), ‘The Intermedia Dynamic’, in K. Friedman (ed.), Fluxus Virus, 1962–1992,
Cologne: Galerie Schüppenhauer and Kölnischer Kunstverein, pp. 214–20.
Bourriaud, N. (1998), Esthétique relationnelle, Dijon: Presses du réel (author’s own
translations). An English translation by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods was
published in 2002 as Relational Aesthetics, Dijon: Presses du réel.
Brecht, G. (1965), ‘A Conversation About Something Else: An Interview with George
Brecht by Ben Vautier and Marcel Alocco’, Identités (11–12), in M. Henry (ed.),
An Introduction to George Brecht’s Book of the Tumbler on Fire, Milan: Multhipla
edizioni, 1978, pp. 67–73, summer to autumn.
—— (1967), ‘Interview with Henry Martin, Art International, XI vol. 9’, in M. Henry
(ed.), An Introduction to George Brecht’s Book of the Tumbler on Fire, Milan:
Multhipla edizioni, 1978, p. 7477.
Buchloh, B. (1989), ‘Andy Warhol’s One-Dimensional Art, 1956–1966’, in Kynaston
McShine (ed.), Andy Warhol: A Retrospective, exhibition catalogue, New York:
Museum of Modern Art, pp. 39–61.
Certeau, M. de. (1990), L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1: Arts de faire (1980), Paris:
Gallimard (author’s own translations).
de Certeau, M., Giard, L. and Mayol, P. (1990), L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 2: Habiter,
Cuisiner (1980), Paris: Gallimard (author’s own translations).
Danto, A. (1981), The Transfiguration of the Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art,
Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.
—— (2002), ‘The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy’, in Jon Hendricks
(ed.), What’s Fluxus? What’s Not! Why, exhibition catalogue, Brasília: Centro
Cultural Banco do Brasil.
Highmore, B. (2002), Everyday Life and Cultural Theory: An Introduction, London and
New York: Routledge.
Horowitz, G. and Huhn, T. (1998), ‘The Wake of Art: Criticism, Philosophy and the
Ends of Taste’, in G. Horowitz and T. Huhn (eds.), The Wake of Art: Criticism,
Philosophy and the ends of Taste, Amsterdam: G+B Arts International, pp. 1–56.
Jouval, S. (2003), Robert Filliou: ‘Exposition pour le 3e œil/ Exhibition for the 3d eye’,
in H. van den Valentyn (ed.), Robert Filliou: Génie sans Talent, Villeneuve d’Ascq:
Musée d’art moderne Lille Métropole, pp. 8–15.
Kaprow, A. (1966), Assemblages, Environments and Happenings, New York: Harry
N. Abrams.
Kraynak, J. (1998), ‘Rikrit Tiravanija’s Liability’, Documents 13, pp. 26–40, autumn.
Rauschenberg, R. (1959), ‘Untitled Statement’, in Dorothy C. Miller (ed.), Sixteen
Americans, New York: Museum of Modern Art.
Robinson, J. (2005), ‘In the Event of George Brecht’, in A. Fischer and J. Robinson.
(eds.), George Brecht Events: A Heterospective, exhibition catalogue, Cologne:
Museum Ludwig, pp. 16–175.
Sellem, J. (1991), ‘The Fluxus Outpost in Sweden: An Interview with Bengt af
Klintberg’, in J. Sellem (ed.), Fluxus Research, Special issue of Lund Art Press, 2(2).
Suggested citation
Dezeuze, A. (2006), ‘Everyday life, ‘relational aesthetics’ and the ‘transf iguration
of the commonplace’’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 5: 3, pp. 143–152,
doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.143/1
Contributor details
Anna Dezeuze is a research fellow at the University of Manchester, where she holds
a Henry Moore Foundation Postodoctoral Research Fellowship in Art History and
Visual Studies. She has published essays on Fluxus scores, on the Brazilian artist
Hélio Oiticica and on kinetic art, and has contributed a chapter on the 1960s to
Amelia Jones’s edited book A Companion to Contemporary Art since 1945
(Blackwell 2006). She is currently co-editing a book on spectator participation
in art since the 1960s. Contact: Anna Dezeuze, Art history and Visual Studies,
University of Manchester, Humanities Bridgeford Road, Manchester M13 9PL,
UK. E-mail: anna.dezeuze@manchester.ac.uk
152 Anna Dezeuze

JVAP 5.3_04_art_Haapalainen.qxd 12/11/06 3:32 PM Page 153

Contemporary art and the role of museums

as situational media
Riikka Haapalainen University of Helsinki
Abstract Keywords
In this paper I analyse some examples from contemporary art and describe the contemporary art
role of museums as a situational media, through which a special kind of social- Maffesoli
ity is produced. In this context, I want to draw attention to the so-called ‘new situational aesthetics
institutionalism’, which seems to be the current denominator among different museums
fields within the art world (including both art institutions and contemporary Pistoletto
artists). New institutionalism refers to a recent resurgence of interest in the influ-
ence of art institutions on the production and reception of art. It generally
understands art in terms of the ideas of openness, networking and process.
Consequently, the reception of art should not be perceived only as a private
contemplation by an individual, but must be understood also as a form of
social, collective experience. According to French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, art
is more and more experienced and interpreted collectively. It is experienced in a
temporal and social process, which is similar to urban everyday experience. It is
based on random events and occasional encounters, which in their own logic
reinforce a sense of togetherness and social collectivity.
This creates an economy which is, in a specific sense, essentially un-produc-
tive. Neither in the example of the open discussion in the Stockholm gallery
about an incident implicating Israel’s ambassador to Sweden, nor in the case of
the events of the Art Project by the Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto does
art aim for a specific end product (exhibition, artwork, cultural programme,
correct interpretation, etc.). The implication is that art practice should be more
about creating situations, encounters and interactions, which are in a constant
state of process, than about creating art objects. This makes everything in and
around the art equally relevant and important. In this way, art practice offers to
society a plurality of values and promotes the enjoyment of this plurality, i.e. the
mobility and choice between different, parallel truths.
Introduction
In this article, I discuss the currently emerging immaterial quality of contem-
porary art and art institutions. One could say that art practice and art institu-
tions are in a process of becoming a situational media. They stand as
concrete sites or more abstract platforms for open communication, gather-
ings and change – without guaranteeing either the direction or nature of that
change. To illustrate what is meant by an immaterial quality, I briefly present
two but quite different examples. One is a single incident that took place in a
museum; the other regards the life-long career of one artist. The decision for
putting forward these somewhat unequal examples is motivated by a kind of

pragmatism, which focuses on the functional and practical side of knowledge

and information. The insight which is gained by the juxtaposition of these two
different cases is taken to justify the lack of consistency.
In addition to their indebtedness to a broad pragmatist framework, my
reflections are also inspired by postmodernism. If modernism can be seen to
have separated art from life, postmodernism aspires to restore their unity in
the banality of the everyday life. My investigation here uses postmodernism in
this specific sense, i.e. not as a period concept succeeding modernism but as
an analytical model, which I borrow from the sociologist Michel Maffesoli
(Maffesoli 1995b; 1996). According to this model, the aim of art practice after
modernism, as I see it, is to reconnect art and life.
The art attack by Ambassador Mazel

In January 2004, news around the world reported that Israel’s Ambassador to
Sweden, Zvi Mazel, had attacked an artwork at the Museum of National
Antiquities in Stockholm (BBC 2004). The artwork under attack was a water
and sound installation called ‘Snow White and The Madness of Truth’. It fea-
tures a photo of Hanadi Jaradat, a 29-year-old trainee lawyer who blew up her-
self and nineteen Israelis in a Haifa restaurant in October 2003. The work is
accompanied by a piece of Bach’s music entitled My Heart Is Swimming In
Blood (Figure 1). The installation was made by two Swedish artists, Dror
Feiler and Gunilla Sköld Feiler, and was part of a cultural event series called
‘To prevent genocide’, which investigated the potential of art for fostering
dialogue and debate and thus for making a difference in the world.
After the incident, the spontaneous outburst of Ambassador Mazel was
both passionately defended and rigorously condemned by the global media.
Figure 1: Dror Feiler and Gunilla Sköld Feiler: Snow White and The Madness
of Truth, 2003.
154 Riikka Haapalainen

But the museum personnel and organizers of the event remained silent.
However, a few days later a press release was announced. The museum was
inviting Ambassador Mazel to take part in an open discussion, and to talk
about the exhibition, the works of art and their differing interpretations.
This mild and ‘civilized’ reaction of the museum seemed equally surprising
and significant. The museum personnel did not officially defend the curatorial
side of the exhibition, nor the ill-fated artwork. They refrained from arguing
whether the artwork was good or bad, proper or even politically correct. They
only invited Ambassador Mazel to participate in a dialogue.
This incident proved a contradictory clash in life and art: Mazel’s assault on
the artwork recalled a modernist attitude where art is taken to unquestionably
possess solid aesthetic values of good, right and true. But for many contem-
porary art practitioners, these pure aesthetic or ethical valuations are no longer
relevant or credible. What is taken to be important today are the specific rela-
tions, situations and interactions that are created by artworks or exhibitions.
This new approach of active resistance, according to which museums
should make an attempt to not only reflect the status quo of society but openly
provide a forum for presenting differing viewpoints and for exchanging ideas
and communicative encounters, can be described as neo-institutionalism (see
Ekeberg et al. 2003). The demand made by neo-institutionalism is that muse-
ums not only present proficiently selected fractures of the art world in their iso-
lated exhibition spaces or laboratories, but also bring their own institutional
role under discussion. This is a new kind of self-conscious and self-reflective
strategy, which can only give temporary, vague, uncertain and situated sugges-
tions about the world and the state of the arts. This means that museums do
not just interpret cultural heritage or straightforwardly exert power; they func-
tion more like a self-reflective or performative agora for a continuous discovery
of new things and ideas (Haapalainen 2004).
To investigate these arguments further, I now make a somewhat ‘illogical’
and abrupt jump to the 1960’s and the work of the Italian artist Michelangelo
Pistoletto (1933). Pistoletto is perhaps best known as one of the protagonists
in the Arte povera movement. However, throughout his career he has been an
exceptionally versatile and multifaceted artist and has worked with an array of
artistic styles and techniques – always trying to change and modify conven-
tional practices. His works are relevant to my reflections here mainly for two
reasons. First, they illustrate and motivate a shift in the positional role of the
viewer, which has been taking place over the past three decades and which
during that time has had an effect on the nature of artworks. Secondly, they
help us begin to understand the so-called ideological ‘failure’ of modernism,
which postmodernism has tried to rectify.
Pistoletto’s mirror paintings

Italian art critic Germano Celant joined Pistoletto in his arte povera ideology
because of a special interest in the artist’s Mirror Paintings (Quadri specchi-
anti) from the 1960s and 1970s (Figure 2; see Celant 1988). Their construc-
tion is relatively straightforward: a fragment of a photograph is printed on a
reflecting mirror so that the viewer, while looking at the artwork is also faced
with his or her own, mobile reflection. This is why the Mirror Paintings
demonstrate, in an utterly concrete way, Pistoletto’s general aims in art: for
him every artwork mirrors a specific experience of public space, in which the
Contemporary art and the role of museums as situational media 155

Figure 2: Michelangelo Pistoletto in front of the Mirror Painting Uomo seduto

(1962–93).
viewer directly participates. As a result, the mirror brings a new content –

namely life – into the artwork.
The reflecting surface of the mirror painting is indefinable in so far as the
photograph that is used and the multiple mirror images do not justify or
explain each other. Any interpretation of the mirror painting is therefore tran-
sitory. For instance, the demonstrators shown in the mirror painting Vietnam
(Figure 3) are cut off from their original political context. Looking at the
painting draws the viewer into the picture as if she was one of the demon-
strators. But, although the viewer may be concretely added to, or associated

Figure 3: Michelangelo Pistoletto 1962–65. Vietnam.
with the political scene, the mirror paintings themselves are precisely apoli-
tical. They reflect anything and affirm everything that is placed in front of
them. As such, they can invite opposing views without ever presenting an
ideological position. Therefore, they can be seen to imitate a postmodern
randomness and anonymous togetherness to which I return later on.
The fictive setting of the mirror paintings puts the viewer in a situation
where he or she does not really belong. Their representation is a kind of
game of make-believe where the viewer is forced to leave the role of the
passive spectator to construct in their own mind the connection (or break)
between their own mirror image and the fragment of the photograph. In
fact, the mirror paintings direct the viewer’s attention not only to the art-
work but even more so towards themselves. Thus the mirror reinforces the
viewer’s perspective whilst the viewer also becomes aware of their own acts
of seeing, perceiving and being (Tarantinao 2000: 10). I want to argue that
the mirror reflections therefore call for a kind of self-observing participation
that can also be understood as pure sociality.
The viewer interactively participates both in the painting and the social
context of the exhibition. They not only see themselves in the mirror as if
through the eyes of others but also, in the equally reflected gallery space
which they share with other visitors, amongst others. The mirror transforms
the viewer from the separate isolated individual of modernism into a parti-
cipant of a collectively, or commonly experienced image or stage. Thus, in
the case of Pistoletto’s mirror paintings, the act of looking at an artwork
becomes a conscious, interactive, and, above all, situational act.
For the French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, the most important thing in
the mirror paintings is how they present (not re-present) the world as it is: it is
a world seen from the world and within the world. The mirror paintings reflect
the intensity of life and the very moment of looking. The reception of the mir-
ror paintings is, according to Maffesoli, the participation in the ongoing and
active creation and recreation of the world (Maffesoli and Pistoletto 2001: 179).

The mirror paintings also intensify the sense of the present: they focus all
attention to the situation here and now. However, they do not provide any
interpretations or representations of the reality or the present moment. They
only reflect re-actively the world set in front of them.
The role of the viewer is to participate in the mirror painting and finish it
with his own experiences, memories or lapses of memories so that, when
looking at the mirror painting, one looks at one’s own history and future in
the concrete present. Mieke Bal calls this a performative narrative: The
viewer compliments the reality of the artwork with his or her own fiction of
the present (Bal 2002: 191–92). Thus, the interpretation of the artwork
resembles the experience of taking part in a narrative play; a play which is
performed by the viewer. Thus, the mirror paintings emphasize the similar-
ities between the art exhibition and theatre. Consequently, the sociologist
Erving Goffman has compared the presentations of self in the everyday life
to theatrical acts. People present their styles to others by taking different,
conscious or unconscious, roles: they are constructing theatrical shells or
masks for themselves. In the reflection of mirror paintings, the viewer is
presenting herself and her style at the same time as she is looking at the
artwork. She is constantly aware of the presence of the fictional (or real)
other. In this way, Pistoletto’s mirror paintings bring forth one of the central
ideas of modernity: the idea that we exist for someone else, even if only
potentially, by representing ourselves in our styles (Goffmann 1971: 29–30).
Thus, even when contemplating art privately, we are always aware of the
gazes of others as well as of the social form of the situation (Figure 4).
The mirror paintings snatch the viewer and make them part of the col-
lage made by the mirror image and the photograph. New participatory tac-
tics are thus required from the viewer. The viewer participates socially in the
artwork at the same time as the artwork takes part in the life of the viewer.
Figure 4: Michelangelo Pistoletto’s exhibition A Reflected World, 1966, Walker

Art Center, Minneapolis. Michelangelo Pistoletto 1965–1966. Oggetti in meno.
Installation in Documenta X, Kassel 1997.

The artwork is no longer an object which is perceived from a distance, but

demands to be nothing else or more than its viewer.
The minus objects

The aesthetic and social encounter between the viewer and the artwork
becomes even more apparent in Pistoletto’s Minus Objects (Oggetti in meno,
1965–66, Figures 5–6). This series of about thirty everyday, furniture-like
objects is characterized by their plain multiplicity. The ‘Minus Objects’ also
carry a strong political dimension – at least for Pistoletto. They stand for his
opposition against the modernist expectation, influenced by ideas of mass
production and consumerism, that all works by the same artist should be in
agreement and represent a unified style or ‘signature’ (Celant 1988: 16). On
the contrary, Pistoletto’s Minus Objects show that he examined different
techniques, materials and styles, and allowed himself to do almost anything.
The versatility of styles and approaches in the Minus Objects thus overturns
the spectator’s anticipation for one permanent style of the artist.
With the positional changes offered by the Minus Objects, Pistoletto
withdraws from the traditionally perceived ways to assess and define style
(Pistoletto 2001: 86–87). The modern culture of individualism compre-
hended representation and expression as individual features and also situ-
ated the concept of style in the private realm (Maffesoli 1995a: 37).
Maffesoli on the other hand, views style as one of the most essential fea-
tures of the postmodern ‘imaginal’ world. According to him, style breeds all
collective ways of existence; manners, routines, rituals, representations and
fashion (Maffesoli 1995a: 34–35). Therefore, style could also be understood
as a shared property of collective sensibility – not only as an exclusive or
formal quality of the artwork. When the concept of style is separated from
its distinct aesthetic content, a social dimension can be added upon it: style
becomes what is shown and performed to others.
Figure 5: Michelangelo Pistoletto 1965–66. Oggetti in meno. Wiener Sezession,

Wien 1990.

Figure 6: Michelangelo Pistoletto 2003. Love Difference, Biennale di Venezia, 2003.
Michel Serres has compared the process of looking to the playful and
sociable activity of visiting (Connor 1999). According to Serres, looking at an
artwork is like paying it a social visit. In this sense, strolling amidst the Minus
Objects offers the viewer forms and ideas, which are in constant movement
(Virilio 1984: 43). Participating in the worlds of the Minus Objects is thus like
visiting socially the different worlds suggested by the objects.
When the Minus Objects give space to the social attitude of the viewer,
notions of rationality and linearity are cut off from the perception. This
means, that in the stylistically ‘uncertain’ world of the Minus Objects, the
viewer is forced constantly to redefine and revaluate the artworks and their
aesthetic content – as well as his or her own relationship to the overall situa-
tion. The meaning of the artwork is being constructed gradually, progressively
and all the time as anew. The multiplicity of the Minus Objects emphasizes
their surrounding space and its variations. One is no longer able to look at art
as unattached from its surroundings: it creates temporal relationships, which
are fundamentally social and collective (Maffesoli 1993: xiii–xv). In this kind of
situationalism, the role of art is to generate chance encounters and situa-
tions, in which the viewer builds both real and fictional relationships with the
objects and things around him. Art transforms the viewer from the distant
role of the receiver or participator into the very centre of the situation where
the actual artwork is happening.
The art project

Pistoletto intends to create works of art that are both socially and collectively
significant: art that exceeds and transgresses all traditional ways of looking.

After the Minus Objects, he has proceeded to orchestrate art in a much more
massive and monumental scale. For instance, in 1994 he published the ‘Art
Project’ (Progetto Arte) Manifesto, his road-map to new, collective art practices.
In the Manifesto, Pistoletto addressed a specific responsibility for artists. He
urged them to care about the world, and to bring the alienated and
autonomous art back to life and even to its everyday banality – until art
becomes a functional and active element in every sphere of society; from poli-
tics to economy, science to religion. In the Art Project he no longer creates
objects but situations in which art and life are intertwined. The central element
is exchange: the Art Project invites all people to share their thoughts, time and
emotions (Pistoletto 1995: 114–21).
Pistoletto here follows Maffesoli’s thoughts about the characteristic features
of today’s society. But while Pistoletto’s Art Project rises from the pessimistic
diagnosis about the current state of the world, Maffesoli’s postmodern life is one
of enchantment. Maffesoli affirms as his paradigm for postmodern life and aes-
thetics the appreciation of the world as it is – without vicarious valuations of
things either as good or bad. Simply put: We should love the world and accept it
simply because it is (Maffesoli 2001: 185).
The Art Project also ‘loves differences’ (Figure 7), as stated in the Pistoletto’s
Manifesto (Pistoletto 1995: 114–21). This statement stands as a contradiction to
modernist ‘high’ art, which distanced itself from the entertainment and the cul-
ture of masses – along with its narrative or social content. As a consequence,
art distanced itself from life. In the same way, modern society had isolated indi-
viduals from each other while life was differentiated through the division of
labour and by consumption (Noro 1993: 47). Modern man was characterized as
a separated, individualistic consumer, who was determined by continuous
desire, need or yearning towards something unknown, which consumption –
the gaze – could satisfy (Mäenpää 1993: 65–66). In its place has, according to
Maffesoli, now emerged a postmodern collective, which is founded on sharing
Figure 7: Cittàdellarte (Stalker Teatro). Cittàdellarte, Fondazione Pistoletto,

Biella 1995.

the common affections and images (Mäenpää 1995: 361–62; Maffesoli 1995a
passim). If modern society was differentiated, the task for the postmodern era is
to bring people, ideas and things together again. This is why Pistoletto, in his
Manifestation, wants to ‘eliminate distances’ and accept the diverse and
ambiguous nature of reality. In his view, art should facilitate interaction across
different social spheres and promote understanding and social change.
This tendency may be compared to the postmodern deconstruction of the
modernist concern with specificity: one has to recover, exceed and transfer
the sameness of the modern differentiation, but still leave the differences in
the society. This concept is congruent with Maffesoli’s call for the rediscovery
of a new, purposeless collective community; one which he describes as neo-
tribal. The tribes of postmodern society are characterized by their temporal
joining in and breaking up, where individuality is transferred to the common
experience of togetherness – even without actual face-to-face interaction
(Maffesoli 1993: xiii–xv).
Postmodernism has traditionally been defined as a combination of
seemingly unsuitable elements in life-style and art (Maffesoli 1995: 35–36).
Pistoletto, too, hopes to include every media and method in his Art Project.
In this sense, it is, by definition, a typically postmodern programme.
Through the years, the Art Project has indeed developed into a generic title
for various happenings, exhibitions, seminars and meetings around the
world. On the one hand the Art Project is still bound to Pistoletto, and on
the other, it may spread out wherever and almost by whomever in ever new
interactions, situations and thoughts.
Pistoletto founded Cittàdellarte (the City of Art, Figure 8) in the outskirts
of Biella, a town in northern Italy in 1996. In Cittàdellarte, the central ideas of
Figure 8: Michelangelo Pistoletto 1997. Arena – Segno arte. KUB, Bregenz.

the Art Project (bringing people together, finding new kinds of creativity)
finally received a concrete form. The collective of artists, also agrees with
Pistoletto’s vision of an ideal society. Thus the Art Project is utopian in its
most classical sense: it is an expression of a hope for a better life (Rahkonen
1996: 5). However, unlike other utopias, which are usually understood as
specific places or environments (Harvey 2000), this utopia lies in the social
(situational) process. It is founded on the ideas of mobility, encounters,
togetherness and random possibilities, not on fixed or permanent illusions
for one better world.
According to Pistoletto, the Art Project thereby supersedes all previous con-
ceptions of art. Equally, the status of the artist is also transformed: the artist’s
role is one of a catalyst, who generates interplay between all areas and agents
of human activity. The artist reunites art and life by selecting and collecting
objects and ideas that already exist in the world. Art is then experienced in tem-
poral and social processes, which resemble common urban experience in their
use and production of random events and occasional encounters (Mäenpää
2005). In this way, the Art Project is perhaps more accurately described as a
method or an attitude rather than as a work of art.
Pistoletto’s Art Project is as such opposed to both the ideas of the ‘Art
for art’s sake’ movement and the rational and economical supremacy of
processes of modernization. The Art Project presents a third dimension,
where art produces organic creativity within the society. It aims to be
socially influential and plausible art: art gets intertwined in life and demon-
strates the everyday life through its own logic. In this way the aesthetic and
visual qualities of the artwork become less interesting than its situational
practices.
The idea of the situational brings forth the sociability in art. German
sociologist Georg Simmel has described the structures of society as funda-
mentally aesthetic. For him the social interaction is beautiful as a form: it
gives pleasure to its participants (Simmel 1964: 40–55). This kind of socia-
bility is more aesthetic than rational, more synthetic than analytical.
Sociability refers to the essence of collective existence: it demonstrates care
and interest in the present (Maffesoli 1990 passim). Tracing the sociability
in art means turning towards the small, banal moments of art practice;
away from the exceptionality of art and artists towards the aesthetics of the
everyday life.
Many social interpretations of art are based on the assumption that the
social functions only as an external framework for the production of art – as
if social reality would always be a rational result of surrounding economical
and political conditions. This perception is nothing but modern. But when
we study artworks like the Art Project, we are inclined to expand the exami-
nation of the social and aesthetic towards a postmodern sociability
(Maffesoli 1990 passim). For Simmel, sociability implied that the social
world is a consequence of a continuous interaction and reversibility of dif-
ferent elements in the everyday life. Society emerges first and foremost in
the everyday chain of events (Simmel 1964: 409–24). But if society is
understood as a series of interactive and vital processes, then even art
shouldn’t be separated from these dynamics.
To make these processes visible in art, one has to abandon the culture
of specialists favoured by modernity. Art as situational media is rooted in

the experience of the common viewer, not only in the ideas of the expert.
Therefore the role of the viewer becomes automatically more active – and
the aesthetic judgements more random and polyphonic.
In the postmodern world, artists and art institutions have lost or at least
renounced the symbolic power they have traditionally had. This has lead to a
negotiable reality, where one cannot invest permanent or absolute values of
good and good taste in art. What remain are the communicative aspects of
art (Bourriaud 2002). Aesthetic and moral questions in art are the questions
of interaction, interplay and negotiation (Rantala 2001: 20).
In Pistoletto’s Art Project, the objectives of art are synonymous to the
objectives of life. It shifts our focus from the role of the artist and art’s fixed
meanings towards occasional, incoherent and even superficial encounters
with works of art and other people (Maffesoli 1993). Art has become a stage
for social exchange, and art museums have become places where a specific
kind of sociability is being created. They don’t primarily generate works of art
or art exhibitions, but ways of being.
Conclusions
To conclude, I revisit my two very different examples: the diplomatic scandal
in of 2004 in Stockholm and the productions of Michelangelo Pistoletto.
Even though they really differ, they both illustrate the same development in
the current artistic practises. They both share the ideal of bringing people
together to communicate and exchange ideas and emotions in a essentially
un-productive economy.
No longer does art practice concentrate on a specific end product
(exhibition, artwork, cultural programme, correct interpretation, etc.). In
place of the product there is increasing interest in ideas of openness, net-
working and process. Potentially, this makes everything in and around art
equally relevant and significant. Art practice thereby becomes more about
creating situations, encounters and interactions, which are in a constant
state of movement and change. This kind of artistic practice presents the
promise to society of a plurality of values, mobility and choices among
different, parallel truths.
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Suggested citation
Haapalainen, R. (2006), ‘Contemporary art and the role of museums as situational
media’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 5: 3, pp. 153–166, doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.153/1

