1.2

Karissa Bowley. Part 2 of Unit 1 Response.

To what extent is representation an essential function of artworks?

The only way that representation is indeed an essential function of artwork is if referencing nothing other than itself counts as “representation.” I think that a work is really “art” when it, for whatever reason, is experienced in itself by a viewer. By “experience” I mean to “undergo” or “face”, I do not mean to “step over” or “pass by” in favor of something else. While there is artwork that undoubtedly refers to something besides itself—like our beloved example of a painting of a couch which we cannot help but think about a real couch when we see it—not all artwork makes such direct references. A painting of a couch is a direct reference to a couch, as Plato would argue, because it necessitates us couch-knowing people to think immediately of a physical couch. But this kind of mimesis, of imitation of the physical world, is not essential to art as art because there are many artistic pieces which do not bring anything particular to mind and because an artwork depicting a couch can be taken as art even to people who have no idea what a couch really is. Instead, it is the indefinite nature of any work of art—the way that art is experienced, taken to be its own object of thought, and never really verifiably speaking about one particular objective truth over another—which keeps people stuck on the same piece or makes people hesitate before moving onto the next matter or brings people back in order to experience it multiple times. I am open to the possibility of this definition changing throughout time, and I realize that the ancient Greeks gave “art” that title based off of different rules, but I do think that these qualifications probably also had to do with the experience of art, as artworks like ornamental architecture forces a person to experience a building as a kind of aesthetically valuable, visually-alluring environment.

Unlike Plato, I think Croce is right to see a kind of dialectic relationship between rationality and feeling, between images and concepts, because I think they can both be tricked and are constantly working in tandem. Croce says that art embodies feelings (I take this to mean that art is not passively absorbed but is actively experienced). These feelings inevitably occur at the same time as intellection is going on, and the person viewing the art might think of any number of concepts or physical truths, which will then impact that person’s ongoing feelings and so on. In this sense, Croce makes a good case for how art engages a viewer in a unique way but in a realm that is not actually separate from intellect and “true knowledge”. The most challenging part of Croce’s ideas, to me, is his discussion of art as an a priori concept in the sense that art has the objective quality of being experienced through feeling. The problem for me here is that it seem circular to say that a particular society’s “artwork” is artwork insofar as it generates experiences of feelings, but it is completely possible that such work only generates those experiences insofar as it is first labeled “artwork”. This, then, seems like a different kind of a priori truth from mathematical certainties, which do not have to be classified as mathematical truths to be accurate.

Gadamer, too, considers art to be a means to knowledge as well, but he talks specifically about the kind of knowledge it can lead people to: art “is a form of recognition that seems to deepen our knowledge of ourselves and thus our familiarity with the world as well” (100). In this way, art is like a mirror (in a different sense from Plato’s idea). Art in a vacuum, a void space, is hardly art at all. Art takes action when it is in play with a viewer, when the viewer can give it life, just as “life” can be found in a mirror only if there is some light out there to be reflected in it. But art and mirrors need not be “accurate”—need not imitate the physical world exactly or even recognizably. They only need to invoke this kind of activity, this kind of mental play, in order to produce something in the world objectively which was not there before: experience, or feelings. People are always experiencing, and some experiences are more life-changing than others, but the aggregate of one’s experiences is the raw material that everyone uses to continuously try to pinpoint how the world is. I like how this conception of “art” allows it to be both intensely personal and far-reaching in effect.

At the end of Gadamer’s essay, he makes a clever point about art being limiting at the same time as freeing. This reminds me of the paradox of an organized state being both a way to bring freedom to people but also to blatantly restrain them (I am free to live where and how I want to the extent that others are not allowed to discriminate against or kill me at will). Both these ideas reflect precisely Foucault’s idea that real freedom can only occur in a field, in a limiting environment. When an artist takes certain mediums and decides to use them in a certain way, he or she purposefully limits him or herself to those mediums in order to convey whatever it is they wish to convey. And the viewer has a very finite piece in front of them, but an infinite number of ways to think about and interpret and use that piece. In terms of representation, I think this means that an artwork as an artwork first and foremost references itself (if anything at all) and tells the viewer to experience it. Because art embodies this paradoxes of finitude and infinity—of stark limitation and complete freedom—it draws viewers in and creates experiences, whether is references something physically separate from itself or not.