In 2019, Jony Ive left Apple to cofound a creative agency, LoveFrom, with his friend and long-time collaborator Marc Newson. LoveFrom is a small collective, with some 40 employees, but it works with some very notable companies and people, including Airbnb, Ferrari, and the new King of England, Charles III. Ive is an obsessive student of what it takes to design and create great products and services in the context of a large corporation. In discussion with McKinsey chief marketing officer Tracy Francis and McKinsey Quarterly editorial director Rick Tetzeli, Ive went deep on what a CEO must do to foster great design, the fragility of new ideas, and how group dynamics both inhibit and propel creation. An edited version of their conversation follows.
Rick Tetzeli: What makes for a great relationship between the CEO and the head of design? What’s the potential for that relationship?
Jony Ive: I think this question actually asks big, important, profound questions: Why are you incorporated? Why are you gathered together, if not to make your products or services? I always thought that the idea of a company was a necessary evil to make an idea relevant, you know [laughs]? The products that we develop and bring to market require a collection of people with expertise in a whole range of different areas, and there’s a process for creating and developing products and solutions with such a group. Why, therefore, would a CEO not want to be intimately involved in that process?
Rick Tetzeli: So, what can a CEO do to cultivate great design? As a lead designer, what do you need from a CEO?
Jony Ive: The most effective relationship you can have is when you work with somebody who has a practical—not academic—understanding of creating. On the LoveFrom website, we mention that we work with founders and leaders. Founders are creatives by definition—they had the idea behind a company. To make that idea material and relevant, they need to work with a collection of people. But the nature of ideas and the creative process is so particular and unusual. It’s an activity that doesn’t naturally or easily sit within a large group of people. When you gather a large group of people, they generally want to be able to relate to one another and to be sociable. But any process that is unpredictable does not sit comfortably or naturally in a large group setting. So, people come to value activities that are predictable.
This doesn’t mean that you would wilfully want to undermine those activities that are predictable. But that is the nature of creating. And one of the things I realised is that when you’re trying to create in the context of a large group of people with a whole range of different expertise, people tend to want to gravitate to those attributes or characteristics of a product that you can measure easily. If you’re trying to relate to a group of very different people and you want to appear sociable and engaged and connected, it’s much easier to talk about something that you can measure with a number. That’s why we choose to talk about schedule or cost or speed or weight. Given our very different backgrounds, that’s a comfortable and easy conversation. I completely get it.
But there’s an insidious problem with that. There is a dangerous assumption that we’re having these conversations because they’re the only important ones. But the really important conversations and preoccupations and concerns are very hard. Because you can’t assign a system of numbers to make the relative judgments that need to be made. I used to think that this kind of conversation was a personal attack, or an affront to the practice of creating, but I’ve come to learn, over the years, that it’s just a natural, very predictable consequence of having larger numbers of people gather together to talk about developing something. There are lots of different coping mechanisms for dealing with that challenge. I found it enormously helpful to understand the natural dynamics that seem to occur when you gather a number of different people together to solve a problem.
Tracy Francis: You’ve spoken of founders. If we accept that it is important for the well-being of any company to innovate, can organizations that are not founder-led have the good design conversations that you’re describing?
Jony Ive: It has to start with the fact that there will be no progress unless there is an understanding about the nature of creating. And, you notice, I didn’t use the word design; I used the word creating.
Tracy Francis: You’re right. I narrowed it down too much. It’s creating, not just design. So, how do you approach the creative process with company leaders?
Jony Ive: Some of the most creative people I’ve worked with have been in engineering and in marketing, not just design. And some of the most dogmatic people I’ve met have been in marketing, design, and engineering [laughs]. The most important thing is that there is a true appetite to create—and with that, consequently, a motivation to really try to understand the nature of the process, to understand what curiosity looks like, and to understand what the impediments to creating can be.
For many people, the creative process can be an unfamiliar one. So, people often try to institutionalize the process, as if, like many activities, you can just review it on a spreadsheet. They want to say, if we apply more people and you give us this amount of time, this is where we’ll end up. Now, there is a bunch of engineering activity that’s like that. In software, for instance, when you’re trying to fix bugs, there can be some quite predictable parts of the process. In general, however, I think there has to be acceptance and engagement with the fact that the creative process is fabulously unpredictable. A great idea cannot be predicted.
You can increase the probability of having a good idea, which is the reason I pay so much attention to the creative process. It’s also partly for my sanity, to deal with that feeling of, “Oh, I’m here again, and I’m staring at a blank piece of paper.” I take enormous encouragement, and massive solace, in reminding myself how many times I’ve been in this position, where I feel that there are no ideas and I feel horribly stuck, and I keenly feel the burden and responsibility of the people that are waiting. I take enormous encouragement, and massive solace, in reminding myself how many times I’ve been in this position, where I feel that there are no ideas and I feel horribly stuck. Some design leaders deal with this by becoming slightly disconnected. That’s one way of dealing with the impasse and all that sense of accountability and responsibility. For me, I’ve personally coped with it by paying huge attention to the process, to the biography of an idea, to the tools that seem to make a difference. Ever since college, I’ve been obsessed with how we think, how to give body to a thought.
You’ll often find creatives are obsessed with process and tools. A primary tool for me is that I write an awful lot. I write because I realized at art school that you can only draw a small percentage of the attributes of an object. You know, if I were to draw this [holds up a glass], you would understand only 20 percent of its nature. You would have no sense of its weight or material or temperature. You would have no sense of the way that it reacted to its environment. Writing helps me frame the problem. A lot of mistakes are made when you frame a problem, because you could already be dismissing 60 percent, 70 percent of the potential ideas. It can be practical and intimate only if there is an understanding about the nature of the process.
Rick Tetzeli: What do you mean by “the biography of an idea”?
Jony Ive: If you’re terrified that you’re never going to have another idea, it makes you think, How did I have previous ideas? So, you pay attention to the conversations, the walks, the writing, the drawing, the models, the prototypes—all that helped you before. I find the nature of creating both terrifying and wonderful. And I am the luckiest guy in the world to be able to participate in that process with others. I love the idea that there is, on one day, no idea. On Tuesday, there’s no idea. But on Thursday, there’s an idea. And the terrifying thing is, which Thursday?
My experience has been that an idea starts life as a tentative thought that tends to grow from something that you’re thinking into a conversation. It turns into a conversation, and then there’s the writing. The idea is so fragile. If you understand the nature of ideas, all that you know with any absolute certainty—and this is a really bizarre, important point, which goes back to what I was saying before about people in large groups needing absolutes—is that when you have an idea, there are no absolutes except all the problems that the idea implicates. Of the latent potential of the idea, there’s nothing of any certainty. But where there is lots of certainty is, “Well, you can’t do that because of this. I will show you proof that you can’t do that.”
The difference between an idea and a product is that you’ve solved the problems. When someone says to me, “Well, you can’t do this for these reasons,” all it means is that there are problems to be solved. If they can be solved, the idea transitions into becoming a thing. If they can’t, it remains an idea. You can see my obsession here. It’s an obsession born out of struggle and of taking the responsibility really seriously. Rather than trying to just disappear into a design studio and sort of disconnect, I really try to understand what the challenges are in terms of a creative practice in the context of a large, extended group of people.
Tracy Francis: You have worked with a lot of institutions that have extraordinary heritages. How do their long histories affect your creative process?
Jony Ive: You know, I am hopelessly practical. Right now, I am extraordinarily fortunate to collaborate with two extraordinary individuals, Brian Chesky and John Elkann. Brian heads Airbnb, and John heads Exor, the Agnelli family’s company, as well as Ferrari—two companies with very different histories, with very different places in society and culture. Brian trained as a designer. He went to the Rhode Island School of Design. John didn’t train as a designer and has responsibilities far broader than Ferrari. But John is an incredibly creative, thoughtful person, who approaches the challenges and questions of business in the same creative, thoughtful, curious way it takes to create and design a Ferrari.
Whether a company has a huge history or a short one, I just see that as one of many design considerations. I’m far more interested in, and far more affected by, the approach of the leader. I love working with people who are curious. I can work very closely and very effectively with anyone who’s curious. I love working with people who are curious. I can work very closely and very effectively with anyone who’s curious. One of the benefits of working closely with a large number of people who are curious is that you learn as a community. There’s this incredible power when you discover and learn together. At the end of a group project, I look at two things: I look at what we made, but far more important, I look at what we learned. If you’re not just going in and out, if you’ve really committed to a relationship, what we’ve learned is obviously far, far more important.
During COVID-19, I really became aware of how important momentum is and all the things that feed momentum. People who entered that period of lockdown and relative isolation with momentum had a far easier time than those people who didn’t enjoy the benefit of momentum. It made me very aware of what helps create momentum from a creative point of view. Learning is really important. If you’re not curious, if being right is more important than learning, you’re going to have a very hard time building and maintaining any sort of momentum.
Rick Tetzeli: So even at a time when talent is highly mobile and there’s a lot of disruption, continuity is crucial.
Jony Ive: Yes. It’s a real privilege if you get to design or address a problem as a group and then go back and do it again with the benefit of what you learned the first time. I always felt very fortunate at Apple when we got to design the third or fourth version. Because if you’re paying attention, the third or fourth one is the beneficiary of an awful lot of learning.
Tracy Francis: Are there any recent evolutions or changes that have reshaped the way you think about the creative process?
Jony Ive: Honestly, when trying to think about ways that I can be of service and solve problems that will be problems in the future, I find myself always looking to the past. I pay most attention to the creative process and the path and journeys of ideas. I’m really more broadly interested in history.
There’s one thing that I find really curious. I don’t know if it’s part of the human condition, but I am always astonished by how quickly we, as a culture, as a society, get to this point where we sort of assume that a product or service was inevitable. I am always astonished by how quickly we, as a culture, as a society, get to this point where we sort of assume that a product or service was inevitable. I care enormously about that, as somebody involved in the process. I care about that because it makes people less thoughtful about what it took to get there. Now, I’m not sure whether it’s reasonable to expect that we pay a bit more attention [to the past]. You know, it wasn’t that long ago that we were sending faxes to each other. But what paying attention to the past does is it gives you a really valuable context for you to understand what you’re doing. That context for ideas is very important—particularly as the tools that we are working with now are so incredibly powerful.
Tracy Francis: One last question. You have worked on products like the iPod and iPhone that completely reinvented a broad set of systems. Are you always reimagining the entire system, challenging its underlying assumptions? Is there a way you think about reimagining whole systems?
Jony Ive: I really don’t. I just start with people, and I’m very clear about my place and my contribution. I like this idea that what I do is in service to humanity, to culture, to people. It’s a place I find very comfortable. Our motivation is not only what defines us in terms of our values but also our fuel for what we do. I can’t think of a more profoundly powerful fuel than realising that what I’m doing is for other people, not for myself. Sometimes the idea implicates or requires innovation that’s broader than the product, as in a system. But other times, it doesn’t. It’s very specific to the task. All I care about is trying to honour the species, trying to make things better. That’s what I care about. That’s something you cannot measure with a number, and you certainly can’t measure it with sales. It’s a really tough one to apply a metric to. But it’s very clear in my own head.
Language has not accustomed itself to a situation in which the act itself is the ‘object’…..fromThe American Action Painters Harold Rosenberg
At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act—rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. The painter no longer approached his easel with an image in his mind; he went up to it with material in his hand to do something to that other piece of material in front of him. The image would be the result of this encounter.
It is pointless to argue that Rembrandt or Michelangelo worked in the same way. You don’t get Lucrece with a dagger out of staining a piece of cloth or spontaneously putting forms into motion upon it. She had to exist some place else before she got on the canvas, and paint was Rembrandt’s means for bringing her there, though, of course, a means that would change her by the time she arrived. Now, everything must have been in the tubes, in the painter’s muscles and in the cream-coloured sea into which he dives. If Lucrece should come out she will be among us for the first time—a surprise. To the painter, she must be a surprise. In this mood there is no point to an act if you already know what it contains. ‘B—is not modern,’ one of the leaders of this mode said to me. ‘He works from sketches. That makes him Renaissance.’
Here the principle, and the difference from the old painting, is made into a formula. A sketch is the preliminary form of an image the mind is trying to grasp. To work from sketches arouses the suspicion that the artist still regards the canvas as a place where the mind records its contents—rather than itself the ‘mind’ through which the painter thinks by changing a surface with paint. If a painting is an action the sketch is one action, the painting that follows it another. The second cannot be ‘better’ or more complete than the first. There is just as much in what one lacks as in what the other has. Of course, the painter who spoke had no right to assume that his friend had the old mental conception of a sketch. There is no reason why an act cannot be prolonged from a piece of paper to a canvas. Or repeated on another scale and with more control. A sketch can have the function of a skirmish. Call this painting ‘abstract’ or ‘Expressionist’ or ‘Abstract-Expressionist’, what counts is its special motive for extinguishing the object, which is not the same as in other abstract or Expressionist phases of modern art.
The new American painting is not ‘pure’ art, since the extrusion of the object was not for the sake of the aesthetic. The apples weren’t brushed off the table in order to make room for perfect relations of space and colour. They had to go so that nothing would get in the way of the act of painting. In this gesturing with materials, the aesthetic, too, has been subordinated. Form, colour, composition, drawing, are auxiliaries, any one of which—or practically all, as has been attempted logically, with unpainted canvases—can be dispensed with. What matters always is the revelation contained in the act. It is to be taken for granted that in the final effect, the image, whatever be or be not in it, will be a tension.
A painting that is an act is inseparable from the biography of the artist. The painting itself is a ‘moment’ in the adulterated mixture of his life—whether ‘moment’ means the actual minutes taken up with spotting the canvas or the entire duration of a lucid drama conducted in sign language. The act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence. The new painting has broken down every distinction between art and life. It follows that anything is relevant to it. Anything that has to do with action—psychology, philosophy, history, mythology, hero worship.2 Anything but art criticism. The painter gets away from art through his act of painting; the critic can’t get away from it. The critic who goes on judging in terms of schools, styles, form—as if the painter were still concerned with producing a certain kind of object (the work of art), instead of living on the canvas— is bound to seem a stranger.
Some painters take advantage of this stranger. Having insisted that their painting is an act, they then claim admiration for the act as art. This turns the act back toward the aesthetic in a petty circle. If the picture is an act, it cannot be justified as an act of genius, “With regard to the tensions it is capable of setting up in our bodies the medium of any art is an extension of the physical world; a stroke of pigment, for example, ‘works’ within us in the same way as a bridge across the Hudson. For the unseen universe that inhabits us an accidental blot or splash of paint may thus assume an equivalence to the profoundest happening….