Contributor details
Riikka Haapalainen holds an M.A. in art history and B.Ed. in educational science
(adult education). She is the Head of Education in the Museum of Contemporary
Art Kiasma in Helsinki. Currently, she is writing her Ph.D. in art history at the
University of Helsinki. Haapalainen has published on history of art, art history writ-
ing and museum education Contact: Head of Education, Museum of Contemporary
Art Kiasma, Helsinki.
E-mail: riikka.haapalainen@kiasma.fi

JVAP 5.3_05_art_Ross.qxd 12/11/06 3:43 PM Page 167

Aesthetic autonomy and interdisciplinarity:

a response to Nicolas Bourriaud’s
‘relational aesthetics’
Toni Ross University of New South Wales
Abstract Keywords
Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’ has proved an influential Relational Aesthetics
framework for understanding discipline cross overs in art of the 1990s. This aesthetic philosophy
paper traces precedents in aesthetic philosophy, both Kantian and Marxist that Neo-conceptual Art
inform Bourriaud’s account of the relational aesthetic of contemporary art. In Mark Dion
the process it registers a number of points of disagreement with the liberal view interdisciplinary art
of democratic social bonds, and the links between aesthetics, ethics and politics Neo-Marxist theory
that Borriaud propounds. The critical terms of my response to relational aesthetics
are derived from a Neo-Marxist thinking of democracy, and the relation between
aesthetics and politics developed by philosopher Jacques Rancière. This question-
ing of Bourriaud’s claims about the democratic incline of relational aesthetics is
fleshed out by an examination of the cross disciplinary art of Mark Dion. Dion is
known for producing performative, site-specific events and installations that
incorporate the discourses and professional protocols of natural science and
archaeology. Bourriaud situates Dion’s practice within a sub-set of relational
aesthetics, namely art production that is modelled on the professional proce-
dures of non-art disciplines, and which emulates the “relational world” that
such disciplines suppose. While acknowledging some affinities between Dion’s
art and relational aesthetics, this paper draws a distinction between the kinds of
social and disciplinary interaction that Bourriaud endorses, and the role that the
aesthetic plays in Dion’s archaeological dig projects of the late 1990s.
Whatever might be the specific type of economic circuits they lie within, artistic
practices are not ‘exceptions’ to other practices. They represent and reconfigure
the distribution of these activities.
(Rancière 2004: 45)
One of the more prominent cases of a recent (re)discovery of aesthetics in art

world circles has been Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of ‘relational aesthetics’,
developed to account for artistic trends of the 1990s. Bourriaud’s collection of
art criticism, Relational Aesthetics, was first published in French in 1998, and
translated into English in 2002. While the author would no doubt insist that
the theory of relational aesthetics arose solely from a critic/curator’s atten-
tiveness to the specifics of contemporary art, in this paper, I would like to
suggest otherwise.
The paper follows three paths that will cross at various points. First, it
traces how previous aesthetic philosophies, both Kantian and Marxist, inform

the theory of art ventured in Relational Aesthetics. Second, it offers a critical

rejoinder to Bourriaud’s claim that relational aesthetics nurtures properly
democratic relations, not only between people, but also between ‘levels of reality’,
normally ‘kept apart from one another’ (Bourriaud 2002: 8). This contention
rides on a key proposition put forward in Relational Aesthetics: that a cluster of
artists who gained notice in the 1990s are preoccupied with inventing alter-
native ‘models of sociability’, to those mandated by the media spectacle and
informational networks of global capitalism (Bourriaud 2002: 28, 31). The final
section of the paper consolidates my criticisms of Bourriaud’s account of the
democratic inclination of relational aesthetics through a discussion of Mark
Dion’s art work, Tate Thames Dig, of 1999. Bourriaud places Dion’s interdisci-
plinary practice within a subset of relational aesthetics, namely art production
that is modelled on pre-existing professional activities, and which mimics the
‘relational world’ that these professions suppose (Bourriaud 2002: 35). While
acknowledging affinities between Dion’s art and relational aesthetics, I also
isolate points of divergence between the kinds of social and disciplinary inter-
actions that Bourriaud endorses, and the role that aesthetics plays in Dion’s
practice.
Genealogy of relational aesthetics

Much of the recent art that Bourriaud refers to intensifies the medium and
disciplinary crossovers that became a hallmark of artistic post-modernism.
Included under the rubric of relational aesthetics are artists Felix Gonzalez-
Torres, Liam Gillick, Angela Bullock, Mark Dion, Peter Fend, Vanessa
Beecroft, Andrea Zittel, Jorge Pardo, Phillipe Parreno, Heimo Zobernig and
Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. In Bourriaud’s view, all of these artists pro-
duce work that thematizes and multiplies connections between art and
other spheres of human activity. Moreover, such art takes ‘as its theoretical
horizon the realm of human interactions and its social context, rather than
the assertion of an independent and private symbolic space’ (Bourriaud
2002: 14). Relational Aesthetics thus continues the post-modern dismantling
of the modernist axiom of aesthetic autonomy, especially in its formalist
incarnations. Also in a post-modern vein, Bourriaud rejects any idea that art
may present alternative forms of social interaction from a locus of excep-
tion outside the relational totality of capitalist formations. Yet significantly,
he does maintain a minimal difference between hegemonic culture and the
aesthetic sphere, describing art as a ‘social interstice’, or gap within a larger
relational system. Acknowledging the materialist orientation of relational
aesthetics, Bourriaud writes:
º the interstice term was used by Karl Marx to describe trading communities
that elude the capitalist economic context by being removed from the law of
profit: barter, merchandising, autarkic types of production etc. º The inter-
stice is a space in human relations, which fits more or less harmoniously and
openly into the overall system, but suggests other trading possibilities to
those in effect within this system.
(Bourriaud 2002: 16)
Despite contemporary art’s widespread submission to commercial impera-

tives, it simultaneously, in Bourriaud’s view,
168 Toni Ross

creates free areas, and time spans whose rhythm contrasts with those struc-
turing everyday life, and it encourages an inter-human commerce that differs
from the ‘communication zones’ that are imposed on us.
(Bourriaud 2002: 16)
Note the truncated nature of this argument. On the one hand, artistic practice is
enmeshed in the exchange networks of global capitalism. Yet, on the other
hand, art also creates free spaces and social experiments ‘partly protected’
from, or in excess of the behavioural patterns that structure everyday life
(Bourriaud 2002: 9). Thus, if there is a transcendental dimension to art, and
there still is for Bourriaud, it exerts its pressure from within the very fabric of
what currently passes for everyday life, rather than being referred to a space
beyond present realities.
Another key theoretical resource for Bourriaud’s account of art’s current
circumstances is Guy Debord’s Marxist inspired text of the late sixties, Society
of the Spectacle. Here Debord analysed the affect upon human relationships
of the capitalist mass media, which appeared to have permeated virtually all
sectors of contemporary life. Debord identified a number of symptoms of this
situation. In the society of the spectacle, images had become the primary
mediating factor in exchanges among people, who relate to each other
according to the reified representations of identity circulated by the mass
media. Echoing the Frankfurt School’s critique of the capitalist culture indus-
tries, Debord argued that capitalism produces standardized cultural repre-
sentations that deaden critical thinking, while alienating people from each
other and their surrounding world. Bourriaud concurs, asserting that now-
adays the ‘social bond has been turned into a standardized artefact’ where it
seems that ‘anything that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish’
(Bourriaud 2002: 9). He goes on to assert that if, in Debord’s terms, the
media spectacle now dominates communicational and social exchanges,
then ‘it can only be analysed and fought through the production of new rela-
tionships between people’ (Bourriaud 2002: 85). The work shopping of new
kinds of social interaction drives art inclined by a relational aesthetic.
A conception of the aesthetic as a vehicle of resistance to the given
realities of capitalist culture has been around for at least two hundred
years, and it often subtends Marxist discourses on aesthetics. For example,
Theodor Adorno saw the aesthetic as an antidote to the modern regime of
instrumental reason, a regime that seeks to master all things through
rational calculation. Instrumental thinking distinguishes economic systems
that operate according to principles of calculated advantage, efficiency and
means–ends strategies, or in the promotion of new technologies that
promise standardized behaviour and the consolidation of uniform tastes.
Adorno saw aesthetic production as offering a negative response to this sit-
uation, as staging instances of otherness that resisted being instrumental-
ized, fully conceptualized, or put to some predetermined use (Adorno 1997).
As such, the aesthetic offers one path to a form of non-dominating know-
ledge, and this has a bearing on our ethical relationships with other people,
as well as the natural world. Despite the fact that Bourriaud speaks of the
critical theory of the Frankfurt School as ‘archaic folklore’, I would suggest
that remnants of this earlier branch of Marxist aesthetics are carried over
into his idea of art as ‘interstice’.
Aesthetic autonomy and interdisciplinarity º 169

But we could go back even further in the history of modern aesthetic

philosophy to locate the forging of an alliance between the aesthetic and a
certain freedom from instrumental rationality. I refer to Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Judgement, a text that contributed substantially to Adorno’s thinking
about modernist art. According to Kant, aesthetic judgements involve a process
of reflection upon the feelings fostered by sensory phenomena that requires the
subtraction of cognitive transparency and utilitarian purpose in our judgement
of the object. For Kant, this conceptual opacity stimulates the free play of the
mental faculties without any instrumental end in view. Yet, when speaking of art,
Kant does not entirely disconnect the aesthetic from rule governed or con-
ceptual procedures. He acknowledges that artistic practice does involve, in part,
º
the presentation of concepts. But, at the same time, ‘ it prompts, even by
itself, so much thought as can never be comprehended within a determinate
concept and thereby the presentation aesthetically expands the concept itself in
º
an unlimited way ’. In such instances, ‘the imagination is creative in [all of]
this and sets the power of intellectual ideas (i.e. reason) in motion’ (Kant 1987,
§49: 183). This suggests a view of art as fostering feelings of cognitive elusive-
ness where an exercise in conceptual recognition by the judging subject is both
incited and frustrated. As Robert Kaufman has argued, it is possible to read
Kant’s account of the critical value of the aesthetic as lying in its capacity to defa-
miliarize given realities, to offer ‘the formal means for allowing new perceptions
and concepts to come into view’ (Kaufman 2000: 711).
A conception of the aesthetic as creating a space for non-formulaic think-
ing continues to operate widely in contemporary accounts of modern art, and
this includes Relational Aesthetics. For example, Bourriaud writes at one point:
‘the fact is that a work of art has no a priori useful function–not that it is
socially useless, but because it is available and flexible, and has an infinite
tendency’ (Bourriaud 2002: 85). The infinite tendency of art recalls the Kantian
premise that aesthetic ideas generate a certain overload of sensory material
that exceeds conceptualization or utilitarian application. Although Bourriaud
implies in Relational Aesthetics that he has left Kantian aesthetic frameworks
behind, his assessment of contemporary art’s critical function differs by degree
rather than by kind from these earlier formulations.
The democratic impetus of relational aesthetics

I now wish to turn to an analysis of what Bourriaud deems the democratic sig-
nificance of art contoured by a relational aesthetic. This hinges on the quality of
communal exchanges that relational practices are said to activate with their
audiences, as well as with disciplinary systems typically demarcated from the
aesthetic sphere.
A prominent feature of relational aesthetics is its cancellation of the avant-
gardist value of dissent. Bourriaud contends that contemporary artists no
longer seek to negate the status quo from a position outside the dominant cul-
ture. He writes that while the ‘imaginary of modernism was based on conflict,
the imaginary of our day and age is concerned with negotiations, bonds and
co-existences’ (Bourriaud 2002: 31). Recalling the advertising spin of the com-
puter industries, relational art is described as ‘interactive’ and ‘user friendly’, it
acts as a ‘summons to dialogue’, it creates contexts and occasions for con-
vivial encounters between people. After all, such art is not described as an
agent of disagreement or rupture within the totality of social relations, rather, it
170 Toni Ross

‘fits more or less harmoniously and openly into the overall system’, while
‘suggesting other trading possibilities to those in effect within this system’.
A key artistic figure for Bourriaud is Felix-Gonzalez-Torres, whose early
work he sees as anticipating subsequent relational practices of the 1990s. The
personal themes of Gonzalez-Torres’s art, its simple and elegant formal struc-
tures, and its mode of audience address are said to convey an ethical demand
for harmonious co-habitation between people (Bourriaud 2002: 52). The
paper stacks and candy pours reach out generously towards their audiences,
who are invited to take pieces of the works away, while also being left with the
civic responsibility of how much of the works to appropriate. Another artist
who figures prominently in Relational Aesthetics is Rikrit Tirivanija, perhaps
best known for choreographing site-specific situations where visitors are
invited to cook and share a meal. Bourriaud also mentions Tirivanija’s contri-
bution to a 1994 exhibition in Dijon, where the artist created a green room for
other artists included in the show. The on site club included the installation of
a table football game, and a fridge stocked with a range of refreshments.
When speaking of these practices, Bourriaud stresses the ‘co-existence crite-
rion’ that underpins them, a criterion that asserts an equivalent status
between makers and beholders, or between artistic activity and other discipli-
nary fields. In the interactive and inclusive events, gatherings, festivals, and
games staged by contemporary artists, audiences are given the role of ‘com-
plementing’ and ‘completing’ the work of art. The democratic significance of
this arises from the sociable, open-ended and non-coercive relations gene-
rated between the art event and audiences, where there is ‘no precedence
between producer and consumer’ (Bourriaud 2002: 109).
All of this suggests that Bourriaud sees democratic social bonds in terms
of non-coercive co-existence, as an equal distribution of different roles,
desires and interests. In a more recent publication, the political significance
of relational aesthetics is stated more starkly. In the catalogue Contemporary
Art: from Studio to Situation, Bourriaud proposes that relational aesthetics is
based on two key suppositions. First, that ‘social reality is the product of
negotiation’ rather than disputation, and second, that ‘democracy is a mon-
tage of forms’ (Bourriaud 2004: 48). It, therefore, seems that Bourriaud sees
democracy as a structure where disparate elements are stitched together to
form a larger whole. Moreover, this vision of community is presented as
alternative to the reified social bonds, and monological directives promul-
gated by the capitalist ‘network culture’. But, is such an image of communal
ties particularly new, or especially alternative to the interactive rhetoric of
network culture? I would suggest not. Rather, the ethical and political agenda
that Bourriaud keys to a relational aesthetic seems perfectly in tune with a
long-standing liberal conception of democracy.
According to political theorist John Rawls’ influential thesis, liberal theories
of democratic equality are based on the fraternal assumption of the ‘symmetry
of everyone’s relation to each other’ (Rawls 1971: 93). Relational aesthetics is
articulated in precisely this way: artists and members of the public, or art and a
plurality of disciplinary parts, come together on an equal footing to form a
whole. More specifically, relational aesthetics echoes the central values of
liberal consensus politics. Seeking to ameliorate social or political dissent, con-
sensus politics assumes that every sector of society, along with their specific
differences, can be incorporated and adjusted to the given political order. One

might therefore locate a situational tenor to Bourriaud’s argument, as a plea

for consensus politics as a preferable alternative to the current U.S. political
regime with its perpetration of warmongering violence against other cultures,
or indeed, as an antidote to sectarian doctrines of all kinds. For the moment,
however, I want to remain within the realm of aesthetic theory, since this will
bring us closer to what I see as the ultimate conservatism of Bourriaud’s
theory, both politically and aesthetically. Referencing a recent book by philo-
sopher Elaine Scarry, I want to draw attention to an overlap between the liberal
conception of democratic social bonds that Bourriaud endorses, and a
Classical aesthetic of beauty.
In her book On Beauty and Being Just, Scarry seeks to advance beauty’s
moral relevance for contemporary times. She draws an analogy between a
Classical or idealist formula of beauty and a liberal image of the democratic
polity. Here the object of beauty, whether found in nature or art, is conceived as
an organic ensemble in which different parts are reconciled into a harmonious
whole. As Scarry asserts, beautiful form incarnates a symmetrical, balanced
and harmonious whole, equal in all of its parts (Scarry 1999: 106–13).
Furthermore, the figural equipoise of beautiful phenomena is said to act as a
symbolic catalyst, or enabling fiction that compels human beings to strive
towards the creation of fair and just social arrangements. While Bourriaud
forthrightly distances relational aesthetics from traditional aesthetic categories
such as beauty, his formulations are not entirely foreign to Scarry’s argument.
For Scarry, the formal concord of beautiful objects symbolizes a utopian faith
in the possibility of distributive justice and social equality. For Bourriaud, 1990s
art creates ‘microtopias’ where relational symmetries between people and sys-
tems are momentarily realized. Notably, however, Scarry insists that the fulfil-
ment of beauty’s purely formal promise of distributional equality can only
emerge through acts of political dissent. Yet, it is precisely dissent that
Bourriaud decants from the adaptive, pragmatic and flexible sociability of rela-
tional aesthetics. As critic Claire Bishop has observed, relational aesthetics
implicitly privileges a harmonious or empathetic connectivity between people,
as the basis of democratic communal bonds (2004: 68).
Neo-Marxist theorist Jacques Rancière has developed an alternative
account of the complex relationship between democratic politics and aesthe-
tics, which differs on a number of levels from relational aesthetics. In the
recent publication, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible,
Rancière responds to questions about his thinking posed by the text’s transla-
tor, Gabriel Rockhill. In the first instance, Rancière conceives of aesthetics
beyond the realm of art, as the numerous ways in which a culture or society
establishes, coordinates and privileges particular kinds of sensible experience
or perception. This ‘distribution of the sensible’ produces a system of natural-
ized assumptions about perception based on what is allowed to be ‘visible or
audible, as well as what can be said, made, or done’ within a particular social
constellation (Rancière 2004: 85). More narrowly, Rancière understands art of
the modern period as contoured by a productive contradiction between two dif-
ferent regimes of the sensible. The first he designates the ‘Representative
Regime of Art’, which roughly coincides with the prevailing aesthetic criteria of
the Classical tradition from Aristotle’s formulations about art though to Neo-
classicism of the eighteenth century. But, rather than making art’s mimetic
function the central feature of the representative regime, Rancière proposes
172 Toni Ross

that works within this particular sensible ordering obey a series of maxims that 1 This thinking of com-
define art’s proper duties and forms (Rancière 2004: 22). These maxims main- munity is also
developed by Eric L.
tained the hierarchical ordering of genres and subject matters typical of Santner in his book
Classical aesthetics, including rules regarding the appropriate matching of spe- On the Psychotheology
cific types of artistic expression with subjects represented. The second distri- of Everyday Life:
Reflections on Freud
bution of the sensible in art that Rancière nominates is the ‘Aesthetic Regime and Rosenzweig,
of Art’, which has only prevailed in Western culture for the last two centuries or Chicago and London:
so. Central to the aesthetic regime is the assertion of art’s autonomy, but this University of Chicago
Press, 2001.
term carries a precise meaning in Rancière’s thinking. Autonomy refers to art’s
presumed freedom from prescribed content or normative criteria, its disrup-
tion of classical hierarchies of subject matter, form and style and its loss of a
pre-given function as to its social or political role (Rancière 2004: 23). By pro-
moting the equality of subjects, themes, forms and materials considered
acceptable for artistic production, the aesthetic regime, according to Rancière,
erodes, but never entirely surpasses the representative regime of art.
Moreover, the ‘criterion of equality’ that Rancière views as a key axiom of the
aesthetic regime of art applies as much to developments in modernism as in
post-modernism. For Rancière, post-modern hybridity, the interbreeding of
different mediums and disciplines, announces a belated recognition of what
the aesthetic regime of art had already made possible (Rancière 2004: 52).
Having said this, Rancière also insists that the maxim of equality, central to the
aesthetic regime, should not be viewed as directly or automatically political.
This is at odds with Bourriaud’s argument, as he speaks of the criterion of
equality that obviously lies at the heart of relational aesthetics, as though it
were political in itself. Rancière argues against treating equality as a founding
ontological principle of this kind. Somewhat like Scarry, he asserts that equality
as a presupposition can only operate when it is put into action: ‘equality only
generates politics when it is implemented in the specific form of particular
cases of disssensus’ (Rancière 2004: 52).
The alliance that Rancière maintains between democratic politics and
dissensus signals another departure from the assumptions of relational
aesthetics. Rancière does not formulate democracy as a relational totality of
co-existing parts that make up a harmonious whole. While democratic forma-
tions do seek to accommodate different interests, groups or beliefs, to inscribe
these differential elements into the whole, this is not all they entail. Democracy
is also constituted by the possibility that sectors of the social field will on occa-
sion dissent from the prevailing givens of public life, will, in the name of equa-
lity, subtract themselves from the predominant consensus (Žižek in Rancière
2004: 70). Thus, an internal hindrance to, or remainder of the structures of
psychic and social identification that normally sustain communal bonds is also
constitutive of democratic arrangements. Rather than being conceived as an
ideal harmonization of parts within the whole, democratic communality is for-
mulated as a self-interrupting whole, or as a whole that never quite coincides
with itself.1 This account differs from the organicist model of communal bonds
adopted by liberal theories of democracy, and which, as I have suggested, is
perfectly compatible with a Classical aesthetic of beauty.
Aesthetic autonomy and interdisciplinarity in Mark Dion’s art

In order to flesh out the issues previously addressed, this section examines
Mark Dion’s Tate Thames Dig project of 1999, a work that was commissioned by

what is now the Tate Britain Gallery. Dion is known for producing performative,
site-specific events and installations that emulate the collecting, classifying
and display protocols of the natural and human sciences. The explicit inter-
disciplinary orientation of Dion’s art echoes Bourriaud’s claim that relational
aesthetics stresses a ‘transitive’ relation between aesthetic production and
other systems or disciplines. The collaborative nature of many of Dion’s
meticulously planned productions, also recalls Bourriaud’s description of
1990s art as focused more on the sphere of human inter-relations, than on
the production of objects. Finally, Bourriaud quite rightly situates Dion’s prac-
tice within a current of recent art that emulates professional procedures from
non-art fields, thereby activating slippages between aesthetic and utilitarian
functions (Bourriaud 2002: 35).
Having previously embarked on a series of projects that engaged with
natural science from the mid nineties, Dion conducted a number of archaeo-
logical digs, including the Tate Britain commission. The Tate Thames Dig was
composed of a performance and installation piece in three parts. The first saw
Dion and 25 collaborators industriously excavating historical and contem-
porary artefacts from two sites on the banks of the Thames River in London.
Site I was located at Millbank, the home of the old Tate Museum, and Site II at
Bankside, the locale of the new Tate in Southwark, which had not yet officially
opened. Members of the dig team included volunteers resident in the
Southwark area [Figure 1, Tate Thames Dig, Lenka Clayton and Dig Team at
Site II (Bankside), 1999].
For the second act of the work all of the materials collected by Dion and the
volunteers were cleaned, conserved and classified. But, significantly, the cata-
loguing system used did not adopt the usual stratigraphic or genealogical sys-
tems of archaeology. Instead, all items of material culture collected were
classified and later exhibited according to typology or formal resemblance. Just
Figure 1: Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, Dion's assistant Lenka Clayton and
members of dig team at Site II (Bankside), 1999. Courtesy of the artist.
174 Toni Ross

Figure 2: Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, Dion and collaborators with cleaned
and classified artifacts, South Lawn of the Tate as Millbank, 1999. Courtesy of
the artist.
some of the categories used were: Leather, Metal, Electrical, Ceramic, Plastic,
Glass and Bone. This preserving and cataloguing activity took place in tents set
up on the South Lawn of the Tate at Millbank, and, as with the excavation
process, it was staged as a performance to be audited by members of the pub-
lic [Figure 2 Tate Thames Dig, Dion and collaborators with cleaned and classi-
fied artefacts, South Lawn of Tate at Millbank, 1999]. Visitors to the sites were
able to interact with Dion and his collaborators with questions or comments
about the proceedings unfolding before them.
For the final stage, the cleaned artefacts were stored, arranged and
exhibited in a large double-sided cabinet, originally installed at the old Tate,
but currently on show at the Tate Modern. Museum visitors are invited to
interact with the Wunderkammer-style cabinet by browsing through the
drawers of temporally divergent archaeological finds. A notable feature of
the cabinet display is that the artefacts are presented without labelling,
chronology or any interpretive text attached [Figure 3 Tate Thames Dig
exhibit, Tate Gallery, 1999].
Three other components complete the Tate Modern installation. In one
corner of the room stands an open metal locker that houses Dion’s tools of
the trade for the project, including books on archaeology and critical theory,
a metal bucket, Wellington boots, and a protective coat. On the gallery wall
closest to the cabinet a small video monitor presents documentation of the
various stages of the dig with commentary from Dion and other participants.
The final component also testifies to the collaborative nature of the Thames
Dig. Photographic portraits of the artist and all collaborators, including dig
team participants, Tate curators and education officers, and members of the
film crew who documented proceedings are affixed to the wall.
A number of commentators have singled out the ‘democratic’ aspects
of the Tate Thames Dig for attention. In the publication produced to accom-
pany the original unveiling of the installation at Tate Britain, Robert
Williams observes that since the volunteers involved in the dig were
advised by Dion to collect anything that caught their eye, the process of
excavation reflected the ‘individual faculties and interests of twenty five
different people’, plus the artist (Coles and Dion 1999: 79). But Williams
also deems the nature of the collection to be democratic, in that all objects
gathered were treated as equally important, from discarded credit cards, to
animal and human teeth, to fragments of antique pottery and china, to

Figure 3: Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, Display Cabinet, Tate Modern. Courtesy
of the artist & Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
baby’s dummies, fish shaped soy sauce containers, and mobile phones
(Coles and Dion 1999: 86). Certainly, the odd assortment of objects displayed
in the cabinet drawers, their anarchic provenance and mixed historical tem-
porality forms one of the more surprising and amusing aspects of the dig’s
finale. It would be difficult to imagine a modern archaeological museum
displaying objects in quite this way, and it is precisely this contrast that
fosters the comic feeling of the exhibition format [Figure 4 Mark Dion, Tate
Thames Dig, cabinet display, 1999].
Christopher Horton has also commented on the democratic aspects of
Dion’s archaeological projects in an interview with the artist published in
the catalogue of the exhibition Mark Dion: Collaborations held at the
176 Toni Ross

