“The chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness, which the mathematical sciences demonstrate in a special degree.†- Aristotle
Classical aesthetics tended toward the canonical, quite literally in the case of sculpture, which in the early centuries strictly conformed to a set of proportional measurements regarding the human form. Even today, this is the clearest way of defining the classical in art and architecture. Even beyond that, it is widely documented that certain pieces were considered exemplary even in the time of their production, even though techniques were improving more or less continually.
So, even back at the origin of western aesthetics we see a tension, one that plagued the philosophers too, between the static and the moving, between the established example and the innovation. This persists, obviously.
What I’m thinking is that it’s all a sham, or at least it’s a false opposition. As with the notion of the spontaneous expression of a unique present moment, the notion of the ‘original’ is duplicitous. Invariably, when the term is applied it is applied in retrospect, to something established in tradition (however briefly) as ‘original’.
Now, I’m not a visual artist, but I am a fiction writer. I hold no delusions in my mind of unique vision or talent, or profound originality. I’m always playing in someone else’s playground, or so I feel. But I’m fine with that. A lot of artists are not.
What constitutes art is something I often think about. Here’s where I am now:
Our four senses (smell and taste are essentially the same) are stimulated almost continually throught our lives. These stimuli can be pleasent, unpleasent, or neutral. Sometimes, they’re moving (examples: a thunderstorm, a tree, the smell of beer, birdsong). I believe that a work of art is something that moves the perceiver to a certain degree. It is thus totally subjective, but nevertheless delivers something real and substantial to the perceiver.
When you read a poem, you should be able to feel whether or not - for you - it’s a genuinely good poem or just a load of ordinary rhyming prose. Ditto music, paintings, etc.
Does this sound like I’m just saying “art = art” ?
SIATD,
I liked your turn of phrase when you said “I’m always playing in someone else’s playground, or so I feel. But I’m fine with that. A lot of artists are not.”
I think you’re expressing a very important concept that has really been changing in art over the past few decades. I don’t think that artists are playing in their own playground - it is shared with many of us. Their work is not original in the sense that it nevers come without some kind of cultural context. (Although I do think there is some technical and aesthetic innovation.) It is always produced within a specific socio-political framework. I think that art is very much tied to the society that produces it.
Your examples of classical art show this very clearly. So too do some other examples of artistic schools troughout history. Anti-reformation renaissance art. De Stijl in the early interwar years. Postmodernism and pop art. All of these schools were explicitly concerned with the world that produced them.
This is a great start, I’m interested to read more of your opinions.
I think that one has to find a clear and comfortable space in defining that which is creative, and that which is merely innovative. This is true for both producer and receiver. Whether one adheres to ‘classic’ concepts or experiment’s in their culture and social tainted ‘visions’ is almost irrelevent.
I would argue that to be truly creative (a cliche if I ever heard one) is to turn loose the dogs. Let the mind go where it will. A vision that is creative in this sense, is a surprise both to the producer as well as to the viewer. That this vision can be further refined is a given. As a metaphor: We all are capable of ‘seeing’ images in clouds. Ohh, look! There is a bunny! Or a dragon, or uncle Tom’s face, or… But who created the cloud? And that is creativity.
Innovation is manipulating forms known. There is nothing wrong with that and it is probably 99% of what is mistakenly called ‘creative’.
As an experiment: Take a piece of paper and smear, splash, or in any way that seems appropriate, get color on that paper. Let it sit and makes pools and puddles of color, different shades of light and darkness. As the color dries one begins to see or feel patterns emerging. With a fine brush, add a few details that define or accentuate what you see or feel. It is a journey of sponteneity and intuition that connects the subconscious and conscious mind. Is it ‘creative’? For me, it is as close as I can get. Almost everything else I do is just innovative…
Creativity is expressed when you lose yourself in it — as if the energy of an unhibited child has taken you and you forget the reason for it. You become engossed in the process forgetting that there was ever a beginning and an end to it. It becomes your meditation and surpasses medication or drugs.
I was my most creative when I wasn’t trying to be.