“If the ultimate subject matter of all art is the artist’s psychic state or tension (and this may be the case even in non-individualistic epochs), that state may be represented either through the image of a thing or through an abstract sign. The innovation of Action Painting was to dispense with the representation of the state in favour of enacting it in physical movement. The action on the canvas became its own representation. This was possible because an action, being made of both the psychic and the material, is by its nature a sign—it is the trace of a movement whose beginning and character it does not in itself ever altogether reveal (e.g., Freud’s point about love-making being mistaken in the imagination for an assault); yet the action also exists as a ‘thing’ in that it touches other things and affects them….
“In turning to action, abstract art abandons its alliance with architecture, as painting had earlier broken with music and with the novel, and offers its hand to pantomime and dance. One thinks of Rilke’s Dance the orange. The warmer landscape, fling it out of you, that the ripe one be radiant in homeland breezes! “In painting, the primary agency of physical motion (as distinct from illusionary representation of motion, as with the Futurists) is the line, conceived not as the thinnest of planes, nor as edge, contour or connective but as stroke or figure (in the sense of ‘figure skating’). In its passage on the canvas each such line can establish the actual movement of the artist’s body as an aesthetic statement. Line, from wiry calligraphy to foot-wide flaunts of the house painter’s brush, has played the leading part in the technique of Action Painting, though there are other ways besides line of releasing force on canvas.” .”Action cannot be perfected without losing its human subject and being transformed thereby into the mechanics of man-the -machine”
“Action never perfects itself; but it tends towards perfection and away from the personal. This is the best argument for dropping the term ‘Abstract Expressionism,’ with its associations of ego and personal Schmerz, as a name for the current American painting. Action Painting has to do with self- creation or self-definition or self-transcendence; but this dissociates it from self-expression, which assumes the acceptance of the ego as it is, with its wound and its magic. Action Painting is not ‘personal,’ though its subject matter is the artist’s individual possibilities.” in a field whose whole measuring apparatus has been sent to the devil. Its value must be found apart from art. Otherwise the ‘act’ gets to be ‘making a painting’ at sufficient speed to meet an exhibition date.
Art—relation of the painting to the works of the past, rightness of colour, texture, balance, etc.—comes back into painting by way of psychology. As Stevens says of poetry, ‘it is a process of the personality of the poet’. But the psychology is the psychology of creation. Not that of the so-called psychological criticism that wants to ‘read’ a painting for clues to the artist’s sexual preferences or debilities. The work, the act, translates the psychologically given into the intentional, into a ‘world’—and thus transcends it. With traditional aesthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is not psychological data but a role, the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were in a living situation. The interest lies in the kind of act taking place in the four-sided arena, a dramatic interest.
Criticism must begin by recognizing in the painting the assumptions inherent in its mode of creation. Since the painter has become an actor, the spectator has to think in a vocabulary of action: its inception, duration, direction—psychic state, concentration and relaxation of the will, passivity, alert waiting. He must become a connoisseur of the gradations between the automatic, the spontaneous, the evoked. Painting could not be reduced to that equipment which the artist needed for an activity that would be an alternative to both utility and idleness. Guided by visual and somatic memories of paintings he had seen or made—memories which he did his best to keep from intruding into his consciousness—he gesticulated upon the canvas and watched for what each novelty would declare him and his art to be. Based on the phenomenon of conversion the new movement is, with the majority of the painters, essentially a religious movement. In almost every case, however, the conversion has been experienced in secular terms. The result has been the creation of private myths. The tension of the private myth is the content of every painting of this vanguard. The act on the canvas springs from an attempt to resurrect the saving moment in his ‘story’ when the painter first felt himself released from Value—myth of past self-recognition. Or it attempts to initiate a new moment in which the painter will realize his total personality— myth of future self-recognition. Some formulate their myth verbally and connect individual works with its episodes. With others, usually deeper, the painting itself is the exclusive formulation, a Sign.
The revolution against the given, in the self and in the world, which since Hegel has provided European vanguard art with theories of a New Reality, has re-entered America in the form of personal revolts. Art as action rests on the enormous assumption that the artist accepts as real only that which he is in the process of creating. ‘Except the soul has divested itself of the love of created things . . .’ The artist works in a condition of open possibility, risking, to follow Kierkegaard, the anguish of the aesthetic, which accompanies possibility lacking in reality. To maintain the force to refrain from settling anything, he must exercise in himself a constant No. Philosophy is not popular among American painters. For most, thinking consists of the various arguments that TO PAINT is something different from, say, to write or to criticize: a mystique of the particular activity. Lacking verbal flexibility, the painters speak of what they are doing in a jargon still involved in the metaphysics of things: ‘My painting is not Art; it’s an Is.’ ‘It’s not a picture of a thing; it’s the thing itself.’ ‘It doesn’t reproduce Nature; it is Nature.’ ‘The painter doesn’t think; he knows.’ Etc, etc. ‘Art is not, not not not not . . .‘ As against this, a few reply, art today is the same as it always has been.
Language has not accustomed itself to a situation in which the act itself is the ‘object’. Along with the philosophy of TO PAINT appear bits of Vedanta and popular pantheism. In terms of American tradition, the new painters stand somewhere between Christian Science and Whitman’s ‘gangs of cosmos’. That is, between a discipline of vagueness by which one protects oneself from disturbance while keeping one’s eyes open for benefits; and the discipline of the Open Road of risk that leads to the farther side of the object and the outer spaces of the consciousness. What made Whitman’s mysticism serious was that he directed his ‘cosmic “I”’ towards a Pike’s-Peak-or-Bust of morality and politics. He wanted the ineffable in all behaviour—he wanted it to win the streets. The test of any of the new paintings is its seriousness—and the test of its seriousness is the degree to which the act on the canvas is an extension of the artist’s total effort to make over his experience. A good painting in this mode leaves no doubt concerning its reality as an action and its relaxation to a transforming process in the artist. The canvas has ‘talked back’ to the artist not to quiet him with Sibylline murmurs nor to stun him with Dionysian outcries but to provoke him into a dramatic dialogue. Each stroke had to be a decision and was answered by a new question. By its very nature, action painting is painting in the medium of difficulties.
“As other art movements of our time have extracted from painting the element of structure or the element of tone and elevated it into their essence, Action Painting has extracted the element of decision inherent in all art in that the work is not finished at its beginning but has to be carried forward by an accumulation of ‘right’ gestures. In a word, Action Painting is the abstraction of the moral element in art; its mark is moral tension in detachment from moral or aesthetic uncertainties; and it judges itself morally in declaring that picture to be worthless which is not the incorporation of a genuine struggle, one which could at any point have been oust.” Unhappily for an art whose value depends on the authenticity of its mysteries, the new movement appeared at the same moment that Modern Art en masse ‘arrived’ in America: Modern architecture, not only for sophisticated homes, but for corporations, municipalities, synagogues; Modern furniture and crockery in mail-order catalogues; Modern vacuum cleaners, can openers; beer-ad ‘mobiles’—along with reproductions and articles on advanced painting in big-circulation magazines. Enigmas for everybody. Art in America today is not only nouveau, it’s news.
The new painting came into being fastened to Modern Art and without intellectual allies— in literature everything had found its niche. From this liaison it has derived certain superstitions comparable to those of a wife with a famous husband. Superiorities, supremacies even, are taken for granted. It is boasted that modern painting in America is not only original but an ‘advance’ in world art (at the same time that one says ‘to hell with world art’). Everyone knows that the label Modern Art no longer has any relation to the words that compose it. To be Modern Art a work need not be either modern nor art; it need not even be a work. A three-thousand-year-old mask from the South Pacific qualifies as Modern and a piece of wood found on a beach becomes Art. When they find this out, some people grow extremely enthusiastic, even, oddly enough, proud of themselves; others become infuriated. These reactions suggest what Modern Art actually is. It is not even a Style. It has nothing to do either with the period when a thing was made nor with the intention of the maker. It is something that someone has had the social power to designate as psychologically, aesthetically or ideologically relevant to our epoch. The question of the driftwood is: Who found it?
Modern Art in America represents a revolution of taste—and serves to identify the caste conducting that revolution. Responses to Modern Art are primarily responses to claims to social leadership. For this reason Modern Art is periodically attacked as snobbish, Red, immoral, etc., by established interests in society, politics, the Church. Comedy of a revolution that restricts itself to weapons of taste—and which at the same time address itself to the masses: Modern-design fabrics in bargain basements, Modern interiors for office girls living alone, Modern milk bottles.
Modern art is educational, not with regard to art but with regard to life. You cannot explain Mondrian’s painting to people who don’t know anything about Vermeer, but you can easily explain the social importance of admiring Mondrian and forgetting about Vermeer. Through Modern Art the expanding caste of professional enlighteners of the masses— designers, architects, decorators, fashion people, exhibition directors —informs the populace that a supreme Value has emerged in our Time, the Value of the NEW, and that there are persons and things that embody that Value. This Value is a completely fluid one. As we have seen, Modern Art does not have to be actually new; it only has to be new to somebody—to the last lady who found out about the driftwood—and to win neophytes is the chief interest of the caste. Since the only thing that counts for Modern Art is that a work shall be NEW, and since the question of its newness is determined not by analysis but by social power and pedagogy, the vanguard painter functions in a milieu utterly indifferent to the content of his work.
Unlike the art of nineteenth-century America, advanced paintings today are not bought by the middle class. Nor are they by the populace. Considering the degree to which it is publicized and fêted, vanguard painting is hardly bought at all. It is used in its totality as material for educational and profit-making enterprises: colour, reproductions, design adaptations, human-interest stories. Despite the fact that more people see and hear about works of art than ever before, the vanguard artist has an audience of nobody. An interested individual here and here, but no audience. He creates in an environment not of people but of functions. His paintings are employed not wanted. The public for whose edification he is periodically trotted out accepts the choices made for it as phenomena of The Age of Queer Things. As the marquis de Sade understood, even experiments in sensation, if deliberately repeated, presuppose a morality.
Limited to the aesthetic, the taste bureaucracies of Modern Art cannot grasp the human experience involved in the new action paintings. One work is equivalent to another on the basis of resemblances of surface, and the movement as a whole a modish addition to twentieth-century picture making. Examples in every style are packed side by side in annuals and travelling shows and in the heads of newspaper reviewers like canned meats in a chain store—all standard brands. In our form of society, audience and understanding for advanced painting have been produced, both here and abroad, first of all by the tiny circle of poets, musicians, theoreticians, men of letters, who have sensed in their own work the presence of the new creative principle.
Nefertiti was queen alongside Pharaoh Akhenaten from 1353 to 1336 B.C.
Our second exhibit from Western art is the bust of Nefertiti. How familiar it is, and yet how strange. Nefertiti is the opposite of the Venus of Willendorf. She is the triumph of Apollonian image over the humpieness and horror of mother earth. Everything fat, slack, and sleepy is gone. The Western eye is open and alert. It has forced objects into their frozen frame. But the liberation of the eye has its price. Taut, still, and truncated, Nefertiti is Western ego under glass. The radiant glamour of this supreme sexual persona comes to us from a palace-prison, the overdeveloped brain. Western culture, moving up toward Apollonian sunlight, discards one burden only to stagger under another.
The bust, found by a German expedition at Amarna in 1912, dates from the reign of Akhenaten (1353–36 B.C.). Queen Nefertiti, wife of the pharaoh, wears a wig-crown peculiar to the eighteenth dynasty and seen elsewhere only on Akhenaten’s formidable mother, Queen Tiy. The bust is painted limestone with plaster additions; the eye is inset rock crystal. The ears and uraeus, the royal serpent on the brow, are broken. Scholars have debated whether the piece is a studio model for court artists.
The Nefertiti bust is one of the most popular artworks in the world. It is printed on scarves and moulded in necklace pendants and coffee-table miniatures. But never in my experience is the bust exactly reproduced. The copyist softens it, feminises and humanises it. The actual bust is intolerably severe. It is too uncanny an object for domestic display. Even art books lie. The bust is usually posed in profile or at an angle, so that the missing left pupil is hidden or shadowed. What happened to the eye? Perhaps it was unnecessary in a model and never inserted. But the eye was often chiselled out of statues and paintings of the dead. It was a way of making a hated rival a nonperson and extinguishing his or her survival in the afterlife. Akhenaten’s reign was divisive. His creation of a new capital and efforts to crush the powerful priesthood, his establishment of monotheism and innovations in artistic style were nullified under his son or son-in-law, Tutankhamen, the short-lived boy-king. Nefertiti may have lost her eye in the wreck of the eighteenth dynasty.
As we have it, the bust of Nefertiti is artistically and ritualistically complete, exalted, harsh, and alien. It fuses the naturalism of the Amarna period with the hieratic formalism of Egyptian tradition. But Amarna expressiveness ends in the grotesque. This is the least consoling of great artworks. It’s popularity is based on misunderstanding and suppression of its unique features. The proper response to the Nefertiti Bust is fear. The queen is an android, a manufactured being. She is a new gorgoneion (a representation of a gorgon’s head), a “bodiless head of fright.” She is paralysed and paralysing. Like the enthroned pharaoh Chephren, Nefertiti is suave, urbane. She gazes toward the far distance, seeing what is best for her people. But her eyes, with their catlike rim of kohl, are cold. She is self-divinised authority. Art shows Akhenaten half-feminine, his limbs shrunken and belly bulging, possibly from birth defect or disease. This portrait shows his queen half-masculine, a vampire of political will. Her seductive force both lures in and warns away. She is Western personality barricaded behind its aching, icy line of Apollonian identity.
Nefertiti’s head is so massive it threatens to snap the neck like a stalk. She is like a papyrus blossom swaying on its river reed. The head is swollen to the point of deformity. She seems futuristic, with the enlarged cerebrum foreseen as the destiny of our species. The crown is filled like a funnel with a rain of hierarchic energy, flooding the fragile brain-pan and violently pushing the face forward like the prow of a ship.
Nefertiti is like the Winged Victory of Samothrace, garments plastered back by the wind of history. As cargo, Nefertiti carries her own excess of thought. She is weighed down by Apollonian wakefulness, a sun that never sets. Egypt invented the pillar, which Greece would refine. With her slim aristocratic neck, Nefertiti is a pillar, a caryatid. She bears the burden of state upon her head, rafters of the temple of the sun. The golden brow-band is a ritual bridle, squeezing, constricting, limiting. Nefertiti presides from the temenos of power, a sacred precinct she can never leave.
Nike of Samothrace (winged Victory), Lartos marble (ship), Parian marble (figure), c. 190 B.C.E., 3.28 meters high (Louvre, Paris)
Venus of Willendorf is all body, Nefertiti all head. Her shoulders have been cut away by radical surgery. Early in its history, Egypt invented the bust, a portrait style still in use. It may have been a robust double, the ka that enters and exits through false doors. The shoulders of the Nefertiti bust have shrivelled to become their own pedestal. No physical force remains. The queen’s body is bound and invisible, like a mummy. Her face gleams with the newness of rebirth. Tense with self-creation, she is a goddess as mother-father. The pregnancy of Venus of Willendorf is displaced upward and redefined. Willendorf is chthonian belly-magic, Nefertiti Apollonian head-magic. Thinking makes it so. Nefertiti is a royal highness, propelling herself like a jet into sky-cult.