Figure 4: Mark Dion, Tate Thames Dig, Display Cabinet (detail), 1999. Courtesy
of the artist & Tanya Bonakdar Gallery.
Joseloff Gallery, Hartford Art School in 2003. For Horton, the success of
Dion’s collaborative works arises from his ‘very honest and integrated kind
of respect for the people digging’, as well as a way of presenting cultural
º
material that is ‘holistic rather than a disciplined or shaped ’ (Horton
and Davis 2003: 5). Responses of this kind echo Bourriaud’s stress on the
democratic impetus of the relational aesthetic with its endorsement of
non-hierarchical interactions between people or different disciplinary sys-
tems. Yet, Dion himself is less sanguine about his work’s egalitarian aims,
at least in these terms. In the interview with Horton, he states:

there is a certain hierarchy in terms of some things. Taking on the role of the
museum, you obviously don’t show everything even though you keep everything
and care for everything. You show what you think is the most representative,
interesting, curious.
(Dion in Davis 2003: 5)
In the final display of items from the Thames dig, Dion’s now signatory style of
artefact exhibition, with its particular aesthetic priorities seems to predominate
over any input from collaborators. Additionally, since Dion so meticulously
emulates the research methods of archaeology, the functional division of
labour and the disciplinary protocols of the field are often rigorously main-
tained. In the various documentations of the Thames Dig, there is no question
that Dion is the director of proceedings. Whether photographed beachcom-
bing the banks of the river, consulting and advising members of the team, or in
animated discussion with members of the public, he is obviously the person in
charge. This suggests that even though Dion’s projects are often collaborative
in nature, he does not pretend to sacrifice his authorial prerogatives in the
name of some idealized image of balancing out the interests and desires of all
participants.
Robert Williams has said of the Thames dig, ‘rather than being art “play-
ing” at archaeology, it is in practice both art and archaeology in all of their
respective aspects’ (Coles and Dion 1999: 32). The question of what defines
the respective domains of art and archaeology brings me the way in which
Dion presents art as a cross disciplinary adventure. There is little question
that Dion’s work modifies any sense that art occupies a space of exception
entirely cut off other practices or disciplinary fields. While Alex Coles has
described the digs as the artist’s ‘anarchistic protest against the scientific
techniques of archaeology’, the authorial tone of the work imparts little sense
of adversial challenge directed towards the archaeological profession (Coles
and Dion 1999: 32). It has become a cliché of modern art that the artist’s job
is to break through or elude all classifications to which formula bound or sci-
entific thinking is subject. Yet, what comes through more strongly in Dion’s
works is the artist’s fascination with and deep immersion in the protocols and
procedures of the archaeologist or the natural scientist. He laboriously, even
obsessively mimics the preparatory schemes and epistemological ambitions
of these disciplines. As Williams observed, the cleaning and classifying
process of Stage II of the project generated scenes of systematic and coordi-
nated activity typical of a real archaeological excavation (Coles and Dion 1999:
92). As the study of the human past through objects of material culture, mod-
ern archaeology prioritizes the gathering and dissemination of knowledge
and information. An important part of this is the careful attention paid to sit-
uating objects collected within their precise historical and social context. Yet
archaeology also implies a collector’s passion for amassing intriguing, desir-
able, exotic or even banal objects. Both a scientific passion for knowledge and
the collector’s more obscure or idiosyncratic desire for objects are put on dis-
play in the Thames Dig.
A crucial point to be made about Dion’s archaeological projects is that
they do not enact interdisciplinary activity as the dissolution of all differ-
ences between art and other disciplines, as the establishment of an
absolute equivalence between them. Rather, the gestures of art and archaeology
178 Toni Ross

are run together in order to expose both similarities and differences

between the fields. One of the surprises of Dion’s body of work is that it
suggests that art may just as well involve epistemological research and
study as the human or natural sciences. The Thames Dig, for example, was
built upon multiple levels of information gathering and application. These
included Dion’s own researches into the history of archaeology, advice and
permissions sought from state agencies responsible for the Thames, and
the insights of professional social historians and archaeologists. By codify-
ing an overlap, rather than a strict division between the aesthetic sphere
and the utilitarian aims of archaeological knowledge, Dion extends the reor-
ganization of ways of making and conceiving aesthetic practice previously
instigated by conceptual art.
At the same time, the success of the Wunderkammer installation very
much depends on a difference marked between the established forms of
exhibiting objects in archaeological museums, and the aesthetic princi-
ple of display that Dion adopts. Dion describes this principle as formal in
the sense that objects are linked together according to similarities and
contrasts of form, shape, texture and colour (Horton and Davis 2003:
5–6). This is not only the case with the Thames Dig display cabinet.
Other digs that Dion has initiated, including Raiding Neptune’s Vault: A
Voyage to the Bottom of the Canals and Lagoon of Venice (1997–98) make
little attempt to qualify the objects in terms of their historical context,
chronology or any sociological information they may convey [Figure 5
Mark Dion, ‘Cabinet B’, Raiding Neptune’s Vault, 1997–98]. Dion has said
that he uses the formal as an organizing principle because it ‘has noth-
ing to do with the historical, in that it’s not about progression or tech-
nology or being part of thinking cultures’ (Horton and Davis 2003: 5–6).
This activity of historical decontextualization ensures that the artefacts
are presented more as conceptually elusive objects trouvés than objects
of scientific inquiry. In other words, the aesthetic here suggests a process of
disconnecting the objects from the identities they would acquire within the
established procedures of archaeological knowledge. Moreover, this proce-
dure recalls how in Kant’s discourse the aesthetic is allied to an experience
of the sensuous, formal and material dimension of objects that suspends
the operations of instrumental rationality. While Dion adheres faithfully to
certain disciplinary axioms of archaeology, he also reconfigures that disci-
pline from within, staging aesthetic interventions that disturb its relational
system.
In the section of Relational Aesthetics that mentions Dion’s art in
passing, Bourriaud speaks of contemporary artists ‘patiently re-stitching
the relational fabric’ of social bonds (Bourriaud 2002: 36). But this is not
the way I have interpreted Dion’s artistic interfaces with archaeology. I
have argued that in the cabinet displays, the artist mobilizes the aes-
thetic plane of the dig projects as subtracting itself from its pure and
simple identification with a given system of knowledge. In this respect,
his art does not maintain an organic metaphor of interdisciplinary con-
nections or aesthetic beauty. Rather, the final act of the Tate Thames Dig
presents an internally truncated compositional structure that symbolizes
more aesthetic ‘reality’ than can be contained by the current configura-
tions of the archaeological field. The ethical implications of this might

Figure 5: Mark Dion, Raiding Neptune's Vault: A Voyage to the Bottom of

the Canals and Lagoons of Venice, Installation (detail), Cabinet B, 1997/98.
Courtesy of the artist.
well be the fostering of a subjective or communal receptivity to the unfa-

miliar, the inconsistent or the as yet invisible within the given ‘realities’
of contemporary art and archaeology.
References
Adorno, T. (1997), Aesthetic Theory (trans. Robert Hulolot-Kentone), London and
New York: Continuum.
180 Toni Ross

Bishop, C. (2004), ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, MIT Press, Vol.
110, pp. 51–79.
Bourriaud, N. (2002), Relational Aesthetics (trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza
Woods), Paris: Les Presses du Reel.
—— (2004), ‘Berlin Letter about Relational Aesthetics’, in C. Doherty (ed.),
Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation, London: Black Dog.
Coles, A. and Dion, M. (eds.) (1999), Mark Dion: Archaeology, London: Black Dog.
Horton, C. and Davis, Z. (2003), ‘Collaboration: A Conversation’, in Z. Davis (ed.),
Interview with Mark Dion, exhibition catalogue, Mark Dion: Collaborations,
Hartford, CT: Joselett Gallery, Hartford Art School.
Kant, I. (1987), Critique of Judgement (trans. Werner S. Pluhar), Indianapolis,
IN/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing.
Kaufman, R. (2000), ‘Red Kant, or the Persistence of the Third Critique in Adorno
and Jameson’, Critical Inquiry, 26.
Rancière, J. (2004), The Politics of Aesthetics (trans. Gabriel Rockhill), London and
New York: Continuum.
Rawls, J. (1971), A Theory of Justice, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Santner, E.L. (2001), On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and
Rosenzweig, Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press.
Scarry, E. (1999), On Beauty and Being Just, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press.
Žižek, S. (2004), ‘Afterward’, in J. Rancière (ed.), The Politics of Aesthetics (trans.
Gabriel Rockhill), London and New York: Continuum.
Suggested citation
Ross, T. (2006), ‘Aesthetic autonomy and interdisciplinarity: a response to Nicolas
Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 5: 3, pp. 167–181,
doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.167/1
Contributor details
Toni Ross is Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at College of Fine Arts,
University of New South Wales. She co-edited (with Jill Beaulieu & Mary Roberts)
Refracting Vision: essays on the writings of Michael Fried (2000), and is currently
conducting Australian Research Council funded research into the role of the
aesthetic in Neo-conceptual art. Contact: Senior Lecturer, School of Art History &
Theory, College of Fine Arts, P O Box 259, Paddington, NSW, 2021, Australia.
Email: t.ross@unsw.edu.au.

JVAP 5.3_06_art_Hamilton.qxd 12/11/06 3:33 PM Page 183

Indeterminacy and reciprocity: contrasts

and connections between natural
and artistic beauty
Andy Hamilton Durham University
Abstract Keywords
This article offers a vindication of the indeterminacy of natural beauty, first through aesthetics of nature
a dissolution of the antinomy between a critical and a positive aesthetics of nature, Kant
then through a resolution of the frame problem. These arguments are developed, Adorno
finally, through a defence of the reciprocity thesis prominent in post-Kantian aes-
thetics, which claims that there is a conceptual connection between the aesthetic
appreciation of art and that of nature. I am concerned to defend indeterminacy
against objections from environmental aesthetics and aesthetic realism, and to give
qualified support to Adorno’s historicist position in Aesthetic Theory. Underlying
my approach is a Kantian emphasis on the ubiquity of the aesthetic and the
democracy of taste.
‘Aesthetic’ as a term of art

My aim in this article is to argue for the indeterminacy of natural beauty, first
through offering a dissolution of the antinomy between a critical and a posi-
tive aesthetics of nature, then through a resolution of the frame problem. This
position is developed, finally, through a defence of the reciprocity thesis
prominent in post-Kantian aesthetics, which claims a conceptual connection
between aesthetic appreciation of art and that of nature. ‘Natural beauty’
refers to humanly untouched nature and its flora and fauna, of which human
beauty is a special case. I defend the claim of indeterminacy against objec-
tions from environmental aesthetics and aesthetic realism, and give qualified
support to Adorno’s historicist position in Aesthetic Theory. Underlying my
approach is a Kantian emphasis on the ubiquity of the aesthetic and the
democracy of taste in the face of post-modern critiques.
I believe that there are two truisms – claims which are, or should be,
universally accepted – involving related formal contrasts between the aes-
thetic appreciation of nature and art. The first follows from the tautology
that, at least in limiting cases of untouched nature, the natural aesthetic
object has no human creator distinct from the observer. In contrast to art-
works, natural objects are not intended to delight aesthetically – even if, as
Kant affirmed in his doctrine of purposiveness without a purpose, they may
appear to. Hence, there is in nature no analogue of an understanding of
artistic purpose, and after the decline of religious belief, no creator to invest
a natural object with meaning. The second, related, truism is that, in
nature, unlike art, there is no determinate aesthetic object; appreciators of

1 This principle is elab- nature have the freedom to decide on the frame or focus of attention.
orated and defended Interpretation of this truism – the extent to which appreciators play a gen-
in Hamilton
(forthcoming). uinely creative role in fashioning an aesthetic object from indeterminate
natural material – is disputed, however. This is the so-called frame prob-
2 Defended for instance
by Stolnitz (1961: lem. Under the heading of the indeterminacy of natural beauty may also be
40–42), and Carlson included the indefinite potential of every natural scene or object to exhibit
(2000: 76). beauty, the indeterminacy of meaning of natural beauty, and the freedom of
3 The moral roots of the viewer to chose the mode of attention or appreciation. The first of these –
the superiority of the potential to exhibit beauty – is considered in the next section.
natural beauty for
Kant are explored A major source of disagreement regarding the aesthetics of nature results
at length in Guyer from dispute over the nature of aesthetic judgement itself. Aesthetic is, I
(1993), and in Allison believe, a term of art in two senses. It is a quasi-technical philosophical term
(2001, Chapter 10).
whose definition is not completely answerable to intuition or ordinary lan-
4 Budd (2002: 97) also guage. Nonetheless, what the term unifies is ordinary enough: a set of atti-
makes this
distinction, but unlike tudes which are unmysterious, involving quickening faculties or heightened
him, I define positive experience, which Kant described as disinterested but which may more pre-
aesthetics in terms of cisely be characterized as devoid of practical interest. Aesthetic judgements are
the potentially
beautiful. irreducibly perceptual, as shown by Kant’s Acquaintance Principle, that judge-
ments of aesthetic value must be based on first-hand experience of their
objects.1 They are also ubiquitous: one can make aesthetic judgements about
anything, natural, artefactual or artwork.2 There is a further sense in which aes-
thetic is a term of art, which particularly concerns this article: it makes essen-
tial reference to art, though not art alone – it involves an interdependence or
reciprocity between the appreciation of art and nature. The reciprocity thesis,
asserted by Kant and defended by Adorno, does not say simply that aesthetic
judgements are applicable to both art and nature, though this is certainly so. It
makes the stronger claim that the capacities to make aesthetic judgements of
art and nature are inextricably intertwined. Kant suggests this when he writes
that ‘Nature proved beautiful when it wore the appearance of art [i.e. appears
designed]; and art can only be termed beautiful, where we are conscious of it
being art, while yet it has the appearance of nature’ (Kant 1987, Section 45).3
Most importantly, for Kant, art will have the look of nature when it is created by
a genius. Kant’s version of the reciprocity thesis asserts the superior moral
effects of natural over artistic beauty; Hegel overturned his position, limiting
aesthetics to the study of artistic beauty. On Hegel’s view, nature requires
human intervention, through artistic forms, to be worthy of appreciation. The
persistence of this Hegelian reversal makes it hard for present-day readers to
understand Kant’s position. Despite its post-Hegelian relative neglect,
however, I believe that natural beauty raises some of the deepest questions in
aesthetics.
Positive versus critical aesthetics

Positive aesthetics may be defined as the view that only positive aesthetic
judgements can be made about nature, and rests on the view that all nature
is at least potentially beautiful; critical aesthetics, in contrast, argues that nega-
tive aesthetic judgements concerning nature are possible.4 The discussion of
natural beauty in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory offers considerations in favour of
both positions. For Adorno, the concept of natural beauty has an ‘essential
indeterminateness º manifest in the fact that every part of nature, as well as
everything made by man that has congealed into nature, is able to become
184 Andy Hamilton

beautiful, luminous from within’. However, it is equally true ‘that the land- 5 There is a further
scape of Tuscany is more beautiful than the surroundings of Gelsenkirchen’. heading – the defence
of positive aesthetics
The positive, egalitarian view is only apparently sophisticated: ‘Goethe still found in Kant’s doc-
wanted to distinguish between objects that were worthy of being painted and
º
trine of
those that were not [but] the classifying narrowness of Goethe’s judg- purposiveness
without a purpose –
ments of nature is nevertheless superior to the sophisticated levelling maxim which I leave for
that everything is equally beautiful.’ Comparative judgements are essential another occasion.
though invidious: ‘Although what is beautiful and what is not cannot be cate-
gorically distinguished in nature, the consciousness that immerses itself lov-
ingly in something beautiful is compelled to make this distinction.’ However,
the inegalitarian view readily falls into the conventional and cliched: ‘thoughts
º
on [natural beauty], virtually the topic itself, have a dull, pedantic, antiquar-
º
ian quality. Whoever declaims on natural beauty verges on poetastery. Only
the pedant presumes to distinguish the beautiful from the ugly in nature.’ Yet
‘without such distinction the concept of natural beauty would be empty’
(Adorno 1997: 62, 70, 72).
From Adorno’s remarks one can construct the antinomy of natural beauty:
everything in nature is, or can appear (equally) beautiful; yet some natural
objects or scenes are less beautiful than others, and may not be beautiful at
all. Although Adorno would dismiss the attempt as an example of identity
thinking, I aim to resolve the antinomy. There are two ways of doing so. The
first distinguishes a stronger reading of the positive or egalitarian position
from a weaker reconciling version, by discerning an ambiguity in the scope
of ‘possibly’:
• ‘Possibly everything in nature can appear beautiful’ = It is possible for

everything (simultaneously) to appear beautiful
• ‘Everything in nature can possibly appear beautiful’ = For any given
thing, it is possible for it to be (regarded as, appear) beautiful
One way of taking the second and weaker reading allows that different peo-
ple, or peoples, find different things beautiful; any individual or culture can
make comparisons with objects which are not beautiful, but not all cultures
share the same ranking. For any individual object, it is possible that there is a
culture which aesthetically values it, and one which disvalues it. Thus, African
communities whose diet includes maggots are unlikely to share the
Westerner’s ‘yuk’ reaction, but if cows are sacred to them, they will find eating
beef disgusting. It is less important to decide whether a positive aesthetics
could include comparative judgements of the beautiful, since the significance
of ranking judgements is overrated. A resolution with which Adorno might
sympathize – provided it was not advertised as a resolution – construes
‘everything in nature can appear beautiful’ as ‘everything in nature can appear
beautiful when represented in art’. Thus, a rotting elk carcass could have
positive aesthetic value – though not perhaps beauty – through being used or
represented in an artwork, one by Damien Hirst for instance.
A reconciling reading of positive aesthetics is the only plausible one, I
believe. The issues involved in its defence come under four headings:5
1. To dispose first of an unconvincing argument. Proponents of positive aes-

thetics try to explain away the obvious fact that there are negative aes-
Indeterminacy and reciprocity: º 185

6 Budd also offers thetic attitudes towards nature by arguing that these are products of encul-
arguments against turation. Saito, for instance, refers to the culturally conditioned negative
the second point, in
his (2002: 97–106). reactions through which, in the West, snakes and bats are associated with
evil; and to the way in which the extension of ‘weed’ is culturally and
historically relative. On this view, young children’s fascination with snakes
and creepy crawlies is natural, while their later squeamishness is not
(Saito 1998). I would reply, with Adorno, that ‘cultural conditioning’ is the
inescapable historical mediation of the aesthetics of nature, and that there
is no distinctive case for the cultural conditioning of negative attitudes
alone. Indeed some negative aesthetic attitudes may have a basis in hard-
wired or instinctual reactions. Perhaps the smell of putrefaction is some-
thing that humans are innately conditioned to recoil from – a survival
mechanism which stops us from eating harmful food.
2. The most important argument in favour of positive aesthetics is the posi-
tivist defence: scientific explanation locates order, regularity, harmony and
balance in the natural world, and these qualities are also the ones which
we find aesthetically good. So as the natural world is progressively
explained by science, the argument goes, it appears aesthetically good
(Carlson 2000: 91, 93–95). Now one might question whether scientific
explanation does always locate order and regularity. More important, it is
simply not the case that an attribution of order implies a judgement of the
aesthetically good. In response to the example of an elk carcass infested
with maggots, Holmes Rolston urges us to thrill over ecosystems, at
whose production he claims nature seldom fails; for him, nature’s land-
scapes almost without fail have an essential beauty (Rolston 1975). This
response is confused, however. It is true that there is no conceptual rea-
son why a rotting elk carcass could not be beautiful, and a culture that
seeks out maggots as nutritious may not find infested elk carcasses revolt-
ing. But the acquisition of ecological knowledge does not of itself make
the scene aesthetically pleasurable, just as the acquisition of art-historical
knowledge cannot of itself generate a positive regard for a painting that
one has previously despised. One overcomes an aversion to the music of
Schoenberg not by learning about twelve-tone theory, but by repeated lis-
tening; and it is unlikely that repeated viewing of the elk carcass will have
a similar effect. Furthermore, one could hardly propose viewing human
injury and death as part of a thrilling ecosystem; this will not make the
mutilated remains of a victim of a volcanic eruption aesthetically pleasur-
able to witness.6
‘Aesthetically positive’ must at least mean ‘affording aesthetic pleasure’,
but this is not sufficient for ascriptions of beauty. The problem cases for
positive aesthetics are those which, if they yield aesthetic pleasure, do not
yield the right kind. Grisly scenes can evoke a visceral excitement, which is
why people stare at road accidents or, in many cases, go to boxing
matches. This ghoulish reaction might be an aesthetic one, but it cannot
be what positive aesthetics requires. Similarly, with the range of reactions
to a dissected corpse – from revulsion to a fascination with death to
necrophilia. A grisly representation in an artwork may in contrast evoke
an appropriate positive reaction – a work by Damien Hirst, for instance,
or more modestly the dead lion still found on tins of Tate and Lyle
Golden Syrup, accompanied by the motto ‘Out of the strong came forth
186 Andy Hamilton

sweetness’. The existence of modernist art does not provide support for 7 Dewey refers to ‘’nat-
the view that the aesthetically positive does not have to be pleasurable. ural criticism’ in the
chapter on ‘Criticism
Although it is sometimes argued that modernism has abolished beauty and Perception’ in his
and aesthetic pleasure, the claim concerning beauty is exaggerated – (1934: 298), though
indeed similar claims could be made about appalling scenes in Greek or his subsequent focus
is solely on artistic
Shakespearean tragedy – and that concerning pleasure is completely false. criticism.
In David Cronenberg’s film Crash, the characters apparently take an aes-
thetic delight in disability; in contrast to a desire to re-witness an actual
car crash, it is not necessarily ghoulish to re-view the film – though there
might be better things one could do with one’s time.
3. It was conceded earlier that there could be no conceptual reason, in a par-
ticular case, why some object or scene may not be regarded as beautiful or
aesthetically positive. Indeed, to say otherwise would be to endorse the
existence of a priori principles of taste which Kant rejects. There is, how-
ever, a conceptual reason why one cannot regard everything in nature as
simultaneously beautiful – the contrast argument suggested by Adorno. In
its conceptual as opposed to psychological form the argument asks: if
everything in nature is beautiful, what claim can be made by ‘X is beautiful’,
and how could its content be acquired? Since one might argue – especially
if the reciprocity thesis is correct – that human artefacts supply the required
contrast of the aesthetically negative, the debate seems inconclusive,
however.
4. Proponents of positive aesthetics will argue that a critical aesthetics of
nature is untenable, because no sense can be made of the idea of nature
criticism. One could argue that negative and comparative aesthetic judge-
ments of nature do not require the possibility of critical justification, but
this seems unconvincing. Conversely, environmental aesthetics might be
considered as one way – a misguided one, I would argue – of vindicating
the idea of nature criticism consistently with positive aesthetics. For most
writers, however, the aesthetics of nature is positive, while the aesthetics
of art is critical (Carlson 2000: 75).7 Certainly, a positive aesthetics of art is
unlikely to have proponents. Many artworks fail as art, and criticism
should articulate the reasons why, given a finite life and a multitude of art-
works to experience, there are better things for art-lovers to do than con-
template Michael Creed’s tedious 2001 Turner Prize entry The lights going
on and off, or listen to the turgid minimalist compositions of Michael
Nyman. But what is the plausibility of the converse position, a critical
aesthetics of nature? Could nature appreciation recognize its aesthetic
failures, and nature criticism help to articulate why they are failures? Like
art, nature also contains longueurs, where there is apparently less to hold
the interest – but ugliness is harder to find. Cockroaches and maggots are
repulsive, but it is harder to view a non-industrial landscape as ugly. One
can say of an artwork that the artist’s colour sense is poor because the
colours selected are harsh and gaudy. One would not say that a combina-
tion of colours in nature is in poor taste, but might they still be harsh and
gaudy? Examples would be hard to find.
My conclusion, therefore, is that the first and stronger reading of positive

aesthetics is incorrect. There is a critical aesthetics of nature in the sense,
as Ronald Hepburn argues, of a distinction between serious and trivial

8 See for instance appreciation of nature. Hepburn’s account offers the beginnings of an
Hepburn (1993). account of nature criticism, even though he does not use the term.8 For
him, trivialized appreciation includes the scenery-cult, excessive observa-
tional detachment, and a sentimental neglect of nature red in tooth and
claw. Serious appreciation, in contrast, involves the imagination, not in the
inconsequential sense of seeing human forms in clouds, but of making
some truth vivid to perception: ‘I had long known that the earth was not flat,
but I had never before realized its curvature till I watched that ship disap-
pear on the horizon’ (Hepburn 1993: 70–71, 1988a: 27–30). Hepburn allows
that scientific explanations may enhance aesthetic appreciation only when
they do not transcend perception – for instance when one comes to see a
U-shaped valley in Scotland or the Lake District as having glacial origins.
Most important, however, Hepburn’s position is not overly prescriptive,
and allows for an indeterminacy in the appreciation of natural beauty con-
sistent with the weak interpretation of positive aesthetics – that anything in
nature may be potentially beautiful.
Although the preceding discussion has claimed that the aesthetics of
nature and of art share common features, it has not asserted an intimate
connection between them. Indeed, it may be felt that in viewing ‘nature
criticism’ as an autonomous practice, the true nature of the reciprocity of
the aesthetics of nature and art has been obscured. On this view, the true
practice of ‘nature criticism’ is found in the work of the artist who uses
nature as raw material. What this reciprocity thesis involves will now be
outlined – initially in response to the frame problem, which seems to mark
a fundamental distinction between the aesthetics of nature and art, and
then directly. Again the claim that natural beauty exhibits indeterminacy will
be vindicated.
The frame problem

Earlier I presented the truism that in nature, the viewer is free to decide on
the frame or focus of attention. It would be absurd to suggest the same for
artworks, which even in the case of environmental or Land Art, are discrete
and clearly bounded. In so far as post-modernists, such perhaps as John
Cage, create artworks with indeterminate boundaries, the concept of the
artwork is undermined – which was precisely Cage’s intention. Artworks
imply a clear, unambiguous focus of attention, and are intended to be expe-
rienced from a certain point or points in order to obtain their full effect. In
the High Renaissance period, a painting might be placed behind a screen
with viewing holes for the viewer to gain the correct perspective; a Mozart
or Beethoven symphony is meant to be listened to from a relatively limited
range of positions in front of the orchestra. Viewers have freedom to focus
on different parts of the artwork, but they cannot construct its boundaries
or its primary focus.
In the case of nature, in contrast, the boundary between the object of
appreciation and its environment is decided by the viewer. It follows that
appreciators play a creative role in fashioning the aesthetic object or its
properties – that is, in determining an essentially indeterminate natural
beauty. Hence, Santayana’s description of the ‘promiscuous natural land-
scape’ as ‘an indeterminate object: it almost always contains enough diversity
to allow the eye a great liberty in selecting, emphasizing, and grouping its
188 Andy Hamilton

elements.’ He emphasizes the creative role of the viewer: ‘A landscape to be

seen has to be composed.’ The implication is rejected by aesthetic realism,
the view that nature possesses mind-independent aesthetic properties,
which is assumed by environmental aesthetics but also by some of its critics.
Zangwill, for instance, agrees with Carlson that the true object of aesthetic
appreciation is independent of the framing or composition of the natural
scene by the viewer or participant (Zangwill 2001).
The existence of natural frames or focuses offers only limited support to
aesthetic realism, I believe. These are features which, though they are selected
for viewing, have ‘natural closure’: caves, copses, grottoes, clearings, arbours,
valleys, and so on. More often, there are arrays which are salient for human
perception and which thus have a natural focus – moving water, bright illumi-
nation, etc. In fact, since the boundaries of attention in the case of nature are
likely to be vague and of lesser importance, the issue is one of focus more
than framing – particularly in the case of the illimitable sublime. In any case,
the existence of natural frames constitutes a very limited truth in aesthetic
realism, since the viewer may always choose to amalgamate or ignore them.
A full-blown aesthetic realist position seems imponderable. Nature does not
dictate a correct frame for its sights or sounds, and it seems clear that the
viewer makes a larger contribution in determining natural beauty than artistic
beauty. Thus, there really is no frame problem as ordinarily conceived.
Aesthetic realists maintain that serious appreciation of nature involves the
tracking of determinate aesthetic properties. But again, the indeterminacy of
natural beauty suggests that the real problem is not ‘which sights or sounds
should I pay attention to and for how long, and what are their boundaries?’,
but rather, ‘what is a trivial and what is a serious appreciation of natural
beauty?’ In ‘determining an indeterminate natural beauty’, whether in viewing
a natural scene or, for instance, composing a photograph of it, one is impli-
citly rejecting certain aspects of the scene and ways of framing it. This activity
requires exercise of critical and incipiently artistic capacities – hence
Bosanquet’s claim that nature is the province of beauty in which everyone is
their own artist, a claim which constitutes one interpretation of the reciprocity
thesis (Bosanquet 1904: 3–4).
The reciprocity thesis

