Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays

by Arthur C. Danto
University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1999
288 pp. Illus. 1 b/w. Paper, $17.95
ISBN 0-520-22906-1.

Reviewed by Robert Pepperell

pepperell@ntlword.com

Arthur Danto is known primarily as a philosopher of art, and this volume of essays on art is the companion to another collection of more philosophically oriented essays, The Body/Body Problem, reviewed recently in this journal.

At the start Danto lays out with deftness and clarity his well-known formulation of the problem of defining art in an age when the art object cannot be perceptually distinguished from the non-art object. The problem is so acute in the case of Warhol’s Brillo Box (1964) that the mere fact of its institutionalization by persons acting of behalf of the art world (the so-called ‘institutional theory’) is not enough, for Danto at least, to account for the philosophical difficulties it provokes. For the box to be art is for it to be "internally connected with an interpretation," which means "precisely identifying content and mode of presentation." The core of Danto’s thesis is that "persons embody representational states, as artworks embody their contents" (9), thus linking the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of art, to the point where he speaks less of "philosophizing art" (as the title might suggest) than "of art philosophizing itself." Such is the case with Andy Warhol, where the work itself, he argues, constitutes a kind of philosophical discourse.

The way Danto then proceeds to write about art from a philosophical perspective is not so much to expound a particular doctrine or mode of analysis than to bring philosophical insights to bear on the difficulties inherent in (mostly) contemporary art. These are difficulties–problems of representation, meaning, reference and interpretation–that Danto recognizes are no less profound, complex or urgent than the problems of contemporary philosophy.

In his chapter on Robert Motherwell, the seminal American expressionist, Danto claims that the artist "saw painting itself as a problem, very much as the great philosophers of the past saw knowledge itself–or understanding, or truth–as a problem, or as, in the twentieth century, philosophers found philosophy itself to be a problem to which increasingly radical solutions were proposed" (14). Motherwell’s strategy for resolving the problem of painting was to adopt a mode of practice that "demanded a wholesale reconstructive methodological solution" (15). This was the "psychic automatism" propounded by Breton in his literary work, but hardly applied to visual art by the original Surrealist circle.

The paintings and drawings Motherwell made using the automatist approach (originally popularized by the psychics and mediums of the nineteenth-century spiritualist revival), pose a number of problems, not just for the philosophy of art, but for the philosophy of mind. In these works we are presented with urgent, mostly scruffy, marks that speak of meaninglessness, holding cognition at bay, but which we inevitably try to reconcile with memory, to find in them known objects or meaning. Consequently, the ordinary perceptual process is somehow challenged or disengaged so that one becomes conscious, as it were, of one’s act of viewing, sifting and guessing. One is left, like Danto talking of the Altamira Elegy (1979-80), hypothesising that "the four heavy forms could be bunches of grapes, or fruits on a table, as in a famous painting of persimmons by the thirteenth-century Japanese artist Mokkei" (34). Although Danto does not say it, in a suitably Zen-like way one is confronted in Motherwell’s automatist marks with something like "pure sensation," a state almost devoid of cognition and one of great philosophical significance.

But in an essay devoted to Warhol, "The Philosopher as Andy Warhol," Danto could be accused of setting himself up for a fall, or at least an anti-climax. Given the centrality of Warhol to Danto’s life’s work, and the extraordinary claims made on behalf of his art ("[Warhol] made a philosophical breakthrough of almost unparalleled dimension in the history of the reflection of the essence of art" (74).), we are entitled to expect something definitive on the nature of art, and even philosophy, as exemplified by this artist. The essay starts by fluently narrating the emergence of Pop, its reaction to the self-proclaimed profundity of the Abstract Expressionists, and Warhol’s peculiar role in shaping the dominant aesthetic of a generation. For Danto there is a specifically philosophical dimension that never quite causes, but is somehow married to, certain artistic concerns in the period; Kant, Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein are implicated in various ways. As with the Motherwell, the Abstract Expressionists were devoted to manifesting an otherwise inaccessible world–be it the unconscious, the transcendental or, as Danto suggests, the ideal realm of the Platonic tradition.

But what Warhol’s art did, how he "invalidated some two millennia of misdirected investigation" in metaphysics (69), was, according to Danto, to collapse the distance between art (or more precisely, the subject of art) and the "real," so that art objects would look like ordinary objects. "Philosophy as Andy Warhol" can then commence:

"Philosophical understanding begins when it is appreciated that no observable properties need distinguish art from reality at all. And this was something Warhol at last demonstrated." (80, my emphasis).

The problem, of course, is that Duchamp had effectively collapsed the distinction between art objects and ordinary objects some 50 years early, as had Braque prior to the first war with his introduction of found matter and papier-collé into image construction. Danto acknowledges Duchamp’s precedence, but seeks to distinguish it from Warhol’s contribution in a rather unconvincing way: "Unlike Duchamp, Warhol sought to set up a resonance not so much between art and real objects as between art and images, it having been his insight . . . that our signs and images are our reality" (81).

The inherent distinction between objects and images upon which Danto’s argument relies is problematic, not to say dubious. Yet he goes on to define Warhol’s "breakthrough" precisely in terms of his treatment of surface, of image, of glamour, stardom and superficiality. As fascinating and ubiquitous, the images of Elvis, Marilyn, Mick, Liza and others are, it stretches credulity to equate them with the very fabric of reality, or to give them anything of the ontological significance implied by some of Danto’s earlier philosophical allusions. More importantly, it does little to explain why some images of Marilyn are art and some are not, which after all is Danto’s primary concern. It’s a flat and rather thinly sketched conclusion to what is, in parts, a vivid essay.

There are many strong essays in this collection on widely varying subjects: "Moving Pictures" (inspired again by Warhol) examines the assumptions underlying stillness and motion in cinema and photography and would make a perfect set text for a seminar; "The Seat of the Soul" addresses the chair in art and the chair as art; "Giotto and the Stench of Lazarus" looks at olfactory data in The Raising of Lazarus, and so on.

Philosophizing Art, taken together with its companion volume, The Body/Body Problem, represent the outpourings of an extraordinary mind at play, a mind engaged with some of humanity’s most complex and elevated accomplishments–art and philosophy. In nearly all respects the result is vibrant, intelligent, and illuminating for anyone deeply interested in either form of inquiry.