Up The Arts

A REFUTATION OF DENIS DUTTON’S THE ART INSTINCT, part 2.

October 5, 2009 – 10:54 pm by Andrew Paul Wood

Attempts to determine the place of art have, until now, looked for that place either at the peak of the theoretical spirit or in the vicinity of philosophy itself. But if, so far, no satisfactory result has been obtained, might it not be because of the obstinacy of looking too high? Why not turn the attempt on its head and instead of proposing the hypothesis that art is one of the highest grades, if not the highest grade, of the theoretical spirit, propose instead the inverted and opposite hypothesis, that it is one of the lowest, even the lowest of all?

- Benedetto Croce, Problemi di estetica

Electricity and magnetism are those forces of nature by which people who know nothing about electricity and magnetism can explain everything.

- Egon Friedell, Kulturgeschichte der Neuzeit (vol.3)

It has occasionally struck me that perhaps all this time we have been misinterpreting Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes”. Perhaps the entire Imperial court is well aware what is going on, complicit in the grand allegorical ritual masque illustrating the Foucauldian hierarchy of power and politics, concluding with the parading Emperor in the role of ‘naked truth’, simultaneously the panoptic all-seen and all-seeing. It’s only some naive and stupid little boy, uninitiated into the Mysteries, who doesn’t understand what is going on and that every participant has a set part to play, who by shouting out that “the Emperor has no clothes” spoils the whole ritual and reveals his lack of understanding and sophistication. It is as gauche at the Roman Emperor Julian the Apostate, who in his attempt to revive paganism participated in the Eleusinian Mysteries and, upon being granted a vision of the gods, panicked and crossed himself, causing the divine beings to vanish in disgust.

For those of us who have regular contact with contemporary art – perhaps on a daily basis, perhaps professionally – Duchamp’s 1917 ironic statement about the power of galleries and critics to convey the aura of artist authenticity (Dutton’s category 11) is, to say the least, old hat. But even as we slide from the knowing cynical-ironic era of postmodernism into a new and slightly saccharine earnest avant-garde, it would seem that Dutton is unable to come to terms with the readymade as art. Indeed, he insists on fixing it in a specific art-historical ghetto – Dada – rather than, as most of us would, viewing it as a bridge to the way installation and subversive intervention inform contemporary art. This is particularly the case in the way that the Kristevan abject critiques modernist minimalism, or the way readymades and duplicates subvert the commodification of art.

Dutton is a kindred soul of pompous British critic Brian Sewell – knowledgeable in a reactionary fashion about some things but misconstruing this to mean he is qualified to comment on the whole (thus, by his rules, Joyce, Sterne and Mallarmé would not be great artists, because they cheat our instinctive expectations). Nonetheless, Dutton is sufficiently intrigued by Duchamp to go into a detailed analysis of Fountain – and thereby falling straight into Duchamp’s trap. Duchamp never intended the readymades to be more than shouting boo! at the bourgeoisie – otherwise he would hardly have produced more conventional but just as avant-garde work like The Bride Stripped Bare, or the later trompe-l’oeil paintings, nor ultimately have retreated from art to play chess. Most of us would be aware – certainly any of us who have seen The Gods Must Be Crazy – that the frisson comes from knowing the real background of the object despite the new context, of being in on the joke. Although it isn’t always clear in the argument, Dutton concedes in chapter seven that Fountain is art because it fits a number of his categories in terms of being commentary and being intellectually engaging. Curiously, the one category Duchamp was actually interested in (#11) is one that Dutton doesn’t see as being a necessary one – something Dutton reiterates in his response to an on-line critique of his book:
“Item #11 is therefore like other items on the list. Henry Darger spent years alone in his Chicago apartment creating and expressing a fantasy world of the adventures of the Vivian girls in their fight against evil. Did he think he was creating art? Would the nearby, and conveniently named, Chicago Art Institute have considered his tracings and fictions as art? Who cares? I say that what Darger was doing was art in terms of the rest of the list, regardless of whether Darger knew it or whether it was validated by any institutional setting or decree. The same argument can be mounted with some genres and individual works of tribal art, as extensively discussed in the book.
Duchamp’s readymades are not a hard case for me at all: they are easy. In chapter seven, I analyze Fountain against every item of the list and come to the conclusion that this reluctant object, despite its reluctance, can’t help being a work of art. It has at least seven of the twelve features on the list, and depending how you interpret it, maybe more. … Readymades are intellectually challenging (#10), they have special focus (#7), generate a critical world around themselves (#5), are objects of pleasure, (#1), and even show in their manner skill and virtuosity (#2) – in the artist’s choice of the object and its presentation, anyway. Skeptics about the artistic status of readymades may disagree, but they will have to do so in terms of the Cluster Definition (which is in my view a true definition; see the work, especially by Stephen Davies, referred to on p. 249).”
I find this illogical and inconsistent – Darger’s bizarre and idiosyncratic work did not become ‘art’ until discovered by people who had a professional relationship with ‘art’ – otherwise (with shades of Kant, Berkeley and Quantum Mechanics) it doesn’t exist at all beyond qualia in a single sensorium – that of its creator. If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, no one gives a crap. Indeed, outsider art is a really bad example for Dutton to use, because outsider art effectively does not exist until it is discovered – the ‘discovery by an art professional’ is a quintessential element of all outsider artist narratives.