The thesis is prominent in various forms in post-Kantian aesthetics. It
asserts a mutual dependence between the aesthetic appreciation of art and
that of nature. Although Kant evaluates natural beauty above artistic beauty,
he may still be said to assert a reciprocity thesis, in contrast to Hegel,
whose reversal of Kant’s evaluation results in the total subordination of
natural beauty. Adorno may be regarded as subscribing to the reciprocity
thesis in at least one of its forms, while proponents of environmental
aesthetics such as Carlson reject most interpretations of it. Here are some
interpretations of reciprocity:
1. Artworks aim to present themselves as natural. Any reference to the organic

unity of the artwork endorses at least a weak form of the reciprocity thesis.
Art is perceived as in some way a natural or spontaneous creation, perhaps
made in imitation of a natural process, and appearing uncontrived though
it obviously is not. Kant’s account of genius assumes this notion, which

9 Mitchell comments derives from organisms not landscape, and concerns the aesthetics of
that landscape ‘is both creation centrally, rather than appreciation.
a represented and a
presented space, both 2. The aesthetic appreciation of nature appears historically with its artistic repre-
sentation. This is a conceptual and not merely empirical claim, which
º
a frame and what a
frame contains ’, acknowledges the following truths. To appreciate nature, in the sense of
quoted in Andrews
(1997:15). scenery as opposed to flora and fauna, is to regard it as landscape.
Landscape is both land and art – the dissolving of the two together.9 It is
10 An example is the
situation of the land viewed as aesthetic amenity as opposed to property. Adorno’s thesis
Renaissance Villa that the development of landscape painting goes together with the recog-
Medici at Fiesole nition of land as landscape is a plausible one.10 In his account of the
discussed in
Ackerman (1990). dialectic of the enlightenment, Adorno argues that aesthetic attitudes to
nature can develop only in an historical epoch in which nature is sub-
11 Schafer writes that ‘no
sound has attached dued, that is from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries onwards:
itself so affectionately ‘Times in which nature confronts man overpoweringly allow no room for
º
to the human natural beauty; as is well known, agricultural occupations, in which
imagination In tests
in many countries we nature as it appears is an immediate object of action, allow little appreci-
have asked listeners ation for landscape.’ For Adorno, to see land as landscape one must be
to identify the most an outsider, not a feudal worker on the land; thus landscape painting
pleasant sounds of
their environment; develops with the destruction of the primal relationship with nature that
bird-song appears occurs with the rise of capitalism and science. Before the late fifteenth
repeatedly at or near and early sixteenth centuries, landscape in painting always served as a
the top of their list’
(Schafer 1994: 29). backdrop to a dramatic historical or human event; landscapes were diver-
Petrarch in the tissements (Andrews 1999: 30). Then in Italy and the Netherlands, land-
fourteenth century scape began to be emancipated as an artistic genre, free of an explicit
seems to have been
the first to write human subject, though with a human narrative often still present as for
enthusiastically about instance in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. With further emanci-
the beauty of pation, landscape could itself become the dramatic focus, as for instance
mountains.
in Turner’s ‘Snow Storm’ of 1842.
Opposed to this historicist interpretation of the reciprocity thesis is
what may be termed naturalism: the view that there is a primitive, spon-
taneous expression of wonder or delight in nature which is not associated
with the appearance of art – an almost instinctive human response which
cultural influences colour and modify but do not originate. This seems
correct, and it implies that while aesthetic appreciation is historically
mediated, Adorno is wrong to insist that the mediation is total. While the
meaning implicit in aesthetic responses to nature is historically deter-
mined, aesthetic response is not entirely a matter of meanings. There is a
middle way between Adorno’s historicism and the unreflective naturalism
which he criticized. A society could show no wonder at the starry heavens
above, or could fail to take delight in birdsong. Although it appears almost
universal, that delight may be as culturally specific as aesthetic apprecia-
tion of mountains; perhaps in the Middle Ages birdsong was used to
locate birds for hunting and eating, with no delight taken in it.11 Any soci-
ety must have some objects of aesthetic delight, but which objects these
are will be historically conditioned.
I would however argue that the instinctive human response to nature
is also expressed in the production of artworks, with a small ‘a’ – crafted
artefacts involving what Pye terms ‘useless work’ (Pye 1978: 12–13, 34).
Thus evidence that members of a primitive society have an aesthetic
attitude towards sunsets may include the fact that they produce
190 Andy Hamilton

artworks, perhaps paintings of natural scenes. Could one imagine a 12 The contrast is
tribe who appreciated a beautiful sunset yet made no attempt to beau- discussed in Hamilton
(2006).
tify their environment, for example with functional or craft objects? It
would be implausible to say that tribespeople apparently issuing gasps
of delight at a sunset were appreciating its beauty, if they did not have
any concern with producing craft objects.
3. Any natural scene or object can yield aesthetic pleasure – if not perhaps
beauty – through being represented in an artwork.
4. The aesthetic appreciation of nature is essentially artistic.
Earlier it was argued that one possible resolution of the antinomy of natural
beauty construes the claim of positive aesthetics as everything in nature
can appear beautiful when represented in art; it was claimed that this reso-
lution constitutes the limited truth in positive aesthetics. It also constitutes
an interpretation of the reciprocity thesis. Interpretation (4) is more con-
tentious. It is most congenial to discredited idealist and intellectualist
accounts of art such as Collingwood’s or indeed Croce’s, but it remains of
wider appeal – to those sympathetic to a positive aesthetics of nature, and
to post-modern proponents of the ubiquity of art. Andrews first grants the
possibility of nature criticism, but then endorses a version of (4): ‘In judg-
ing what is a “good view” we are preferring one aspect of the countryside to
º
another. The process of marking off one particular tract of land as aes-
thetically superior to, or more interesting than, its neighbours is already
converting that view into the terms of art; it is what we do as we aim the
camera viewfinder’ (Andrews 1999: 3).
Reciprocal and Hegelian interpretations of (4) should be distinguished,
as should democratic and elitist ones. The reciprocal standpoint is demo-
cratic; the Hegelian standpoint has democratic and elitist versions.
Bosanquet’s initial statement appears to be democratic: ‘nature for aesthetic
theory means that province of beauty in which every man is his own artist’.
This claim will appeal to the post-modern sensibility according to which
anything can be art and anyone can be an artist. But Bosanquet is not a
democrat in aesthetics. He defends the Hegelian view that aesthetically,
nature is primarily material for art, and that fine art is the main and per-
haps sole representative of ‘the world of beauty’. He now treats artists as
an elite: ‘just as in speaking generally of the real world we practically mean
the world as known to science, so in speaking generally of the beautiful in
the world we practically mean the beautiful as revealed by art. In both
cases we rely upon the recorded perceptions of those who perceive best,
both because they are the best perceptions and because they are recorded.’
Bosanquet’s view would be favoured by those who contrast a positive aes-
thetics of nature with a critical aesthetics of art, and certainly artists may
see more in a natural scene than those without artistic expertise or experi-
ence. But his position is pre-Kantian in the way in which it defers to aesthetic
experts, and implies a cognitivist account of aesthetic judgement.
Although I may be advised to take a special interest in them, I do not need
to rely exclusively or heavily on ‘the recorded perceptions of those who
perceive best’ – I can experience and explore the beauty of nature for
myself. Thus the elitist as opposed to democratic interpretation of (4) should
be rejected.12

13 His view is discussed Versions (2)–(4) of the reciprocity thesis would, I think, be rejected by envi-
by Andrews (1999: ronmental aesthetics. It is interesting to note that Bosanquet argues that ‘even
184, 186); Ruskin
(1906: Vol. 1, xxxviii, such an analysis of natural beauty in the light of physical fact as has been
‘Preface to the attempted by Ruskin in the Modern Painters is chiefly directed to showing how
Second Edition’). great artists have extended the boundaries of so-called natural beauty, by their
superior insight into the expressive capabilities of natural scenes and objects’.
In Modern Painters, a defence of J. M. W. Turner against his critics, Ruskin
rejects the academic tradition of generalizing and idealizing landscape which
he found exemplified by Claude and Gainsborough. This tradition, he argues,
does not attend to the true character of the chosen landscape, either natural or
historical, but rather assembles a random and incoherent group of the artist’s
studies from nature. In a more forceful statement of earlier criticisms by
Constable and Goethe, Ruskin urges that ‘every class of rock, earth, and cloud,
must be known by the painter, with geologic and meteorologic accuracy’.13 His
programme echoes the tradition of anatomical studies associated with figure
painting. There is a very partial justification of environmental aesthetics to be
found in Ruskin’s analysis – an analysis which assumes the view, unfashion-
able since modernism, that the artist must have scientific knowledge. But as
Bosanquet notes, this scientific concern is subordinated to artistic objectives,
in a way not clearly understood by environmental aesthetics.
The Kantian recognition of the autonomy of the aesthetic subject, and the
spectator-dependence of aesthetic properties, is interestingly linked by Jason
Gaiger with landscape painting’s rise in status as an artform in which the spec-
tator has to impose organization. This approach offers a distinct gloss on the
connection between the indeterminacy of nature, and the reciprocity thesis. The
claim is that in the case of human beauty, organization is given, but organiza-
tion of a landscape has to be imposed; so landscape comes to be seen as an
ambitious form of painting. In the classical tradition of history painting, stan-
dards of organization are given by the Bible or mythology – the freedom of the
artist is more restricted. It is true that if one is depicting a human figure, one is
constrained not to give it three arms, just as when one is depicting a landscape,
one cannot show trees growing out of the sky, and so on. Nonetheless, there is
a determinacy in an organism which is lacking in an aggregate of things; there is
no ‘natural grouping’ of lakes and trees and hills. The key contrast is between
the subjectivity of aesthetic experience, and a classical conception involving nor-
mative criteria. It is consistent with Hegel’s exclusion of natural beauty from
aesthetics that he considers landscape painting wholly in terms of its capacity
for representing the mood or feeling of the artist (Gaiger forthcoming).
I have given in this final section several versions of the reciprocity thesis, all of
which seem to be plausible. Together with indeterminacy, I have argued that it
illustrates an essential feature of the aesthetics of nature. I would further maintain
that the reciprocity of the aesthetics of nature and art exemplifies the reciprocity of
art and the aesthetic itself. But that claim is material for another occasion.
Acknowledgement
Thanks to Jason Gaiger, E. J. Lowe and Roger Squires.
References
Ackerman, J. (1990), The Villa: Form and Ideology of Country Houses, London:
Thames and Hudson.
192 Andy Hamilton

Adorno, T. (1997), Aesthetic Theory (trans. R. Hullot-Kentor), London: Athlone Press.

Allison, H. (2001), Kant’s Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Judgment,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Andrews, M. (1999), Landscape and Western Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bosanquet, B. (1904), The History of Aesthetic, 2nd edn., London: George Allen &
Unwin.
Budd, M. (2002), The Aesthetic Appreciation of Nature: Essays on the Aesthetics of
Nature, Oxford: Clarendon.
Carlson, A. (2000), Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art
and Architecture, London: Routledge.
Dewey, J. (1934), Art As Experience, New York: Capricorn Books.
Gaiger, J. (forthcoming), ‘Ideal Form and the Unity of Landscape’, in Between
Sentiment and Reason: Art, Beauty and the Judgment of Taste.
Guyer, P. (1993), ‘Nature, Art, and Autonomy’, in Kant and the Experience of Freedom,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 229–74.
Hamilton, A. (2006), Criticism, Connoisseurship and Appreciation, in C. Adlam
(ed.), Critical Exchange: European Art Criticism of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth
Centuries, Amsterdam: Rodopi.
—— (forthcoming 2007), Aesthetics and Music, London: Continuum.
Kant, I. (1987), Critique of Judgment (trans. W. Pluhar), Indianapolis: Hackett.
Pye, D. (1978), The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, London: Herbert Press.
Rolston, H. (1975), ‘Is There an Ecological Ethic?’, Ethics, 85, pp. 95–110.
Ruskin, J. (1906), Modern Painters, 5 vols, London: George Allen.
Saito, Y. (1998), ‘The Aesthetics of Unscenic Nature, in Berleant, A. & Carlson, A.
(eds.), 1996, pp. 101–11.
Schafer, R.M. (1994), The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the
World, Rochester, Vermont: Destiny Books.
Stolnitz, J. (1961), Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art Criticism, New York: Houghton
Mifflin.
Zangwill, N. (2001), Formal natural beauty, Aristotelian Society Proceedings, 101.
Suggested citation
Hamilton, A. (2006), ‘Indeterminacy and reciprocity: contrasts and connections
between natural and artistic beauty’, Journal of Visual Art Practice 5: 3, pp. 183–193,
doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.183/1
Contributor details
Andy Hamilton is a lecturer in Philosophy at Durham University. He has published
many articles on philosophy of mind and aesthetics. He is completing a book on
aesthetics and music for Continuum, and a monograph on philosophy of mind,
memory and the body: A study of self-consciousness. He is a long-standing contri-
butor on contemporary music to The Wire and other magazines, and has completed
a book with jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz, The Art of the Improviser: Conversations
with Lee Konitz on Jazz and Improvisation (forthcoming, University of Michigan
Press). Contact: Andy Hamilton, Department of Philosophy, Durham University,
Durham DH1 3HP, North Carolina.
E-mail: a.j.hamilton@durham.ac.uk

JVAP 5.3_07_art_Seeley.qxd 12/11/06 3:34 PM Page 195

Naturalizing aesthetics: art and the

cognitive neuroscience of vision*
William P. Seeley Columbia University
Abstract Keywords
Recent advances in our understanding of the cognitive neuroscience of percep- aesthetics
tion have encouraged cognitive scientists and scientifically minded philosophers cognitive neuroscience
to turn their attention towards art and the problems of philosophical aesthetics. neuroaesthetics
This ‘cognitive turn’ does not represent an entirely novel paradigm in the study vision
of art. Alexander Baumgarten originally introduced the term ‘aesthetics’ to refer mental imagery
to a science of perception. Artists’ formal methods are a means to cull the struc-
tural features necessary for constructing clear perceptual representations from a
dense flux of sensory information in conscious experience. Therefore he inter-
preted artists’ formal methods as tools for studying the structure of perception,
and art as a field whose interests overlapped with aesthetics. In what follows,
I examine three approaches to cognitive science and aesthetics that rest on a tacit
assumption of Baumgarten’s program. I argue that, whereas this new research
can explain how viewers perceptually recover the content of artworks, it does not
explain what makes that content aesthetically interesting. Therefore, the chal-
lenge for cognitive science and aesthetics is to tie the perceptual practices of
artists and viewers to their more narrowly construed aesthetic, or artistic, prac-
tices. What is needed to establish this link is an interpretation of Baumgarten’s
original definition of aesthetics that treats attention to the way the formal struc-
ture of an artwork works to perceptually convey its content as a source of aesthetic
interest. Unfortunately this interpretation is not transparently established by expla-
nations of the perceptual practices of artists and viewers. Therefore, I conclude
that it remains an open question whether this research can contribute to philo-
sophical aesthetics.
What is the new field of cognitive science and aesthetics? In the most gen- * The ideas in this
eral sense, it encompasses a diverse range of interdisciplinary work involv- paper were developed
in part for a seminar
ing the application of theories and methods from philosophy, computer taught by the author
science, psychology, cognitive neuroscience, art history, and anthropology in the College Seminar
to the study of art and aesthetic experience. More specifically, it is an Program at Yale
University during the
attempt to understand art in terms of the perceptual practices of artists Fall of 2003 and
and viewers.1 This approach has recently been referred to as a ‘psycholog- Spring of 2005 titled,
ical’ or cognitive turn.2 In fact, it is not so much a new direction as a con- ‘Aesthetics and
Cognitive Science’.
temporary spin on a traditional view of philosophical aesthetics. Alexander
Baumgarten introduced the term aesthetics in the eighteenth century to 1 In this context,
aesthetics is
describe a new discipline dedicated to the study of sensuous cognition, or interpreted narrowly
perception. Baumgarten conceived the study of aesthetics as an examina- to refer to the
tion of the way perceivers translate the dense flux of sensory information phenomenal character

of aesthetic in conscious experience into clear perceptual images. The computational

experience, e.g. the model of cognitive science likewise treats perceptual systems as sets of
perceptual and affec-
tive properties of processes for transforming the dense flux of sensory input into the rich
viewers’ perceptual content of perception. Artworks are artefacts intentionally designed to trig-
interactions with ger, or control for, particular perceptual responses in viewers, e.g. a paint-
artworks and natural
scenes, and the ing is an abstract two-dimensional pattern of paint perceived as a
formal features three-dimensional scene, object, or abstract space. Therefore the cognitive
responsible for these turn in the study of art and aesthetics can be conceived as an examination
phenomenal
characteristics of of the way perceptual systems transform the sensory contents of viewers’
aesthetic experience interactions with artworks, e.g. the two-dimensional formal structure of a
(see Carroll 1986: 57, painting or the series of tones that constitute a musical score, into clear
1991: 307).
perceptual representations.
2 ‘Art, Mind, and There is a general explanatory strategy that unifies this new research
Cognitive Science,’
NEH Summer into a coherent field of enquiry. This strategy, which I call ‘the constructivist
Institute, 2002, hypothesis’, is derived from the conjunction of the following assumptions:
University of
Maryland,
http://www.philosoph • (CH1) The Constructivist Thesis
y.ubc.ca/art-mind/ Perception is an active process
overview.html. • (CH2) The Fry-Ruskin Thesis
Art exploits the properties of this process
• (CH3) The Constructivist Hypothesis
An understanding of the way artworks exploit these processes plays a
role in explanations of art and aesthetic experience
The constructivist hypothesis is a functional theory of art. Functional theo-

ries of art define artworks generically as artefacts designed to generate aes-
thetic experiences (Beardsley 1983: 239). Aesthetic experience is, in turn,
defined relative to the phenomenal character of viewers’ perceptual interac-
tions with artworks (Carroll 1986: 57), and interpreted to be a product of the
way viewers perceive their formal features. Therefore, the constructivist
hypothesis assumes that explanations of how artworks function as percep-
tual stimuli suffice to explain how they function as triggers for aesthetic
experience.
The intuition underlying the constructivist thesis can be cashed out in
terms of a constructivist theory of vision. Constructivist theories can be
interpreted as solutions to the ‘inverse problem’ (Winner 1982: 89–90;
Palmer 1999: 56). The inverse problem is a computational problem that the
visual system must overcome in form recognition. The input to the visual
system is a two-dimensional projection of the overall form of the visual field
(Palmer 1999: 25). The structure of this initial image is arrived at by simply
flattening out the surface geometry of the visible world, much like when one
projects a slide image or movie onto a wall. In this regard, each object and
surface in the visual field maps to a unique shape on the two dimensional
surface of the retina. But the converse relationship between the retinal
image and the visual field is not so well defined. Many different shapes in
the distal environment produce the same retinal image. For instance, the
retinal image in Figure 1 could have been produced by any member of a
mathematically infinite set of distinct shapes whose two-dimensional reti-
nal projection is a square. Therefore, the two-dimensional retinal input to
the visual system is consistent with an infinite number of inverse, or
196 William P. Seeley

3 This example is
derived from E.H.
Gombrich’s
discussion of
Thouless (1931)
(Gombrich 1960:
302–03).
Figure 1: The same retinal image can be produced a mathematically infinite set
of distinct shapes.
three-dimensional, projections (Palmer 1999: 23; Goldstein 2002: 173;

Scholl 2005: 40–41). This, in turn, demonstrates that the input to the
visual system is a spatially ambiguous retinal image that underdetermines
the structure of perception.
Consider a simple line drawing of a place setting at the head of a long
rectangular table (Figure 2). If one initially masks the rest of the drawing
so that only the dinner plate is revealed, normal subjects report that they
perceive an ellipse (or two concentric ellipses), the correct two-dimen-
sional shape of the marks on the paper. But when shown the same shape
in the context of the whole drawing, they perceive a round plate.3 This
example demonstrates that the same image feature can be perceived as
either a two-dimensional ellipse or a shallow three dimensional circular
object. Therefore, the retinal input to the visual system underdetermines
the content of perception.
David Marr argued that what is most interesting about the inverse prob-
lem is not that it is a problem, but rather that the visual system is able to
quickly, consistently, and accurately recover the structure of an object’s
appearance in most contexts (Marr and Nishihara 1978: 177). Constructivists
argue that this means that visual perception relies on some extra source
of information beyond the retinal image. On this account, prior knowledge
Figure 2. The drawing on the left is a masked version of the drawing on the right.
The central figures, the ellipse and the dinner plate, are identical. Normal sub-
jects perceive the two figures as different shapes. (derived from Winner 1982: 92)
Naturalizing aesthetics: art and the cognitive neuroscience of vision 197

4 This view had been of the ordinary shapes and functions of object types functions as a set of
expressed 50 years hidden assumptions that, in conjunction with sensory inputs, generate
earlier by John Ruskin
(Ruskin 1857: visual representations of perceived objects and scenes. For instance, in the
fn. 27–28; see also dinner plate demonstration, differences in context trigger different sets of
Gombrich 1960: hidden assumptions about the identity of the central figure. These different
pp. 291–329).
assumptions, in turn, generate different visual representations from the
5 The head is in fact a same two-dimensional elliptical shape. Therefore, constructivists define
cast of a toy car.
vision as an interpretive or inferential process.
6 The phenomenal The constructivist hypothesis rests on the claim that visual artworks are
shape of an object is
the shape of its two- perceptual stimuli designed to exploit the interpretive nature of perception.
dimensional retinal This is not a novel view of either perception or the nature of artworks in
projection. philosophical aesthetics. Roger Fry argued that familiarity and practical
necessity cause the functionally salient attributes of an object’s appearance
to become ‘labelled’ by the visual system. Once this occurs, viewers attend
only to an object’s ‘labels’ and cease to perceive it as it actually appears in
any particular context. Therefore, one’s memory of the ordinary shapes and
functions of object types, ‘interferes’ with perception, and renders the
actual structure of a visual stimulus ‘invisible’ to the viewer (Fry 1909:
17–18, 1919: 33–34).4 The goal of the artist is to construct abstract percep-
tual stimuli whose formal structure is sufficient to trigger the hidden
assumptions constitutive of an artwork’s depictive content. As a result,
viewers perceive what the work depicts, and the actual formal structure of
the stimulus is rendered invisible. For instance, the outline of the head of
the figure in Picasso’s ‘Baboon and Young’ (Figure 3) resembles the outline
of a baboon’s head. This cue causes viewers to categorize, or identify, the
sculpture as a representation of a baboon. As a result they perceive the fig-
ure as a higher primate and fail to perceive the formal features that define
the actual shape of the figure’s head.5
This aspect of the Fry-Ruskin thesis is supported by psychological data.
Henri Thouless demonstrated that subjects’ expectations about the identity
of an object effected their perception of its shape. Thouless asked subjects
to match a dinner plate, presented at an obtuse angle analogous to the
drawing in Figure 4, to the member of a graded series of ovals that most
accurately depicted its perceptual, or phenomenal, shape.6 Interestingly,
even trained draftsmen, artists who understand the effects of knowledge on
perception, consistently overestimated the height, or ‘roundness’ of the
plate’s perceptual shape across numerous trials (Gombrich 1960: 302;
Thouless 1931; Winner 1983: 92).
Artists’ formal methods function as perceptual strategies that enable
them to attend to the structure of appearances independent of the influ-
ence of practical knowledge (see Seeley and Kozbelt 2004). These strate-
gies enhance a painter’s ability to recognize scenes and objects as
perceptual stimuli composed of the abstract visual cues necessary for accu-
rate depiction, e.g. to categorize, and so recognize, scenes and objects as
paintings and drawings in order to recover their phenomenal shapes (Fry
1919: 35–37; Gombrich 1960: 298). For instance, the interpretation of the
central figure in the drawing above as a plate is the product of ‘external’
relations between it and the other formal features of the drawing, e.g. the
irregular trapezoid depicting the table top and the position of the tall cylin-
der depicting the glass as a part of the place setting. Categorizing, and

Figure 3: Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973) ‘Baboon and Young,’ 1951. Bronze (cast
1955), after found objects, 21 x 13 1/4 x 20 3/4⬘. Mrs. Simon Guggenheim Fund,
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, USA (196.1956). © 2006 Estate of
Pablo Picasso/Artist’s Rights Society (ARS), New York. Digital Image Photo
Credit the Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
Subjects ordinarily fail to recognize the unique shape of the mother’s head.
thereby perceiving, the figure as a round object is the product of attention

to these ‘external’ formal relations. Alternatively, the phenomenal shape
of the central figure is defined by ‘internal’ formal relations, e.g. the dis-
crepancy between its height and width. Categorizing the work as a draw-
ing to be copied (as opposed to a depiction of a dinner table) enables
artists to recover the correct phenomenal shape of the central figure, and
Figure 4: Naive subjects and trained draughtsman incorrectly match the shape
of the ellipse that depicts the dinner plate to figures on the left that are rounder,
or taller than its actual shape. (Derived from Winner 1982: 92)