25,000 to 30,000-year-old female figurine 10.6 cms high; 5.7 cms wide; 4.5 cms thick, the so-called Venus of Willendorf was discovered in an Austrian village in 1908. It is an example of a piece of art from the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age) . Its exaggerated proportions, with outsized breasts, stomach, and thighs, easily invite interpretations involving fertility and sex, but the figurine’s actual connotations and function remain assumed.
Forward thrust. Nefertiti leads with her chin. She has “great bones.” She is Egyptian stone architecture, just as Venus of Willendorf is earthen ovals, woman as quivering poached egg. Nefertiti is femaleness made mathematical, femaleness sublimised by becoming harder and more concrete.
Egypt’s false doors—gateways bridging the living and deceased worlds.
I said Egypt invented elegance, which is reduction, simplification, condensation. Mother nature is addition and multiplication, but Nefertiti is subtraction. Visually, she has been reduced to her essence. Her sleek contoured face is one step from the wizened. She is abbreviation, a symbol or pictogram, a pure idea of pagan pictorialism. One can never be too rich or too thin, decreed the Duchess of Windsor. I said the idea of beauty is based on enormous exclusions. So much is excluded from the Nefertiti bust that we can feel its silhouette straining against the charged atmosphere, a combat of Apollonian line. The name Nefertiti means “The Beautiful One Cometh.” Her haughty face is carved out of the chaos of nature. Beauty is a state of war, a frigid blank zone under siege.
“Nefertiti is ritualised Western personality, a streamlined thing. She is forbiddingly clean. Her eyebrows are shaved and redrawn with male width and frown. She is as depilated as a priest. She has the face of a mannequin, static, posed, self-proffering. Her knowingness is both fashionable and hieratic. The modern mannequin of window or runway is an androgyne, because she is femaleness impersonalized by masculine abstraction. If a studio model, the Nefertiti bust is as much a mannequin as the royal dummy of a London tailor shop. As queen and mannequin, Nefertiti is both exposed and enclosed, a face and a mask. She is naked yet armoured, experienced yet ritually pure. She is sexually unapproachable because bodiless: her torso is gone; her full lips invite but remain firmly pressed together. Her perfection is for display, not for use. Akhenaten and his queen would greet their court from a balcony, the “window of appearance.” All art is a window of appearance. Nefertiti’s face is the Sun of consciousness rising over a new horizon, the frame or mathematical grid of man’s victory over nature. The idolatrous thingness of Western art is a theft of authority from mother nature. Nefertiti’s mismatched eyes, deliberate or accidental, are a symbol of Egyptian duality. Like the cat, she sees in and sees out. She is frozen Apollonian poseur and Gorgonesque daemonic seer. The Greek Graiai, three old divine sisters, had one eye that they passed from hand to hand. Fontenrose connects this to the double pupil of a Lydian queen: “What she had, it seems to me, was a removable eye of wondrous power. It was an eye that could penetrate the invisible. Nefertiti, the half-blind mannequin, sees more by being less. Mutilation is mystic expansion. Modern copyists suppress the missing eye because it is fatal to popular canons of beauty. Maimed eyes seem mad or spectral, as in the veiled vulture’s eye of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Nefertiti is a mutant and visionary materialist, a thing that sees. In Egypt, matter is made numinous by the first electricity of mind. In the Egyptian cult of seeing, Nefertiti is thought in flight from its origins.”
From Venus of Willendorf to Nefertiti: from body to face, touch to sight, love to judgment, nature to society. Nefertiti is like Athena born from the brow of Zeus, a head-heavy armoured goddess. She is beautiful but de-sexed. She is hieratic decorum and reserve, her head literally a reservoir of containment and curtailment, like her stunted torso. Her ponderous, ostentatious crown is the cold breeding ground of Greek categorical thought. Her tight brow-band is stringency, rigor, channelled ideas. The miasmic cloud of mother nature has lifted. Nefertiti’s imperious jutting face is the cutting edge of Western conceptualisation and projection. In her profile, all roads lead to the eye. From the side, diagonals converge in peaking vectors of force. From the front, she rears up like a cobra head, woman as royal intimidator. She is the eye-intense West, the over-enlargement and grandiosity of head culture. The bust of Nefertiti is eye-pleasing but oppressive. It looks forward to Bellini’s androgynous Doge Loredan, to Neapolitan silver reliquary busts, to 1950s fantasy drawings of smiling armless women in chic evening gowns. Authority, good will, aloofness, asceticism. Epiphany as a totem of vibrating passivity. With her welcoming but uncanny smile, Nefertiti is Western personality in its ritual bonds. Exquisite and artificial, she is mind-made image forever caught in radiant Apollonian freeze-frame.
Ideas about good and bad painting are often uncertain because of a tendency to confuse representation with copying. While people praise and admire lifelike portraiture and landscape painting, they also suppose that artists should not merely copy what they see but add an element of personal ‘interpretation’. It is in this ‘interpretation’ that many people think the art lies and which raises it above simple copying. This is partly why they often wonder whether photography, which merely reproduces what is ‘there’ by causal means, can really be an art.
Yet whether photography is an art or not, it does not produce copies of the appearance of things. We never see in sepia or monochrome. When I look at a black and white photograph of a group of people one of whom has red hair, that person is represented in the picture, but not by a copy of her appearance. Even in a full-colour photograph, the redness of her hair can be enhanced by filter, exposure or lighting. Besides, every photograph has an angle from which it is taken. Since there is no neutral position that we can think of as the ‘true’ angle from which a person or an object has to be seen, the angle is the choice of the photographer. ‘Copying’ suggests passivity, but perfect passivity in photography is impossible. It is this fact and other similar facts upon which the art of the photographer is built.
The same is true of painting. We are inclined to think of representation as copying partly because the dominant convention in painting has long been to represent via strict resemblance. But this need not be so. Figures in ancient Egyptian art often appear peculiar and somewhat primitive to us, as though the artists were incapable of better. Part of the reason for this, however, is a different convention in representation. Ancient Egyptian art operated with the principle that each part of the human anatomy should be represented from the angle at which it is best seen. Thus, while the face was depicted in profile, the torso was depicted from the front, and legs and feet from the side. Taken as a whole the end result was a body unlike any that has ever been seen. But it would be a mistake to conclude that there was some failure of representation. There was merely a different convention of representation. Ours may seem to us more ‘natural’, as perhaps it is, but its naturalness should not deceive us into thinking that it is more representational.
Foreshortening, perspective, the use of light and shade, which contribute so significantly to representation in Western art, were all important discoveries that greatly increased the power of the painter. But the power they give to the painter is not to reproduce what is ‘there’ but to create a convincing impression that we are seeing the thing represented. The consequence is that even the most lifelike representations cannot be thought of as mere copies. Their creators follow conventions determining how things are to be represented and employ techniques which oblige us to look at things in certain ways. John Constable (1776–1837), that most ‘natural’ of painters, The Haywain is one of the best-known and best-loved pictures in existence, uses blues and greens that are never actually found in sky or foliage. In Gimcrack, George Stubbs (1724–1806) represents the speed of a racing horse very effectively, but movie stills reveal that horses do not actually gallop that way. (All the paintings referred to in this chapter can be found in E. H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (1995). Any depiction of nature that tries just to copy must fail, partly because every ‘copy’ of nature must involve seeing selectively, and partly because the work must reflect the representational resources available to the painter.
Gimcrack on Newmarket Heath, with a Trainer, a Stable-Lad, and a Jockey’ by George Stubbs
The divorce between representation and copying is complete when we turn to a popular area of visual art – cartoons. No mouse ever looked like Mickey Mouse and no ancient Gaul ever looked like Asterix, yet it is obvious even to small children what they are. Many famous woodcuts, drawings and engravings could be cited to sustain the same point. It is simply a mistake to think of representation in the visual arts as a simple attempt to ‘copy’ what is ‘seen’.
Representation and artistic value
‘Resembling’, ‘copying’ and ‘representing’ are easily confused, but they are quite different. Cartoons can represent without resembling, and pictures can resemble the things they represent without being copies of them. Under the influence of naive representationalism people sometimes complain that the faces and figures in so-called ‘modern’ art do not look anything like the real thing. This is probably not a complaint peculiar to the modern period. It seems likely that those brought up on the highly realistic pictures of Dürer (1471–1528) and Holbein (1497/8–1543) thought something of the same about the rather more extravagant paintings by El Greco (1541– 1614). But the important point is that if representation and resemblance are different, the visual arts can abandon resemblance without ceasing to representational. Might they then go further, and abandon representation without ceasing to be art?
This year is the 400th anniversary of El Greco’s death but his works can feel shockingly modern. Jason Farago examines how his works influenced Manet, Cézanne, Picasso and Pollock by Jason Farago 26th August 2014
One reason for thinking so is the fact that some outstanding artists whose skill at representation is unquestionable have abandoned strictly representational painting. In The Story of Art Gombrich invites us to compare Picasso’s A Hen with Chickens with his slightly earlier picture A Cockerel. The first of these is a charming illustration for Buffon’s Natural History, the second a rather grotesque caricature. Gombrich makes the point that the first of these pictures amply demonstrates Picasso’s ability to make lifelike representations. Consequently, when we note that the second drawing looks ‘nothing like’ a cockerel, instead of dismissing it we should ask what Picasso is trying to do with it. According to Gombrich, ‘Picasso was not content with giving a mere rendering of the bird’s appearance. He wanted to bring out its aggressiveness, its cheek and its stupidity’ (Gombrich 1987: 9).
Mother Hen, from Picasso: Original Etchings for the Texts of Buffon 1936
L. S. Lowry (1887–1976) is another artist illustrative of the same point. In his most famous pictures people are generally drawn with a childish simplicity, ‘stick’ figures in fact, but his early drawings of male nudes show that this manner of depiction was a matter of choice, and we will only appreciate the pictures properly if we look into the reason for that choice.
Gombrich’s interpretation of the Picasso cartoon brings out an important distinction that representationalism tends to overlook. There is a difference between representing something and giving a rendering of something’s appearance. Those who favour representational art usually mean to favour painting that gives a good rendering of the appearance of things. As we have seen, ‘giving a good rendering’ is not a matter of ‘copying’ the appearance of things but creating something that resembles and thereby gives the viewer a convincing impression of having seen the object. Now what the example of Picasso’s cockerel shows is that the creation of a resemblance is only one purpose for representation. The cartoon does not look like a bird we might see, but it is still representational. What it represents is not the bird’s appearance, but its character. This shows that representation can serve purposes other than creating a resemblance, and in turn this opens up the possibility that these other purposes can be served by means other than representation.
Consider some further examples of representation. Almost all the painting from the European Middle Ages is religious in inspiration and purpose. The aim of much of it was to provide the illiterate faithful with instruction in Bible stories, Christian doctrine and the history of the Church, especially the history of its saints and martyrs. It did not aim at mere instruction, however, since it sought also to be inspirational, to prompt in those who looked at it an attitude of mind that would be receptive of divine grace. One interesting example of this is Dürer’s engraving The Nativity (Dürer is a particularly good choice here because his pictures give such obviously excellent ‘renderings of the appearance of things’). The engraving shows a dilapidated farmyard in which Joseph, depicted as an elderly peasant, is drawing water at the well, while in the front left-hand corner Mary bends over the infant Jesus. Much less prominently portrayed (looking through a rear doorway in fact) is a kneeling shepherd, accompanied by ox and ass. In the very distant sky there is a single angel.
The difference in scale of these traditional nativity figures, relative to the house and farm buildings, is striking. But it is also a little misleading; the picture is not any the less a nativity scene than those in which shepherds and angels are more prominent. What Dürer has done, by a magnificently detailed representation of a common Northern European farmhouse, is to convey very immediately the compel- ling atmosphere of Holy Night with the purpose, we may suppose, of inducing a deeper sense of the mystery of the incarnation in the sort of people for whom the picture was intended.
Compare Dürer’s engraving with No. 1 by Jackson Pollock (1912–56). This painting is a result of Pollock’s celebrated ‘technique’, later known as ‘action painting’, in which the canvas is placed on the floor and commercial enamels and metallic paints are dripped and splashed on it spontaneously. The outcome is an interesting and unusual pattern which the advocates of action painting thought revealed something of the artist’s unconscious. But whether it does or not, the painting itself does not resemble anything.
Jackson Pollock No.1 1949
At first sight, these two paintings could hardly be more different. Pollock’s was intentionally the product of spontaneity and made with some speed, Dürer’s the result of hours of painstaking work. Dürer’s is representational to an unusually high degree, Pollock’s wholly non-representational. Yet despite these striking differences, it is not implausible to say that both works share something of the same purpose. Pollock’s No. 1 is an example of ‘abstract expressionism’, and much of the painting that falls under this label was influenced by Eastern mysticism. Both the spontaneity of production and the random patterns it brings about were thought valuable because they shake ordered preconceptions. We are forced to see visual chaos rather than visual pattern and thus to see the uncertain, even unreal, nature of the world of appearance. Using the visual to create impressions of unreality is similar to the way in which some versions of Buddhism try to shake our preconceptions as a means of spiritual enlightenment. The paintings of abstract expressionism might be thought of as visual equivalents of Zen koans, the questions which the novice is made to contemplate, such as ‘What is the sound of one hand clapping?’ Interpreted in this way, both Dürer’s and Pollock’s paintings, despite their striking differences, share the same purpose – to make people aware of spiritual realities behind everyday experience. It is not crucially important here whether the spiritual purpose so described fits either case. These two pictures illustrate the point that, in intention at any rate, representational and non-representational styles of painting, despite their radical differences, are both means that can be employed to the same artistic purpose.
What this shows is that we should not think of representation as the sole or even chief end of visual art, but only as one, admittedly very prominent, means. To see this is to reject representation as the criterion by which visual art is to be judged, since a means is only as valuable as the end it serves. It remains the case, of course, that representation is the stock in trade of visual artists, and nothing in the foregoing argument involves denying this. Even the Surrealists, a school of which Salvador Dali (1904–89) is perhaps the best-known member, who rejected the idea of ‘renderings of the appearance of things’ still made extensive use of representation. One of its greatest exponents, Rene Magritte (1898–1967), is a brilliant representational artist, but the things he represents are fantasies that could not possibly be how actual things appear.
paintings by Rene Magritte
We should infer from this, not that most painting is visual representation, but that representation is a highly valuable technique in visual art. Importantly, it is not the only one; there are other techniques to be explored. But to understand the value of visual art, we must go beyond both representation and these other techniques, and seek the ultimate purpose they serve. This brings us back to our central question. What is the most valuable end that art can serve? Preceding chapters concluded that neither pleasure, nor beauty nor the expression of emotion can adequately fill this role. The answer aesthetic cognitivism gives is, ‘Enriching human understanding.’ Can painting do this and, if so, how?
