The recent history of art has posed – or perhaps has seemed to pose – a new set of problems for those concerned with aesthetic evaluation. Considerable prominence has been given to ‘Works of Art’ of a kind which has not previously been seen: that is, works which apparently embody no imaginative (or indeed physical) transformation of materials; no sense of belonging to any of the particular arts – like painting, sculpture, drawing, engraving, or whatever; no sense of tradition, nor of skill. Such works possess no identifiable aesthetic qualities, and offer no aesthetic experience.
The prototype for works of this kind was, in a sense, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain, a urinal, signed R. Mutt, which he submitted to the Salone des Indépendants. There is nothing at all I would wish to say in defence of Duchamp’s action. Even so, it must be stressed that the urinal was a (relatively) isolated phenomenon. A great deal of the institutionally approved art of our time is of this character.
During the twenty or so years I have practiced as an art critic, I have been invited to attend to all manner of objects and events – ranging from a document entitled, ‘A Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs’, to folded blankets, a man seated in a bath of bull’s blood, another who successfully amputated his sexual organs, used nappy liners and sanitary towels, a beach covered in polythene, thousands of used tyres arranged in the shape of a Polaris submarine, and, of course, Equivalent VIII – the Tate’s notorious stack of fire bricks by Carl André – and to consider all these things as ‘Art’.
En passant, the production or exhibition, of almost every item alluded to here – and I could have listed scores, if not hundreds of other comparable examples – involved public funds, a point to which I will return in a moment. Here I would also like to stress that a large part of the current contemporary art offered for exhibition at the Tate, and through the Arts Council, may, formally, have a greater affiliation with recognizable arts, such as sculpture, or painting, but often that affiliation remains extremely tenuous. For example, there is little or no aesthetic content in much Pop Art, Minimalism, New Expressionism, or New Sculpture of the 1980’s. a ‘painting’, these days, tends to be identified with the mere presence of paint as a substance. Similarly, one of our most eminent art critics recently defined sculpture in the pamphlet accompanying the Hayward Gallery’s despicable 1983 ‘Sculpture Show’ in this way: ‘Sculpture,’ he declared, ‘is what sculptors do. No other definition is possible.’
This then is the problem. The temptation is simply to say, ‘This is not art’, and to pass on without hesitation to consider those things which appear more worthy of attention. That, after all, was the approach favoured by, say, Clive Bell, in his book, Art. Bell’s aesthetic hypothesis was that the essential quality of a work of art was ‘significant Form’, which gave rise to aesthetic response and experience. Significant form was, ‘the expression of a peculiar emotion felt for reality’ – and anything which did not possess ‘Significant Form’ was not a work of art. Most of that which was presented as art was not art at all. ‘I cannot believe,’ Bell wrote, ‘that more than one in a hundred of the works produced between 1450 and 1850 can be properly described as a work of art.’ He claimed that calling something a work of art, or not, was a ‘momentous moral judgement’. He would have experienced no difficulty in dealing with the anaesthesia of Late Modernism; he would simply have expressed the view that less than one in a thousand of the works produced between 1950 and 1986 were works of art.
It must be said, however, that Bell’s concept of ‘Significant Form’ (borrowed from Roger Fry) and his idea of aesthetic emotion are rather out of fashion. More characteristic of current thinking is the view put forward by the aesthetic philosopher, Walter Tilghmann, in his recent book, But is it Art? Tilghmann is concerned with the inadequacy of traditional aesthetic theories to deal with the sort of phenomena I have been discussing: Duchamp’s urinal, André’s bricks, etc. Tilghmann argues that the very idea of a theory, or definition of art, is a confused one. This confusion, he believes, arises from the fact that the language of aesthetic theory has simply lost contact with the sort of everyday practice we – or perhaps I should say he – engage in when we (her) look appreciatively at urinals, piles of bricks, or acts of castration. Instead of trying to stretch the old aesthetic theories to accommodate these new kinds of artistic practice, we should be elaborating new theories appropriate to the new sorts of practice.