7 Rendering the plate so produce a copy of the drawing that triggers the unconscious inferences
as a round two constitutive of the perception of a dinner plate presented in perspective.7
dimensional figure
would cause it to Fry and Ruskin argued that artists employ similar strategies in their percep-
appear to float in tion of to be drawn scenes and objects in the visual field.
space, detached from This discussion demonstrates that artists’ productive strategies depend
the formal geometry
of the picture plane. on a novel class of semantic knowledge that defines artworks as distinct
types of perceptual stimuli.8 Semantic knowledge is defined as one’s knowl-
8 See for instance
Gombrich’s critique of edge of general facts about the world, including the shapes and functions
John Ruskin and of object types. On this interpretation, the function of the formal structure
Roger Fry (Gombrich of an artwork is to generate the depictive content of paintings in the phe-
1960: 291–329).
nomenal experience of viewers by triggering the influence of semantic
knowledge in perception. Artists’ methods are a means to recover the for-
mal cues sub-serving this function from the visual field. Therefore artists’
formal methods and vocabularies, as means to manipulate the uncon-
scious inferences constitutive of what viewers perceive, reveal their knowl-
edge of the structure of appearances.
Two correlated explanatory streams emerge from this model for artists’
methods. The Fry-Ruskin thesis maintains that the formal structure of art-
works can be explained relative to what artists know about manipulating the
content of viewers’ perceptual interactions with artworks. The constructivist
thesis holds that the formal structure of an artwork can be explained rela-
tive to its functional structure, or how it works to trigger perceptual experi-
ences in perceivers. The functional structure of an artwork is defined in
terms of the way perceivers receive and process its perceptual content, i.e.
in terms of relations between the formal features of artworks and the oper-
ation of perceptual systems. This entails that the study of cognitive science
and aesthetics can be defined relative to two general projects: first, one
must empirically establish the content of these two correlated explanatory
streams; second, one must establish a link between them that explains the
aesthetic dimension of art and aesthetic experience.
Baumgarten’s original framework for aesthetics grounds the first stage
of this project. But this generates a problem for the second stage. He did
not associate aesthetics with issues concerning the nature of art or its
sociocultural importance (Davey 1997: 40). He, therefore, thought of art
and aesthetics as correlated, but not coextensive, fields of study linked by
the common goal of understanding the structure of perception. Thus one
must distinguish between two uses of the term aesthetics: one that refers
to the processes responsible for the perceptual content of artworks, and the
other, in a more contemporary sense, refers to what differentiates artworks
and aesthetic experiences from their ordinary counterparts. Cognitive sci-
ence can, at least in principle, explain aesthetics in the former sense. But it
is an open question whether it has, as a result, explained aesthetics in the
latter sense.
In what follows, I introduce three approaches to cognitive science and
aesthetics that exemplify the constructivist hypothesis: Semir Zeki’s neu-
roaesthetics; Jennifer McMahon’s claim that aesthetic experience is the prod-
uct of an intuitive understanding of sub-linguistic perceptual schemata; and a
theory of art and imagination derived from Stephen Kosslyn’s model of men-
tal imagery. These theories show that an understanding of the cognitive neu-
roscience of vision can play a role in explaining the perceptual practices of

artists and viewers. I argue that this is not, however, sufficient to demonstrate 9 See Livingstone
that they play a role in explaining the contemporary use of the term aesthet- (2002); Montero
(2005); and Raffman
ics. I conclude that a complimentary theory of aesthetics is needed that iden- (1993); see Dowling
tifies attention to the formal structure of an artwork as a source of aesthetic (2001: 417–18) for a
interest. discussion of physio-
logical similarities
The following arguments lean heavily on examples drawn from the his- between the auditory
tory of painting. There are several reasons for this choice. First, painting is and visual systems;
a two-dimensional visual medium that generates three-dimensional visual and see Kandel et al.
(2000) for the general
experiences. Therefore, the perceptual experiences associated with painting constructive nature of
exemplify the claim that vision is an active process. Second, painting has perceptual systems.
historically been closely associated with the study of perception. Therefore,
the traditional conception of painters’ formal methods exemplifies the Fry-
Ruskin thesis (Gombrich 1960: 291–293). Third, the case studies in the cog-
nitive neuroscience of visual aesthetics that generate the model for the
constructivist hypothesis lean heavily on the history of painting (Chatterjee
2003; Livingstone 2000, 2002; Zeki 1999; Zeki and Lamb 1994).
Nonetheless, the model is not restricted to the study of painting. Given the
constructive nature of perceptual systems in general, the constructivist
hypothesis can be extended to cover sculpture, film, dance, and aesthetic
mediums that exploit other perceptual modalities, e.g. music.9
Semir Zeki’s neuroaesthetics

Semir Zeki has coined the term ‘neuroaesthetics’ for his research on the
relationship between art, aesthetics, and the neurophysiology of percep-
tion. Neuroaesthetics can serve as a limiting case to illustrate the construc-
tivist hypothesis. Zeki’s central claim is that the function of art and the
function of vision are synonymous. The function of the visual system is to
provide representations of the constant and enduring properties of scenes
and objects that enable perceivers to recognize them in ordinary visual con-
texts. This task is constrained by the fact that the retinal inputs to the visual
system underdetermine the rich content of perception. I used the inverse
problem to illustrate this claim above. Zeki employs a related argument.
Retinal images are two-dimensional records of the relative luminance of
light reflected from discrete points in the visual field over time. This two-
dimensional array is in constant flux due to alterations in lighting condi-
tions and movements of both objects and perceivers. Yet what perceivers
see is not a pattern of constantly changing points of light, but stable, three-
dimensional objects and scenes in color. This entails that even the basic
formal features of images, e.g. the ambiguous set of geometric features
that must be interpreted to solve the inverse problem, are the product of
independent contributions from perceptual processing. Therefore, Zeki
argues that vision is an active, or constructive, process.
Zeki uses the notion of a receptive field property to establish a func-
tional analogy between the formal structure of artworks and the operation
of the visual system. The receptive field properties of neurons in the visual
system are defined as either the discrete areas of retinal stimulation that
result in the reaction of neurons or groups of neurons within the visual sys-
tem or the projection of these areas of the retinal image onto the visual
field. The receptive fields of neurons in the pathways of the early visual
system are selectively sensitive to colour, form, and motion cues. This

10 See also Latto, 1995: information is, in turn, employed to build up representations of the con-
66–72. stant and enduring properties of scenes and objects. Zeki argues that the
11 One can argue that receptive fields of neurons in the early visual cortex can therefore be con-
Zeki’s description of sidered evolved mechanisms for selecting salient formal cues from the
Calder’s mobiles is
both formally and art visual field to serve as the building blocks for visual perception.
critically inadequate. The function of the formal structure of an artwork is to provide viewers
On the one hand, with a set of visual cues sufficient to enable them to recognize its represen-
Calder does not
control for the relative tational content. These cues work because they trigger the same sets of
luminance of visual processes by which perceivers recognize objects in ordinary visual
elements in his contexts. Visual artists derive these cues via a detailed examination of the
mobiles. They are
ordinarily monochro- phenomenal structure of ordinary perceptual experience. Zeki argues, as a
matic. Further, he result, that artists’ formal methods and vocabularies are the product of
does not control for practices designed to cull those visual cues from the rich content of ordi-
the way these
elements cross in nary perception that are sufficient to trigger the receptive fields of neurons
front of one another. of the early visual cortex.10 He concludes that the formal structure of an art-
Nor does he control work works because it is tuned to the operation of the visual cortex.
for the relative
luminance of the ele- Zeki’s discussion of Alexander Calder illustrates his theory. Calder
ments of the mobiles thought that motion was most efficiently represented by the juxtaposition
and the colors of the of highly contrastive surfaces. As a result, he limited himself primarily to
gallery walls.
Therefore, luminance the use of black, white, and red elements in his mobiles. He argued that all
contrast is not a other colors confuse the clarity of motion (Calder 1952: 43). Zeki interprets
salient formal feature these comments as follows:
of Calder’s mobiles.
The aesthetically
formal features of Calder’s Claim: Luminance enhances and colour distracts from the perception
Calder’s mobiles are and depiction of motion.
their equipoise and
dynamics, the juxtapo-
sition of which Zeki argues that Calder’s claim indicates that he intuitively understood the
generates their rich functional specialization of the colour and motion pathways in the early
aesthetic quality.
However, this fact visual cortex. Three types of evidence demonstrate the functional special-
does not affect either ization of these two pathways. First, PET studies show that, when one is
neuroesthetics or my viewing a moving array of black and white dots, a different area of the visual
argument against it.
Clearly Calder cortex, V5, is active than when one is viewing a static colour pattern, V4.
understood how to Second, damage to these discrete regions of the brain are associated with
generate these effects. selective loss of motion and colour perception. Third, behavioural evidence
Presumably Zeki could
provide an explanation demonstrates that motion perception is, as Calder asserts, sensitive to
of how Calder used luminance, and not colour cues (Ramachandran and Gregory 1978: 56).
his mobiles to The evidence demonstrating the functional specialization of area V5
intentionally control
for these features of also confirms Calder’s comments. It thereby establishes a link between
viewers’ perceptual artists’ formal vocabularies and the operations of the visual system.
experiences. But, However, a problem arises if one takes this to stand as an explanation of
short a neurological
explanation of why either the aesthetic properties of, or the aesthetic experiences triggered by,
these features are aes- Calder’s mobiles. Neuroaesthetics rests on explanations of the success of
thetically compelling; depictive practices, e.g. Calder’s understanding of how to construct percep-
this new explanation
would suffer the same tual stimuli that trigger specific perceptual experiences. Explanations of this
difficulties as the one type apply equally to the functional success of Calder’s mobiles and, for
above. example, the stimuli used by Ramachandran and Gregory in their behav-
ioural research. Each are perceptual stimuli designed to selectively control
for salient features of viewers’ perceptual experiences.11 However, only the
former function to trigger aesthetic experience. Therefore, explanations of
how artworks function as perceptual stimuli to selectively stimulate the

operations of the early visual cortex do not suffice to explain how they trig-
ger aesthetic experience.
Jennifer McMahon’s theory of aesthetic form

Jennifer McMahon offers an alternative approach. The retina records infor-
mation about light reflected from points in the visual field. But it does not
record information about the spatial relationships among these points, e.g.
whether two spatially contiguous points belong to the same surface.
McMahon argues that the fact that the visual system is able to generate sta-
ble, three-dimensional visual representations entails that it contains two
types of computational structures: form primitives, which enable it to orga-
nize visual inputs into lines, planes, local volumes, and global shapes; and
transformational rules, or perceptual principles, which govern the construc-
tion of, and relations among, form primitives. On this account, form per-
ception consists of several stages of image processing whose function is to
transform ambiguous two-dimensional retinal images into representations
of the global structure of an object or scene. For instance, sharp luminance
boundaries in the retinal image are interpreted as lines, sets of overlapping
or closely grouped lines form texture gradients that are interpreted as con-
tours, and contours separating regions of different luminance are inter-
preted as surface boundaries. The lines, contours, and surfaces used to
construct visual representations are form primitives. The rules used to
derive them from ambiguous sensory inputs are perceptual principles.
McMahon hypothesizes that aesthetic experience can be explained as the
product of an intuitive awareness of the role these features of the visual sys-
tem play in form perception.
The role attributed to principal axis representations in form recognition
and object constancy illustrates McMahon’s theory of aesthetics. The
appearance of an object changes, often dramatically, relative to changes in
viewing angle, lighting, and the distance between it and the perceiver. Yet
viewers are easily able to recognize each of these images as a representa-
tion of a particular object with a constant, unchanging size and shape.
Thus, the visual system must employ a strategy for matching the perceptual
form of disparate sets of initial visual images to stored records of the defin-
ing formal features of objects and scenes. This feature of visual processing
is referred to as object constancy.
McMahon appeals to a generalized, Marr-style model that, consistent
with this hypothesis, divides visual recognition into two types of process-
ing: bottom-up computational processes responsible for constructing the
perceptual form of an image from ambiguous inputs, e.g. basic grouping
processes; and top-down categorization processes responsible for subse-
quently identifying what an image represents relative to prior knowledge of
the shapes and function of object types, i.e. semantic knowledge.
McMahon’s explanation of aesthetic experience rests on the claim that
these processes can be dissociated in ordinary conscious experience. She
argues that in certain contexts the perceptual form of an image challenges
the visual system so that normal perceivers become aware of its key formal
elements independent of the influence of semantic knowledge in object
identification. Given the constructive nature of perception, prior to becom-
ing subject to these sorts of top down conceptual influences, i.e. prior to

12 In principle, an object becoming associated with objects in the visual field, the perceptual form of
could be enlarged, an image refers to, and so represents, the processes from which it was con-
shrunk, or rotated
around its principal structed, not the objects, scenes, or formal features in the visual field that
axis to produce any of triggered it. McMahon asserts that aesthetic interest is the product of this
an infinite set of novel sort of perceptual event, and so reveals direct intuitive knowledge of the
views. But the
relationship between form primitives and perceptual principles responsible for the form of per-
the parts and the prin- ceptual representations.
cipal axis would McMahon does not explicitly identify the way her theory maps to the
remain constant
across all of these detail of Marr’s model. However, in several places she identifies an intuitive
variations. Therefore, awareness of the processes by which the visual system generates the
as long as the axis is ‘unified form of a scene or object’ as an important source of aesthetic inter-
recoverable, the ordi-
nary shape of the est (McMahon 1999: 20, 2000b: 4–5, 1999: 13–14). Marr argued that prin-
object should remain cipal axis representations are the form primitives used to recover the
recognizable. shapes of objects and scenes from the ambiguous surface geometry of an
Conversely, if the prin-
cipal axis defining the image. Principal axis representations define the central axes of objects and
shape of an object is are employed to group image features and object parts into representations
obscured in a view, of the global unified forms of objects, e.g. the long vertical line defining the
then the ordinary
shape of the object torso in a stick figure drawing or pipe cleaner model of a man is used to
should be difficult to group its disparate, abstract parts into a unified representation of the shape
recognize. Therefore, of a person.12 Therefore, one can interpret principal axis representations as
principal axes provide
a mechanism to critical aesthetic primitives for McMahon’s theory of aesthetics.
explain the success McMahon’s discussion of Cubism supports this interpretation. She
and failure of object argues that the form of an artwork functions as a source of aesthetic inter-
constancy in ordinary
perception. est by virtue of the way it either epitomizes or challenges the use of form
primitives and perceptual principles to construct representations of the
13 In this context, ‘object
recognition’ refers to unified forms of objects in perception:
the form recognition
processes responsible Perhaps certain relations in the object, in the course of being perceived, chal-
for identifying that
there is a discrete lenge or stretch the relevant perceptual principles in an unprecedented or
object in the visual non-typical way. On the other hand, the relation of the elements within some
field with a particular objects, such as natural forms (and certain artworks, for example the sculp-
shape. These
processes are ordina- tures of Constantin Brancusi, 1876–1957), might epitomize these perceptual
rily thought to be a principle. Perhaps when these principles are invoked in any way likely to draw
logically prior to, and our attention from straightforward object recognition to the process of per-
so a necessary precur-
sor of, object ception as the solution to a problem, we experience [aesthetic pleasure].13
identification. That is, when it is as if the very process of perception itself is experienced as
º the solution to the problem of constructing a coherent form from the array
º
14 See also McMahon
2001: 236; McMahon of [form] primitives, then we experience [aesthetic pleasure]
2000a: 34. (McMahon 1999: 21–22)14
15 This observation
entails that the McMahon argues further that the figures in the fractured surface of a
success (or failure) of
Cubist paintings Cubist painting are recognizable only relative to the degree to which the
reveal Picasso and rendering of their parts retains a perceivable relationship to the principal
Braque’s understand- axes that define their global, or unified, forms (McMahon 2000b: 2).15
ing of how to control
for the relationships Consider George Braque’s ‘Bouteille et Poissons’ (Figure 5). The shape of
between local image the bottle in the upper right quadrant is defined by a clear silhouette that
structure and global groups a set of abstract formal image features symmetrically around a
form primitives in
viewers’ perceptual strong vertical axis, or axis of symmetry. Consequently, it is the figure most
experience. easily recognized in the painting because it ‘epitomizes’ the use of principle
axes in visual processing.

Figure 5. Braque, George (1882–1963), ‘Bouteille et Poissons,’ 1910. Oil on

Canvas, 24 x 29 1/2⬘. Tate Gallery, London (T00455). © 2006 Artist’s Rights
Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Digital photo credit Tate Gallery,
London, 2005/Art Resource, NY. The image on the right illustrates the principal
axes that define the shapes of the bottle and five fish in the painting.
The shapes of the five fish in the foreground of the painting are not sym-
metrical. Consequently the forms used to depict the fish are defined by axes
of elongation. Axes of elongation are used to group surfaces defining
objects in images with non-symmetrical shapes by their proximity, lumi-
nance, and relative orientation. These axes are difficult to recover in the
painting, and so challenge the processes by which the visual system con-
structs the unified form of the object. There are three reasons for this. First,
the planes defining the visible parts of the fish are the same luminance as
their surround. Second, the relative orientation of these planes has been
skewed. Third, the tails of the fish are occluded by the way they are piled on
the table. This means that one of the form cues indicating the correct ori-
entation of the axis of elongation for each fish, i.e. from its mouth to the
centre of its tail fins, is missing. As a result, the fish challenge the
processes of form recognition and are hard to perceive. On this model
viewers’ interactions with Braque’s painting involve games of visual play in
which they are invited to search for the objects named in the title.
McMahon argues, following Marr, that visual recognition rests on one’s
ability to recover principle axis representations from the flux of information
in the retinal inputs. Therefore, one can interpret principal axis representa-
tions as the salient aesthetic primitives for McMahon’s interpretation of
Cubist paintings.
The critical feature of McMahon’s theory is her claim that viewers can
become aware of the form of a scene, object, or image independent of the
perceptual processes sub-serving object identification. This can be under-
stood as an extension of Baumgarten’s original framework for aesthetics.
Following Leibniz, Baumgarten identified knowledge of the salient formal
features of scenes, objects, and artworks as ‘clear but confused’ because
one can discern the thing represented from other objects, but cannot
explicitly identify the marks by which one makes this discrimination.
Leibniz identifies the aesthetic judgments of painters as a paradigm case:
ºwe sometimes see painters and other artists correctly judge what has been
done well or been done badly; yet they are often unable to give a reason for

their judgment, but tell the inquirer that the work which [pleases or] dis-
pleases them lacks ‘something I know not what’.
(Leibniz 1684: 291)
Baumgarten argued similarly that, when the focus of attention is the struc-
ture of a scene, object, or image itself, the clarity of perceptual knowledge
generates a feeling of pleasure, a sense of cognitive consonance that marks
a resonance between a perceptual representation and the stimulus.
Moses Mendelssohn’s elaboration of Baumgarten’s aesthetics can be
used to illustrate this claim. Mendelssohn argued that the function of
artists’ methods and formal vocabularies is to ‘beautify nature’. In this
regard, when an artist paints a scene or object he or she does not neces-
sarily copy its appearances. Rather, the goal is to render the subject matter
in a manner that enhances the harmony, or resonance, between its appear-
ance and the processes of perception (Mendelssohn 1771: 174–76).
Viewers, in turn, experience the resonance between an artwork and their
perceptual faculties as a sense of satisfaction or pleasure, which is the mark
of the perception of beauty. Mendelssohn concluded that artworks function
as a source of aesthetic interest by virtue of the resonance between their
formal structure and the faculties of perception (Guyer 1996: 134–35).
McMahon’s theory of aesthetics rests on a similar claim. Recall that
McMahon argues that stimuli evoke aesthetic interest by either epitomizing
or challenging the processes of perception. An artwork whose shape or for-
mal structure epitomizes a set of form primitives is a perceptual stimulus
that exhibits a strong resonance with the operations of the visual system,
e.g. the bottle in Braque’s painting. A stimulus that challenges the operation
of the visual system is only recognizable by virtue of the sets of image trans-
formations that enhance the resonance between a sensory representation
and the faculty of perception in order to facilitate form recognition and
object identification, e.g. the fish in Braque’s painting. In both cases, suc-
cessfully recovering the coherent or unified form of an artwork from sensory
inputs is dependent upon the resonance between a sensory representation
of the stimulus and the operation of the visual system. McMahon’s argues
that viewers experience this type of perceptual resonance as a source of
aesthetic interest.
McMahon’s theory rests on the claim that that viewing an aesthetic
object is akin to resolving a perceptual problem by culling the structural fea-
tures necessary to identify its global form from the detail and variety of its
appearance, e.g. the two dimensional marks on a canvas. On her account,
paintings like Braque’s are limiting cases that reveal the viewer’s share,
ordinarily unnoticed, in structuring the content of perception. But this
account of aesthetic interest is subject to the same difficulty as Zeki’s. The
input to the visual system is a dynamic array of discrete points of light that
underdetermines the spatial structure of visual representations. Thus the
form primitives and perceptual principles employed to recover the formal
and depictive content of Braque’s painting are operative in all ordinary
visual recognition tasks. Therefore, explanations of the way the form primi-
tives and perceptual principles function in viewers’ perceptual interactions
with artworks do not suffice to explain how artworks trigger aesthetic
experience.

An imagery feedback model for a theory of art and imagination 16 See also Currie and
Ravenscroft 2002:
Imaginings also, like thoughts of other kinds, enter into visual experience º Chapters 1 and 4.
the seeing and the imagining are inseparably bound together, integrated into 17 Walton uses paintings
to illustrate this claim,
a single, complex, phenomenological whole. but research by Justin
(Walton 1990: 295) London demonstrates
that imaginative
perception plays a
The constructivist hypothesis is an aesthetic theory of art. Aesthetic theories similar role in the way
of art are functional theories of art that define the aesthetic character of a listener’s experience
viewer’s interaction with an artwork in relation to the formal and expressive familiar beats in
popular music like the
properties of their perceptual experience (Beardsley 1983: 238; Carroll 1986: blues (London 2003:
57). The central claim of the constructivist hypothesis is that attention to 1, 2004: 86).
the way the formal structure of an artwork functions to convey its content is 18 Walton argues that
a source of aesthetic interest. Therefore, theories in cognitive science and similar processes, dri-
aesthetics attempt define art relative to the structure of viewers’ perceptual ven by knowledge of
the conventions sub-
interactions with art works. serving aesthetic
However, philosophers like Noël Carroll and Arthur Danto have argued practices, drive
that the interest generated by artworks does not lie in how viewers perceive viewers’ interactions
with abstract works of
them. Rather it is a product of the way viewers categorize what they have art, only in these
already perceived relative to background art historical knowledge. This is cases one
not to deny that some artworks are perceptually striking. Rather, it is to imaginatively
perceives a geometric
argue that the interest generated by an artwork is, more often than not, the space, not a natural
product of non-perceptual interpretive events that determine its meaning scene or object.
(Carroll 2001: 15, 1986: 59; Danto 2001: 6, 2000: xx–xxiv). Carroll argues fur-
ther that aesthetic theories of art cannot, given the perceptual bias of their
definition of aesthetic experience, accommodate these sorts of cognitive
practices (Carroll 1986: 57–58 and 64). This objection implies that aesthetic
theories of art provide an anaemic view of art in which artworks are identi-
fied as a narrow category of objects that trigger formal aesthetic responses,
e.g. beautiful landscapes and some types of geometric abstraction.
Kendall Walton’s theory of visual imagination suggests an interpretation
of the constructivist hypothesis that can resolve this problem. Walton has
argued that the marks on the perceptible surface of a work of fine art func-
tion to trigger imaginative events that are partially constitutive of the per-
ceptual content of that work (Walton 1990: 138).16 This claim can be
illustrated by an examination of viewers’ perceptual interactions with paint-
ings. Oil paintings are flat perceptual stimuli composed of overlapping
patches of pigment suspended in linseed oil; in other words, they are two-
dimensional patterns of colour patches. Yet viewers naturally perceive
paintings as realistic three dimensional scenes, objects, and abstract geo-
metric spaces. Walton describes the mental events underlying these experi-
ences as instances of ‘imaginative perception’.
Imaginative perception is defined as a mental event whose content
includes modality specific perceptual properties, e.g. visualizing the kitchen
table to recall where one has left the car keys. Walton argues that viewers’
perceptual interactions with artworks are augmented by imaginative per-
ception.17 Therefore, he argues that the way one conceptualizes the broad
representational content of an art work contributes to the way one per-
ceives its visible surface and visualizes the spatial extent of its occluded
spaces, e.g. the misperception of Picasso’s baboon.18

Stephen Kosslyn’s model for mental imagery, and in particular the func-
tion he attributes to imagery feedback in ordinary vision, provides a mecha-
nism for the role Walton ascribes to imagination in viewers’ perceptual
interactions with paintings. Kosslyn’s theory rests on a hypothesis testing
model of object identification. This approach differs from the theory of
vision introduced in the previous section. Marr’s theory is a structural
description theory. Visual recognition involves matching the forms of visual
representations to semantic knowledge, i.e. to stored records of the shapes
and functions of object types. Structural description theories assert that
this process depends on a prior process in which the visual system con-
structs a full representation of its three dimensional form. Kosslyn sug-
gests, alternatively, that small, spatially ambiguous sets of image features
often suffice for object identification. He argues that these image features
can be used to generate perceptual hypotheses about the identity of per-
ceived objects. Semantic associations derived from perceptual hypothesis
are, in turn, used to prime the visual system to the expectation of further
object features at particular locations in the visual field. If these expecta-
tions match further sensory data, the visual system treats a perceptual
hypothesis as confirmed. Otherwise the process cycles through again.
Kosslyn identifies the priming function of perceptual hypotheses as the
mechanism responsible for visual imagery. He argues that semantic associ-
ations derived from perceptual hypotheses are used in both imagery and
ordinary vision to instantiate representations of expected objects, parts, or
image features in the areas of the visual system responsible for form recog-
nition. These representations are realized by patterns of neural activation
whose function in vision is to amplify aspects of the retinal input as it is
processed. Kosslyn argues that, in imagery, these same patterns of activa-
tion function as surrogate retinal images to trigger the neurophysiological
processes ordinarily responsible for visual experience independent of sen-
sory inputs. Therefore, mental images are non-perceptual visual images
that share formal attributes, e.g. spatial structure, with ordinary visual rep-
resentations.
One consequence of Kosslyn’s model is that imagery can play a role in
ordinary vision (Kosslyn 1996: 260–61). Given the function of patterns of
neural activation in imagery, low level representations instantiated in the
visual cortex by perceptual hypotheses can be used to augment missing,
occluded, blurry, or otherwise degraded features of ordinary visual images.
This entails that how one identifies the content of the visual field can influ-
ence how one perceives it. This lends support to Walton’s claim that ‘imag-
inative seeing’ pervades our ordinary perceptual interactions with
paintings. Paintings are two dimensional abstract patterns of paint whose
spatial structure must be augmented in perceptual processing, i.e. they are
degraded images whose spatial structure is in part filled in by imagery feed-
back. Therefore, on Kosslyn’s model, interpretation and perception are inte-
grated in aesthetic experience, not distinct.
This model for form recognition and object identification generates a
model for viewers’ perceptual interactions with artworks that dissolves
Carroll and Danto’s criticism of aesthetic theories of art. Consider Braque’s
‘Bouteille et Poissons’ again. Knowledge of the aesthetic practices that
define Cubism as a style authorizes a game of visual play that prescribes

the way viewers interact with the painting. The title is a cue which indicates 19 Diagnostic features
that the work is a still life. Knowledge that ‘Bouteille et Poissons’ is a Cubist are image features
that suffice to
painting indicates that a viewer should search its surface for the objects determine the identity
mentioned in the title, e.g. a bottle and some fish. Knowledge that it is a of a scene or object
still life is a cue to look for natural objects in a pile spilling out towards the (Schyns 1998: 149;
Thompson and
viewer from the center foreground of the painting. This, in turn, influences Kosslyn 2000: 538).
how viewers perceive the painting. For instance, the fish are hard to recog-
20 An image of this work
nize. Even educated viewers have difficulty finding them. However, if they can be viewed at the
can find one fish head, they often report that the rest pop into focus almost website of the Museum
immediately. Recognizing one fish indicates what types of formal features of Modern Art,
www.moma.org/
are diagnostic for the shapes of the fish in the painting, e.g. the triangular collections/browse_
shape of a fish head.19 This, in turn, functions to prime the visual system results/object_id=78455
and enables viewers to recover the image features necessary to project the
shapes of the other four fish into the picture plane. Therefore, the act of cat-
egorizing the work as a Cubist painting, an act of interpretation on Carroll
and Danto’s account, functions to guide attention and shape the way view-
ers perceive the painting.
Similarly, biographical information about Christina Olsen has a dra-
matic effect on viewers’ perceptual interactions with Andrew Wyeth’s
‘Christina’s World’. Subjects often identify the figure in the foreground of
the painting as a healthy young woman. This effect is, in part, due to the
fact that Wyeth used his healthy, thirty year old wife as the model for the
painting. But Christina was in her fifties, had suffered since childhood from
an undiagnosed degenerative muscular disease, could not walk, and reg-
ularly dragged herself by her hands across the field in the foreground to
visit her parents’ graves. Knowledge of these facts focuses viewers’
attention on her, ordinarily unperceived, emaciated ankles and gnarled
wrists, and amplifies the perceived distance between the figure and the
house. It therefore enhances the visual juxtaposition between the young
woman in the foreground and the bleak landscape, and clarifies the bit-
tersweet tone of the painting. In this manner, background knowledge
influences the way viewers interpret the painting, which in turn influ-
ences the way they perceive it.20
Kosslyn’s model demonstrates that aesthetic theories of art can
accommodate the influence of meaning and interpretation in viewers’ per-
ceptual interactions with paintings. Therefore theories of art and imagina-
tion provide a richer description of viewer’s perceptual practices than
either Zeki or McMahon’s versions of the constructivist hypothesis.
However, one can raise a, by now familiar, objection to this interpretation.
The influence of imagery feedback on the perception of paintings does not
single them out as a unique class of perceptual stimuli. On this account,
all types of pictures, both aesthetic and non-aesthetic, are two-dimen-
sional perceptual stimuli whose depictive content must be filled-in in per-
ception by imagery feedback. Furthermore, given that all sensory inputs to
the visual system are ambiguous and incomplete, Kosslyn argues that
imagery feedback plays an essential role in all form recognition. In this
regard, Kosslyn’s theory treats viewers’ perceptual interactions with paint-
ings as no different in kind than any other type of perceptual event. This
entails that it does not suffice to explain how these artworks function to
generate aesthetic interest.