We nipped over to Tate Britain over the weekend to check out the Late Turner exhibition, which is more than worth the trip if you have time. His use of colour and light is quite extraordinary, and it’s incredible to think that he was painting his stunning, almost abstract canvases in the 1840s, a good sixty years before Monet started doing the same.
But, what really caught our eye was the separate show, upstairs in the Clore Gallery, of colour experiments by Olafur Eliasson, based on J.M.W. Turner’s work.
The colour experiments are part of an ongoing series of oil paintings by Eliasson, working with a chemist to mix paint colours for each nanometre of light in the visible spectrum. The seven on show at the Tate are direct responses to seven of Turner’s paintings, some of which are on in the Late Turner show, including The Burning of the House of Lords and Commons:
Over on the Tate site, Eliasson has this to say about them:
‘For each of his paintings, I bring the colours and light into a schematic system which is then transferred to a round canvas without a centre. This shape generates a feeling of endlessness and allows the viewer to take in the artwork in a decentralised, meandering way. The fading colours in each sequence deter the viewer’s eye from resting on a single line or spot. Instead, the eye must negotiate its way around the work, which creates a sense of personal narrative.’
Eliasson’s canvases are truly beautiful – unfortunately there’s not much indication of how they are produced, just that they’re oil on canvas. Though this studio shot over on Eliasson’s Facebook page is rather lovely:
Jennifer Wen Ma (b. 1973) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice includes installation, drawing, video, public art, design, performance, and theatre. She frequently creates site-specific works that respond to the institutional or community contexts in which they are viewed. Born in Beijing, China, she immigrated to the U.S. in 1986. She has exhibited worldwide and was a member of the creative team for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Opening and Closing Ceremonies.
foward essay by Cynthia Freeland
I must mention a caveat about drawing on re- sources of colour science and psychology to understand expression in art. Colour science attempts to give universal explanations of how vision works, based on studies of human color vision. But people vary, and cultural factors also affect emotional responses to colours. Results of studies of colour in relation to cultural influences are inconclusive (Hardin 1988; Whitfield and Wiltshire, 1990). Let me supply a brief, but I hope interesting, example of an artwork from China for purposes of illustration.
In July 2013 the Chinese American artist Jennifer Wen Ma collaborated with computer expert Zheng Jianwei on a light installation project in Beijing titled Nature and Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube. The skin of the enormous Water Cube, an aquatic centre built for the 2008 Olympics, was illuminated by an LED display directed by a computer program. The cube displayed varying colours in diverse patterns, brightness, and rhythms to reflect the results of a daily analysis of emotional states. This in turn was generated from two factors: (1) readings and daily summaries from the I Ching (the “Nature” part of the work), and (2) analyses of the emotional expressions (the “Man” part) of participants on the Chinese social media website Weibo (a Twitter equivalent). Wen Ma commented, “We hope that the daily expressions of the Water Cube will convey the current mental state of the Chinese people, as well as reflect upon the traditional view that China holds of the world” (quoted in Zhao 2013).
Man in Rhapsody of Light at the Water Cube. Visual media experience here
One fundamental background colour was used in each daily display, based upon a selection from among the eight natural elements of the I Ching, interpreted by a relevant expert. Then other display factors were calculated based on analysis of 75 different emoticons gleaned from Weibo. The speed of changes on the display was coordinated with overall moods; sadness was linked to slow movements and happiness to fast ones, and so on. The result was an animated surface on the exterior “skin” of the Water Cube.
Obviously, colour is not the sole expressive element of this installation, but it is one element, and an important one. Some of the colour links chosen to coordinate with the I Ching elements would seem natural to Westerners: the Fire theme was red and the Water theme blue. However, other colour choices seem odd, perhaps because for many non-Chinese people there simply are no relevant associations at work. Thus, the Earth theme was yellow, the Thunder theme involved certain greens, and Heaven was signalled by a sort of pinky-purple-beige colour. My point in mentioning this example is to highlight the fact that cultural factors can affect viewers’ emotional responses to colour in abstract works of art. Even though Western viewers could no doubt appreciate much about the design and appearance of Rhapsody of Light, many probably lack the traditional Chinese cultural associations with the I Ching that would enrich responses to the piece.
My discussion of Jennifer Wen Ma’s work has introduced an example of light installation art. I now turn to a more detailed consideration of how colour functions expressively in other such installation works by James Turrell and Olafur Eliasson. Here, colour no longer involves pigments, since the medium is light itself.26 This changes the terms of the analysis. We must move beyond talk of how painters use pigments to questions about the nature of light and visual perceptions. Typically Turrell and Eliasson do not employ coloured light to represent anything. They do see themselves, however, as continuing and expanding the lengthy tradition of artistic explorations of colour in painting. They also each use coloured light in ways that are emotionally expressive, as I will illustrate; but the explanation of how will prove to be complex.
As it turns out, each man has commented explicitly on the fact that they found inspiration in a painter’s work. Turrell explains that his work was stimulated by the example of how Monet worked with pigment in the well-known serial paintings he did of Rouen Cathedral and of haystacks in different seasons and times of day. Turrell remarks: Monet started painting the cathedrals [of Rouen]. You see the light and the light aspect on things, but with the haystack paintings he begins to take out the haystack. You forget the haystack but not the light, and this was interesting to me. . . . The Impressionists really did this in a manner so that you’re really just looking at light, and that’s the depiction of light in painting.
I guess I was very American about it-like space is colour going to the moon as opposed to exploring how you are in space already, here-I didn’t understand why we didn’t just use light instead of painting light. Turrell managed to create “objects” made of light in some of his early Projection Works of the 1960s and 1970s. These involved bright light projections in a corner of a room otherwise illuminated with a deep colour light. They induce belief in the viewer that there is a solid shape hovering in that corner in the form of a cube or pyramid. Like Turrell, Eliasson has also cited the influence of an earlier artist, in his case Turner, who was devoted to the study of light and colour. In 2014 Eliasson created seven unusual new works, the Turner Colour Experiment Paintings, as both commentary and counterpoint to a major Turner exhibit at the Tate Modern in London. Eliasson commented: For Turner, colour was never an autonomous phenomenon or an aesthetic end in itself-he used it to create ephemeral effects and to leave traditional depiction behind. The paintings are almost abstractions, and I remember my reaction when I first encountered Turner in an art history book as a child: I thought, “Wow, what is such an abstract painting doing here before all these more conventional, realistic paintings?” (Eliasson, quoted in Almino 2015)
Turner colour experiments by Olafur Eliasson
The Colour Experiment Paintings are large, disk- shaped works, each digitally generated after detailed analysis of the colours in specific paintings by Turner. Eliasson said he was fascinated by Turner because of his “distinct emotional ability to shape and frame light.” He made the paintings in a disk format because “the circular shape . . . generates a feeling of endlessness and allows viewers to take in the artworks in a decentralised, meandering way” (quoted in Almino 2015). But the circles of these paintings are surely also a nod to the tradition of the colour wheel. Eliasson has devoted considerable attention to studying colours, with the aim of identifying the exact colours of “each nanometer” of the visible spectrum (quoted in Alderson 2015). After his team had identified up to 60 distinct colours in the Turner paintings’ palettes, they distributed them on the disks’ surfaces to represent those colors in proportion to the way they were shown on the original canvases. For example, Colour Experiment No. 57 was based on Turner’s Burning of the House of Lords and Commons, 1837.
Coloured light functions in complex ways in the two light artists’ works. Turrell explores subtle gradations among colors in light, using a strategy that places viewers into contained spaces. He asks us to slow down, observe, and respond to a mea- sured sequence of changes in the light. Perhaps the best examples of this are Turrell’s skyspaces. These are buildings or earth structures, often in a pyramid or mound shape, that include openings to the sky. In the interior space, colours modulate in complex ways linked to environmental factors including seasons and times of sunrise and sunset. I will discuss two of these spaces in Houston, One Accord, at the Live Oak Friends Quaker Meet- ing House (2000) and Twilight Epiphany (2012) at Rice University. The venues are, of course, different: the first is part of an active religious institution, whereas the second is an art installation on a university campus.
Despite this difference in mission, the visual aspects of the two Houston structures work similarly. A viewer who visits near dawn or dusk will wit- ness changing light effects in relation to the sun’s movements. After people are assembled, an open- ing in the roof structure is drawn back to reveal the sky. These openings are different in construction: at the Meeting House there is an aperture in the slightly sloping roof over the interior; at Rice University, a doorway opens and closes inside a knife- edged canopy standing over the structure. Interior lighting creates illuminations in the structure that shine around the opening or reflect on the ceiling in ways that frame experience of the sky.
At the Rice skyspace rows of LED bulbs change colour across the spectrum to illuminate the white canopy overhead. These colours change gradually as the light outdoors changes. The colour of the sky takes on a wide range of new hues. It may appear to be light blue, for instance, against a darker blue projected onto the ceiling, and then shift to a much deeper shade when the interior colour modulates to pale peach. The experience is fascinating, but can also be somewhat unsettling. One’s perception of the physicality of the opening above changes as things progress. Near the end of the light show, the sky became so black above that I was concerned a thunderstorm was imminent. But the black turned out to be the roof screen slowly closing: I had mistaken the black roof covering for part of the now-dark sky.
James Turrell’s Skyspace lit up on the campus at Rice University on Wednesday, Feb. 23, 2022 in Houston, as it celebrates its10th anniversary.
The Quaker Meeting House and the Rice University installation, like other Turrell skyspaces, take time to experience. Surprisingly in this age of Instagram and Snapchat, when I visited at Rice, even the younger people at the Twilight Epiphany were rapt and attentive. Of course, the Quaker Meeting House presupposes a lengthy tradition of patient waiting at religious gatherings. As a Quaker himself, Turrell is familiar with the spiritual construal of light in that tradition. He explains as follows:
Well, the Quakers talk about the light inside. In fact, the light inside everyone. . . . Even with the eyes closed, we have vision, as in a dream. My grandmother believed the purpose of meditation or contemplation was to wait upon the Lord and meet up with the light inside. The temple is within. (Quoted in Govan and Kim 2013). Another example of a Turrell work was his 2013 Guggenheim exhibit Aten Reign, in which he provoked new experiences of a space very familiar to museum goers, the large Guggenheim central rotunda. He illuminated this space with a series of conical structures including LED displays to create luminous oval rings of homogenous colour in the space overhead, which included at the top an eye-like central disk or opening. Visitors responded at times simply by lying on the floor to watch the show above, “patiently staring up like it’s some sort of celestial event” (Ferro 2013). This was actually appropriate, given that the work was named after the ancient Egyptian god worshiped in association with the disk of the sun.
A similar response occurred in viewer reactions to what is probably Eliasson’s best-known work, The Weather Project in the Great Turbine Hall of Tate Modern in London (2003). This was an extraordinarily successful installation in the Great Turbine Hall. It was so popular attracting six million visitors that it had to be extended. Like Turrell, Eliasson makes expressive use of particular colours and colour combinations. Even though in many of his other works Eliasson has created a whole rainbow of colours using prisms and lenses, in The Weather Project he narrowed the palette to tones of yellow, gold, and orange.29 These are colours with strong connotations of the sun and summer.
In The Weather Project, a large central disk was hung high in the space, composed of hundreds of lights that emitted yellow rays, creating a virtual sun. Visitors enjoyed basking in this golden light to the point of lying under it and “sunbathing,” despite the absence of any actual physical warmth.30 The links between the bright yellow light and familiar summer weather were heightened by mist pumped into the hall. Mirrors added to the cocoon-like feeling by enabling people to watch themselves and others responding to the space. Eliasson has said, “I am generally not as interested in what an artwork depicts as in what it produces, its performative aspect, the way it induces you to act and behave in space” (quoted in Gilbert 2004). The work seemed to succeed in these aims at least, judging from testimony of the Telegraph’s critic Richard Dorment (2003). He noted that The Weather Project was crucially comprised by its participants: although people were reduced into identical faceless silhouettes by the blazing light, their behaviour indicated a common humanity. Eliasson, like Turrell, aims at enhancing our awareness of sensory access to the world. He encourages viewers to consider how perception works to become aware of “seeing yourself seeing” or “seeing yourself sensing. “31 In Eliasson’s Your Blind Passenger (2011) people were invited to traverse a 295-foot tunnel filled with a dense mist.
The tunnel of Your Blind Passenger was lit by white light that varied in tone from yellows to bright white to different shades of blue, replicating illumination effects of daylight. People walking through the tunnel took tentative steps due to the limited visibility. Their skin colour altered as the coloured light changed, and if they moved further ahead they became indistinct silhouettes that dissolved into the fog.32 Eliasson commented that although people felt lost at first, they quickly became reoriented through shifting to the use of other sensory modalities (2017). This installation stimulated participants to engage in something like a Cartesian project: an introspective search for self and certainty. We could also draw comparisons with Hume and his complaint that when he looks for himself, he finds nothing there.
arousing and expressing emotions in works of light art
We cannot easily account for the power of light installation works by borrowing from color science, in the way I tried to sketch above for Rothko. First, these artists employ light rather than pigment. And, second, the colours in the installations tend to shift-there is no single pair or defined combination of colours at work, as in a Rothko canvas. Perhaps some implications from research studies of people’s preferences of colour combinations might still be relevant. But there are alternative sources to draw on. Research has been conducted in a variety of fields, ranging from biology and psychology to ergonomics and architecture, concerning the effects of light on human bodies, moods, memory, and performance. The colours of light (including both brightness and wave length) affect our bodies, brains, and emotions in many ways, altering heart rate, blood pressure, melatonin levels, sleep cycles, and circadian rhythms (Stone 1999). This research has filtered out into the media of popular science and psychology. In northern climates, people know about the role of full spectrum lights in combating so-called SAD (seasonal affective disorder; Kuller et al. 2007). There is much accumulated expertise about the role of types and colors of light in helping to define space, shape mood, and elicit varied viewer reactions.
This scientific research helps explain some aspects of the emotional force of works by Eliasson and Turrell. One way they move viewers is just be- cause the light in the works affects people directly. This is what Robinson in Deeper than Reason calls arousing emotions. She describes how this differs from, but can be related to, expressing emotions by using examples from music. Music can stir us psychologically: it can calm or excite us, make us feel happy or melancholy. Such experience involves numerous physiological changes. All this is similar to how the light of installation artists’ works can affect people. Coloured environments (especially red and blue ones) affect us physically, altering alertness, brain activity, blood pressure, respiration rates, and more. In addition, Turrell uses his extensive knowledge of perceptual psychology to construct works that affect our vision directly. The colour shifts in Aten Reign, for example, trigger automatic switches between photopic and scotopic vision (between use of cones and rods in our eyes; Ferro 2013). Eliasson’s Your Blind Passenger disorients people within a world that restricts visual identification of distances and objects.