As far as I’m concerned, the only real definition of a “work of art” is:

1. It must embody its creator’s intent.
2. It must be able to be its own best excuse for existing once the scaffolding of any practical function is pulled away.
3. It must have organic integrity and unity.
4. These categories may not always apply.
5. As Shakespeare asks us “How with such rage shall beauty hold a plea / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?”

I don’t care much for Dutton’s trainspotter approach to aesthetics, especially applied to anti-aesthetic movements like conceptualism. For Dutton, art must be a hedonistically normative experience to be beautiful, whereas I believe it is plausible that beauty can be found in the elegance of Duchamp’s protest. It immediately becomes abundantly clear that Dutton isn’t interested in aesthetics, art or beauty, but POPULISM. Popularity seems to be a more defining feature than any of his twelve categories – in other words, kitsch (reminding one irresistibly of official Soviet art diktats via VKhUTEMAS to paint more peasants and tractors and lay off the Suprematist black squares and red triangles). The problem is that something can be beautiful and not art (a sunset, for example) therefore logic dictates a category must exist where something can be un-beautiful and still be art (although at this point I feel I must say that I really enjoy atonal music – freak that I am – and think Schoenberg is utterly beautiful). I really have no time for Dutton’s prescriptive normative designation, as opposed to impartial description –
“A play in which a man brews a cup of tea, throws it down the drain without tasting it, makes another an throws it out too, and another repeatedly to the end, might be a Dadaist experiment, or an illustration of an on obsessive disorder, but it would be better described as an anti-story rather a story. A character’s motivation, as I indicated earlier in this chapter, involves the expression of will, normally towards the fulfilment of a desire, and against resistance and obstruction of some kind”

Yet I would argue that repetition (especially in minimalism, video performance art) is actually a deeply significant and subtle aesthetic category in terms of psychological inertia set up for the brain’s pattern recognition wiring. The oldest fairytales collected by the Grimm brothers hinge on the repetition of patterns and motifs (usually in threes), as do Shakespeare, Wagner, Dante and Homer. But this is merely one of many examples of Dutton’s narrow mindedness. Surely the audience is expected to do some of the interpretive work as part of their jouissance. Surely the dénouement of such a sequence is when it terminates – the climax is when the stimulus is removed. Indeed, is not being left unsatisfied a valid aesthetic impulse? To dismiss this would be to dismiss five centuries of trompe-l’oeil still-lives – and indeed Dutton contradicts himself because deception (such as would give Plato the shits) and therefore denial of consummation, lies at the heart of his beloved mimesis. The cups of tea must continue to be made and poured down the sink, because to stop would be to admit the absurdity of art (which is rather the point of Dada).

As the book moves on, Dutton in keeping with any authoritarian ideology, alights on increasingly bizarre and extreme observations to support his thesis (but then Pound proved unfortunately attached to Social Credit and fascist dogma, and Yeats had a tragic attraction to all sorts of mystical nonsense, but the genius of Yeats, like that of Kandinsky, was able to transcend the mumbo jumbo at the clinch; Pound couldn’t, nor would it appear can Dutton):
“…smell shows no solid signs of becoming the basis for a high art tradition”.

Aside from the ambiguity of expressions like “solid signs” and “high art tradition”, tell that to a high end luxury perfumier. Every perfume is a carefully mixed tone poem of base, counterpoint and accent. The only reason smell isn’t more widely deployed in the arts is because it is very difficult to store and deploy in a narrative sense, but it has functioned perfectly well for centuries as an abstract consumable. In fact scent is one of the most powerful of senses, and there are many descriptive accounts in literature of smell setting off Proust-like reminiscences. For an excellent history of the venerable and highly sophisticated culture of smell, I highly recommend Alain Corbin’s Le Miasme et la jonquille (available in English as The Foul and the Fragrant: Odour and the Social Imagination) seems rather closed-minded to dismiss something completely out of hand simply because the technology is not quite yet available. But regardless, what a peculiar and rather irrelevant point to alight upon. This bullying continues down to the level of how we indeed experience art! Surely not!
“Properly experienced, a work of art is bracketed off, detached, disengaged – not from close attention but from immediate personal needs, desires, and practical plans”.