Art, cognitive science, and aesthetics

The constructivist hypothesis is derived from two largely unexamined
assumptions: part of what makes an artwork aesthetically interesting is its
formal structure (Zeki and Lamb 1994: 607; McMahon 2001: 235–36); and
what makes the formal structure of an artwork aesthetically interesting is
the way it ‘resonates’ with the operation of the visual system (Latto 1995:
68; Zeki 1999: 150; McMahon 2001: 236). The resonance between the for-
mal structure of an artwork and the operation of perceptual systems
explains how it functions as a perceptual stimulus. Therefore, the construc-
tivist hypothesis can be interpreted as the claim that explanations of how
artworks work as perceptual stimuli are also explanations of how artworks
generate aesthetic interest.
Unfortunately explanations of the perceptual practices of artists and
viewers do not demonstrate the validity of this aesthetic thesis. Artworks
work as perceptual stimuli simply because they exploit the cues and
processes operative in ordinary perceptual experience (Cavanaugh 1999:
648). As a result, explanations of the way artworks work as perceptual stimuli
apply equally to artworks and non-aesthetic visual stimuli, e.g. the scene
perceivable from my window. This observation suggests the following gen-
eral objection to an aesthetic interpretation of the constructivist hypothesis.
Cognitive science can explain the functional success of artworks as percep-
tual stimuli and can, as a result, augment our understanding of aesthetic
experiences as a category of perceptual experience. But these sorts of expla-
nations do not, in themselves, add anything to our understanding of the
aesthetic dimension of these objects and activities. Therefore, the value of
the constructivist hypothesis as an aesthetic thesis is not established by
research in cognitive science. Rather, it depends on the existence of a com-
plimentary theory of aesthetics which grounds aesthetic interest in an
understanding of how artworks work.
A solution to this difficulty is forthcoming in the aesthetics literature.
Noël Carroll argues that the search for latent structure in visual artworks is
a source of aesthetic interest (Carroll 1986: 61, 2002: 165). The term ‘latent
structure’ refers to the design features of an artwork responsible for the way
it conveys its content. In this sense, Carroll treats the latent structure of an
artwork as a hidden meaning that viewers uncover by contemplating how
they come to recognize an artwork’s content perceptually. He claims further
that this practice is grounded in knowledge of the traditional Western con-
ception of aesthetics as the science of perception (Carroll 1986: 59–61).
This tradition traces its roots back to Baumgarten. Therefore, aesthetic eval-
uations of how artworks work are interpretive acts loosely grounded in an
understanding of the trace of Baumgarten’s original framework remaining
in contemporary aesthetics.
Baumgarten argued that clarifying the structure of one’s phenomenal
experience, e.g. enhancing the detail of perceptual representations, was a
source of aesthetic pleasure (Davey 1997: 40; Guyer 2001: 74, 1996: 84;
Beck 1993: 14). He believed that the resulting phenomenal experience yields
a form of perceptual knowledge of the structure of an object’s appearance
that is direct, intuitive, can not be resolved into explicit propositional form,
and so cannot be explicitly described by perceivers. Rather, conscious
access to this form of knowledge is mediated by a feeling of cognitive

consonance akin to the feeling that accompanies the resolution of a partic- 21 See Guyer’s
ularly recalcitrant theoretical problem, e.g. proofs in mathematics, science, discussion of
Mendelssohn’s
or logic. Evaluations of latent structure are a means to clarify the structure aesthetics
of the phenomenal content of one’s interactions with an artwork. Therefore, (Guyer 1996: 136).
within Baumgarten’s framework, one can interpret aesthetic experience as a
product of the intuitive apprehension of the latent structure of an artwork.
Cognitive science and aesthetics, as I have defined it, rests on the tacit
assumption of this epistemic aspect of Baumgarten’s program. Zeki and
McMahon argue that artists’ aesthetic practices and viewers’ aesthetic
experiences are the product of an intuitive awareness of sub-linguistic
perceptual processes dedicated to clarifying image structure, and that the
aesthetic interest these perceptual experiences yield is measured relative to
what they reveal about the structure of perception. Kosslyn’s hypothesis
testing theory of object recognition demonstrates that semantic knowledge
contributes, via processes unavailable to perceivers’ explicit awareness, to
the process of clarifying visual images. Therefore, the constructivist hypo-
thesis, as a theory of aesthetics grounded in an interest in the latent struc-
ture of artworks, can be conceived as an extension of Baumgarten’s original
framework for aesthetics. This entails that, if Baumgarten’s framework
represents a sound theory of aesthetics, the constructivist hypothesis can
contribute to explanations of the artistic sense of aesthetics.
I am deeply sympathetic to this perspective. My conclusion here is not
sceptical. The difficulty is that, given the nature of the retinal inputs to the
visual system, all visual experience rests on psychological processes that
function to clarify, or enhance, the structure and detail of perceptual repre-
sentations. Therefore the value of Baumgarten’s framework to an under-
standing of art and aesthetic experience is not established by explanations
of the perceptual practices of artists and viewers.21 This, in turn, entails
that the status of the constructivist hypothesis as a model for an aesthetic
theory of art depends on a further elaboration of the relationship between
cognitive science and philosophical aesthetics.
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Contributor details
William P. Seeley is a professor of philosophy and a sculptor. He received his M.F.A.
from Columbia University in 1992, his Ph.D. from CUNY – The Graduate Center in the
spring of 2006, and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster, PA. His welded steel sculp-
tures and mobiles have been exhibited in New York City, Tokyo, at the Addison Gallery
of American Art, and at Yale University. Contact: William P. Seeley, Department of
Philosophy, Franklin and Marshall College, PO Box 3003, Lancaster, PA, 17604-3003.
E-mail: william.seeley@fandm.edu

JVAP 5.3_08_art_Lowry.qxd 12/11/06 3:44 PM Page 215

Putting painting in the picture

(photographically)
Joanna Lowry University College for the Creative Arts
Abstract Keywords
It seems to be the case that when photography and painting become entangled, photography
one becoming both a copy and a commentary upon the other, then a series of painting
complex discursive issues get put into play. The photograph always seems to be allegory
in excess of the painting, engaging with it performatively, whilst painting is performativity
posed in these forms of contemporary practice, not as a single point of reference, mimesis
to be mimicked or copied, but as a discursive presence troubling the security of framing
the photographic image, producing a differentiated space of representation that
opens up a more complex articulation of the way in which photography inter-
sects with the field of the visible.
In 1857 the photographer O.G. Rejlander decided to make his greatest work of
art. It was to be a picture that would definitively confirm photography’s place
as equal to that of painting in the hierarchy of the arts. It would put to shame
all those who refused to recognize photography’s entry into the salon, who saw
it as a mere technical skill, doomed to the twin roles of documentary recording
and the mimicry of minor genres and far removed from the higher concerns of
painting and sculpture. He embarked upon the construction of a large allegor-
ical picture, entitled The Two Ways of Life (Figure 1). The photograph was con-
ceived in the style of contemporary painters like Thomas Couture who
favoured dramatically staged allegorical themes that could represent the
virtues and vices of the world in carefully disguised historical settings. It fea-
tured the story of two young men being sent out into the world by a central
patriarchal figure. One of the young men was to choose the way of piety and
industriousness: his fortune was represented on the right-hand side of the can-
vas with scenes of work, prayer and just rewards. The other young man’s route
into dissipation and despair was mapped out on the left-hand side of the
photograph – a scene of bawdy over-indulgence, food, drink, gambling and
depraved women. The central figure in the scene, placed below that of the
father, was the allegorical female figure of penitence, symbolizing the young
man’s return to an honest life. In the tradition of the best allegorical painting,
penitence was, of course, nude – and it was therefore difficult, to say the least,
to securely distinguish her from the seductive bawds through which our young
man had worked his way on his moral journey.
Rejlander used the technique of combination printing to create his pho-
tograph. The 30 different elements of the picture were staged separately
and then carefully combined through a process of printing and reprinting
onto a single sheet of paper. It was an extraordinarily slow and laborious

process at a time when the technology of printing was cumbersome and

unpredictable and it was undoubtedly the most ambitious project of its
kind at that time. It was a technique that was popular at the time. Henry
Peach Robinson had achieved some respectability through using it to pro-
duce minor genre pictures of domestic scenes – but the grandiose aspira-
tions of Rejlander’s picture put it in another league and his technical skills
could not save him from the storm that was to unfold.
When the photograph was first exhibited at the Manchester Photographic
Exhibition, it caused a minor scandal. Initially admired – Queen Victoria
bought one version of it – it had very negative response from the critics who
were generally appalled by what they saw as the total impropriety of using
photography to mimic the forms of history painting and to address such
complex moral issues. They were united in their conviction of photography’s
inability to express allegory: it was too basely rooted in the stuff of the real to
be able to address a spectator in that elevated vein. Indeed the spectator was
seen as so susceptible to the base documentary representational mode of
photography that, when it was exhibited the following year at the Scottish
Photographic Society Exhibition, the left-hand side of the photograph was
exhibited with a curtain in front of it, lest the audience be seduced by the
images of vice and debauchery represented there.
Criticism focussed upon two main issues. Firstly, there was particular con-
cern expressed by the photograph’s critics with the difficulty of using images of
real women – ‘the women of Wolverhampton’ to represent abstract principles
of vice and virtue. The discussion was clear that there was no way in which one
could forget the reality of their presence in photography; they could never really
be deemed to enter representation, and their presence, in all their indexical
nakedness was something that could not be overcome by the conventions of
the genre. Their bodies were seen as a source of deep trouble in the picture,
evoking as they might, an inappropriate range of desires. They were concerned
by a kind of untamed looking that might be unleashed by the indexicality of the
photograph, and by the certain knowledge that these women had performed
for the camera. Secondly, they were concerned about the technique of combi-
nation printing itself, which came, in the discussions, to stand in for a kind of
lack of moral control on the part of the medium itself. It was as though a
coherent moral message had to be secured in place by a coherent composi-
tion. The cracks could not be allowed to show. Unfortunately, however con-
summate the mastery of the photographer, the very fact that the combination
print was essentially an amalgam of parts was enough to make the edifice
tremble. The space of allegory was threatened by the very means through
which it had been created. Photography, it was agreed, was simply inadequate
to the task of representing ideas; split between its iconic reference to an arche-
typal but absent painting and its indexical trace of the performance of the
women of Wolverhampton it was clear that it presented its nineteenth century
spectator with an irresolvable and troubling ambiguity of the gaze.
Photography could never occupy the position of painting; it had to return to
more appropriate tasks. This small ruckus in the mid-nineteenth century set
the terms of a debate about the relationship between the two mediums of
painting and photography, and about the triangulated relationship between
medium, audience and aesthetic value, that was to structure our understand-
ing of the limits of photography for a long time to come.
216 Joanna Lowry

Rejlander never really recovered from the critical debacle of The Two
Ways of Life, and it was to be over a century before photographic artists
began to re-aspire to the kind of ambitious project that had been repre-
sented by that work. The 1980s saw the development of the phenomenon of
the large spectacular colour print and the light box in the work of artists like
Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Jeff Wall, finally ensuring a place in the
academy for photography, with the camera effectively replacing the brush as
the medium of choice for contemporary history painting. But it also, under
the influence of postmodernism, saw photography emerge as the prime
vehicle for performance and pastiche, on the one hand becoming the site of
a staging of the self through all manner of performance, masquerade and
dressing up, and on the other hand suddenly revelling in the potential
offered for mimicking the genres of traditional painting by the emergence of
a new baroque sensibility, photographers creating large elaborate sets to
recreate the scene of painting.
What is clear now, when we look at these photographs, by artists as
diverse as Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Jeff Wall, Yinka Shonibare, Eleanor
Antin, Hiroshi Sugimoto and many others, is that the very same issues that
were raised by Rejlander’s work were still being played out in our confusions
about how to address their work. How do we disentangle the reference of the
work from the recording of its staging? How do we look at a picture that
seems also to be a performance? Or perhaps how does it look at us? How do
the conventional rules of pictorial framing, composition and perspective work
when realized through a medium that habitually constructs those devices very
differently? These are questions that arise out of a convergence between a set
of cultural ideas about the painting on the one hand, and a developing tech-
nology that is not contained by those ideas and that still has the potential to
disrupt them. It seems to be the case that when photography and painting
become entangled as they do in this kind of work, the one becoming both a
copy and a commentary upon the other, then a series of complex discursive
issues get put into play. The photograph always seems to be in excess of the
painting, and to interrogate in what sense this is the case is significant
because it makes us more attentive to the particular ways in which we engage
with photography in general.
These photographs under consideration here, however, have been made in
a more reflexive age, an age in which, as Rosalind Krauss has pointed out,
photographic practice has in effect been re-constituted as a theoretical
practice – less to be considered as a medium than as an agent for interro-
gating the meaning of medium. Krauss argues that ironically, at the very point
at which the photograph was being finally recognized as potentially being a
medium in its own right as an art form that had its own intrinsic qualities and
that had a capital value, that could be collected and subjected to critical and art
historical scrutiny, it simultaneously became technologically obsolescent and
was transformed, in the hands of contemporary artists, into a ‘theoretical
object’ that could be used to deconstruct and reinvent the very way in which
materiality, technology and cultural form intersected.
Photography then has suddenly become one of those industrial discards, as

newly established curio, like the jukebox or the trolley car. But it is at just this
point, and in this very condition as outmoded, that it seems to have entered
Putting painting in the picture (photographically) 217

into a new relation to aesthetic production. This time however photography

functions against the grain of its earlier destruction of the medium, becoming,
under precisely the guise of its own obsolescence, a means of what has to be
called an act of reinventing the medium.
(Krauss 1999: 296)
In the context of this debate the ambivalence of the relationship between the
painting and the photograph seems less a cause of distress for late twentieth
century practitioners than it does an opportunity for exploration, and it is this
process of exploration that is being undertaken by the works discussed here.
What I hope to do is to indicate a number of ways in which the artists con-
cerned adapt the ‘theoretical object’ of photography to suggest a reposition-
ing of the relationship between painting and the photograph. In doing this
they open up a wider set of issue about how we understand photography’s
relationship to the visual.
This type of photography is as different from the kind of photography that
has been the object of most photographic theory as it is possible to imagine.
Photographic theory from Bazin, Benjamin, Barthes, Berger, Sjarkowski, up
until the mid-1970s was in general preoccupied with the documentary and the
vernacular. Postmodern practices after the 1980s were predominately sup-
ported by a body of theory derived from a poststructuralist menu of semi-
otics, psychoanalysis and identity politics influenced by writers like Victor
Burgin, or alternatively by a re-inscription of the photographic into a critique
of postmodern media culture in general under the influence of writers like
Douglas Crimp and Abigail Solomon-Godeau. The kinds of staged photo-
graphs that I am considering here seemed, in the context of this literature, to
offer a lot to discussions about identity or ideology or culture but little to an
analysis of what photography itself might be. Indeed that was a question that
it no longer seemed perhaps even relevant to ask. And yet these images also,
in the very task that they set themselves, were engaged with the problem of
delimiting the photographic. In staging the painting as their object they were
confronting the issue of how the representational space mapped out by these
two very different mediums could meet, and of how photography differed
from the painting that it displaced.
These photographs indeed involved the suppression of many of the quali-
ties traditionally associated with the photographic medium: its close associa-
tion through the referent with the real – in their establishment of totally
imaginary artificial sets; its interception of time – in their construction of a
fictionalized narrative time within the image; its establishment of the photo-
graphic frame as a means of cutting into the space of vision – in their establish-
ment of a bounded frame for the image that has no ‘outside’ beyond its
perimeter; its contingency and uncontrollability – in the marked degree of
control exercised by the photographer in constructing these images; its
automatism – in the extent to which these images are intentionally managed
and directed. And yet they are also images that in an important sense always
fail in their address to the spectator. They may be fully intentional but our
desire is to find that within the image that evades intentionality; they may be
carefully composed – but our desire is to disclose the historical staging of
that composition; they may be securely framed – but our desire is to extend
the connotative semiotic beyond the frame. Like Rejlander’s audience we, as
218 Joanna Lowry

spectators, are positioned between the lure of the index and the seduction of
allegory and are unable to choose between them.
In a series of recent photographs, The Fontainebleau Series (2002),
Melanie Manchot has taken as her point of departure the famous and capti-
vating painting, made by an anonymous member of the School of
Fontainebleau in 1594, of Gabrielle d’Estrées and the Duchess of Villars in
their bath (Figure 2). There is an enigmatic beauty to this image, which
depicts the two women sitting naked in a strangely theatricalized bathroom
scene and which centres on the delicate and precise gesture with which one
of the women is pinching between two fingers the nipple of the other. The
round circle of her fingers, like a spyglass, which directs us to the sign, it has
been argued, of the other woman’s pregnancy, operates as a kind of trap for
the gaze, fetishistically focussing us upon this detail of the body, locating it
as the terminus of our desire.
If the painting had a precise iconographical significance at the time of its
production, to a modern eye, steeped in psychoanalytical and post-struc-
turalist theory, the puzzle that it presents to the spectator is the puzzle of the
place of sexuality within representation itself. The space represented within
the frame is itself framed: on the one hand by the edge of the bath (itself
draped in satin), on the other by the soft red labial folds of the curtains.
Within this space we see a world inverted, as through a looking glass. The
private, intimate space of the women’s bathtub is on public display in the
foreground; the two women, ivory-skinned, one fair, one dark, with matching
ear-rings, are like mirror images of each other. Behind them, in the recesses
of the interior is the more public body of a seated nurse, fully clothed and
bent over her sewing. Above her we can just see a fragment of a painting
depicting a man’s spread legs. The red cloth, like a river of blood between
them, mirrors the white cloth that the nurse is sewing, pricking the cloth
with her fine needle. The painting seems to operate as a scene of disclosure,
unmasking the intimacy of women, against the backdrop of a disturbingly
castratory sexual politics.
The language of this image is overwhelmingly fetishistic: the nipple and
the ring, the folded curtains and skin, the needle and the absent phallus. If
it is a painting about a woman’s fertility, then it certainly also indicates an
anxiety about the male place within that cycle of reproduction. But it is also
the symbolic space of painting itself, the scene of its own plenitude, a world
within representation which fixes us as spectator: our own gaze is con-
trolled by the confrontational returned gaze of Gabrielle d’Estrees who pins
it down, directing it to that hard pink nipple. Through the over-determined
detail of the nipple we are drawn into a world of rich metaphor and allusion,
each element in the painting seeming to operate as a metaphor for another:
a world of resemblances, doppelgangers, similitudes.
A series of formal devices suture Melanie Manchot’s Fontainebleau
series to the original painting: the title, the bathtub, the two women, and
the pinched nipple. The alcove, the window and the mirror each operate as
internal frames within the image that parallel the small, framed room in the
background of the painting. Within this space, a more elusive set of
metaphorical displacements around the imagery of the female body is also
used to invoke the original. The folds of the curtains are substituted for by
the vulvaic veining of the marble tiles in the Emma and Charlie photographs

(Figure 3). White soaps nestle like eggs in a glass bowl on top of a blood
red draped cloth in the Liz and Corrie images (Figure 4). The gleaming
chrome circle of the faucet in the Zena and Namita pictures is positioned
between them like a ghost reminder of the intertwined circularity of nipple
and ring in the painting (Figure 5). Thus, the theatre of female sexuality
encoded in the painting becomes the theatre within which this set of
photographs is performed.
But where the painting’s iconic structure, contained within the confines of
the frame, folds in on itself, pleasuring the spectator through its internal sym-
metry and symbolic play, the performative nature of the photographs spreads
out beyond the frame, insisting on a different, more metonymic relationship
to the real. Each of the images is one of a sequence of other gestures and
caresses, a record of a performance of the body and its relationships that took
place over real time and in a certain place. The luxurious surroundings of
these hotel bathrooms can never inhabit the archetypal forms of the imagina-
tion: photography is too inescapably wedded to its referent, to its location in
the real world of commerce and consumption beyond the frame. The bodies
of the women similarly have none of the ethereal ivory perfection of the
painted surface: they are marked by time, age, tan-marks, and tattoos. They
have an idiosyncratic specificity that leads us to ask other questions about
who these women are and what stories they have lived. These women do not
mirror each other like the figures in the paintings, they are insistently different
from each other, and what we notice are the contingent details that only
photography reveals: the undyed roots of one woman’s hair, the bitten nails,
the birthmark, the faint wrinkle, and the sunburnt collar-bone.
The writer Peggy Phelan has argued that performance is always about a
resistance to representation. (Phelan 1993: 152). The promise that it offers,
but which it always fails to deliver, is that the body will escape representa-
tion, that it will become one with its subject in the moment of enactment.
The performance does not offer the spectator the pleasures of encoded
desire; it offers the promise of a corporeal identification with the lived body
in the here and now. The body in performance is outside metaphor; it is
locked metonymically into the real. Through performance, the spectator is
brought up against the limits of the body as the threshold of identification
and subjectivity. For this reason, performance often engages with a kind of
humiliation and suffering of the body. It is about a kind of testing of the
boundaries of self and other that cannot be contained by the discourses of
the visual but must be played out in real time and through real bodies. The
encircled nipple in the photographs invites us to feel the gesture, the pinch
of another’s fingers on our skin. It is an act, not a symbol. It is not visual
pleasure but it might be physical pain. These works remind us that there is a
sense in which photography always hovers at the interface between perfor-
mativity and representation. The moment after the performance has been
recorded, the moment at which the frame of the picture displaces the out-
side world, the promise of representation returns and the internal dynamic
of the iconography of the picture begins to unfold.
What is being described here is of course at one level quite obvious.
Staged photographs involve real places and real people. We find it difficult to
forget this when we look at these pictures. We are engaged with the visual
field of photography in a more complex and varied way than we can ever be
220 Joanna Lowry

engaged with the visual space of painting. Painting, in this kind of practice
becomes, then, a means of controlling and managing that act of looking. It
provides us with an allegorical pretext for the image but the photograph is
too present: it denotes a world that threatens a plenitude of contingent
detail, that spreads infinitely far beyond the boundaries of the picture, that
exists in a real time in which bodies age and die, in which people perform to
us and share, through the moment of being photographed, some minutely
brief but significant moment of lived time with the spectator. There is, I
would argue an uneasy incompatibility between the two forms of looking
that the two practices of painting and photography represent. Through this
fissure in the image Manchot is able to focus our attention on the pinched
nipple – on that action, that performative moment that is on the boundary of
the photographic.
Let us look now at a more complex articulation of this space, at a photo-
graph made by Thomas Struth, Musee d’Orsay I, Paris (1989; Figure 6) one
of the series of museum images that he made between 1989 and 1992. This
was a set of photographs ostensibly of spectators in museums looking at
paintings but also a commentary upon their relationship to the painting
and metaphorical absorption by it. The figures in the pictures always oper-
ate as extensions or reflections of the paintings themselves. In this picture
of spectators in the Musee d’Orsay, a series of layered relationships are
constructed between photography and painting. At one level, that of the
document, the photograph simply records the paintings which hang on the
wall of the museum. The paintings themselves are part of a much larger
scene; we do not address them directly – only as objects of a particular kind
of knowledge, as part of a statement being made by the photograph about
museums and their audiences, the ‘studium’. Nevertheless we still see the
paintings, if only from a distance, obliquely, at a kind of remove – and we
can imagine what it might be to see them in actuality. Because of course we
also, in our engagement with the image identify with the spectators who are
looking at the paintings, and their absorption in the act of looking provides
exactly that mirror to our own gaze, simultaneously opening up an identifi-
cation with them and signifying a separation from them. More importantly
though the spectators themselves are artfully arranged within the frame of
the photograph; gazing to the left of the image, their bodies mimic the
arrangement of bodies in one of the paintings – representing a theatre
audience – which hangs on the back wall. The spectators in the gallery not
only mimic the audience in the painting they also seem to be an extension
of it. A visual passage seems to have been cleared for us through to this
painting, the photographer having devised, through the arrangement of
bodies a set of perspective lines that seem to lead from the photograph
back into a vanishing point within the painting itself. Through this rhetori-
cal gesture the photograph is designed not so much to represent the paint-
ing as to share the same space as it. If this sense of a shared perspective
represents a metonymic relationship between photographic space and the
space of the painting, these spaces are also put into a metaphorical rela-
tionship. The viewpoint in the gallery duplicates the view of the theatre; the
row of paintings along the back wall reflects the row of lights in the paint-
ing. Moreover when we look more closely at the spectators, it is clear that a
number of them bear some kind of resemblance to the figures in the other