Robinson says that when moved by music, we may consider why and thus be prompted to interpret specific aspects of the music as expressive. In doing this, I might, for example, say that a song uses a minor key, slow tempo, and wailing voice to express melancholy, perhaps arousing in me a distinct emotion like nostalgia (Robinson 2005, 368-369). Light installation works may not be expressive as some music is, by conveying experiences of a persona, in the way I argued Rothko’s paintings do. But, just as expressive music employs formal musical features of a song or sonata, light art installations employ specific formal features such as location, tempo, arrangement, prescribed forms of behaviour, and so on. Like music, these are temporal artworks.
Environmental installations typically slow people down. They require attention and lingering to grasp meaning. Often these works create environments pointing to or recalling experiences of nature. People may find the experience provokes memories of a golden summer day, rainbows, the Northern lights, or a romantic twilit evening. Our responses involve recognition of distinct features we attend to. Similarly, in discussing our encounters with nature, Noel Carroll has argued that emotions are normal responses, which are not altogether subjective because they presuppose recognition of specific features of the environment. His view of emotions is similar to Robinson’s treatment of them as types of appraisals that connect bodily responses to evaluations of a situation or action. Specific objective elements of a waterfall, for example, such as its size, noise, and power, are sources of our awe and wonder. We can have similarly distinctive responses to aspects of a light installation, but, here, we are recognising features of the world that have been deliberately designed for expressive purposes. As I noted earlier, Robinson argues that art can be expressive by presenting the world as seen by someone in a particular emotion or showing what it is like for a person to see the world that way. Simplifying, an artwork provides expressive insight into how the world looks or how a person feels when viewing such a world. A nice example Robinson gives is Edvard Munch’s famous pain ing The Scream. Here we see both a character in anguish and that this character’s world is bizarre and twisted; it is a world, as Robinson puts it, “infected with the screamer’s anguish and anxiety”.
Artworks like Your Blind Passenger or Aten Reign are like the Munch painting: they show the world as experienced in a certain way: as challenging and disorienting or as mysterious and awe in- spiring. The very fact that coloured light affects our perceptual awareness can stimulate conscious reflection about the nature of perception and about how we tend to experience art and museums.36 Just as we can reflect on a musical work that arouses us, perhaps judging it to be expressive of melancholy, so too can we conclude that art installation is expressive of warmth and community, of human in- significance within the vast scope of nature, of the so-called light inside, and so on. Arousal of emotion contributes to but is not identical with recognition of the installation artist’s expressive aims.
Context is an important contributing factor (Robinson 2005, 249). The coloured lights of Turrell and Eliasson’s works are set within distinctive created environments. To experience these spaces, they must be sought out; they are wholes separated from everyday life. In Turrell’s skyspaces people must wait for the aperture to be opened; in Eliasson’s Your Blind Passenger they must enter and walk through a tunnel. There is something ceremonial or ritualistic about such a venture, which takes on the nature of a pilgrimage. This is intensified if the work is in a Quaker meeting house or has become as popular as The Weather Project. The Weather Project recalled some ancient religion of sun worship, fostering community even within the vast unfriendly space of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. In Turrell’s works people look up at the vault of the sky, again as in some prehistoric ritual, as if seek- ing the meaning behind falling stars, eclipses, or other “celestial events.
Art installations by Turrell and Eliasson sometimes challenge our confidence about seeing and knowing the world. An art installation that pre- vents our ability to see space or judge distances accurately appears to thwart our very nature. We are, after all, visual creatures as the result of a lengthy and complex evolutionary process that gave certain advantages to animals that could see and hence move more efficiently around in their environment to find mates and food and avoid predators. Nevertheless, artworks that make us ponder the nature of physical reality and of how we manage to perceive it, like Eliasson’s and Turrell’s, are valuable in themselves. Colour in these artists’ works becomes something very intriguing, mysterious, beautiful, and valuable. It arouses emotions, fulfils expressive functions, and stimulates reflection about reality and ourselves. It does all this so well that I now feel better about endorsing Goodman’s claim that I quoted earlier-about how experiences of abstract work carry over when we leave the gallery or museum into the outside world by making us look at and reflect upon things very differently. Surely this is one of the best things art can do.
Stephen Hicks is Professor of Philosophy at Rockford University in Illinois
For a long time critics of modern and postmodern art have relied on the “Isn’t that disgusting” strategy. By that I mean the strategy of pointing out that given works of art are ugly, trivial, or in bad taste, that “a five-year-old could have made them,” and so on. And they have mostly left it at that. The points have often been true, but they have also been tiresome and unconvincing—and the high-art world has been entirely unmoved. Of course, the major works of the twentieth-century art world are ugly. Of course, many are offensive. Of course, a five-year old could in many cases have made an indistinguishable product. Those points are not arguable—and they are entirely beside the main question. The important question is: Why has the high-art world of the twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries adopted the ugly and the offensive? Why has it poured its creative energies and cleverness into the trivial, the mocking, and the self-proclaimedly meaningless?
It is easy to point out the psychologically disturbed or cynical players who learn to manipulate the system to get their fifteen minutes or a nice big check from a foundation, or the hangers-on who play the game in order to get invited to the right parties. But every human field of endeavor has its hangers-on, its disturbed and cynical members, and they are never the ones who drive the scene. The question is: Why did cynicism and ugliness come to be the game you had to play to make it in the world of art? The flip-side of that question is why representational art became a non-player. Why was it dismissed by high art establishment and driven underground for much of the twentieth century? Why did cutting edge decide to abandon representation, especially representations of the positive, the healthy, the romantic, or the optimistic?
My first theme will be that the modern and postmodern art world was and is nested within a broader intellectual and cultural framework generated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Despite occasional invocations of “Art for art’s sake” and attempts to withdraw from life, art has always been significant, probing the same issues about the human condition that all forms of cultural life probe. Artists are thinking and feeling human beings, and they think and feel intensely about the same important things that all intelligent and passionate humans do. Even when some artists claim that their work has no significance or reference or meaning, those claims are always significant, referential, and meaningful claims. What counts as a significant cultural claim, however, depends on what is going on in the broader intellectual and cultural framework. The world of art is not hermetically sealed—its themes can have an internal developmental logic, but those themes are almost never generated from within the world of art.
My second theme will be that, come the latter part of the twentieth century and the death of modernism, postmodern art does not represent much of a break with modernism. Despite the variations that postmodernism represents, the postmodern art world has never challenged fundamentally the framework that modernism adopted at the end of the nineteenth century. There is more fundamental continuity between them than discontinuity. Postmodernism has simply become an increasingly narrow set of variations upon a narrow modernist set of themes. To see this, let us rehearse the main lines of development.
Modernism’s Themes
By now the main themes of modern art are clear to us. Standard histories of art tell us that modern art died around 1970, its themes and strategies exhausted, and that we now have more than four decades of postmodernism behind us.
The big break with the past occurred toward the end of the nineteenth century. Until the end of the nineteenth century, art was a vehicle of sensuousness, meaning, and passion. Its goals were the significant, originality, beauty, the sublime. The artist was a skilled master of his craft. Such masters were able to create original representations with human significance and universal appeal. Combining vision and skill, artists were exalted beings capable of creating objects that in turn had an awesome power to exalt the senses, the intellects, and the passions of those who experience them. The break with that tradition came when the first modernists of the late 1800s set themselves systematically to the project of isolating all the elements of art and eliminating them or flying in the face of them.
The causes of the break were many. The increasing naturalism of the nineteenth century led, for those who felt strongly their religious heritage, to feeling desperately alone and without guidance in a vast, empty universe. The rise of philosophical theories of skepticism and irrationalism led many to distrust their cognitive faculties of perception and reason. The development of scientific theories of evolution and entropy brought with them pessimistic accounts of human nature and the destiny of the world. The spread of liberalism and free markets caused their opponents on the political left, many of whom were members of the artistic avant garde, to see political developments as a series of deep disappointments. And the technological revolutions spurred by the combination of science and capitalism led many to project a future in which mankind would be dehumanised or destroyed by the very machines that were supposed to improve its lot.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the nineteenth-century intellectual world’s sense of disquiet had become a full-blown anxiety. The artists responded, exploring in their works the implications of a world in which reason, dignity, optimism, and beauty seemed to have disappeared. The new theme was: Art must be a quest for truth, however brutal, and not a quest for beauty. So, the question became: What is the truth of art?
The first major claim of modernism is a content claim: a demand that we recognise the truth that the world is not beautiful. The world is fractured, decaying, horrifying, depressing, empty, and ultimately unintelligible. That claim by itself is not uniquely modernist, though the number of artists who signed onto that claim is uniquely modernist. Some past artists had believed the world to be ugly and horrible—but they had used the traditional realistic forms of perspective and colour to say this. The innovation of the early modernists was to assert that form must match content. Art should not use the traditional realistic forms of perspective and colour because those forms presuppose an orderly, integrated, and knowable reality.
Edvard Munch got there first (The Scream, 1893): If the truth is that reality is a horrifying, disintegrating swirl, then both form and content should express the feeling. Pablo Picasso got there second (Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907): If the truth is that reality is fractured and empty, then both form and content must express that. Salvador Dali’s surrealist paintings go a step further: If the truth is that reality is unintelligible, then art can teach this lesson by using realistic forms against the idea that we can distinguish objective reality from irrational, subjective dreams.
The second and parallel development within modernism is Reductionism. If we are uncomfortable with the idea that art or any discipline can tell us the truth about external, objective reality, then we will retreat from any sort of content and focus solely on art’s uniqueness. And if we are concerned with what is unique in art, then each artistic medium is different. For example, what distinguishes painting from literature? Literature tells stories—so painting should not pretend to be literature; instead it should focus on its own uniqueness. The truth about painting is that it is a two-dimensional surface with paint on it. So instead of telling stories, the reductionist movement in painting asserts, to find the truth of painting painters must deliberately eliminate whatever can be eliminated from painting and see what survives. Then we will know the essence of painting. Since we are eliminating, in the following iconic pieces from the twentieth century world of art, it is often not what is on the canvas that counts—it is what is not there. What is significant is what has been eliminated and is now absent. Art comes to be about absence.
Many elimination strategies were pursued by the early reductionists. If traditionally painting was cognitively significant in that it told us something about external reality, then the first thing we should try to eliminate is content based on an alleged awareness of reality. Dali’s Metamorphosis here does double-duty. Dali challenges the idea that what we call reality is anything more than a bizarre subjective psychological state. Picasso’s Desmoiselles also does double-duty: If the eyes are the window to the soul, then these souls are frighteningly vacant. Or if we turn the focus the other way and say that our eyes are our access to the world, then Picasso’s women are seeing nothing.
So, we eliminate from art a cognitive connection to an external reality. What else can be eliminated? If traditionally, skill in painting is a matter of representing a three-dimensional world on a two-dimensional surface, then to be true to painting we must eliminate the pretence of a third dimension. Sculpture is three-dimensional, but painting is not sculpture. The truth of painting is that it is not three-dimensional. For example, Barnett Newman’s Dionysius (1949)—consisting of a green background with two thin, horizontal lines, one yellow and one red—is representative of this line of development. It is paint on canvas and only paint on canvas. But traditional paints have a texture, often leading to a three-dimensional effect if one looks closely. So, as Morris Louis demonstrates in Alpha-Phi (1961), we can get closer to painting’s two-dimensional essence by thinning down the paints so that there is no texture. We are now as two-dimensional as possible, and that is the end of this reductionist strategy—the third dimension is gone.
Barnett Newman’s Dionysius (1949)
On the other hand, if painting is two-dimensional, then perhaps we can still be true to painting if we paint things that themselves are two-dimensional. For example, Jasper Johns’s White Flag (1955–58) is a painted-over American flag, and Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl (1963), Whaam! (1963), and others are over-sized comic- book panels blown up onto large canvases. But flags and comic books are themselves two-dimensional objects, so a two-dimensional painting of them retains their essential truth while letting us remain true to the theme of painting’s two- dimensionality. This device is particularly clever because, while remaining two-dimensional, we can at the same time smuggle in some illicit content—content that earlier had been eliminated.
But of course, that really is cheating, as Lichtenstein went on to point out humorously with his Brushstroke (1965). If painting is the act of making brushstrokes on canvas, then to be true to the act of painting the product should look like what it is: a brushstroke on canvas. And with that little joke, this line of development is over. So far in our quest for the truth of painting, we have tried only tried eliminating content and playing with the gap between three-dimensional and two- dimensional. What about composition and colour differentiation? Can we eliminate those?
If, traditionally, skill in painting requires a mastery of composition, then, as Jackson Pollock’s pieces famously illustrate, we can eliminate careful composition for randomness. Or if, traditionally, skill in painting is a mastery of colour range and colour differentiation, then we can eliminate colour differentiation. Early in the twentieth century, Kasimir Malevich’s White on White (1918) was a whitish square painted on a white background. Ad Reinhardt’s Abstract Painting (1960–66) brought this line of development to a close by showing a very, very black cross painted on a very, very, very black background.
Morris Louis Alpha-Phi (1961)
Or if traditionally the art object is a special and unique artefact, then we can eliminate the art object’s special status by making art works that are reproductions of excruciatingly ordinary objects. Andy Warhol’s paintings of soup cans and reproductions of tomato juice cartons have just that result. Or in a variation on that theme and sneaking in some cultural criticism, we can show that what art and capitalism do is take objects that are in fact special and unique—such as Marilyn Monroe—and reduce them to two-dimensional mass-produced commodities. Warhol’s 1962 diptych of Marilyn Monroe, for example, repeats images of her head dozens of times; the left side shows twenty-five minor variations in garish colour, and the right side shows another twenty-five in progressively fading black and white.
Or if art traditionally is sensuous and perceptually embodied, then we can eliminate the sensuous and perceptual altogether, as in conceptual art. Consider Joseph Kosuth’s It was It, Number 4. Kosuth first created a background of type-set text that reads: Observation of the conditions under which mis-readings occur gives rise to a doubt which I should not like to leave unmentioned, because it can, I think, become the starting-point for a fruitful investigation. Everyone knows how frequently the reader finds that in reading aloud his attention wanders from the text and turns to his own thoughts. As a result of this digression on the part of his attention he is often unable, if interrupted and questioned, to give any account of what he has read. He has read, as it were, automatically, but not correctly. Here the perceptual appeal is minimal, and art becomes a purely conceptual enterprise— and we have eliminated painting altogether.
My point is not that in the above works I’ve mentioned that eliminationism is the only thing going on. Sometimes it is, and sometimes of course artists make more than one point in a painting. But elimination and reduction is a key line of development in modernist painting. And if we put all of the above reductionist strategies together, the course of modern painting has been to eliminate the third dimension, composition, colour, perceptual content, and the sense of the art object as something special.