What then of public art? Street murals? Relational aesthetics? Realism (which must inneviatbly draw on the real world)? Happenings? Situationalism? Fluxus? The painting over the family dining room? Art that is intimately involved in religious and cultural ritual? What kind of snake oil is this man selling? “Properly experienced,” on whose terms? Dutton’s obviously. And surely that would be a reflection of Dutton’s category 11, art as institutional definition, which he tells us isn’t one of the essential categories in defining art. Well, either #11 is or it isn’t essential. Which is it? Make up your mind, Denis: “…any artefact that has all, or nearly all, of the other twelve features on the list does not need to have this one to be a work of art; such an object could not fail to be a work of art in the absence of only this feature” p. 200. As Pedro Henriquez Ureña once noted: “Todo aislamiento es ilusorio” – ‘all isolation is illusory’.

Georg Cristoph Lichtenberg writes in his Aphorismen that “It is a common failing of all people with little talent and more learning than understanding, that they call more on an artistic illustration than a natural one”. What Lichtenberg fails to note in his Rococo German is that in discussing the arts the inverse is true – art should only be discussed in terms of its artist merits, not nature, because art must exist free of any such posturing and be assessed exclusively in terms of artistic and art historical standards. To assume a ‘destiny’ is the naive flaw in any ideology: the Nazis believed race was destiny; the Soviets believed that socialism was destiny (and, in the case of Lysenko, could even trump biology and evolution); and capitalism – which failed so spectacularly in 2009 – believed that capitalism was destiny. To believe Evolution is destiny in anything other than a biological sense is to fall into a similar error. To demand that art offer only the most immediate of gratifications is to deny the best aspects of both Christianity and Capitalism – that gratification must be delayed in favour of lasting fulfilment in the future – otherwise we would never get anything done (and why I am largely anti recreational drugs).

Dutton, at times, seems so determined to shock us in his rejection of received cultural institutions that occasionally he will come out with something so ridiculous that one can only marvel that it got past any editor worthy of the title. –
“the use of mixed colours in the history of painting has always been intuitive and singular, and never especially depended on observing the rainbow or on Newton’s demonstration of the spectrum”.

This is simply not true. Goethe’s erroneous colour theories (a considered but bollocks reaction to the un-poetic nature of Newton’s writings) formed the basis of much German Romantic painting. Nineteenth century optic theory lead to pointillism (indeed Seurat would be impossible without it) and was widely read by the impressionists. Colour theory was a core study of the Academies from Newton until the1960s. I would think Constable would have called Dutton a scoundrel for suggesting that his atmospheric effects were not precisely observed and Whistler would have at the very least twisted his mouth into a moue of distaste. In the late nineteenth century Théodore Roussel, a close friend of Whistler, Sickert and Degas, invented a “tone detector” – an optical device for matching the tones of nature to paint. One wonders what Dutton makes of the grisaille paintings of the Renaissance and Baroque, or indeed the well-known South Island painter whom I know for a fact is colour-blind and has an assistant pick his palette.

Again and again with statements like these Dutton conclusively demonstrates that he has never spent time in a contemporary artist’s studio talking to a real live artist, or even cracked open and ploughed through the occasional artist biography. His observations come across to living, breathing art as ornithology is to birds – the living artist is a distant, stuffed (and often ignorant) specimen in Dutton’s writing, far more attention is paid to secondary and tertiary sources, philosophers and theorists. How can the artist be so irrelevant in a book about the very origins and nature of art? History is denied as irrelevant and only our primitive brain matters, but as Ernst Robert Curtius observed, “Culture without tradition is destiny without history” – what an unfortunate kind of art that would result in.

“If we look at [work in aesthetics]… we find that the paradoxes on which aesthetics as a discipline depends – the conflicts that generate incisive analysis instead of bland description – are manifestations of varied and conflicting feelings about art that lie deep in the psyche. The logical analysis requirement… is unable… to explain where these competing feelings and intuitions come from. For this level of explanation, we need to turn to evolution”

