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tags: Art
How do banal objects become works of art?
The last portion of the book was written in the late summer of 1976, after the death of my first wife. Only a year later I discovered how moved I was by my own description of artists’ portraits of their wives, and that I had written a philosophical memorial to her and to that marriage.
J’s piece
Seething with rage, J paints a red paint rectangle and asks it to be displayed. He titles it “Untitled.” J’s achievement lacks richness.
A title is more than a name: frequently it is a direction for interpretation or reading, which may not always be helpful, as when someone perversely gives the title “The Annunciation” to a painting of some apples.
J says his piece is about nothing. I allow that J has much the same right (as Duchamp) whereupon he declares the red expanse a work of are, carrying it triumphantly across the boundary as if he had rescued something rare.
The difference between a basic action and a mere bodily movement is paralleled in many ways by the differences between an artwork and a mere thing.
J exhibits a mirror. A natural metaphor for the theory that art is imitation, this mirror perverts the theory by not being itself an imitation for anything. It’s just a commonplace mirror. What end could be achieved by detaching appearances from the world and representing them in a reflecting surface?
Though it is true Narcissus fell in love with himself, he didn’t at first know it was himself that he saw reflected in the smooth crystal spring - he initially thought it was a marvelous attractive boy looking up at him out of the depths.
The cognitive dimension of pleasure - food may turn to ash in the mouth (displeasure) the moment it is realized. (A vegan enjoying the taste of a meal till it is discovered animal product is in it.)
Text imagines a world where Narcissus believes that the boy he sees reflected in the water, is actually of an order of boys who live in the water, like he does in the air. He finds spears driven through them draw no blood. They are maddeningly unembraceable. His mother instructs him on the concept of a dream: a dream-cat is not a cat.
There are close conceptual ties between games, magic, dreams and art, all which fall outside the world and stand at just the same kind of distance from it which we are trying to analyze. To be sure, one will have gone only a certain way in the understanding of imitation in characterizing tit this way, for in addition to being a false thing, imitations have a more important function of representing real ones.
If a man were to stand in the middle 114th street and bark madly, he would be considered mad. If on the stage nothing of the sort would be thought of him, because we would know that he is imitating one and not believing himself one.
Life itself is supposed to be something like a map for art, since it is reference to life and we find our way through what is set up as an imitation of life. So the cognitive defense the analogy to maps might offer is gone, forfeit in the case of such art. And immediately a counterprogram suggests itself: if art is to have any function at all it must be exercised through what it does not have in common with life, and this function can hardly be discharged by the Euripidiean program. Only to the degree that it is discontinuous is it art at all, this counter theory holds. Mimetic art fails when it succeeds, when it gets to be like life. But then to the degree that it is to succeed in whatever function it is to discharge, it cannot be through mimesis.
I can for example, burn up a copy of the book which a poem is printed, but it is from from clear that in doing so I have burned up the poem since it seems plain that though the page was destroyed the poem was not; and though it exists elsewhere, say in another copy, the poem cannot merely be identical with that copy.
The works are in part constituted by their location in the history of literature as well as by their relationships to their authors, and as these are often dismissed by critics who urge us to pay attention to the work itself, Borges’ contribution to the ontology of art is stupendous: you cannot isolate these factors from the work since they penetrate, so to speak, the [essence] of the work.
rel: Islands
In view of the logical symbiosis of philosophy and its own subjects therefore, it comes as a kind of shock that some of our best philosophers of philosophy - and of art - have wished to insist that the definition of art cannot be given, that it is a mistake to attempt to give it, not because there is not a boundary but because the boundary cannot be drawn in ordinary ways. Or, to the degrees that a definition of art cannot be given, then to just the degree that the boundaries between philosophy of art and art have been washed away, neither can can a definition of philosophy of art, nor for the matter of philosophy itself be given. This challenge comes, predictably from Wittgenstein.
Wittgenstein : in Investigations: philosophy begins when “language goes on a holiday.” In Tractatus, it begins when we fall off the outermost edges of natural science into the void of senselessness. rel: Holes
A Wittgenstein stance of art is that a definition of art both cannot and need not be formulated.