artintelligence

This is a lecture I gave to my students; as it touches on some basic problems regarding the role of language, narrative and metaphor in contemporary fine art I thought I would share it with you. You will need to click the image to the left twice to get it full size.

Since the 1960s the dominant discourse in fine art is what I will refer to as “deconstructive art”. I am using my own terminology here (Coulter-Smith 2006) mainly because the dominant discourse of which I am speaking doesn’t have an institutionally agreed upon name yet, in the manner of ‘abstraction’ or ‘expressionism’.

One of the core features of deconstructive art is “nonlinearity”, a notion that has particular reference to “nonlinear narrative”: a mode of narrative less concerned with storytelling and more preoccupied with the process of establishing connections, associations and transformations.

Non-linear narrative can be viewed as a licence to not make sense, which is to say to combine elements in a composition without any concern for making sense. There is some precedent for artistic “nonsense” in literature, in the field of poetry; but in visual art the absence of words means that there is more scope for not making sense than is the case even in poetry.

Concepts of “sense” and “nonsense” carry with them an implicit value judgement that, interestingly, disappear when we shift terminology and refer instead to the “foregrounding of form”. The latter being a typical feature of modernism evident across all the arts from the late nineteenth century onwards.

An outstanding pioneering instance of the foregrounding of form is Stéphane Mallarmé’s Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice never will abolish chance), 1897.

Stéphane Mallarmé, Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A throw of the dice never will abolish chance). 1897

In “A throw of the dice” Mallarmé shifts away from the usual literary focus on the meaning and sound of words and enters into a visual dimension. And he is making use of a technology here: that of typography. There is something intrinsically modern about exploiting such technology rather than romanticising something more “personal” and “human” such as handwriting. One thinks here of Italian futurists such as the poet Filippo Tomaso Marinetti who championed the typewriter and typography over and above “outmoded” handwriting.

A throw the dice is deconstructive in the sense that it shifts poetry into another dimension: in this case the visual dimension. There is not only a foregrounding of form there is also a process of shifting from one medium into another which effectively breaks out of conventional constraints. In the case of the throw of the dice such constraints would be those of lines and verse.

A poem such as Charles Baudelaire’s “Beauty” from Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil), 1857 looks staid in contrast with “A throw of the dice”.

Lawrence Weiner “ON A STRING”, 2004 (AS HIGH AS THE SKY ON A STRING / AS DEEP AS THE OCEAN / ON A STRING / AS WIDE AS A RIVER / ON A STRING / AS LONG AS THE RAINBOW / ON A STRING) Katalog Nr. 897, size variable

It is interesting, also, to compare Mallarmés “A throw of the dice” with a more contemporary work of art by Lawrence Weiner On a String, 2004, because there appears to be a family resemblance. And there is a similar breaking of boundaries because Weiner not only breaks out of line and verse but also takes the poetry off the page and on to the walls of an art gallery.

There is, moreover, a double deconstruction taking place here because not only is this poetry on the walls of the gallery but it is poetry that is defined as fine art breaking down boundaries not only between media but also between disciplines.

The foregrounding of form is a significant strategy because it points to the importance of material features, such as purely visual aspects of a work. It enables us to look at things differently and create new formal configurations which become significant on purely formal grounds. One can make an analogy here with music which is completely free of any demand for a narrative dimension. Music has no significance, Raymond Monelle notes:

Unfortunately, commentators have persistently found musical signification a difficult area. Musical meaning is said to be “vague” or “foggy”. This is apparently because musical semiosis is different in kind from linguistic semiosis, and music therefore cannot be translated into words. Music is “at once intelligible and untranslatable” (Lévi-Strauss 1970/1964, p. 18). Students of meaning have been historically prejudiced towards linguistic meaning; failing to find it in music, they have called music “vague”. (Monelle 2000: 8 )

Another way of putting it would be to say that music is fundamentally a material practice as opposed to an intellectual practice. But a material practice becomes an intellectual practice when we examine the complexity of its evolution over several generations. And Arnold Schoenberg’s development of methods of composing music without a key (atonality) can be considered intellectual, indeed it would be strange not to consider it intellectual.

Similarly, the discourse of abstraction that dominated art in the first half of the 20th century is fundamentally akin to music in terms of its lack of a narrative dimension. But this does not entail that abstraction is devoid of meaning. One can note, for example, that abstraction led directly to the rise in importance of interpretation. Representational art can be understood fairly easily especially by people viewing art created in their own time and place. But abstract art was less accessible and was accompanied by an increase in the quantity of material written about such art, for example manifestoes, artist statements and sometimes entire books (e.g. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art).