These, then, are two opposing approaches to the problem of anaesthetic art objects: the Bell position which dismisses these objects which do not give rise to aesthetic effect, anaesthetic objects, out of the category ‘Art’ altogether, and the Tilghmann position which includes everything which anyone ever designated as ‘Art’, as art – but recommends a rejection of traditional concepts of what is and what is not aesthetic experience.
Most discussions of this issue tend to take up a position somewhere along the line that joins these polarities. As I have no wish whatever to give other than a functional attention towards a urinal, I have not doubt about which is more congenial. Nonetheless, I now wish to argue that this is a polarity, or at least a line of argument running between two poles, the whole of which should be refused. Let me explain.
Aesthetic response and experience – from Baumgarten onwards – were never regarded as being synonymous with what was called ‘Art’. The early philosophers of the aesthetic all recognised that a great many natural phenomena – flowers, minerals, waterfalls, landscapes, forests, and the song of the nightingale among them – also gave rise to an aesthetic response, a disinterested response, unrelated to use, price, necessity, or whatever. It may well be that this view ultimately depended upon a ‘Natural Theology’ – i.e. the belief that the natural world was, in some sense or other, a revelation of the handiwork of God. As Friedrich Schlegel put it: ‘As God is to his creation, so is the artist to his own.’ Natural theology, of course, is somewhat out of fashion – even among Christians. And this may have something to do with the fact that most aesthetic theories do not even pay lip service to the ‘non-artistic’ aspects of aesthetic experience. My own belief, however, is that the aesthetic faculty has its roots in our continuities with – and ultimately helps to establish our differences from – the remainder of the animal kingdom: it can be understood in terms of our specifically human natural history. This aesthetic potentiality, though threatened by the decline of religious belief, and the growth of industrial, and latterly, electronic production, is not necessarily destroyed by it.
And so rather than see aesthetic theory re-written in such a way that it incorporates anaesthetic
‘Art’, I think we should be attending to the independence of ‘Aesthetic Dimension’ from ‘Art’. But if this implies that we should not go along with Tilghmann, I think it also means that we must not go along with the Bell-type of argument, either. There is, after all, something inherently wrong-headed in his view that most – sometimes 99% - of works of art are not ‘really’ works of art at all. It reminds me of the argument that most socialist countries aren’t really socialist at all. I think one can – indeed, I believe one should – readily concede to the Post-Structuralist brigade that art is a category constituted within ideology, and maintained by institutions, especially the institutions of contemporary art. But aesthetic experiences, and aesthetic values, are not the same thing at all: they are an innate and inalienably human potentiality. Aesthetic experience, of an imaginative order, is a terrain that we can enjoy because we are the sorts of creatures that we are. Some ‘Art’ embodies aesthetic values, and gives rise to aesthetic experience of the highest order, but much art does so only ‘minimally’, or not at all.
This position may seem like a platitude. But important consequences flow from it. Not only does it cut through a tired, if not an exhausted, debate, but it implies a new – or perhaps I should say, an old – set of priorities. For example, the issue of ‘artistic freedom’ (used to justify so many of the present contributions to General Anaesthesia) does not, in the new-old context, seem to be one of momentous consequence. But the freedom to engage and develop innate aesthetic faculties is, and that freedom, I am suggesting, is being greatly impinged upon by present social and cultural policies. Certainly, I see my practical task, as a critic, as one of fostering those circumstances in which the aesthetic potential can thrive.
Of course, all sorts of issues and arguments are begged by the position I have been putting forward. One question I have left in brackets is, ‘Why in our time has there been such a preponderance of anaesthetic art?’ The most commonly advanced argument on the left used to be that it was all the fault of the market in art. This was the essence of the argument of my teacher, John Berger, who insisted that pictures were ‘first and foremost’ portable capital assets. But, despite my respect for Berger, I came to recognise that there was something strangely circular in the argument that aesthetic discourse, and connoisseurship, were simply derivatives of the market, because, if they were, it was not at all clear to me what it was that the market could be said to be corrupting, distorting, or infecting. Nonetheless, positions like Berger’s led to an unholy, anti-aesthetic alliance (which persists to this day) between philistines of both the left and the right.