This inevitably leads us back to Marcel Duchamp, the grand-daddy of modernism who saw the end of the road decades earlier. With his Fountain (1917), Duchamp made the quintessential statement about the history and future of art. Duchamp of course knew the history of art and, given recent trends, where art was going. He knew what had been achieved—how over the centuries art had been a powerful vehicle that called upon the highest development of the human creative vision and demanded exacting technical skill; and he knew that art had an awesome power to stimulate the senses, the minds, and the emotions of those who experience it. With his urinal, Duchamp offered presciently a summary statement. The artist is not a great creator—Duchamp went shopping at a plumbing store. The artwork is not a special object—it was mass-produced in a factory. The experience of art is not exciting and ennobling—it is puzzling and leaves one with a sense of distaste. But over and above that, Duchamp did not select just any ready-made object to display. He could have selected a sink or a door-knob. In selecting the urinal, his message was clear: Art is something you piss on.
But there is a still deeper point that Duchamp’s urinal teaches us about the trajectory of modernism. In modernism, art becomes a philosophical enterprise rather than an artistic one. The driving purpose of modernism is not to do art but to find out what art is. We have eliminated X —is it still art? Now we have eliminated Y —is it still art? The point of the objects was not aesthetic experience; rather the works are symbols representing a stage in the evolution of a philosophical experiment. In most cases, the discussions about the works are much more interesting than the works themselves. That means that we keep the works in museums and archives and we look at them not for their own sake, but for the same reason scientists keep lab notes—as a record of their thinking at various stages. Or, to use a different analogy, the purpose of art objects is like that of road signs along the highway—not as objects of contemplation in their own right but as markers to tell us how far we have travelled down a given road.
This was Duchamp’s point when he noted, contemptuously, that most critics had missed the point: “I threw the bottle rack and the urinal into their faces as a challenge, and now they admire them for their aesthetic beauty.” The urinal is not art, and Duchamp did not think of it as one—it is a device used as part of an intellectual exercise in figuring out why it is not art.
Modernism had no answer to Duchamp’s challenge, and by the 1960s it found it had reached a dead end. To the extent modern art had content, its pessimism led it to the conclusion that nothing was worth saying. To the extent that it played the reductive elimination game, it found that nothing uniquely artistic survived elimination. Art became nothing. In the 1960s, Robert Rauschenberg was often quoted as saying, “Artists are no better than filing clerks.” And Andy Warhol found his usual smirking way to announce the end when asked what he thought art was anymore: “Art? —Oh, that’s a man’s name.”
Postmodernism’s Four Themes
Where could art go after death of modernism? Postmodernism did not go, and has not gone, far. It needed some content and some new forms, but it did not want to go back to classicism, romanticism, or traditional realism.
As it had at the end of the nineteenth century, the high-art world reached out and drew upon the broader intellectual and cultural context of the late 1960s and 1970s. It absorbed the trendiness of Existentialism’s absurd universe, the failure of Positivism’s reductionism, and the collapse of socialism’s New Left. It connected to intellectual heavyweights such as Thomas Kuhn, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, and it took its cue from their abstract themes of antirealism, deconstruction, and their heightened adversarial stance to Western culture. From those themes, postmodernism introduced four variations on modernism.
First, postmodernism re-introduced content—but only self-referential and ironic content. As with philosophical postmodernism, artistic postmodernism rejected any form of realism and became anti-realist. Art cannot be about reality or nature—because, according to postmodernism, “reality” and “nature” are merely social constructs. All we have are the social world and its social constructs, one of those constructs being the world of art. So, we may have content in our art as long as we talk self-referentially about the social world of art.
Secondly, postmodernism set itself to a more ruthless deconstruction of traditional categories that the modernists had not fully eliminated. Modernism had been reductionist, but some artistic targets remained.
For example, stylistic integrity had always been an element of great art, and artistic purity was one motivating force within modernism. So, one postmodern strategy has been to mix styles eclectically in order to undercut the idea of stylistic integrity. An early postmodern example in architecture, for example, is Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building in Manhattan—a modern skyscraper that could also be a giant eighteenth-century Chippendale cabinet.
Philip Johnson’s AT&T (now Sony) building Manhatten
The architectural firm of Foster & Partners designed the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation headquarters (1979–86)—a building that could also be the bridge of a ship, complete with mock anti-aircraft guns, should the bank ever need them. Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s House (1986) in Vienna is more extreme—a deliberate slapping together of glass skyscraper, stucco, and occasional bricks, along with oddly placed balconies and arbitrarily sized windows, and completed with a Russian onion dome or two.
If we put the above two strategies together, then postmodern art will come to be both self-referential and destructive. It will be an internal commentary on the social history of art, but a subversive one. Here there is continuity from modernism. Picasso took one of Matisse’s portraits of his daughter—and used it as a dartboard, encouraging his friends to do the same. Duchamp’s L.H.O.O.Q. (1919) is a rendition of the Mona Lisa with a cartoonish beard and moustache added. Rauschenberg erased a de Kooning work with a heavy wax pencil. In the 1960s, a gang led by George Maciunas performed Philip Corner’s Piano Activities (1962)—which called for a number of men with implements of destruction such as band saws and chisels to destroy a grand piano. Niki de Saint Phalle’s Venus de Milo (1962) is a life-size plaster-on-chicken-wire version of the classic beauty filled with bags of red and black paint; Saint Phalle then took a rifle and fired upon the Venus, puncturing the statue and the bags of paint to a splattered effect.
Saint Phalle’s Venus links us to the third postmodern strategy. Postmodernism allows one to make content statements as long as they are about social reality and not about an alleged natural or objective reality and—here is the variation—as long as they are narrower race/class/sex statements rather than pretentious, universalist claims about something called The Human Condition. Postmodernism rejects a universal human nature and substitutes the claim that we are all constructed into competing groups by our racial, economic, ethnic, and sexual circumstances. Applied to art, this postmodern claim implies that there are no artists, only hyphenated artists: black-artists, woman-artists, gay-artists, poor-Hispanic-artists, and so on.
Let us start with Power and consider race. Jane Alexander’s Butcher Boys (1985– 86) is an appropriately powerful piece about white power. Alexander places three South African whites on a bench. Their skin is ghostly or corpse-like white, and she gives them monster heads and heart-surgery scars suggesting their heartlessness. But all three of them are sitting casually on the bench—they could be waiting for a bus or watching the passers-by at a mall. Her theme is the banality of evil: Whites don’t even recognize themselves for the monsters they are.
Now for Money. There is the long-standing rule in modern art that one should never say anything kind about capitalism. From Andy Warhol’s criticisms of mass- produced capitalist culture we can move easily to Jenny Holzer’s Private Property Created Crime (1982). In the centre of world capitalism—New York’s Times Square— Holzer combines conceptualism with social commentary in an ironically clever manner by using capitalism’s own media to subvert it. German artist Hans Haacke’s Freedom is now simply going to be sponsored—out of petty cash (1991) is another monumental example. While the rest of the world was celebrating the end of brutality behind the Iron Curtain, Haacke erected a huge Mercedes-Benz logo atop a former East German guard tower. Men with guns previously occupied that tower—but Haacke suggests that all we are doing is replacing the rule of the Soviets with the equally heartless rule of the corporations.
Jenny Holzer’s Private Property Created Crime
Now for Sex. Saint Phalle’s Venus can do double-duty here. We can interpret the rifle that shoots into the Venus as a phallic tool of dominance, in which case Saint-Phalle’s piece can be seen as a feminist protest of the male destruction of femininity. Mainstream feminist art includes Barbara Kruger’s posters and room-size exhibits in bold black and red with angry faces yelling politically-correct slogans about female victimization—art as a poster at a political rally. Jenny Saville’s Branded (1992) is a grotesque self-portrait: Against any conception of female beauty, Saville asserts that she will be distended and hideous—and shove it in your face.
The fourth and final postmodern variation on modernism is a more ruthless nihilism. The above-mentioned works, while focused on the negative, are still dealing with important themes of power, wealth, and justice toward women. How can we eliminate more thoroughly any positivity in art? As relentlessly negative as modern art has been, what has not been done? Entrails and blood: An art exhibition in 2000 asked patrons to place a goldfish in a blender and then turn the blender on—art as life reduced to indiscriminate liquid entrails. Marc Quinn’s Self (1991) is the artist’s own blood collected over the course of several months and moulded into a frozen cast of his head. That is reductionism with a vengeance.
Unusual sex: Alternate sexualities and fetishes have been pretty much worked over during the twentieth century. But until recently art has not explored sex involving children. Eric Fischl’s Sleepwalker (1979) shows a pubescent boy masturbating while standing naked in a kiddie pool in the backyard. Fischl’s Bad Boy (1981) shows a boy stealing from his mother’s purse and looking at his naked mother who is sleeping with her legs sprawled. If we have read our Freud, however, perhaps this is not very shocking. So, we move on to Paul McCarthy’s Cultural Gothic (1992– 93) and the theme of bestiality. In this life-size, moving exhibit, a young boy stands behind a goat that he is violating. Here we have more than child sexuality and sex with animals, however: McCarthy adds some cultural commentary by having the boy’s father present and resting his hands paternally on the boy’s shoulders while the boy thrusts away.
A preoccupation with urine and feces: Again, postmodernism continues a longstanding modernist tradition. After Duchamp’s urinal, Kunst ist Scheisse (“Art is shit”) became, fittingly, the motto of the Dada movement. In the 1960s Piero Manzoni canned, labeled, exhibited and sold ninety tins of his own excrement (in 2002, a British museum purchased can number 68 for about $40,000). Andres Serrano generated controversy in the 1980s with his Piss Christ, a crucifix submerged in a jar of the artist’s urine. In the 1990s Chris Ofili’s The Holy Virgin Mary (1996) portrayed the Madonna as surrounded by disembodied genitalia and chunks of dried feaces. In 2000 Yuan Cai and Jian Jun Xi paid homage to their master, Marcel Duchamp. Fountain is now at the Tate Museum in London, and during regular museum hours Yuan and Jian unzipped and proceeded to urinate on Duchamp’s urinal. (The museum’s directors were not pleased, but Duchamp would be proud of his spiritual children.) And there is G. G. Allin, the self-proclaimed performance artist who achieved his fifteen minutes by defecating on stage and flinging his feces into the audience.
So again, we have reached a dead end: From Duchamp’s Piss on art at the beginning of the century to Allin’s Shit on you at the end—that is not a significant development over the course of a century.
The Future of Art
The heyday of postmodernism in art was the 1980s and 90s. Modernism had become stale by the 1970s, and I suggest that postmodernism has reached a similar dead-end, a What next? stage. Postmodern art was a game that played out within a narrow range of assumptions, and we are weary of the same old, same old, with only minor variations. The gross-outs have become mechanical and repetitive, and they no longer gross us out.
So, what next?
It is helpful to remember that modernism in art came out of a very specific intellectual culture of the late nineteenth century, and that it has remained loyally stuck in those themes. But those are not the only themes open to artists, and much has happened since the end of the nineteenth century.
We would not know from the world of modern art that average life expectancy has doubled since Edvard Munch screamed. We would not know that diseases that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of new-borns each year have been eliminated. Nor would we know anything about the rising standards of living, the spread of democratic liberalism, and emerging markets. We are brutally aware of the horrible disasters of National Socialism and international Communism, and art has a role in keeping us aware of them. But we would never know from the world of art the equally important fact that those battles were won and brutality was defeated.
And entering even more exotic territory, if we knew only the contemporary art world we would never get a glimmer of the excitement in evolutionary psychology, Big Bang cosmology, genetic engineering, the beauty of fractal mathematics—and the awesome fact that humans are the kind of being that can do all those exciting things. Artists and the art world should be at the edge. The high-art world is now marginalised, in-bred, and conservative. It is being left behind, and for any self- respecting artist there should be nothing more demeaning than being left behind.
There are few more important cultural purposes than genuinely advancing art. We all intensely and personally know what art means to us. We surround ourselves with it. Art books and videos. Films at the theatre and streamed via the internet. Stereos at home, music on our MP3 players and in our cars. Novels at the beach and as bedtime reading. Trips to galleries and museums. Art on the walls of our living space—and the living space itself. We are each creating the artistic world we want to be in. From the art in our individual lives to the art that is cultural and national symbols, from the $10 poster to the $10 million painting acquired by a museum—we all have a major investment in art.
The world is ready for the bold new artistic move. That can come only from those not content with spotting the latest trivial variation on current themes. It can come only from those whose idea of boldness is not—waiting to see what can be done with waste products that has never been done before. The point is not that there are no negatives out there in the world for art to confront, or that art cannot be a means of criticism. There are negatives and art should never shrink from them. My argument is with the uniform negativity and destructiveness of the art world. When has art in the twentieth century said anything encouraging about human relations, about mankind’s potential for dignity and courage, about the sheer positive passion of being in the world?
Artistic revolutions are made by a few key individuals. At the heart of every revolution is an artist who achieves originality. A novel theme, a fresh subject, or the inventive use of composition, or colour marks the beginning of a new era. Artists truly are gods: they create a world in their work, and they contribute to the creation of our cultural world. Yet for revolutionary artists to reach the rest of the world, others play a crucial role. Collectors, gallery owners, curators, and critics make decisions about which artists are genuinely creating—and, accordingly, about which artists are most deserving of their money, gallery space, and recommendations. Those individuals also make the revolutions. In the broader art world, a revolution depends on those who are capable of recognising the original artist’s achievement and who have the entrepreneurial courage to promote that work.
The point is not to return to the 1800s or to turn art into the making of pretty postcards. The point is about being a human being who looks at the world afresh. In each generation there are only a few who do that at the highest level. That is always the challenge of art and its highest calling. The world of postmodern art is a run-down hall of mirrors reflecting tiredly some innovations introduced a century ago. It is time to move on.
Arousing & Expressing Emotions in Works of Light Art
We cannot easily account for the power of light installation works by borrowing from color science, in the way I tried to sketch above for Rothko. First, these artists employ light rather than pigment. And, second, the colours in the installations tend to shift-there is no single pair or defined combination of colours at work, as in a Rothko canvas. Perhaps some implications from research studies of people’s preferences of color combinations might still be relevant. But there are alternative sources to draw on. Research has been conducted in a variety of fields, ranging from biology and psychology to ergonomics and architecture, concerning the effects of light on human bodies, moods, memory, and performance.
The colours of light (including both brightness and wave length) affect our bodies, brains, and emotions in many ways, altering heart rate, blood pressure, melatonin levels, sleep cycles, and circadian rhythms (Stone 1999). This research has filtered out into the media of popular science and psychology. In northern climates, people know about the role of full spectrum lights in combating so-called SAD (seasonal affective disorder; Kuller et al. 2007). There is much accumulated expertise about the role of types and colours of light in helping to define space, shape mood, and elicit varied viewer reactions.