Returning to “A throw of the dice”, one way of understanding the revolution in poetry that Mallarme introduced in this work is to understand it in terms of abstraction. For example, in a commentary on Mallarme’s poetry Roger Pearson notes:

Post-structuralist readings of Mallarmé revealed, if nothing else, the poverty and misdirection of so many traditional attempts to recuperate his difficult poems as ‘intentional’ representations of the real world. (Pearson 1996: 2)

Pearson suggests that Mallarmé poetry is non-representational, which is interesting because this is akin to calling it abstract. But it is abstract in a very particular manner. It is abstract in the sense that it transcends commonsense. One can note that at the time Mallarmé was writing there was significant interest amongst the intelligentsia concerning scientific knowledge. In particular, the intelligentsia were fascinated by the way in which science was capable of exploring phenomena beyond the horizon of our natural senses. The page from “a throw of the dice” illustrated above refers to the stars and being “born on the stars” which can be interpreted as referring to a very modern concept of the origin of humanity, something very different from the religious version which dominated pre-modern society.

Technically we refer to the abstraction in Mallarmé’s poetry in terms of a “foregrounding of form”, and indeed forgrounding form is a key feature of poetry in general. This is significant because deconstructive art, I would argue, is essentially a poetic form. William F. Hanks notes:

the internal dynamic of poetic speech rests on the intensification of form, or what [Bohuslav] Havránek called the foregrounding of form itself. Through foregrounding of form, aspects of language that are often invisible because taken for granted become the source points from which parallelisms and remarkable tropes are generated. It might even be said that without metalinguistic consciousness, there would be no poetry, that the potential of the one is interwoven with the potential of the other.’ (Hanks 1996: 194) [emphasis added]

Hanks’ observations bring up some interesting terminology which is useful for an understanding of deconstructive art, which is defined here as a mode of art that functions in a grey area in between abstraction and representation. For example, Hanks refers to “tropes”. A trope is a “figure of speech, the use of a word or phrase which deviates from the norm” (glossary), a visual trope, therefore, can be described as “an image that deviates from the norm”.

Meret Oppenheim, Breakfast in Fur, 1936.

Meret Oppenheim’s Breakfast in Fur, 1936, it is most certainly an image that deviates from norm. And examining Breakfast in Fur it is worth noting that metaphor is the principal trope. I think this is significant due to the fact that one of the most concise definitions of metaphor can be found in the “Manifesto of Surrealism”, 1936, by Andre Breton when Breton uses the phrase “a juxtaposition of two or more or less distant realities” (Breton). Metaphor is a cognitive process, more particularly it is an intuitive and even unconscious cognitive process. It is a process that takes place within the synaptic universe that it is the brain.

Perception involves massive computational processes that take place within the brain unconsciously. Eighteenth century philosophers such as John Locke and David Hume began the process of formulating a model of human cognition that was to become the foundation for the science of psychology. Hume was especially important because he theorised in considerable depth the notion that the brain operates via the association of ideas. According to Hume ideas are “impressions” (as if in wax) of sensations.

Ideas are fainter, weaker than actual immediate sensations, but on the other hand ideas are much more powerful than actual, immediate sensations because they exist in a parallel universe: the universe of memory. Within this mental universe ideas are like particles of sense that can fragment and recombine according to their own laws; which, according to Hume, are the laws of imagination. If we want to understand deconstruction and there is no better place to start than the Humean model of the mind. And it is interesting that the philosopher (Jacques Derrida) who coined the term “deconstruction” authored a book on the French 18th-century philosopher Étienne Bonnot de Condillac whose ideas were in part indebted to the same source as Hume’s thinking, namely: John Locke. In addition, Hume’s focus on the association of ideas had a significant impact on the evolution of modern psychology via Hume’s contemporary David Hartley, then J. S. Mill, and Freud’s use of word association tests which, in turn, influenced Surrealist automatism. More recently, one can point to the continued evolution of associationism evident in the connectionism movement in the fields of cognitive science, artificial intelligence and artificial creativity.

Returning to metaphor, metaphor is a cognitive process that can be understood in terms of preconscious and/or unconscious thought processes that associate ideas in a manner that can result in “a juxtaposition of two or more or less distant realities” (Breton).

If we return to Oppenheimer’s Breakfast in Fur the above diagram analyses Oppenheim’s visual metaphor into its components. A deeper understanding can be obtained by familiarising oneself with the context that is surrealism. Without knowledge of the intellectual context in which they were made Surrealist montages may appear to be obscure or even nonsensical. They begin to make sense, however, when one is aware of their context especially with respect to ideas informing surrealism, such as the post-Freudian concern with the libidinal forces of the unconscious mind.

Barbara Kruger, Untitled (You are not yourself), 1982.