paintings on the walls: the woman in the portrait at the very centre of the
image is mirrored by the woman dressed in black and white in the fore-
ground of the photograph, hand against her cheek, posed in meditation.
The girl to the right of the picture has her blouse tied up under her breasts,
her figure and demeanour almost precisely reflecting the figure in the paint-
ing we glimpse behind her head. The man who peers through his camera
lens reminds us of the nineteenth century theatre-goers represented in the
painting, binoculars always to hand.
Struth’s photograph creates a complex dynamic of metaphorical and
metonymical relations between the representational space of photography
and that of painting, knitting the two into each other in what Craig Owens has
coined as the mise en abyme of photography (Owens 1992). This complex
interplay of signs also has the effect of drawing our attention to, or perhaps
we should say, actually producing for us a sense of the photograph as both
surface and as composition. The photograph itself, as a large spectacular
print (147 cms ⫻ 182 cms), mimics the space of painting, even as it displaces
it. In a fundamental sense, we can say that this is a photographic allegory
about painting, a complex composition within which every element is drawn
into a significatory play with its displaced other. Yet the composition of the
image, which at first glance seems so secure, is also, one feels, unstable. We
cannot forget that this is a photograph, and that the bodies in the picture are
not merely signs, but that they also communicate a presence that always
threatens to spill over, corrupting the careful organization of the image. We
are aware for instance that these people are perhaps passers-by, perhaps
actors, but that, whatever the case and however controlled the theatre, they
bear with them a wealth of contingent detail that cannot be controlled. Their
bodies occupy space in a way that cannot be managed through the formal
techniques of the perspectival painter; moments after this photograph is
taken they will walk out of the frame, pursuing their own narratives elsewhere,
untying the knotted blouse, laying down the camera, relaxing the gaze. It is,
moreover, this lived and performed relationship between the bodies in the
picture and the paintings that are the object of their attention which is the
true subject of the image: a space of the gaze which articulates the difference
between the body in composition and its place as an indicator of the perfor-
mativity of the photograph.
Central to this discussion are two issues. On the one hand, we note the
primacy of the concept of composition and the organization of perspectival
space within a frame, as that which holds the image in place as a space for inter-
pretation and for the play of the imagination. We have seen the way in which
Struth’s photograph uses the underlying concept of the painting to establish
this through multiple metaphorical and metonymic devices – indicating the
parameters of a space of painting whilst still, through the play of internal dif-
ferences, reminding us of the photograph’s essential difference. On the other
hand, we are confronted with the presence of the body within that space, a
body which seems to be the focus of a potential disruptive power, which bears
the trace of a real presence in a manner that threatens to fracture the surface
of the image, reaching out beyond the confines of the frame and demanding
our identification.
Clearly this discussion, as I have mapped it out here, has something to
do with Diderot’s concept of the tableau and the development of that idea by
222 Joanna Lowry

Michael Fried in his study of eighteenth century painting Absorption and

Theatricality (Fried 1988). Fried’s distinction between forms of painting that
invoke a kind of self-aware theatricality in the staging of the action, and
those that, often through the placing of an absorbed figure in the fore-
ground, invite a purely contemplative relationship between the spectator
and the painting, is well-known. Struth’s series of photographs knowingly
employs the trope of absorption to promote an identification between the
spectator of the photograph and the spectators within it – but we can’t
forget their presence. They are still there. And of course it is that ambivalent
movement between the anti-theatrical and the theatrical, between the con-
tained space figured by the painting and the photographic space that
exceeds it, that is the source of both our pleasure and fascination. Fried him-
self, in a recent essay on Barthes’ concept of the punctum, has attempted to
address the complex ways in which the photograph can be considered to
address the viewer, and is concerned with the paradoxical relationship
between the theatricality, or ‘literality’ of the photographic effect that relies
upon the viewer’s subjective response to be realized, and the contrasting anti-
theatricality of the image that is a consequence of its mechanical automatism
(Fried 2005).
In the light of this, it is valuable to consider my third example of a photo-
graph mimicking painting – Gursky’s photograph of a painting by Jackson
Pollock (Figure 7). This image confronts precisely the convergence between
the theatrical and the anti-theatrical that Fried has been concerned with
throughout his career, realized here in the explicit confrontation between
painting and photography. It is interesting indeed to note how different this
photograph seems when we consider it as a staging of the painting rather
than merely as a photograph of it. Gursky’s oeuvre is, of course, indebted to
the history of modernist art: in his large urban landscapes he constantly seeks
out the tropes of the all-over pattern and the grid in his construction of the
image. It is this aesthetic reference point of the modernist painting as surface
that he uses to frame and contain the way in which we look at his photo-
graphs. The selection of Pollock’s drip painting is, then, an ironic move in
itself. Pollock’s painting has to stand in for the pure field of modernist paint-
ing as surface – the very act of photographing it, creating two surfaces in the
space of one, indicates a dialogue about what it is that photography either
adds or subtracts. It is a picture that is essentially about the difference
between the two mediums and their entanglement in the image.
On the one hand, the photograph formally denotes the painting. It
records its presence. At another level still it frames it. Its formal frontality,
the inclusion of the frame within the image, the white border of the museum
wall, the dim shadows like a painted strip at the top and bottom of the
image, all serve to contain the painting and make it part of another compo-
sition. An ambivalence is set up between the mechanisms through which a
painting is framed and the way in which photography frames the image. The
photographic space is delimited by a cut through the space, an intervention
in time. We are always aware of the museum’s walls extending beyond the
frame and into history. An ambivalence is also set up between what we are
looking at – is it the painting or the photograph as painting? In setting up
that uncertainty in the observer the photograph demands a theatrical
response from them. This is an image that reveals, through its controlled

formality, everything that is uncontrolled about photography and its peculiar

engagement with visuality.
Many of the theoretical concepts that we use to understand our relation-
ship to the photograph – the punctum, the index, the performative, seem to
be a response to our sense that the significance of the image is outside it:
whether in our subjective response to it, in the material world, in the moment
of production or performance. Each of these concepts, in their way, repre-
sents a recognition that the photograph cannot be contained by a theory of
representation. It was this sense of photography’s excess that was such a
source of concern for Rejlander’s critics, but which we might see nowadays as
potentially interesting. There is no great moral issue at stake here; unlike the
nineteenth century salon-goer, we are no longer preoccupied with establish-
ing a hierarchy of the arts or worrying about whether certain types of practice
are appropriate to a medium or not, but we are, I think, interested in ideas
about how pictures address us, how they mediate between us and the world,
how they engage our commitment and belief in the world represented. The
absent (but in some sense always present) painting is posed in these forms
of contemporary practice, not as a single point of reference, to be mimicked
or copied, but as a discursive presence troubling the security of the photo-
graphic image, producing a differentiated space of representation that opens
up a more complex articulation of the way in which photography intersects
with the field of the visible.
References
Fried, M. (1988), Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of
Diderot, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
—— (2005), ‘Barthes’s Punctum’, Critical Inquiry, 31: 3, pp. 539–74.
Krauss, R.E. (1999), ‘Reinventing the Medium’, Critical Inquiry, 25: 2, pp. 289–305.
Owens, C. (1992), in B. Scott et al. (eds.), Beyond Recognition: Representation, Power
and Culture, London/Berkeley, CL: University of California Press.
Phelan, P. (1993), Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, London: Routledge.
Suggested citation
Lowry, J. (2006), ‘Putting painting in the picture (photographically)’, Journal of Visual
Art Practice 5: 3, pp. 215–224, doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.215/1
Contributor details
Joanna is Reader in Visual Theory and Media Arts, University College for the Creative
Arts at Maidstone. She has written widely on contemporary photographic practices
and theory. She has recently co-edited (with David Green) Stillness and Time,
Photoworks, 2006. Contact: University College for the Creative Arts, Oakwood Park,
Maidstone, Kent ME16 8AG, UK..
224 Joanna Lowry

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The bodies and the embodiment

of modernist painting
Jeremy Spencer University of Essex
Abstract Keywords
This paper considers the theme of materialism that emerged in the late writings Paul de Man
of Paul de Man. Drawing on de Man’s late essays and lectures, it outlines mate- T. J. Clark
rialism as a factor of language that philosophical aesthetics must constantly materialism
resist or evade to ensure the stability of the category of the aesthetic. It focuses embodiment
on de Man’s still challenging and provocative antipathy towards the category of body
the aesthetic manifested in the imagery of bodily mutilation of the late writings. deconstruction
The essay then focuses on how these de Manian themes, summed up by the
phrase ‘aesthetic ideology’, have been taken up in the writings on modernism of
T. J. Clark. It considers two essays on Paul Cézanne to highlight the iconoclastic
role Man’s elaboration of materialism plays in them. Clark’s ‘Freud’s Cézanne’
and ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne’ see in Cézanne’s late painting
a disruption or disarticulation of humanism and the body as founding principles
of the aesthetic and are marked by a suspicion of the claims and espousals of
embodiment of modernism’s defenders. Given the strength of the ‘critical-
linguistic analysis’ of the category of the aesthetic encountered in de Man’s late
writings, this essay distances itself from the presuppositions of hermeneutical
and phenomenological aesthetics.
The theme of embodiment and its expression in the body has been insep-
arable from the philosophy of aesthetics since its inception in the mid
eighteenth century. In its attentiveness and responsiveness to sensuous
things, the body reconciles the conceptual with the sensual, and given that
the principle of articulation or reconciliation of the material with the spir-
itual has always been the primary goal of the aesthetic, philosophical aes-
thetics itself was ‘born as a discourse of the body’ (Eagleton 1992: 13;
Redfield 2003: 77). As ‘the most gross and palpable dimension of the
human’, the body is considered to be the beginning and first premise of
material history in historical materialism, and in Sartrean existentialism,
the body is the condition of access to the world and represents the open-
ing to human perception and sensation. For realist aesthetics, the body
has represented a guaranteed means for artistic and literary practices in
close contact with social and historical experience they wish to reveal intel-
ligibly. The body in painting, for instance, would seem to allow us to move
beyond the mediations of the ideological realm of artistic representation
where medium is no longer the substitute for flesh, but is flesh. With its
apparent power to restore to us the thing itself directly and in its immedi-
acy we can imagine painting closest to an art of embodiment.

The question of the body and embodiment framed 1960s Anglo-

American art criticism and history inspired by the French phenomenologist
Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His emphasis upon our bodily engagement with
the world appeared to offer the possibility of countering the hegemony
of the ‘disembodied formalism’ that the American critic Clement Greenberg’s
theory of modern art represented, and so grounding the critical reception of
minimalism in particular, not in the categories of opticality and autonomy,
but in the ‘bodily dimensions of viewing’ (Potts 2000: 210; Jones 2003: 76).
Following Merleau-Ponty’s observation in his 1961 essay ‘Eye and Mind’
that bodies paint rather than minds, painting was understood to corre-
spond to the inescapably embodied condition of vision and the bodily
movement of the artist. For Merleau-Ponty, vision is inescapably indebted
to and intertwined with bodily movement because the body must turn to
look and the eye move to see. As such, a painting would correspond to and
evoke an artist’s bodily experience of his or her subject matter as it was
originally experienced.
The question of embodiment has also been important to aesthetics
concerned with the puzzling heterogeneity of the sensory and material
objectivity of contemporary works of art and their definition in an art world
of hybrid-found objects, of reproductions of appropriated imagery, of, for
instance, Marcel Duchamp’s industrially fabricated objects, his Bicycle Wheel
of 1913, or his more pure readymade, In Advance of the Broken Arm, a snow
shovel Duchamp bought during the Winter of 1915 in New York. If we are to
make sense of the heterogeneity of the things that get described as artworks,
of the pluralism of contemporary art practice, then the question of those
things, which are arguably indistinguishable from objects which are not
works of art, the embodiment of a content, their embodying or otherwise of
meaning, and the appropriateness of the one to the other, seems more pro-
ductive than making categorical definitions or setting boundaries which are
ultimately already fluid and will always be repeatedly exceeded or crossed
(Danto 1996: 284–85).
This paper does not attempt a comprehensive account of how philosophi-
cal aesthetics or art discourse has conceived of and put embodiment to use.
Instead, the focus is on the critical interrogation of embodiment that emerges
in the later essays and lectures of the literary critic Paul de Man and its appli-
cation in the writings of the art historian T. J. Clark. De Man had appeared in
the footnotes of Clark’s writing on ‘Jackson Pollock’s Abstraction’ in the mid-
1980s, and in a 1992 conference paper, ‘On the Very Idea of a Subversive Art
History’, he was offered as ‘a guide to reading in the “social history of art”’,
even if that guide was ‘tainted’ for Clark given de Man’s collaborationist writ-
ing in occupied Belgium between 1940 and 1942, and the rejection of the
naivety of Marxist aesthetics and criticism in de Man’s earlier writings. In ‘On
the Very Idea of a Subversive Art History’, Clark had cited de Man in the con-
text of his criticism of art history’s use of habitual generic period terms to
‘shield’ itself from the ‘deep otherness’, the real strangeness of nineteenth
century visuality and culture. In this paper, however, my concern is more with
Clark’s application of de Man’s version of materialism to painting, rather than
the methodological role de Man has played in the social history of art. I, there-
fore, address two provocative essays by Clark, ‘Phenomenality and Materiality
in Cézanne’ and ‘Freud’s Cézanne’, which appeared revised as the third
226 Jeremy Spencer

chapter of Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism 1 More generally, critics
(1999). Clark finds in de Man’s writings the conceptual means or possibilities have imputed de
Man’s apparent
to get to grips with the radical materialism of Paul Cézanne’s late painting, nihilism to the fact de
and he asks whether the acknowledgement of de Man’s materiality leaves Man allied himself
intact or cancels out the materialism usually associated with Cézanne’s pain- with such figures as
Nietzsche, Heidegger,
ting and modernism more generally. De Man’s critique of embodiment, which and in his more
is for him, as an inseparable, constant, and ideological theme of philosophical mature writings,
aesthetics, inspires the questions Clark asks of Cézanne’s paintings. Derrida, writers who
have sought to disrupt
the grounds of
Materialism and phenomenalism in Paul de Man’s later writings Western metaphysics
The theory of language and literature that Clark discovered in de Man uncom- and subvert any posi-
tion that relies upon,
promisingly ‘teaches the dearth of meaning’ (Bloom 2004: 4). The concept of or privileges an origin
materiality is at the heart of de Man’s nihilistic and inhumane conception of or centre. De Man’s
language. Its nihilism originates in its refusal to identify the value or the impor- nihilism has also been
described as that of
tance of literature with the embodiment of meaning and in its disbelief that Hegel’s Unhappy
words either incarnate or are fully equivalent to meaning.1 De Man’s material- Consciousness, which
ist theory of the text suspends those modes of language, the ‘expressive, inten- is an important trope
in Clark’s portrayal of
tionalist, anthropomorphic, referential, metaphorical, symbolic’, which, as the modernist culture and
traditional rhetorical instruments of artistic meaning and truth, are most practice. See Klein
closely associated with art production (Derrida 1989: 31; Norris 2000: 139). (1973).
The idea that language is irreducible to its referential function or to repre- 2 Pierre Macherey, how-
sentation, and the opposite idea, that words do adequately stand in for things, ever, reminds us that
even though it is not
suggest de Man’s paired but contrasting concepts of materiality and phenom- unique to literary
enality. The meanings of materiality and phenomenality are never clearly language, veracity,
explained by de Man, despite the increasingly frequent use he makes of these ‘the production of an
impression of reality’
terms in his later writings. However, it is plain enough that ‘phenomenality’ is a necessity of the
denotes ‘accessibility to intuition and cognition’, the ‘representational’, the literary work. For
‘iconic’, ‘sensory experience’, and encapsulates a distinctly pleasurable ‘aes- Macherey, ‘the surface
of its discourse is the
thetic moment’ in literature in de Man’s writings (Gasché 1998: 53; de Man scene of an illusion’
2002: 34, 1984: 114). In Derrida’s terms, ‘phenomenality’ designates the reduc- and like de Man, he
tion of the opacity of the sign to the point of actual transparency, which we can seeks to distinguish
its materiality from
imagine most easily happens in living speech, for the sake of the full substan- the absent pheno-
tiality of presence. Thus, the notion of phenomenality expresses what an ordi- menal object. Thus,
nary referential reading assumes to be the power of the sign to evoke the we would not inhabit
the Paris of Balzac’s
richness of the sensory experience of natural or empirical reality. De Man did Comédie humaine any
not believe that anyone ‘in his right mind will try to grow grapes by the lumi- more easily than we
nosity of the word “day”’, however, it is just this kind of ‘confusion of linguistic can grow grapes.
Balzac’s Paris is ‘the
with natural reality’, a confusion of signifier with signified, that phenomenality product of an effort of
entails for him (de Man 2002: 11).2 writing; it has no prior
We can see the connection between de Man’s concept of phenomenality existence’. It has noth-
ing to do with a real
and the concerns of hermeneutic aesthetics. Thus, Nicholas Davey has historical Paris – it is
explained that the confusion of signifier with signified is the essence of aes- not ‘the reflection of a
thetic experience in which the aesthetic represents ‘a productive bringing reality or an
experience’ – but
together, a confusion of thought and perception which enables us to see the coheres in relation to
idea embodied in a work’ (Davey 1999: 8). Given his definition of the aes- Balzac’s labour and its
thetic as embodiment, Davey is led to conclude that art production cannot position within and as
an effect of his text
‘be a matter of merely producing and looking at tactile sensible objects’. (Macherey
But, it is exactly this ‘mindless’ activity that inspires Farewell to an Idea’s night- 1989: 54–8).
marish vision of painting as pre-eminently and primarily the application of
technique to matter, the mechanical activity Clark’s chapter in Farewell to an
The bodies and the embodiment of modernist painting 227

3 See de Man’s essays Idea on Cézanne’s Bathers describes as ‘nothing but matter dictating (dead)
‘The Resistance to form’ (Clark 1999: 167). De Man’s materialism challenges the principles of
Theory’ and ‘Reading
and History’ (de Man hermeneutic aesthetics and the notion of embodiment that informs it,
1986) and Loesberg as outlined by Davey. If we could not ‘see bodies and objects as metaphoric
(1997: 89). carriers of abstract concepts’, Davey argues, then aesthetics is reduced to
‘effete aestheticism’. However, for de Man, it is exactly this kind of conclu-
sion that represents a ‘misunderstanding of the category of the aesthetic’ in
its avoidance of the radical materialism present in the aesthetic theories of
Kant in particular (de Man 1996: 121). Davey’s argument resists the conclu-
sion embraced in Farewell to an Idea’s chapter on Cézanne’s late Bathers, the
notion that once an important precondition of de Man’s sense of materiality
is in place, the declared irrelevancy of the intentionality of the author, art is
not any longer analogizing anything much and is, or could be easily mis-
taken for, truly dead, unanimated matter.
The concept of materiality occurs in three intimately related registers in
Paul de Man’s work: the materiality of the letter or inscription, the materiality
of history, and so-called material vision (Miller 2001: 187). The terminology of
materiality comes late in his writings and, according to Timothy Bahti, repre-
sents de Man’s final dismissal of the vocabulary of ‘temporal continuities’
and ‘phenomenalities’ that characterized de Man’s earlier writings of the mid-
1950s to the later 1960s (Bahti 1995: 39–40). As Andrzej Warminski’s explica-
tion of ‘material vision’ points out, how ‘the poets’ are supposed to look at
nature in the section on the sublime in Kant’s Critique of Judgement is enig-
matically material, and that, as de Man insists, Kant’s critique of the aesthetic
is materialist in a way that is ‘much more radical than what can be conveyed
by such terms as “realism” or “empiricism”’ (de Man 1996a: 121). According
to de Man, Kant provides a materialist critique of the aesthetic that ‘runs
counter to all values and characteristics associated with aesthetic experience’
(de Man 1996b: 83). Realism, for instance, ‘postulates a phenomenalism of
experience which is here being denied or ignored’ (de Man 1996a: 128). As
such, the aesthetics of de Man’s reading of Kant diverges from the usual def-
initions of the aesthetic that appear and are subject to critique in de Man’s
writings. His topic is, and he typically defines the aesthetic in terms of a criti-
cal focus ‘on the process of signification rather than on significance’, or more
definitely as the convergence or the ‘correspondence between meaning and
its empirical manifestation’. De Man writes that ‘aesthetics is in fact [ ] aº
phenomenalism of a process of meaning and understanding’, describing it as
‘the embodiment of significance within the sensuously apparent’.3 In that
Kant’s aesthetics, according to de Man, are not concerned with symbolic or
sensuous embodiment, that they do not bring together thought and percep-
tion, he therefore affirms rather than deconstructs them in his Aesthetic
Ideology. As such, Kantian materialism emerges as a ‘counteraesthetic’ run-
ning through the essays of this text. It is through an imagery of actual bodily
dismemberment and fragmentation that the Critique of Judgement represents
to de Man a critique of traditional aesthetic beliefs. It is unsurprising that de
Man finds in Kant an excuse to ‘disarticulate, mutilate the body’ given the
importance of the body to the aesthetic as a principle of articulation and syn-
thesis and de Man’s clear antipathy towards these ideas. This imagery also
appears more markedly in de Man’s ‘Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über
das Marionettentheater’, which informs Clark’s interpretation of Cézanne. The
228 Jeremy Spencer

‘aesthetic machines’, the mechanical yet strangely graceful puppets that fea- 4 Jacques Derrida also
ture in Kleist’s story, and the sometimes ‘exuberant’ and ‘lurid’ imagery of acknowledges that
‘figures of
mutilation in this essay, correspond to the Kantian materialism explored in dismemberment,
Aesthetic Ideology (Loesberg 1997: 97).4 fragmentation, muti-
This ‘counterintuitive concept’ of materialism is difficult, and complex, lation, and ‘material
disarticulation’ play
appearing elliptically and metaphorically in de Man’s late writings, through an essential role in a
the images of such authors as Kant and Kleist. It is not surprising that com-
º
certain ‘materialist’
mentators on de Man warn us not to assume that we have understood this signature [ ] that
insists in the last
extremely ‘obscure’ part of de Man’s work (Miller 2001: 185–86). For exam- texts of de Man’. See
ple, in ‘Phenomenality and Materiality in Kant’, arguably the ‘most extended Jacques Derrida,
thematization of linguistic materialism’ in de Man’s late writings (Redfield ‘Typewriter Ribbon:
Limited Ink (2)
1989: 43), he calls the poets’ vision of nature ‘material’ only as a last resort (‘within such limits’)’
having rejected other designations – the symbolic, the figural and the lit- (Cohen et al.
eral. Material seems to describe adequately and successfully the ‘peculiarly 2001: 319).
unfamiliar nature’ of the vision de Man reads in Kant; but it only does so
because of the apparent lack of anything better. Materiality, then, is defined
negatively and cautiously in de Man’s writings; it is a kind of convenient
and bricoleur term in de Man’s text, material is the only positive description
de Man can come up with. He comments that although material seems to
fit his purposes, expresses what he means, what it actually means for him
is not yet ‘clearly intelligible’. Materiality possesses a kind of symbolic func-
tion in de Man’s later writing, it names something the late work hopes to
invoke (Miller 2001: 187). Miller and Warminski’s opposed definitions of
the term also seem to add to its complexity: when referring to an earlier
appearance in de Man’s Allegories of Reading, Miller cites de Man’s descrip-
tion of materiality as ‘something real, actually experienced’, while
Warminski’s essay, ‘As the Poets do it’ stresses its inaccessibility to the
senses. It is plainly and ‘exceedingly strange’ that the three modes of mat-
erialism are not phenomenal, that a general opposition between, rather than
the more expected or commonsensical conjunction of, materiality and phe-
nomenality appears in de Man’s writings of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
However, despite its complexity, the notion of materiality becomes more
intelligible when considered linguistically, as Warminski points out, it is a
word that comes to de Man’s mind here. De Man understands materialism
in ‘linguistic terms’, that is, as a factor or element of language in his essays
on Kant, in much the same way as he understands the symbol in the essay
on Hegel’s aesthetics, ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’.
De Man’s critique of embodiment

Paul de Man’s late essays and lectures are occupied with questioning
notions of embodiment in philosophical aesthetics. Although preceded by
the themes of Marx and Engels’ The German Ideology, de Man’s critique of
embodiment properly originates in what he describes as Roland Barthes’
‘euphoric’ ‘liberation of the signifier from the constraints of referential
meaning’ (de Man 1990: 180), the same liberation that the art critic and
historian Hal Foster, for instance, has claimed as characteristic of the prac-
tices of post-modernist art making.
The critique of embodiment emerges in de Man’s incomplete critical pro-
ject to address ‘the relationship between rhetorical, aesthetic, and ideological
discourse in the period from Kant to Kierkegaard and Marx’ (de Man 1982: 761).