This scientific research helps explain some aspects of the emotional force of works by Eliasson and Turrell. One way they move viewers is just be- cause the light in the works affects people directly. This is what Robinson in Deeper than Reason calls arousing emotions. She describes how this differs from, but can be related to, expressing emotions by using examples from music. Music can stir us psychologically: it can calm or excite us, make us feel happy or melancholy. Such experience involves numerous physiological changes (Robinson 2005, 406-407). All this is similar to how the light of installation artists’ works can affect people. Coloured environments (especially red and blue ones) affect us physically, altering alertness, brain activity, blood pressure, respiration rates, and more (Hardin 1988, 166-167; Elliot and Maier 2014). In addition, Turrell uses his extensive knowledge of perceptual psychology to construct works that affect our vision directly. The colour shifts in Aten Reign, for example, trigger automatic switches between photopic and scotopic vision (between use of cones and rods in our eyes; Ferro 2013). Eliasson’s Your Blind Passenger disorients people within a world that restricts visual identification of distances and objects.
Robinson says that when moved by music, we may consider why and thus be prompted to interpret specific aspects of the music as expressive. In doing this, I might, for example, say that a song uses a minor key, slow tempo, and wailing voice to express melancholy, perhaps arousing in me a distinct emotion like nostalgia (Robinson 2005, 368-369). Light installation works may not be expressive as some music is, by conveying experiences of a persona, in the way I argued Rothko’s paintings do. But, just as expressive music employs formal musical features of a song or sonata, light art installations employ specific formal features such as location, tempo, arrangement, prescribed forms of behavior, and so on. Like music, these are temporal artworks.
Environmental installations typically slow people down. They require attention and lingering to grasp meaning. Often these works create environments pointing to or recalling experiences of nature. People may find the experience provokes memories of a golden summer day, rainbows, the Northern lights, or a romantic twilit evening. Our responses involve recognition of distinct features we attend to. Similarly, in discussing our encounters with nature, Noel Carroll has argued that emotions are normal responses, which are not altogether subjective because they presuppose recognition of specific features of the environment (1993, 257-260). His view of emotions is similar to Robinson’s treatment of them as types of appraisals that connect bodily responses to evaluations of a situation or action (Robinson 2005, 57-99). Specific objective elements of a waterfall, for example, such as its size, noise, and power, are sources of our awe and wonder. We can have similarly distinctive responses to aspects of a light installation, but, here, we are recognising features of the world that have been deliberately designed for expressive purposes.
As I noted earlier, Robinson argues that art can be expressive by presenting the world as seen by someone in a particular emotion or showing what it is like for a person to see the world that way. Simplifying, an artwork provides expressive insight into how the world looks or how a person feels when viewing such a world. A nice example Robinson gives is Edvard Munch’s famous pain ing The Scream. Here we see both a character in anguish and that this character’s world is bizarre and twisted; it is a world, as Robinson puts it, “infected with the screamer’s anguish and anxiety” (2005, 283).
Artworks like Your Blind Passenger or Aten Reign are like the Munch painting: they show the world as experienced in a certain way: as challenging and disorienting or as mysterious and awe in- spiring. The very fact that colored light affects our perceptual awareness can stimulate conscious reflection about the nature of perception and about how we tend to experience art and museums.36 Just as we can reflect on a musical work that arouses us, perhaps judging it to be expressive of melancholy, so too can we conclude that art installation is expressive of warmth and community, of human in- significance within the vast scope of nature, of the so-called light inside, and so on. Arousal of emotion contributes to but is not identical with recognition of the installation artist’s expressive aims.
Context is an important contributing factor (Robinson 2005, 249). The colored lights of Turrell and Eliasson’s works are set within distinctive created environments. To experience these spaces, they must be sought out; they are wholes separated from everyday life. In Turrell’s skyspaces people must wait for the aperture to be opened; in Eliasson’s Your Blind Passenger they must enter and walk through a tunnel. There is something ceremonial or ritualistic about such a venture, which takes on the nature of a pilgrimage. This is intensified if the work is in a Quaker meeting house or has become as popular as The Weather Project. The Weather Project recalled some ancient religion of sun worship, fostering community even within the vast unfriendly space of the Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern. In Turrell’s works people look up at the vault of the sky, again as in some prehistoric ritual, as if seek- ing the meaning behind falling stars, eclipses, or other “celestial events.
Art installations by Turrell and Eliasson some- times challenge our confidence about seeing and knowing the world. An art installation that pre- vents our ability to see space or judge distances accurately appears to thwart our very nature. We are, after all, visual creatures as the result of a lengthy and complex evolutionary process that gave certain advantages to animals that could see and hence move more efficiently around in their environment to find mates and food and avoid predators. Nevertheless, artworks that make us ponder the nature of physical reality and of how we manage to perceive it, like Eliasson’s and Turrell’s, are valuable in themselves. Color in these artists’ works becomes something very intriguing, mysterious, beautiful, and valuable. It arouses emotions, fulfils expressive functions, and stimulates reflection about reality and ourselves. It does all this so well that I now feel better about endorsing Goodman’s claim that I quoted earlier-about how experiences of abstract work carry over when we leave the gallery or museum into the outside world by making us look at and reflect upon things very differently. Surely this is one of the best things art can do.
Far out on Long Island, in the tiny village of Springs, with the ocean as background and in close contact with open, tree-studded fields where cattle graze peacefully, Jackson Pollock lives and paints. With the help of his wife, Lee Krasner—former Hofmann student and an established painter in her own right—he has remodeled a house purchased there to fit the needs of the way of life they have chosen, and a short distance away is a barn which has been converted into a studio. It is here that Pollock is engrossed in the strenuous job of creating his unique world as a painter.
Before settling on the Island, Pollock worked for ten years in a Greenwich Village studio. Intermittently he made trips across the country, riding freight trains or driving a Model A Ford, developing a keen awareness of vast landscape and open sky. “You get a wonderful view of the country from the top of a freight car,” he explains. Pollock loves the outdoors and has carried with him and into his painting a sense of the freedom experienced before endless mountains and plains, and perhaps this is not surprising in an artist born in Cody, Wyoming (in 1912) and raised in Arizona and northern California. Included in his background is study with Thomas Benton—for whom he was at one time a baby sitter on New York’s Hudson Street—but he has mainly developed by himself, in contemplation of the lonesome silence of the open, emerging in the last few years as the most publicized and controversial of younger abstractionists. He is also one of the most successful.
To enter Pollock’s studio is to enter another world, a place where the intensity of the artist’s mind and feelings are given full play. It is the unusual quality of this mind, penetrating nature to the core yet never striving to show its surface, that has been projected into paintings which captivate many and agitate others by their strange, often violent, ways of expression. At one end of the barn the floor is literally covered with large cans of enamel, aluminum and tube colors—the boards that do show are covered with paint drippings. Nearby a skull rests on a chest of drawers. Three or four cans contain stubby paint brushes of various sizes. About the rest of the studio, on the floor and walls, are paintings in various stages of completion, many of enormous proportions. Here Pollock often sits for hours in deep contemplation of work in progress, his face forming rigid lines and often settling in a heavy frown. A Pollock painting is not born easily, but comes into being after weeks, often months of work and thought. At times he paints with feverish activity, or again with slow deliberation.
After some years of preparation and experimentation, during which time he painted his pictures on an easel, Pollock has developed a method that is unique and that, because of its newness, shocks many. He has found that what he has to say is best accomplished by laying the canvas on the floor, walking around it and applying the paint from all sides. The paint—usually enamel, which he finds more pliable—is applied by dipping a small house brush or stick or trowel into the can and then, by rapid movements of the wrist, arm and body, quickly allowing it to fall in weaving rhythms over the surface. The brush seldom touches the canvas, but is a means to let color drip or run in stringy forms that allow for the complexity of design necessary to the artist.
In his recent show, at the Parsons Gallery, Pollock exhibited a very large work, titled Number 4, 1950. (Pollock used to give his pictures conventionally symbolic titles, but—like many contemporary abstractionists—he considers them misleading, and now simply numbers and dates each work as it is completed.) It was begun on a sunny day last June. The canvas, 9 by 17 feet, was laid out flat, occupying most of the floor of the studio and Pollock stood gazing at it for some time, puffing at a cigarette. After a while he took a can of black enamel (he usually starts with the color which is at hand at the time) and a stubby brush which he dipped into the paint and then began to move his arm rhythmically about, letting the paint fall in a variety of movements on the surface. At times he would crouch, holding the brush close to the canvas, and again he would stand and move around it or step on it to reach to the middle. Within a half hour the entire surface had taken on an activity of weaving rhythms. Pools of black, tiny streams and elongated forms seemed to become transformed and began to take on the appearance of an image. As he continued, still with black, going back over former areas, rhythms were intensified with counteracting movements. After some time he decided to stop to consider what had been done. This might be called the first step of the painting, though Pollock stresses that he does not work in stages. He did not know yet when he would feel strongly enough about the picture to work on it again, with the intensity needed, nor when he would finally be finished with it. The paint was allowed to dry, and the next day it was nailed to a wall of the studio for a period of study and concentration.
It was about two weeks before Pollock felt close enough to the work to go ahead again. This was a time of “getting acquainted” with the painting, of thinking about it and getting used to it so that he might tell what needed to be done to increase its strength. The feverish intensity of the actual painting process could not be kept up indefinitely, but long periods of contemplation and thought must aid in the preparation for renewed work. In the meantime other paintings were started. When he felt able to return to the large canvas with renewed energy, Pollock placed it back on the floor, selected a light reddish brown color and began again to work in rhythms and drops that fell on uncovered areas of canvas and over the black. Occasionally aluminum paint was added, tending to hold the other colors on the same plane as the canvas. (Pollock uses metallic paint much in the same sense that earlier painters applied gold leaf, to add a feeling of mystery and adornment to the work and to keep it from being thought of as occupying the accepted world of things. He finds that aluminum often accomplishes this more successfully than greys, which he first used.) Again the painting was allowed to dry and then hung on the wall for a few days’ renewed consideration.
The final work on the painting was slow and deliberate. The design had become exceedingly complex and had to be brought to a state of complete organization. When finished and free from himself the painting would record a released experience. A few movements in white paint constituted the final act and the picture was hung on the wall; then the artist decided there was nothing more he could do with it.
Pollock felt that the work had become “concrete”—he says that he works “from the abstract to the concrete,” rather than vice versa: the painting does not depend on reference to any object or tactile surface, but exists “on its own.” Pollock feels that criticism of a work such as this should be directed at least in terms of what he is doing, rather than by standards of what painting ought to be. He is aware that a new way of expression in art is often difficult to see, but he resents presentation of his work merely on the level of technical interest.
Such a summation of Pollock’s way of working is, of course, only part of the story. It has developed after years of concentrated effort, during long periods when nothing was satisfactory to him. He explains that he spent four years painting “black pictures,” pictures which were unsuccessful. Then his work began to be more sure. There was a period of painting symbols, usually of figures or monsters, violently expressed. Of them, She Wolf, now owned by the Museum of Modern Art, was a crucial work. Here areas of brush-work and paint-pouring were combined, the painting being done partly on the floor and partly on the easel. The change to his way of working today was gradual, accompanying his various needs for expression, and though there is a sense of the brutal in what he does this gradually seems to be giving way to greater calm.
During the cataclysmic upheavals painting has undergone in recent years there have been rather drastic measures taken with the object. It has been distorted and finally eliminated as a reference point by many artists. The questions arise as to what the artist is dealing with, where he gets his ideas, what his subject matter is, etc. The answer may be found partly in the consideration that these artists are not concerned with representing a preconceived idea, but rather with being involved in an experience of paint and canvas, directly, without interference from the suggested forms and colors of existing objects. The nature of the experience is important. It is not something that has lost contact with reality, but might be called a synthesis of countless contacts which have become refined in the area of the emotions during the act of painting. Is this merely an act of automatism? Pollock says it is not. He feels that his methods may be automatic at the start, but that they quickly step beyond that, becoming concerned with deeper and more involved emotions which carry the painting on to completion according to their degree of strength and purity. He does not know beforehand how a particular work of his will end. He is impelled to work by the urge to create and this urge and what it produces are forever unknowable. We see paint on a canvas, but the beauty to which we respond is of an intangible order. We can experience the unknowable, but not understand it intellectually. Pollock depends on the intensity of the moment of starting to paint to determine the release of his emotions and the direction the picture will take. No sketches are used. Decisions about the painting are made during its development and it is considered completed when he no longer feels any affinity with it.
The work of art may be called an image which is set between the artist and the spectator. A Pollock reveals his personal way of bringing this image into existence. Starting automatically, almost as a ritual dance might begin, the graceful rhythms of his movements seem to determine to a large extent the way the paint is applied, but underlying this is the complex Pollock mind. At first he is very much alone with a picture, forgetting that there is a world of people and activity outside himself. Gradually he again becomes aware of the outside world and the image he has begun to project is thought of as related to both himself and other people. He is working toward something objective, something which in the end may exist independently of himself, and that may be presented directly to others. His work may be thought of as coming from landscape and even the movement of the stars—with which he seems almost intimate at times—yet it does not depend on representing these, but rather on creating an image as resulting from contemplation of a complex universe at work, as though to make his own world of reality and order. He is involved in the world of art, the area in which man undertakes to express his finest feelings, which, it seems, is best done through love. Pollock, a quiet man who speaks with reserve and to the point, is in love with his work and his whole life evolves about what he is doing.
He feels that his most successful paintings carry the same intensity directly to the edges of the canvas. “My paintings do not have a centre,” he says, “but depend on the same amount of interest throughout.” Since it has no reference to objects that exist, or to ideal objects, such as circles and squares, his work must be considered from the point of view of expression through the integration of rhythm, color and design, which he feels beauty is composed of. Physical space is dispensed with as an element in painting—even the dimensions of the canvas do not represent measurements inside which relationships are set up, but rather only determine the ends of the image.
Pollock’s Number 4, 1950 is concerned with creating an image in these terms. In this it is like much of his other work, but it is also among his most successful paintings, its manifold tensions and rhythms balancing and counteracting each other so that the final state is one of rest. In his less realized paintings one feels a lack of rest: movements have not been resolved. Colors in Number 4, 1950 have been applied so that one is not concerned with them as separate areas: the browns, blacks, silver and white move within one another to achieve an integrated whole in which one is aware of color rather than colors. Nor is the concern with space here. There is no feeling that one might walk bodily into the rectangle and move about. This is irrelevant, the pleasure being of a different nature. It is more of an emotional experience from which the physical has been removed, and to this intangible quality we sometimes apply the word “spiritual.”
In this picture Pollock has almost completely eliminated everything that might interfere with enjoyment of the work on this level. It is true the painting is seen through the senses, but they are only a means for conveying the image to the aesthetic mind. One is not earthbound in looking at Number 4, 1950. In lesser paintings one does not feel this sense of release from physical reactions. The experience Pollock himself has had with this high kind of feeling is what gives quality to his work. Of course anyone can pour paint on a canvas, as anyone can bang on a piano, but to create one must purify the emotions; few have the strength, will or even the need, to do this.
