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| Smiles
Certain & Uncertain Part IV Rex Butler |
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Immanual Kant Part
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II Part
III Part
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Kant’s
Aesthetic Smile Kant thought about art along the lies of the famous teleological proof of the existence of God: that just as anyone finding a gold watch washed up on a deserted beach would have to assume it was put there by somebody, such was its complexity and seeming purpose, so with the world, which exhibits a similar complexity, we must assume a Watchmaker, God. For him, the same assumption of what he calls "finality" applied to art. That is, faced with a difficult or incomprehensible work of art, we give ourselves a law — an assumption of purpose that is neither simply subjective nor objective — to help us begin to understand it. It is a law Kant entitles the "principle of formal purposiveness", and it consists in treating what we seek to understand but do not comprehend "in accordance with such a unity as it would have if an understanding (although not our understanding) had furnished it to our cognitive faculties so as to make possible a system of experience according to particular laws of nature". In other words, we treat those things we do not yet understand but would like to as though they were the product of another "understanding", at once like our own and unlike it (for it has produced precisely what we do not yet comprehend). An intriguing example of this — almost exactly analogous to Kant’s argument about finding a watch washed up on a deserted beach — is a series of works by Carl Andre from the mid-’60s, the earthwork Pile and this Scatterpiece, for example. For the obvious question is raised there: are they ordered or not? Are they intended or not? The ‘60s were indeed a time when artists began to explore this Kantian issue of the assumption of intentionality. In fact, despite Kant’s archaic language, he is speaking of something that is very common in our everyday experience of art: that necessary assumption of intentionality that makes something a work of art or, more exactly, that necessary assumption of intentionality that allows us to begin deciphering a work of art. That is, confronted with a hermetic piece of modern poetry, a monochrome painting or indeed a pile of rocks tipped down a hill, we interpret the question "What does it mean?" as "What did its author mean?" As a reaction to our own bewilderment before the work, we suppose a consciousness that is like our own only less bewildered. And yet, immediately after this — and this alternative opens up perhaps the whole dialectic of modern art — Kant goes on to qualify what he calls this "law of reflective judgement", imposing a certain limit upon its applicability, how far it may be taken. After that passage above, Kant continues: "Not as though, in this way, such an intention should really be assumed (for it is only our reflecting judgement to which this idea serves as a principle — for reflecting not determining); but this faculty thus gives a law only to itself and not to nature". In other words, what Kant is suggesting here is that this "understanding" is only our own, that this other who makes the work meaningful is only us, that we see the work merely as a reflection of ourselves. But all this takes place only through the assumption of another intentionality, "like our own and yet unlike it". The spectator, then, is torn between having to assume a meaning — or perhaps even another meaning — to the work and thinking that it may have no meaning, that its meaning is only his own. He is torn between giving the work a meaning and thinking that behind this meaning there is always another, that he is still seeing it exclusively in his own terms and not in terms of the artist who made it. He is torn between — and here we return to the question of the smile — thinking that he understands the work, that its meaning is what he attributes to it, that the work is laughing with him, and that he does not understand the work, that its meaning is always hidden, that the work is laughing at him. As with Warhol’s Marilyn, the work appears at first to have nothing to say; but then the spectator thinks that others, whether it be the artist himself or other viewers, do see a meaning, and it is on this basis that he can see a meaning in it too. In the end, however, he must always wonder whether the work does in fact have any meaning, whether its meaning is only what he and others give it; but even then he cannot be sure. We might say that Warhol’s work — and this is its real connection with such dissimilar looking objects produced during the period as Andre’s — is exactly a dramatisation of the Kantian assumption of purposiveness or finality in the work of art; the idea that the spectator’s assumption of intentionality is a necessary part of the work, that the work is not complete without the spectator, that to begin to understand the work the spectator must necessarily take the place of the artist, complete the picture for him, all the while suspecting (this is the famous blankness or vacuity of Warhol) that the artist is not really there, has nothing to say. This is undoubtedly the "meaning", if we can say this, of such Warhol works as the Dancefloor Diagrams, which were installed horizontally and were a clever undermining of the heroic, existential, all-seeing, all-encompassing author figure of Jackson Pollock, or the Do-It-Yourself-Paintings; but these were themselves only a continuation of Marcel Duchamp’s original gesture of the readymades, which explicitly factored in the potential response of their audience. We might recall in this regard Duchamp’s orchestration of the scandal at the Society of Independent Artists where he first presented the urinal. After he had previously exhibited Nude Descending A Staircase at the Armoury Show, his audience already expected to be outraged, and Duchamp in turn had to upset this expectation. What is thereby inaugurated is the whole modern game between a work of art and its audience, in which each attempts to assume the intention of the other and how there might even be another intention behind that. And we shouldn’t forget that Duchamp lived most of his life as a kind of courtier to a number of rich collectors and women, that he must have learnt the values of sprezzatura, of speaking beyond his immediate context to an audience that did not yet exist, leaving a message in a bottle behind for others to pick up, as he often said of his readymades. It mightn’t be too much to argue that the whole of modern art — after Kant, after Duchamp — is an art of the smile, the wink, the nudge; that the only issue in art today is the meaning of this smile, the audience’s assumption of a meaning to the work and the work’s playing on this expectation. The only question to be decided any more is whether the work, beneath its apparent conformity to our interpretation, contains another, hidden meaning or not. We might ask: Why is it that paintings with smiles — but henceforth all paintings are paintings of smiles — fascinate us so much? Leonardo’s Mona Lisa, Frans Hals’ The Laughing Cavalier, Manet’s Olympia and Déjeuner sur l’herbe: each of these works has provoked an incredibly long history of interpretation, each contribution trying to discern the final meaning of the piece, but each still haunted by the fact that they still haven’t got to the end of it, that there is still another meaning behind the one they propose, that the work is in fact laughing at them, which is the same as thinking that the work has no meaning, that its only meaning is the one we give it. We might consider Duchamp’s and Warhol’s work in this light, their seeing in these masterpieces something akin to their own ironic temperament: L.H.O.O.Q. as a reply to Mona Lisa and Etant Donnés as a reworking of Déjeuner sur l’herbe; Warhol’s Self-Portrait as a sphinx with his fingers placed across the thin slit of his mouth as a replaying of Manet’s Olympia with her splayed fingers covering but also drawing attention to her own feminine secret or smile. © Rex Butler and |
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