Although de Man borrowed the term ‘deconstruction’ from Derrida’s writings

to describe his project, it appears as an original procedure in de Man. Its
originality lies in the central role allegory plays in de Man’s deconstructive
readings, which I do not discuss here. For de Man, deconstruction is primarily
the undoing or unravelling of the thematic and aesthetic totalizations imposed
upon texts; it seeks to undo their thematic readings which can only happen
through a reader dismissing or remaining unaware of the ‘mechanics’, the
‘textual strata’ or ‘the structure of the text’. Deconstruction is essentially the
interrogation of those readings that accept at face value a text’s ‘totalizing
images’. Deconstruction represents a text’s own ‘negative knowledge’, the
recognition that its own mechanics, its ‘rhetorical and syntactical structures’,
will ultimately and consistently invalidate its claims to referentiality and any
expected aesthetic or thematic conclusion or completion (Gasché 1981:
44–46). Barbara Johnson more conventionally describes a deconstructive
reading as an analysis that attempts ‘to show how the conspicuously fore-
grounded statements in a text are systematically related to discordant signify-
ing elements that the text has thrown into its shadows or margins’ in the effort
to suppress or dominate them (Johnson 1985: 74). However, although de Man
himself considered his earlier essays uncomfortably marked by idealist themes
and a largely existential ‘vocabulary of consciousness and of temporality’ they
prefigure his mature project of a deconstructive reading of the more oblique,
the implicit, and the less conspicuous, perhaps hidden, articulations of a text.
Paul de Man’s 1982 essay ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’ repre-
sents a sustained interrogation of the notion of embodiment through its
analysis of Hegel’s statements on semiology and psychology and their bear-
ing on the status of the category of the aesthetic in his writings. However, a
suspicion of the notion informs de Man’s earlier warnings of the ultimately
false but nevertheless seductive promise of bodily serenity and security above
the struggles and chaos of history. In ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’,
the critique of embodiment emerges through a deconstructive reading of the
synthesis of a ‘historical causality with a linguistic structure’ that underlies
Hegel’s history of art developed in his lectures on aesthetics. The ‘linguistic
structure’ de Man has in mind is the symbol. De Man understands the sym-
bol in the same way as he construes materiality, that is, in specifically linguis-
tic terms. The ‘symbolic’ functions in a linguistic rather than a historical
register throughout ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’. De Man under-
stands this use of the term to correspond more accurately with Hegel’s own
in the Aesthetics. He points out that the symbolic can be read historically as
the first form or the beginning of art that has its material prototype in the
Egyptian pyramid, it is a unique and the first of Hegel’s three stages of art fol-
lowed by the classical and the romantic. But the symbolic can also be read lin-
guistically in the Aesthetics, in which case it signifies the reconciliation of
matter with consciousness, which for de Man, is too easily assumed to be a
property of literary language. Hegel, according to de Man, ‘always considers
the symbolic by way of an increasing proximity between sign and meaning,
proximity which, by principles of resemblance, analogy, filiation, interpenetra-
tion, and so forth, tightens the link between both to the ultimate point of
identity’ (de Man 1983: 386). So, when Hegel insists that he does not wish to
extend ‘symbolism to every sphere of mythology and art’, but actually distin-
guish that mode of representation from the classical and the romantic, which
230 Jeremy Spencer

appears to contradict the thrust of de Man’s argument, he is in fact speaking

historically, in the register of art history, rather than the linguistic register that
interests de Man (Hegel 1998: 312). He finds in Hegel a trope of articulation,
amalgamation and substitution, the canonical symbol of romantic aesthetics,
which conceived the symbol as designating a totality in which it participates
and is ‘the sensorial [equivalent] of a more general meaning’. Following
Coleridge’s remarks in The Statesman’s Manual, de Man, in his 1969 ‘The
Rhetoric of Temporality’, observes that, to the extent that the symbol is ‘a part
of the totality that it represents’ its structure ‘is that of the synecdoche’, but
although Coleridge ultimately emphasized the translucent nature of symbol,
it is the principle of synthesis or interpenetration promised by the synecdoche
that Hegel found as the ‘ultimate intent’ of the symbolic image that informs
his art history (de Man 1989: 189–92).
So, according to de Man, artistic production for Hegel is by definition
symbolic because it overcomes the heterogeneity, the arbitrariness, the
unnatural and forced analogies that characterize the relationships of signifi-
cation. This ‘assertion that art belongs unreservedly to the order of the sym-
bolic is made in the context of a distinction between symbol and sign’, de
Man observes (de Man 1982: 766). The relationship between the ‘sensory
component’ of the sign and the referent is arbitrary in Hegel (although
de Man cites Barthes ‘semiocritical sociology’ of an advertisement for the
ingredients of an Italian meal from Barthes’ 1964 essay, ‘The Rhetoric of the
Image’ in order to acknowledge that the relationship between signifier and
signified can be easily and is commonly naturalized). The symbol is distin-
guishable from the sign because of the ‘analogical participation’, alien to
the deferrals and detours of the sign, between the symbol itself and sym-
bolized. De Man repeats the point in ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s
Aesthetics’ that Hegel’s assertion of the intrinsically symbolic nature of artis-
tic production occurs in the context of his distinguishing the qualities of the
symbol from those of the sign.
There is nothing particularly unusual in Hegel’s characterization of the sign
as arbitrary or that it happened earlier than the investigations of Ferdinand de
Saussure or Roland Barthes. However, de Man does find it surprising that,
given his clear identification of art proper with the symbol, Hegel does not rate
the symbol more highly than the rather half-hearted theorization offered in the
Aesthetics. It is the sign that is ‘great’ in Hegel’s text because it demonstrates
our capacity to intentionally and perhaps violently transform the world, ‘to
efface its properties and to put others in their stead’ (de Man 1982: 767). As
Derrida explains it, for Hegel, ‘the production of arbitrary signs manifests the
freedom of the spirit’ that the production of the symbol largely disallows
because a symbol possesses the same qualities as the significance it is
intended to express (Derrida 1982: 86; Hegel 1998: 304).
De Man’s complicated reading of the interplay of Hegelian aesthetic
theory, semiology and psychology in ‘Sign and Symbol in Hegel’s Aesthetics’
engages with questions of representation and recognition and Hegel’s cho-
sen means, the mode of representation most suited for the self-recognition,
constitution or self-presence. The sign is less suitable for this task that it
first seems in that a word like ‘I’ (and also ‘now’, ‘here’, ‘this’) is simultane-
ously and paradoxically a specific and singular designation and ‘a powerful
[agent] of generalization’ in that it can refer to anyone. Therefore, de Man

concludes that the very enterprise of thought, which is roughly the means
of self-recognition and constitution, ‘seems paralyzed from the start’. As
such, the ‘I’ becomes an instance of the materiality of the letter that preoc-
cupies and fascinates de Man’s later writing and is central to his inhumane
theory of language. De Man’s reading of Hegel leads him to claim that in its
materiality, this sign not only fails to represent the speaking subject, the
subject’s recognition of itself in the world, but is an agent of actual ‘self-
erasure’. The aesthetic, however, is understood by de Man, to be a powerful
means of self-recognition and so shelters the self from that erasure. And so
even through Hegel’s rigorous and consistent thought understands the
necessity to distinguish sign from symbol, given what stands to be lost, the
temptation to forget or efface that distinction becomes too strong for him,
resulting in the ‘quite traditional’ theory and history of art as symbolic.
Thus, the symbol remains an ideological and defensive construct in
Hegel’s Aesthetics. The metaphor of ‘interiorization’ at work in literary and art
criticism is symptomatic of this ideology of the symbol. By interiorization,
de Man means ‘the understanding of aesthetic beauty as the external mani-
festation of an ideal content which is itself an interiorized experience, the
recollected emotion of a bygone perception’ (de Man 1982: 771). De Man
goes on to claim that Erinnerung, which means the ‘recollection as the inner
gathering and preserving of experience’, is an ‘integral part of the ideology
of the symbol’ in Hegel’s Aesthetics. In that he is an ideologist, Hegel
espouses Erinnerung. Hegel complains that everyday language often confuses
Erinnerung with Gedächtnis, which means memory in the sense that someone
has a good memory for names or faces. But surprisingly, it is Gedächtnis,
which de Man identifies with the sign in that it leaves a trace or a mark upon
the surface of the world, and not Erinnerung, which represents, ‘the highest
capacity of the thinking intellect’ for Hegel. De Man sharply distinguishes
memorization from recollection on the ground that recollection is ‘devoid of
images’ – in that we learn a poem or a passage from a book by heart we for-
get the meaning of the words, they retain only their materiality as inscription.
Thus, de Man labels the Aesthetics ‘a double and possibly duplicitous text’
because it espouses the ideology of the symbol in the form of classical art –
for Hegel, an art of the human body or form – but makes that defence
impossible from the start because the paradigm for art emerges as the albeit
flawed sign rather than the symbol.
Clark’s ‘de Manian’ Cézanne

Clark’s essay ‘Freud’s Cézanne’ understands Paul Cézanne’s three late
Bathers as paintings that put to the test and pushed to their limits ‘a specific
set of representational powers’ that had been historically and commonly
taken to be equivalent to nature. Cézanne’s painting tested ‘representational
powers’ by their ‘being materialized, by being reduced to a set of actual,
technical manoeuvres’ (Clark 2002: 165). The conviction that modernist
painting had always and characteristically dared viewers to find the ‘reper-
toire of inherited forms’ wanting or insufficient in some way appears fre-
quently in Farewell to an Idea. The notion that works test the putative
coherence of those forms was a theme of Clark’s manifestos of the social
history of art dating from the 1970s informed by the literary theory of Pierre
Macherey. And the idea that ‘negation is inscribed in the very practice of
232 Jeremy Spencer

modernism’, that negativity characterizes modernism’s habitual relation to

its inherited forms mobilized Clark’s writings of the 1980s (Clark 1983). And
although Clark has said he no longer likes the formula ‘practices of negation’
because as a description of what modernism did it is too one-sided, it did
not capture what he considers to be modernism’s actual fullness, its totaliz-
ing ambitions, its sophistication, and its euphoria at its results, there is a
continuity with his recent works on Cézanne which I discuss here and his
earlier intellectual trajectory. The two versions of the Bathers that most
occupy Clark’s essay on Cézanne pursue ‘questions of form and equivalence
relentlessly’, but Clark is more interested in the failures and the limits of this
‘wonderful, hopeless’ materialist project which emerge through Cézanne’s
putting it through its paces (Clark 1999: 165).
Cézanne discovers the limits of the materialism that informed modernist
painting through a project, in the words of Freud, ‘to represent psychical
processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable materials and so
to make them plain and void of contradictions’. Although there was ‘no such
º
thing as a tradition of materialism [ ] in the art of the last hundred and fifty
years’ and that their relationship was one of continual misunderstanding,
modernism and materialism did ‘go together’ (Clark 1999: 139). Thus, French
painting of the 1890s, ‘was materialist where it really counted, when it came to
the business of looking and making’, Clark insists (Clark 1999: 129). He quotes
Greenberg to support this view for whom this painting ‘spoke positivism or
materialism: its essence lay in the immediate sensation’. However, the ‘stuff of
painting’, ‘the factual status of the painted mark’ only mattered ‘if it was recog-
nised as the raw material of meaning – what we should call the signifier of
some complex, intractable signified. Matter was a moment of signification’
(Clark 1999: 129). It is in Cézanne’s successful effort to extend modernist
materialism or positivism to the realm of phantasy that its limits come to light.
Clark detects a ‘more savage kind of materialism’ in Cézanne’s late Bathers
that has as its spokesman Paul de Man rather than Clement Greenberg (Clark
1999: 166). However, accounting for the search for an analogical language for
our perception of nature in de Man’s terms means challenging or denying that
interest and the readability of form assumed by its modernist critics.
Cézanne’s brushstrokes do not disappear before a signified; they cannot be
easily traversed, and they obviously constitute the surface we attend to.
Individual brushstrokes remain ‘aggressively visible’ in Cézanne’s painting and
exceed the margins of the represented objects that become ‘a series of shapes
that melt into one another’ (Shiff 2000: 116–17).
However, de Man’s materialism appears only at the end of ‘Freud’s
Cézanne’. Clark had argued that Cézanne’s The Large Bathers (1895–1906) in
the Barnes Foundation had tried to materialize and make ‘palpable’ a phantasy
world, and if we could understand the painting as ‘a staging of some ultimate
sexual material’ then it might ‘look less strange’. We might be able to under-
stand its ‘insecurely gendered’ figures, the figure on the right hand side of the
painting in apparent reverie particularly interests Clark, if we see them caused
by materialism confronting the paradoxical task of showing ‘bodies thoroughly
º
subject [ ] to the play of phantasy; that is deformed and reconstituted at every
point by the powers of the mind’ (Clark 1995: 101). This ‘dreaming figure’ is
sexually indeterminate in that he or she combines a more masculine muscula-
ture with an absence, an ‘empty space between the figures thigh and upraised

leg’. Cézanne’s painting strives to materialize and realize a phantasy, ‘a purely

illusory production which cannot be sustained when it is confronted with a cor-
rect apprehension of reality’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 315). Cézanne’s
effort to materialize ‘the existence of the body in phantasy’ far from shattering
his materialism drives it on; he ‘never gives up trying to imagine that imagin-
ing in material terms’ (Clark 1995: 105).
Clark distinguishes the approach to phantasy in the Barnes painting from
that of The Large Bathers (1904–06) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. He
takes as his object the two female figures to the far right of the painting that
epitomizes its different realization or approach to phantasy than that of the
Barnes. The arms and shoulders of the kneeling figure become the legs and
buttocks of a second standing figure: painting that describes the part of one
body serves equally well to form a different part of another. The two images are
not blurred or merged together and retain their ‘salience’ on the canvas sur-
face and Clark’s least cumbersome formula to describe it or them is ‘double
figure’ (Clark 1995: 110). The double figure is Cézanne’s ‘plainest attempt to
rewrite phantasy in material terms’ Clark insists, and represents the extremism
of Cézanne’s and more broadly, modernism’s materialism, in its attempt to
represent plainly and literally metaphors of the body (Clark 1995: 111). It is the
Philadelphia Bathers’ ‘trying for a literalization of metaphor’ that determines
‘its overall abstractness of drawing and colour’ (Clark 1995: 112). It is this
abstractness and its causes that differentiate the Philadelphia Bathers from the
Barnes painting. The Barnes picture, Clark believes, was ‘still committed to the
idea of going beyond to beneath metaphor to some bedrock of experience’, a
dream of certainty or security of signification that the introduction of Farewell
to an Idea describes as ‘all but destroyed’ by modernity. If the Barnes picture
tried to materialize an original experience then the Philadelphia Bathers seeks to
provide a thoroughly coherent imaging of the phantasy itself. This effort is
itself metaphorically realized by ‘the flatness of its surface’ that provides ‘a con-
sistent idiom’ of the painting’s materialization of bodies. However, surface, in
Cézanne, allows us to imagine humanity but only to the extent that it is ‘one of
its effects’. We therefore ‘recoil’ from the inhumanity, the inorganic and
mechanical quality of these bodies. Clark insists that the power of ‘inanimate
matter’ to be beautiful is modernism’s ‘worst discovery’ or ‘horrible’ under-
standing. Modernism asserts ‘the beautiful as its ultimate commitment’, but
in that Cézanne could invent an aesthetic mechanism, or realize that inani-
mate matter was able to produce the effect of animate human bodies, leads us
to question that commitment. Modernist beauty appears duplicitous in that
life seems to be ‘at grips with death in every pore’ in this painting where
painterly technique and procedure breathe life and death into the bodies it
evokes (Balzac 2001: 12). Cézanne does not quite paint mechanical puppets or
automatons rather than living, breathing bathers but he always risks being
overtaken by the logic of puppetry expounded in Kleist’s Über das
Marionettentheater. Kleist’s essay understands self-consciousness to be always
the inverse of the graceful or the beautiful in art – it believes that inanimate
matter once set in motion by the puppeteer can out do the grace of a human
dance. In its radicalism, it is arguable that Cézanne’s project, like those of
other modernist artists and authors, conceived authorial self-consciousness to
be the enemy of the aesthetic, and took its absence to empower rather than
hinder the work of art making. In wondering whether he can know the reality of
234 Jeremy Spencer

his own body, Descartes, like Cézanne’s painting of the body as an effect of the
soul to grasp its reality, ends up in dissecting it and implies that Cézanne could
never give carnal existence to what ordinary or ‘profane vision believes to be
invisible’. Like Cézanne’s bathing figures, Descartes’ enlightenment body is a
machine ‘made up of flesh and bones’ permeated by a soul that brings the self
into existence, and I would suggest that the Cartesian body functions just as
well as a trope for the human bodies in Cézanne’s late painting as the puppet
(Descartes 1968: 104; Foucault 1977: 30).
Cézanne announced his anxiety that he had failed to realize the object
world, writing that although he was becoming ‘more clear sighted in front of
nature’ he could not ‘attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses’
(Rewald 1941: 262). If his last painting could not give adequate expression to
the experience of the richness of the object world, then was it fundamentally
blind, undoing the possibility of cognizing nature’s ‘magnificent richness of
colouring’ and replacing it with the uncontrollable power of Cézanne’s brush
mark as inscription? We can find suggestions of blindness in the criticism of
the late paintings of Le Château Noir or Mont Sainte-Victoire. For de Man,
such a blindness would be determined the disengagement of eye from mind to
the point where the formation of the work is without any ‘intellectual compli-
cation’ and so strictly, radically material, producing painting which ends up
running counter to the values of aesthetic experience, particularly the enduring
‘link between sense experience and understanding’ (de Man 1996a: 128, 83).
Theodore Reff, for instance, suggests something of the de Manian theme
of blindness in discussing the strokes of blue and green which are intended to
figure sky appearing through and in-between the foliage of pine trees in a
picture of Le Château Noir but which end up blurring the distinction between
the two and failing to distinguish ‘between solid and void’ (Reff 1977: 47). And
R. G. Collingwood uses the word ‘blind’ in describing Cézanne’s painting
which is an apparent bodily engagement with a menacing object world
through touch, and thus Cézanne painted like a ‘blind man’. The fruits, pots
and pans and bottles of Cézanne’s late still life watercolours look like ‘things
that have been groped over with the hands’ of ‘an infant feeling its way’, as it
traverses the floor (Collingwood 1974: 144).
Clark turns to the mark making that fascinates him most in Cézanne’s Trees
and Houses (c. 1885) to question its motivation or intention to analogize vision.
Clark is not necessarily looking for a particularly iconoclastic answer and
agrees with Roger Fry’s criticism, for whom the ‘small touches’ of Cézanne’s
brush were ‘the perfect embodiment of his feeling’, that Cézanne’s painting
has an ‘astonishing synthetic power’ (Fry 1927: 43, 44). However, Clark doubts
that synthesis is the overarching intention behind Cézanne’s mark making,
and sees in it qualities that challenge Fry’s criticism. Fry may be right to argue
that the world ‘has to be pictured as possessed by the eye, indeed “totalized”
by it’ for Cézanne. However, possession or totalization happens in Cézanne,
‘always on the basis of exploding or garbled data or utterly intractable data –
data that speak to the impossibility of synthesis even as they seem to provide
the sensuous materiality for it’ (Clark 2001: 105). Cézanne’s was a radically
materialist project which risked ‘everything on the possibility of re-creating the
structure of experience out of that experience’s units’ (Clark 2001: 106).
However, Cézanne’s fetishism of the singular ‘elementary particle’, the eleva-
tion of that ‘momentary-and-material “ping”’ leads to the realization that it is

not the form of a synthetic or total experience after all (Clark 2001: 107).
However, this non-identity of the singular dab and experience, or its failure to
describe anything, is only ever be glimpsed in Cézanne’s late painting. Clark
concludes that:
The world of objects reached after in Cézanne, and laid before us in all its
manifoldness, overtness, and pungency, could hardly signal its counterfactual
status more clearly. It is a horizon of meaning, an alternative to experience, a
contentment with non-identity.
(Clark 2001: 105)
However, Clark’s iconoclasm is not a simple reversal that claims that the phe-
nomenal is consistently and irrevocably displaced by the material or the for-
mal as de Man understands these terms (Clark 2001: 108). Materiality and
phenomenality in Cézanne possess a kind of sequential relationship and what
Clark labels the ‘Cézanne effect’ is a ‘whirligig’ of experience and its displace-
ment and experience re-asserting itself the other side, as it comes back round
into view; as if it was always already and punctually signified in these material
particles of paint. A whirligig is like a spinning top, the decorative images or
designs on the toy merging and melting into each other as the machine spins
round. As we behold Cézanne’s paintings, first the materiality of the stroke
comes into view and is immediately and incessantly replaced by the ‘picture’
and so on. The ‘fanatic process’ of applying brushstrokes might at any
moment achieve or embody the phenomenality of the sensory world or, con-
versely, that next stroke might drag the painting away from the sensory to a
different and more austere account of matter altogether. For Clark, the next
brush stroke ‘might (somehow) not be a mere sign in a sequence but a true
figure of things seen – a figure that cancels the marks preceding, or raises
them to a different power’ (Clark 2001: 108). This process or sequence, which
Clark hesitates to understand as one of ‘erasure’, reveals that painting is not
going to ‘ever perform the aesthetic conjuring trick’ of embodiment or con-
sistently and irrevocably secure a picture inhering to the surface of the canvas.
Picturing does not inhere in these pictures surfaces; picturing or ‘seeing as’ is
not in the dabs of paint the artist applies. But, on the other hand, their mate-
riality does not displace their phenomenality. The ‘vividness’ of Cézanne’s
painting is that of procedure for Clark, a procedure that will always, finally fail
to secure the phenomenality of the sign. The vividness of Cézanne’s painting
is, Clark insists, the ‘vividness of defeat’.
Thus, despite the acknowledgement of a materialism closer to Paul de Man
than Clement Greenberg in Cézanne’s painting, we cannot conclude that he
‘turned away from the detail of the world’ in the aristocratic and Apollonian
fashion of modernism. Jean-Paul Sartre argued that the nineteenth century
bourgeoisie lacked the distinction of birth, blood, or nature enjoyed by the aris-
tocracy. With regards his body, the individual bourgeois obviously resembled
the workers he exploited and could only distinguish himself from them, ‘by dis-
sembling his body, dismissing his needs, denying the nature inherent in him’
(Sartre 1971: 592). Michel Foucault has similarly discussed how the individual
bourgeois of the nineteenth century cultivated his body, a careful construction
and affirmation of the body for the sake of bourgeois hegemony considered
unsafe in the hands of the legal and political superstructure (Foucault 1990:
236 Jeremy Spencer

125–26). And it is arguable that a distinctly bourgeois aesthetic originates in

the bourgeoisie’s effort to vanquish a sensuality it shared in common with the
proletariat. It is as if the modernists followed the bourgeoisie in demanding, in
the words of Nietzsche, ‘above all else the conquest of the subjective, [the]
release from the self’, as if their work was in opposition to the aesthetic in its
impulse to empty art once and for all of its ‘spiritual content’, to be purely dis-
cursive rather than sensory or bodily. Modernist artists could not ‘imagine a
º
truly artistic creation [ ] without objectivity, without a pure and disinterested
contemplation’ or working as a ‘faithful reproduction of immediate reality’
(Lukács 1962: 206; Nietzsche 1993: 28). Cézanne also commented that the
º
artist was merely a ‘good machine’, ‘a receptacle for sensations [ ] a record-
ing device’. (Doran 2001: 111).
This paper has followed writings associated with the project of social his-
tory of art which discovers in de Man’s materialist and formalist lexicon pos-
sibilities for a detailed analysis of the making and the effects of modernist
painting. I have intended to accentuate the notion of embodiment, and argue
that, through Clark’s appropriation of de Man in his writings on Cézanne,
embodiment is a far less secure or stable concept than aesthetic writing has
often believed. The possibility of taking de Man’s critique of embodiment and
its art historical application as a challenge to hermeneutical and phenomeno-
logical aesthetics is something that I hope to have begun, or at the least, ges-
tured towards in this paper.
Acknowledgement
I would like to thank Alison Stone for her comments on an earlier version of this
paper.
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Suggested citation
Spencer, J. (2006), ‘The bodies and the embodiment of modernist painting’, Journal
of visual art practice 5: 3, pp. 225–239, doi: 10.1386/jvap.5.3.225/1
Contributor details
Jeremy Spencer is completing a doctorial thesis on the methodological role of the
literary theory of Paul de Man in materialist art histories at the University of Essex.
He teaches contextual studies at the Colchester School of Art and Design,
Colchester Institute. Contact: jcspen@essex.ac.uk Department of Art History and
Theory, University of Essex, Wivenhoe Park Colchester, Essex, CO4 3SQ.


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JVAP 5.3_00_FM.

qxd 12/11/06 3:46 PM Page 121

Journal of Visual Art Practice – Volume 5 Number 3

Editorial Board Editor

(JVAP has chosen not to use academic titles)

Notes for Contributors

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 5 Number 3 © 2006 Intellect Ltd

The history of aesthetics is a disputed one. Even when philosophers and

JVAP 5 (3) 123–126 © Intellect Ltd 2006 123

124 Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor

Joana Lowry reminds us that the question of medium or media is inex-

Editorial Introduction 125

126 Francis Halsall, Julia Jansen and Tony O’Connor

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 5 Number 3 © 2006 Intellect Ltd

Minimalism, subjectivity, and aesthetics:

In a recent round table discussion on conceptual art and the reception of

JVAP 5 (3) 127–142 © Intellect Ltd 2006 127

128 Susan Best

as dismantling subjectivity, rather, as we will see shortly, her argument dis-

Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 129

130 Susan Best

Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 131

3 Krauss, Merleau-Ponty and the Space of Experience

132 Susan Best

9 In the Critique of Pure

Figure 1: Robert Morris, Untitled (L-Beams), 1965–7, fibreglass, 244 3 244 3

Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 133

134 Susan Best

Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 135

136 Susan Best

Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 137

conventional understandings of this term. For him, anthropomorphism is

138 Susan Best

We no longer have confidence in the Kantian model of transcendental subject,

De Duve’s argument by embracing the anthropomorphism of minimalism,

Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 139

140 Susan Best

Minimalism, Subjectivity, and Aesthetics º 141

142 Susan Best

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 5 Number 3 © 2006 Intellect Ltd

Everyday life, ‘relational aesthetics’ and

The old ‘art and life’ chestnut

JVAP 5 (3) 143–152 © Intellect Ltd 2006 143

The conditions of transfiguration

One of Danto’s greatest achievements lies in his analysis of the sudden

144 Anna Dezeuze

146 Anna Dezeuze

Describing the everyday

Knowles’s proposition to make a salad relates to an act that we perform in

In every language, cooking recipes compose a kind of minimal text, defined by

Knowles’s Proposition is certainly presented in a concise and minimal for-

148 Anna Dezeuze

150 Anna Dezeuze

152 Anna Dezeuze

Journal of Visual Art Practice Volume 5 Number 3 © 2006 Intellect Ltd

Contemporary art and the role of museums

JVAP 5 (3) 153–166 © Intellect Ltd 2006 153

pragmatism, which focuses on the functional and practical side of knowledge

The art attack by Ambassador Mazel

154 Riikka Haapalainen

Pistoletto’s mirror paintings

Contemporary art and the role of museums as situational media 155

Figure 2: Michelangelo Pistoletto in front of the Mirror Painting Uomo seduto