But there is also a right-wing version of the ‘corrupting market’ theory – put forward, for example, by Suzi Gablik in her slim and slight book, Has Modernism Failed? Here, anaesthetic art is equated with Market activity, which corrodes ‘Higher Values’ through commercialism. There remains strong empirical evidence against such a line of reasoning. Gablik notably does not mention Henry Moore, Graham Sutherland, Barbara Hepworth or Ben Nicholson, all of whom were deeply enmeshed in the higher reaches of the art market, but whose work embodies precisely those spiritual and aesthetic values which are so often absent from the work of less commercially successful artists of today’s official, state subsidised ‘avant-garde’, e.g. Burgin, Art Language, etc. Also, it seems to me that the evidence of history is against Gablik’s view. The market, in and of itself, did not corrupt in 17th century Holland, or in 16th century Venice; on the contrary, in these cases at least, intense activity in the picture-markets seems to have been inextricably bound up with extraordinary efflorescences of aesthetic life.
But we should not rush to apparently self-evident conclusions: it is perfectly true that much anaesthetic art – as I suggested at the beginning of my argument – involves an element of public subsidy but public subsidy, both historically and also in our time, has been associated with high aesthetic achievement. We don’t have to look back to Athens or the Gothic world for instances of the successful use of public funds to foster the highest expression of the arts: I am thinking particularly of the days, not so very long ago, when the Arts Council and the British Council fostered an exceptional generation of British artists, including Moore and Sutherland. Today some dealers may prefer to deal in works of quality, rather than in trash, nonetheless, if the art institutions, or indeed anyone else, foster a demand for trash, then others will happily serve that. ‘Real’ demand – i.e. individual, subjective choices – certainly determines various ‘pockets’ of taste, which are neglected by, and unrepresented within, the institutions of art: I have in mind here a wide range of popular painting ranging from charging elephants and studies of oriental ladies, express trains and tea-clippers, to portraits of the Lord Mayors of London, Brigadier Generals and the Chairman of the Board. Though these market-determined tributaries of artistic life are rarely aesthetically worse than the dreary institutional avant-garde of, say, the Arts Council-backed Hayward Annual or the Turner Prize, they can hardly be acclaimed as significantly better either.
From all this, I conclude nothing except that the market clearly does not cause good art (art of high aesthetic value) or bad art (anaesthetic art, art of low aesthetic value). In art, at least, the operations of the market seem in a certain sense neutral, neither implying nor eliminating aesthetic values; the market, on its own, is simply insufficient or incapable of creating that ‘facilitating environment’ in which good art can be created.
In the absence of God, how then are aesthetic values to be ensured, if not by the market, or by the professional art bureaucrats of the subsidised art institutions? As William Morris well realised, it is worse than useless to appeal to any kind of democratic process in these matters. ‘People sometimes talk as though the ordinary man in the street (of all classes I mean) is the proper person to apply to for a judgement on Works of Art,’ wrote Morris. ‘They say he is unsophisticated, and so on … Now let us just look the facts in the face. It would be very agreeable if he were. But … on the contrary he is steeped in the mere dregs of all the Arts that are current in the time he lives.’ Quite so. And this leads me to believe that there is no alternative to positive, discriminating patronage from above: this occurred, briefly, historically, in Britain, from about 1940 to around 1952, when Kenneth Clark, and the Arts Council, fostered that great generation of British Romantic artists, to which I have already referred. In the 1950s, however, those who possessed the power of patronage suffered an alarming loss of nerve, right across the political spectrum: Clark and his colleagues began to believe that the advocates of anaesthesia had a view as deserving of public patronage as their own. Alarmed by the growth of a new breed of philistine art bureaucrats, Clark fell silent, and eventually withdrew from endeavouring to influence the patronage of contemporary art. That is a silence which those who broadly – and of whatever political persuasions – share his aesthetic values should now begin to break. Only then might we see a diminution in the status of the presently ubiquitous anaesthetic art objects.
This article was first printed in the Salisbury Review April 1987 and Seeing Through Berger, The Claridge Press, 1988
Image at the top, Peter Fuller with David Hockney
Image in the middle, Peter Fuller at the launch of Modern Painters