Which is why the art world is better off ignoring theorists and philosophers and just getting down to the business of making art. Hello! Basic human empathy would account for much of it! Jeebers – it’s like reading that paedophilic old misery John Ruskin, who held that the critic’s interpretation is superior to the artist’s intention. As an art writer, often I take the time to talk to artists about their work, and more often than not they are quite conscious and analytical about the visual pool they draw upon. One can also look to the writings of artists like Kandinsky and Mondrian to see that any amount of pseudoscientific theosophical jibberjabber may be involved, and the artists of the Renaissance achieved miracles of beauty based on their frequently informed theology and Neo-Platonism. NEWSFLASH: artists are actually capable of being consciously and actively intellectual. This is just so patronising. Dutton is regurgitating the old Romantic notion (and keep in mind that Modernism was the last gasp of Romanticism’s heroic ideals) that the artist is some passive vessel for cosmic or divine inspiration, but replacing the numinous with something else impossible to demonstrate conclusively – and evolutionary imperative. In fact, you can’t prove any of Dutton’s suppositions without drilling into people’s heads and implanting electrodes in their brains.

“From Lascaux to Bollywood, artists, writers, and musicians often have little trouble in achieving cross-cultural aesthetic understanding. The natural centre on which such understanding exists is where theory must begin”.

“Often!” Show me the statistics. Seems? Nay Lady, I know not seems. It’s quite self-evident that many westerners (like myself) find Bollywood excessively sentimental, saccharine and annoying, and as for Lascaux, unless Dutton has a defrosted Cro-Magnon in his basement, how the marshmellowfudgecake would he know? Examples are plucked out of the air and occasionally an orifice I shall forbear from mentioning. WHERE IS THE EVIDENCE? I will tackle this in greater depth when I start carving up Dutton’s evidence for universal trans-cultural aesthetics (wherein I shall point out that Western techno-industrial Enlightenment culture is the result of a specific linguistic relational logic of syntax, numeracy and tense which does not occur, say, in various Native American cultures, and has important implications for aesthetic relativity). “Often” Dutton ‘often’ says, which is just a little rhetorical trick to get him off any concrete hook in his contentiousness by slipping into the passive voice. Finally, everything falls back on Dutton’s obsessive delusion that somehow we have strayed from art’s true path – the pseudo-Hitlerian ideal:

“…bringing an understanding of evolution to bear on art can enhance our enjoyment of it. A determination to shock or puzzle has sent much recent art down a wrong path. Darwinian aesthetics can restore the vital place of beauty, skill and pleasure as high artistic values.”

Do not Bosch, Goya and Grünewald shock? Do not Bosch, Piranesi and Escher puzzle? What of late Renaissance Mannerism? What has Denis been smoking? Are those the jackboots of the SS Ahnenerbe I hear outside? I’m not sure how any educated adult in the early twenty-first century can talk smack like that with a straight face. “Wrong path?” Naughty children, smack handies – back to the studio and paint me some cows in a field. This is a straightforward denial of our human ability to think and choose for ourselves. According to Christian theology, God permits free will. Denis Dutton does not. Surely this is some kind of joke. It could almost be a quote out of Orwell’s 1984 (25 years late) or Huxley’s Brave New World which shocked me when I read it at age 12 and continues to do so. One is reminded of the elderly composer Richard Strauss screaming at the orchestra, “Louder! Louder! I can still hear the singers!”

And, I might add, much of the art that Dutton idolises frequently as ‘beautiful’ shocked and puzzled upon its first appearance, thus again casting serious doubt on the whole thesis. I’m inclined to agree with G. K. Chesterton, “To set a measure to praise and blame, and to support the classics against the fashions”. Art in one way or another always returns to life to filter and qualify experience at either the visual or conceptual level – and the critic should be like a milk-separator chugging away in some Waikato dairy shed, dividing the cream of the poetry (poesia) from the milk of what belongs to its time (Letteratura). And modern life is NOT a bucolic frolic – indeed, much contemporary life is spent mediated by the internet, broadcast media, consumer capitalism, and not the concrete world at all. Mind you, there’s nothing like the ivory tower among the plane trees of the Grove of Academe to ossify one’s sense of taste (and make one sound not unlike a NKVD slave driver at a Siberian salt mine).

The time has come to acknowledge that among human beings Darwinian evolution in the meaningful sense of genetic mutations selected by survival requirements has become meaningless. Humans now sufficiently control their environments to a degree where they can adapt them to human requirements rather than vice versa. Any further changes to be wrought in the human genome will be conscious ones enacted by genetic modification, interactions with cybernetic systems, and related post-human technologies. Just as humans have gained mastery over their own biological evolution, the introspective and philosophical among us have come to realise that our psyches are not so bound to animal instinct that we cannot override them in the exploration of the new realities our society and technology creates.

Denis, take a photograph – then you don’t have all that messy business of the artist being a creative entity entrenched within a society that produced him/her.

End of Part 2

Another instalment to follow. Stay tuned.