By Cynthia Freeland The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 2017
I now turn to my new question about colour: What is the role of colour in expression? I cannot hope to answer this as a general question. But to try to advance at least some way, I will take up the example of Mark Rothko. Many critics agree that Rothko’s paintings evoke unusually strong emotional responses in viewers and that this is mainly due to their use of colour. In histories of modern art, Rothko is usually classified as a colour field painter, although he himself rejected accounts of his works that focused on formal features. Rothko staunchly defended claims about his works’ expressive aims.
I’m interested only in expressing basic human emotions – tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on – and the fact that lots of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I communicate those basic human emotions. . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their colour relationships, then you miss the point! (quoted in Rodman 1957, 94)
Many viewers agree and find Rothko’s paintings unusually potent. Indeed, James Elkins speculates in his wonderfully titled book Pictures and Tears: A History of People Who Have Cried in Front of Paintings that more people have wept before Rothko’s works than those of any other painter (2004, 4). And the colours in the works are central to the viewers’ intense responses. Elkins comments, “From a distance a Rothko painting can be pleasing and even pretty. If you walk up to it, you may find yourself lost in a smear of colors.” He adds: If you step too close to a Rothko, you may find yourself inside it. It is not hard to see why people say they are overwhelmed. Everything conspires to overload the senses: the empty incandescent rectangles of colour, entirely encompassing your field of vision; the sheer glowing silence; the lack of footing, or anything solid, in the world of the canvas; the weird sense that the colour is very far away, yet suffocatingly close. It’s not a pleasant feeling: the painting is all around you, and you feel both threatened and comforted, both cushioned and asphyxiated.
There are few philosophical discussions of how colour operates expressively in Rothko’s paintings. As perceptive a critic as Arthur Danto was sceptical about the kinds of grandiose claims made on behalf of the work by both the artist and his fans. In his essay “Rothko’s Material Beauty,” Danto said that one of the works ”shows what materiality comes to when it does not evoke something deeper than itself” (quoted in Boxer 2000). To him the works were only about beauty. However, some philosophers have found more depth in Rothko’s works. Selma Kraft, writing in 1986, argued as follows:
In 1947 Rothko began to probe a new area of meaning: colour as the source of an indefinitely open, expanding experience in which the boundaries between viewer and viewed, space on canvas and beyond, are obliterated. In his attention to the possibility of lifting the emotional experience of colour beyond something closed and finite, Rothko went beyond the questions explored by such earlier innovators in the meaning of colour as Gauguin, Matisse, and Kandinsky. [His works] made it possible to express a new general kind of meaning. Kraft’s claim that Rothko expresses “a new general kind of meaning” sounds promising. But just what is this meaning?
I am reminded by Kraft’s vagueness of my dissatisfaction with Nelson Goodman’s claims about the intellectual impact of abstract art in Ways of Worldmaking. Goodman argues that time spent with abstract art affects our subsequent experience: “Everything tends to square off into geometric patches or swirl in circles or weave into textural arabesques, to sharpen into black and white or vibrate with new colour consonances and dissonances”. But I am not sure it is the world outside the museum that vibrates with new colour consonances when we leave a Rothko exhibition – it is the paintings themselves that vibrate. Perhaps, too, something about ourselves and our own inner states is transformed.
More help comes from a subsequent article in which Katherine Thomson-Jones took up the challenge of specifying content in abstract art. In her article, “Inseparable Insight: Reconciling Cognitivism and Formalism in Aesthetics,” Thomson- Jones sketched what Kraft may have intended: Rothko’s work is about something, namely, our very own experience of colour. Many minimalist artworks are about something in this sense, precisely because they are minimalist. . . . What is interesting about Kraft’s argument is that she applies the semantic distinction between form and content to a corpus of artworks that is not obviously representational. . . . [T]he semantic distinction can be applied to minimalist art like Rothko’s insofar as such work has meaning that is articulated in a certain way.
It is refreshing to hear such a clear claim that nonrepresentational works can have semantic content. But the content suggested here by Thomson-Jones is still too minimal to account for many viewers’ strong responses to Rothko’s paintings. Abstract works understood this way are about art or about themselves; the colors are about colour. This leaves us a long way from Rothko’s grand themes of ecstasy, fate, and doom. Thomson-Jones does take things further, though, by suggesting that, on certain views of emotions, an artwork that stimulates exploration of our inner emotional lives can have cognitive dimensions that inform us about our lives and ethical views.
Just as the way I respond to a situation establishes its significance for me, so the way an artist presents the subject of his or her work establishes my ability to see new significance in familiar aspects of ethical life. These two ways of learning from art show that the inseparability of form and content in art need not rule out the aesthetic relevance of learning from art. Thomson-Jones’s idea that emotional insight or reflection stimulated by an artwork can inform ethical life is interesting and offers further specification of Goodman’s claims about abstract art. But the challenge about Rothko’s expressive power remains, because Thomson-Jones’s main examples to illustrate how emotional experience can lead to ethical insight are from works by authors like Charles Dickens and Toni Morrison. It is easier to see in such literary cases how processes of identification, empathy, and moral assessment are facilitated by readers’ emotional responses.
Recall Rothko’s claim that his paintings are about basic human emotions and that if audiences respond, then they feel what he was feeling while painting them. This reflects a theory of expression sometimes called the contagion view, which treats art as an expression of the artist’s own emotions, a view presented by Tolstoy (1996) in What Is Art? On this view, expression works in a direct way: the artist has a feeling, somehow puts it into the work, and it is transferred to the audience. This view has many critics. A prominent alternative is Peter Kivy’s account of expression in music, developed in The Corded Shell (Kivy 1980). Kivy speaks of an artwork as expressive of emotion rather than expressing it. Aspects of music are expressive due to their resemblance to familiar cases of human expressiveness. As an example of this “contour theory,” Kivy mentions how a Saint Bernard’s face can be expressive of sadness without the dog itself being sad. A major challenge for the art critic attempting to account for expressiveness in Rothko’s mature works is their simplicity. This is particularly true of the very large and dark coloured canvases in the Houston chapel that bears his name. Elkins cites remarks from the Rothko Chapel visitors’ book saying things like “I felt crushed,” “I was moved to tears,” and “It is a visually and viscerally stunning experience”.
Basically, the contour theory posits recognition of some observable similarity to human expression of emotion. Trying to apply the contour theory to the Rothko Chapel murals, we might draw comparisons between their dark colors and people’s dark moods or dark faces.13 Generally, faces are termed “dark” when they are angry (angry people’s faces tend to become more red), and moods are dark when someone is depressed. But such comparisons seem superficial. It is too easy to draw links between the dark colors of the Rothko Chapel canvases and facts we know about the artist’s depression and eventual suicide.
Talk of the “dark” paintings seems not so much to involve visual similarities as using “dark” metaphorically. Elkins surely uses the term in a metaphorical way when he says, “I think Rothko was trying to learn how to live with pure unrelieved darkness”. The contour theory fails to recognise that the murals were designed for a (nondenominational) chapel-that is, for a religious setting. In addition, the paintings in situ change appearance in surprising ways due to the skylight overhead that allows for shifting natural light. Or, at evening events, the works take on yet another appearance when lit by flickering candelabra.
Perhaps the paintings are dark in order to convey mystery and stimulate meditation in a cave-like atmosphere. For some viewers this experience is fruitful; for others, off-putting. The latter was Elkins’s reaction. After a few days of studying the murals and how visitors react to them, he writes: The paintings are like black holes, absorbing every glint of light, sopping up every thought. Wherever you turn, they face you, and show you nothing but blackness. They say nothing and depict nothing: they just bear down. I had felt some of that the day before, and I had started taking notes partly to avoid thinking about it. Other people just close their eyes and meditate, released from Rothko’s weird unhappiness into their own more pleasant thoughts.
The Rothko Chapel murals are atypical in the artist’s oeuvre in using very dark shades of black, blue, and purple. I would like to move toward understanding how other examples of Rothko’s paintings express emotions. Suppose that we pursue the ideas from Kraft and Thomson-Jones that Rothko’s paintings are about our own experiences of colour and that these experiences lend themselves to acts of emotional appraisal that can inform our lives. Here we can benefit from the theory of expression developed by Jenefer Robinson (2005) in her book Deeper than Reason. Robinson offers a careful defence of the idea that emotions are types of “affective appraisals” of the world. Her account of expression, the “new Romantic theory,” is a revised version of the position articulated by R. G. Collingwood, who held that artists work out their ideas and emotions in forms suitable for embodying them.
In its primary sense expression is something intentionally brought about by an artist that consists, roughly speaking, in the manifestation and elucidation of an emotional state of a persona in the expressive character of a poem, a painting, a piece of music, etc., such that the work provides evidence for the emotional state of the persona and the persona’s emotional state is communicated to other people . . . through the character of the work.On Robinson’s account, an artwork gives evidence that a persona in the work has experienced an emotion. The emotion is intentionally put in the work and in turn perceived by the audience; in this process the artist and audience both become clearer about the emotion.
Robinson outlines how her account can be applied to examples of expression in various artistic genres ranging from music to literature and painting. She writes, for example, that some musical works “should indeed be experienced as containing a persona whose unfolding emotional life is portrayed in the music”. The case is similar for painting. Here Robinson writes: Representational paintings can also express emotions in a double way. On the one hand a painting can convey a point of view by presenting a vision of the world as seen from the viewpoint of a person in the throes of a particular emotion. On the other hand, a picture can also convey something of what it is like for a person to view the world in that way: it can show the person him- self or herself and how the emotion affects him or her. As examples, Robinson discusses various representational works by Friedrich, Delacroix, Munch, and Kirchner. Stylistic features such as “violent brushwork and lurid colours” can express a painter’s attitude, “or that of his artistic persona” (2005, 276). What about nonrepresentational works? Despite not depicting characters, Robinson argues, abstract works can also manifest expressive actions – as for example with Pollock’s drip paintings. We can see the actions constituting these works, and such paintings might express emotions in a way comparable to how dance does, by enacting gestures or behaviours of someone manifesting an emotional state.
Robinson’s “new Romantic theory” of expression offers a promising avenue for de- scribing Rothko’s use of colour. Remember that we can recognize intended expressive aims in works without necessarily experiencing the emotions that are expressed. This way of putting things helps fill out missing details of Thomson- Jones’s idea that even abstract art can provide illumination about our emotional and moral life. It is more accurate to say that people who are moved by Rothko’s paintings are moved by seeing the world in a new way or realising something about emotional life than to insist on a direct transmission of feelings, as Rothko did (along the lines defended by Tolstoy).
We see and understand the emotional expressiveness of Rothko’s works because of very specific ways in which the stylistic components (especially colors) function in his mature paintings. Bianca Bromberger offers some help on this: “His paintings, he believed, were ‘dramas’ and the presences of light in the pictures were ‘performers.’ These shapes ‘have no direct association with any particular visible experience, but in them one recognizes the principle and passion of organisms'” (2008, 12-13, citing Rothko 2004, 33 and 35). Rothko himself gave reasons for viewing his central shapes as playing the role he claimed form them, as the counterpart of figures or organisms. He felt a very strong need to eliminate the human figure in his works. He wrote, ‘I belong to a generation that was preoccupied with the human figure and I studied it. It was with most reluctance that I found that it did not meet my needs. Whoever used it mutilated it. No one could paint the figure as it was and feel that he could produce something that could express the world. I refuse to mutilate and had to find another way of expression. (Rothko, quoted in Greene 2015, 168)
Of course, we do not have to take Rothko at his word about how elements of his paintings work. We could dismiss his claims as grandiose, as Danto apparently did. But I think it is fruitful to consider relationships between the central blocks of colour in Rothko’s paintings as dynamic and therefore gestural. The simple looking rectangles of colour of the mature canvases function like dramatic figures engaged in intricate relationships. The shapes and their interactions can be regarded as personas that manifest emotions; they are stand-ins for the personas Robinson wrote about in representational works, showing us how it feels to be in the throes of certain emotions, or how the world looks to someone with those emotions. To begin filling this out, let me cite a descriptive analysis of one of Rothko’s works. This is from the Phillips Collection (2017) website concerning the painting Ochre and Red on Red.
In Ochre and Red on Red a buoyant effect is created by the blazing yellow square, which, in comparison to the darker red of its surroundings, appears to surge out of the composition into the viewer’s space. Ochre and Red on Red becomes an example of Rothko’s highly emotional works with its high-keyed pigments and vibrant colours. This analysis makes a good start at identifying the expressive components (“personas”) of Ochre and Red on Red. The features cited here are of the right sort. They involve specific facts about this work with expressive potential: its yellow square and its red background and how they are related. These parts are characterised by use of terms like “blazing” and “high-keyed”; the yellow square is “surging out of the composition.”
Taking this lead, we can identify numerous factors in Rothko’s paintings that make their coloured sections – rectangles, backgrounds, and edges – function expressively. Because of the paintings’ scale, their surface treatment, choices of pigment and its application, and colour relationships, they do appear to manifest expressive actions and attitudes. It is important to remember the works’ size. Rothko’s mature canvases (1950- 1958) are typically quite large, as large as six by nine feet. When viewed from close up, Rothko recommended a distance of just 18 inches, the paintings envelop our visual field.18 (This enveloping strategy will become even more salient, as we shall see, in the light installations of Turrell and Eliasson.) Rothko wanted the works to be hung at eye level and with indirect, even dim, lighting. He typically painted over the edge of the canvas. These factors work to heighten the envelopment effect and to bring the simple components of the paintings to our attention.
In Rothko’s signature works these components are two unequally sized rectangular shapes with indefinite edges that appear to float against a different coloured background. He employed various techniques to apply the paint, including staining, so it is rare to see evidence of brush strokes, though one can discern streaks, patches, feathering, and under-layers. The colours are distinctive and saturated, but not uniform. Standing eye to canvas we can notice textures and subtle differentiations in colour along with individual quirks such as a block’s blurred edges. The dynamism of the forces at work results from specific aspects of the composition, including hue and saturation, intensity, and edge treatment. We should also notice the selection of backgrounds and the thin lines of border colours that are sometimes interposed between the two central masses.
Especially when a viewer stands very close, the large vague shapes of these paintings, with their indefinite boundaries, seem to move; critics comment that the shapes appear to pulse from within. Sometimes the material substance of the picture seems to be either receding or pushing outward. (Remember the remark above about how yellow of Ochre and Red on Red “seems to surge out . . . into the viewer’s space.”) Within their typically vertical format, due to the uneven size of the rectangles, it can look as if the shapes are not in balance: either one is erupting upward or one is pressing the other down. Elkins comments in a similar vein about one of the Rothko Chapel paintings that “the black rectangle is up at the top as if it has floated there against the law of gravity”. The active interaction of the shapes is akin to the gestural interaction of dancers.
Truro College Art and Design 