Defining art as art is conscious. Being creative - can be conscious, unconscious, subconscious other prefix-conscious…
I work with words, so perhaps it is clearer to me that I’m just playing a game by rules that I didn’t entirely create than it is for, say, a painter. On the other hand, Bessy is primarily a musician as I understand it, which, as with literature, is a game composed of moves that someone else has defined.
Nonetheless one can be creative within set parameters, no doubt about it…
It seems to me that there are certain distinct levels of creativity we can discuss here. This is only a rough begining and probably photography oriented (since I’m a shite painter and writer…)
Technical creativity - getting new things out of the process, using the same materials differently, or to create a new and different outcome. I think this could be better called innovation.
Aesthetic creativity - creating images or arranging visual images in new and unique ways that are genuinely new. This can be expanded into styles and schools where certain subject matter and stylistic choices become prevalent (and can include technical considerations.)
Media creativity - where you create an entirely new way of visually portraying a message. Who’s that guy that wraps stuff… Christeau or something… I would say he’s like that.
Content creativity - where you begin talking about things that no one else talks about - De Stijl was an example of this.
Ok, so that’s all I can think of for now, I’m not sure if there are more or less than what I’ve begun to outline here.
I am also not sure if it is really important whether or not the artist was creating or creating. Many artists seem to think so but I’m not so sure. I think it’s ridiculous to not include context into a piece of work. To not do so seems to me to remove it from its foundation and connection to the wider world. We constantly try to create a context for works… titles, the artist’s name, etc. Even if its untitled and make an artist’s statement that says “only consider the aesthetic elements of this piece” that itself is context.
I think there is a midline between artist as wholly unattached creative god and artist as regurgitative cultural mouthpiece.
I am also not sure if it is really important whether or not the artist was creating or creating. Many artists seem to think so but I’m not so sure. I think it’s ridiculous to not include context into a piece of work.
It is only important in art. If it is just normal expression referred to as art then it doesn’t matter.
The notion of the perfect physique still exists, but it is always haunted by its own plurality. The canon could be 36-24-36 (amusingly, this is Bart Simpson’s locker code) and indeed, I happen to like this sort of build. But set against that there are any number of other apparent ideals, each one a miniature narrative in its own right. Each fights for supremacy, none ever achieves it for long. A minute on the lips, etc.
A rewriting of the same question - are postmodern literary canons possible?
The notion of a literary canon, a text or set of texts taken to be the best examples of a particular age or group of ideas (depending on which side of the Hegelian coin you stand on), seems at odds with the postmodern malaise. In the absence of metanarratives, overarching ideologues that dominate lots of different discourses for centuries, by what means can we justify the assertion of a canon? In the absence of any confirmed teleological project (such as illustrating the glory of God, replicating nature, emancipating the proletariat) where do we find a justification for positing a given text over another?
Nonetheless, there are characteristics of postmodern literature, if one views it in the right way.
Now, Bertens goes on to explain how some postmodern literature is a move away from pictorial narrative towards an even purer formalism than that achieved by modernists like Joyce or Picasso, citing Samuel Beckett among others. Indeed, in a play where ‘nothing happens, twice’ and where the audience are declared to not even exist, one finds an accessible example of how self-reflection taken to its logical extreme produces nothing but scepticism and uncertainty. We wait and wait and wait, watch and watch and watch. We never see ourselves or the world purely. We never meet Godot.
Contrasting this is a mature postmodern literature, one that realises that in the face of such scepticism, such absence of presence, such failure of metanarratives, that we must still strive and work and play. For what should be rather obvious reasons, the best examples that I’ve found are in futurist sci-fi. While Orwell’s 1984, in my opinion the first canonical piece of postmodern literature, is depressing and ends pessimistically, texts such as Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and The Possibility of an Island maintain a determination and even hope and faith.
The latter is a particularly good example, as the central character is a stand-up comedian living in the early 21st century, witnessing the arrival of a new religion, Azraelianism. The story is told via three diaries, the first written by Daniel 1, our protagonist. The second and third are written by clones of Daniel, 20 generations into the future, when the Azraelian religion has risen and fallen, reflecting on the diaries of their ‘original’ and trying to understand what love and happiness meant 1000 years before.