In the same way that Meret Oppenheim’s Breakfast in Fur makes sense when we understand the context of Surrealism and psychoanalysis it is evident that Barbara Kruger’s cryptic use of pronouns in her works of the 1980s makes sense when we understand the context that is 1970s feminism. Another intellectual framework that has contributed considerable significance to a broad spectrum of artistic practice is the concept of chance. Chance is the principal intellectual thread interconnecting Dada and Surrealism and its primary manifestation in material practice was via montage, a method and that provides another bridge between Dada and Surrealism. Although Dada and Surrealism are now in the background contemporary art one should remember that they provide the principal historic bedrock for the revolutionary overthrow of the dominance of abstraction that took place in the 1960s. And it is interesting to examine two precocious artists, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, who began to challenge the dominance of abstraction as early as the mid-1950s.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1955. Oil paint, crayon, pastel, paper, fabric, print reproductions, photographs and cardboard on wood., 39.3 x 52.7 cm (15 1/2 x 20 3/4 in.). Jasper Johns Collection. © Robert Rauschenberg / Adagp, Paris.

Rauschenberg and Johns challenged abstraction by using representational elements in their work. But in so doing they did not herald a return to the tradition of narrative painting that modern art had broken with. Instead they introduced a different way of dealing with imagery, one that is in many ways abstract. Instead of being concerned with visual abstraction, however, these artists were concerned with linguistic abstraction. Both artists were fascinated by processes of replication which are very typical of language and Johns, in particular, explored concepts of cliché and stereotype. Significantly, the term “stereotype” originally referred to a method of replicating a relief printing surface, such as a page of type or a wood-engraving, by taking a cast using a mould originally made of papier-mâché or plaster, later of rubber, plastic, etc. (OED). In short, the stereotype is a copy of a copy.

Jasper Johns Target with Four Faces, 1955 Encaustic and collage on canvas with plaster casts 29 3/4 x 26 x 3 3/4 in. (75.5 x 71 x 9.7 cm.)

Jasper Johns’ Target with Four Faces, 1955, is figurative but it is not about people, instead the context it refers to concerns philosophical ideas such as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language (see PBS). In Target with Four Faces Johns chooses the most empty symbol he can muster and tops it with four identical faces, four plaster moulds. These images are less about meaning than they are about the infinite replication of the same. But an even greater challenge to conventional notions of meaning is provided by the discourse of chance.

Robert Rauschenberg, Untitled, 1955. Oil paint, crayon, pastel, paper, fabric, print reproductions, photographs and cardboard on wood., 39.3 x 52.7 cm (15 1/2 x 20 3/4 in.). Jasper Johns Collection. © Robert Rauschenberg / Adagp, Paris.

Rauchenberg’s Untitled, 1955 is, like Target with Four Faces, bereft of meaning being quite simply a random juxtaposition of images. Rauschenberg’s approach is perhaps even more disturbing than Johns’ because it provides artists with a licence to randomly juxtapose imagery without any concern for meaning. One can see this, for example, in the work of James Rosenquist and David Salle.

James Rosenquist, I Love You with My Ford, 1961. Oil on canvas, 6 feet 10 3/4 inches x 7 feet 9 1/2 inches. Moderna Museet, Stockholm. © James Rosenquist/Licensed by VAGA, New York.

David Salle Old Bottles 1995, Oil and acrylic on canvas 245 x 325 cm

Four decades after Rauschenberg’s original experiment David Salle continues to turn out randomised montages of imagery which have little contextual significance apart from sexual references and homomorphisms (similarities between shapes). From a theoretical point of view what is interesting about such work is that it treats representational imagery like abstract form and colour. It is fundamentally formalist. In terms of deconstruction what is deconstructed is the boundary between abstraction and representation. Such processes of deconstruction are not only directed at content but also form and media as well. Rauschenberg, for example, quickly deconstructed the boundary between painting and sculpture:

Robert Rauschenberg. Minutiae, 1954. Freestanding combine painting, 214.6 x 205.7 x 77.4 cm (84 1/2 x 81 x 30 1/2 in.). Private collection, Switzerland.

Against this historical background consider a contemporary work such as Daniel von Sturmer’s, The Object of Things, 2007; a video-sculptural installation filling the Australian Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. What is interesting about this work is that it marks a return to abstraction, but via a deconstructive route that intersects all manner of media.

Art & Language, detail of installation, 50th Venice Biennale, 2003.

REFERENCES

Hanks, William F. 1996. Language & Communicative Practices. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1970/1964. The Raw and the Cooked: Introduction to a Science of Mythology. Translated by John and Doreen Weightman. London: Cape.
Monelle, Raymond. 2000. The Sense of Music: Semiotic Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pearson, Roger. 1996. Unfolding Mallarme: The Development of a Poetic Art. New York: Oxford University Press.