Technically, this is formalism at its very best. Using fiction to produce a diary that reflects on the real world is an established method of literary modernism, but by extending that into the future, and using the first diary as the only tie between the future and the real world of the present, Houellebecq illustrates just how literature can move away from something and move closer to it in the same step, what I call poststructuralist formalism. The more fictional the diary entries become, the more significant they are to the reality of the present.
Thematically, the main topics are religion and love, and the importance of each. Houellebecq explicitly states at one point that technological progress, political revolution, artistic innovation - nothing compares in significance to the birth of a new religion, a new ‘metaphysical mutation’ (the term he uses in Atomised when making a similar point). Nothing has such an impact on our world as how we view it. Sex and death are fascinating points of the narrative, but ultimately it’s life and love that matter.
Are there any characteristics of postmodern art/literature that distinguish it from modern art/literature?
I myself wrote a couple of months ago, as part of a discussion on this very topic for my literary studies:
The key point for this post in the central paragraph - that artistic innovation, the breakdown of the boundary between art and philosophy, broad intertextuality, the fragmented self - all are characteristic of modern art and postmodern art.
A more specific question, and for me a more interesting one, is whether there’s a conclusive difference between the formalist self-reflection of modernism (best illustrated in literature by EM Forster, Virginia Woolf and TS Eliot, in my view; best illustrated in art by Picasso and Duchamp) and the reflection on this formalist self-reflection of the postmodernists. Bertolt Brecht for example - a German Nietzchean-come-Marxist playwright, poet and critic - sits uncomfortably between the two. The A-effect (verfremdungseffekt) marks a clear departure from the Russian formalism that underpins the modernism self-reflection. In Shklovsky’s mode the defamiliarisation (usually the combination of the familiar and unfamiliar) is designed to enhance the understanding of the familiar, whereas in Brecht it is designed to enhance the understanding of the unfamiliar, and how it is relevant to the familiar. Thus he uses analogical narratives with heavily Marxist-Nietzschean undertones but alienates the audience from the narrative so that they see it as an analogy.
However, one might be tempted to say that Brecht is still tied to the somewhat academic tradition of literature that is merely an artistic manifestation of philosophy, which takes us back to the high modernism of Eliot and the rest. However, Brecht sought not only the elucidation of Marxism and Nietzschism but also for those ideas to have a grand impact on the audience subsequently perceived and acted in the world i.e. he returns to the premodernist Marxism of art being a means to subvert and cause revolution, but in doing so escapes at least some of the trappings of high modernism.
a few initial responses to your very insightful post.
I think that you’ve really caught a critical concept in the difference between modernism and postmodernism here. For me, modernism and postmodernism have always been almost taxonomic differences; You could usually tell by looking closely (or by knowing the artist.) But the ideological difference that set postmodern work apart felt almost like modernism with another layer of angst.
It’s true what you said about the elitism of modern art. I have often laughed at the incredible lack of approachability in so much of the art that has been made since the trun of the 20th century. I have often compared high art to high fashion.
Hardly anyone actually likes or can wear the stuff in most designer’s shows, and that’s just the same as the very few people who understand and are capable of paying outrageous prices for the hard core modern and postmodern art pieces. (Think artists like Rothko, Mondrian, Barnett Newman, etc, etc.) Those types of artists are incredibly far removed from what the person on the street considers artistic enough to hang in their house.
Something that just occurred to me - the AI singularity, which gets a reasonable amount of press in today’s dystopian journalistic climate, is invariably construed in popular media as pitching the machines against the humans. Why would we assume that the machines, upon achieving artificial intelligence and consciousness, would seek to fight us? Why wouldn’t they fight each other, like in Robot Wars?
Seems like a far more interesting story to me. Of course, there’s a huge Hollywood influence on this - movies like the Matrix and Terminator trilogies have set the scope for such conversations in the minds of many.
