It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

Lie Down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
— W.B. Yeats

This is from Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist by Caroline A. Jones (1996):

… Through the 1950s and 1960s, the genre of artist-photographer furthered in American by Edward Steichen swelled to massive proportions. Like Steichen, many of the participating photographers were direct heirs to a Northern European Romantic tradition: photographers Hans Namuth, Rudolph Burckhardt, Alexander Liberman, and filmmaker Michael Blackwood had all emigrated to America from various war-torn sectors of Germany (via Russia in Liberman’s case): with younger Americans such as Fred McDarrah and Marvin Lazarus they established careers as filmers and photographers of the emerging American avant-garde. Liberman, again like Steichen, had begun in the spirit of a pilgrim, returning to Europe over and over again after the war to photograph aging masters in their studios, pursuing the trope and seeking his own artistic identity at the same time. He began in 1947 the project that would take him thirteen years to complete and publish as The Artist in His Studio, described as: “so much like a religious pilgrimage that the photographs of the artists’ studios appear as shrines documenting sacred arts.” Many of Liberman’s photographs, before being exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art and published in book form in 1960, were published in Vogue in the late ’40s and ’50s together with accompanying essays on the artist and their work. The life of these texts and images has been rich, spread over many sectors of American society and enduring over decades; we can locate here a primary source for the postwar Americanization of the isolated Romantic artist. In Liberman’s 1960 book, we read:

Paul Cézanne is the spiritual father of modern art. … He is the painters’ painter, an archetype for painters. … This studio, stark and sad, a room of anguish and torment, was also the shell of a hardened egoist. Cézanne sacrificed all personal human contacts to achieve his vision. … Like Picasso, … Cézanne lived in ascetic, mystical surroundings, with painting as his sole luxury.

… Liberman deeply believed that the artists he documented “are the priests of a new religion — Art. … Their dedication to art, like that of men to religious orders, is a self-imposed vow.” Liberman (and many others) helped transfer this religion to America through tireless efforts to publish these photographs, seen in many incarnations and still in print … . Fascinated by every detail in these sacred sites, Liberman lovingly recorded their chipped cups, stacked paintbrushes, and dusty corners, as well as the artists who inhabited them — if they still did. By the time he visited them, many of these studios had passed from the realm of active production sites to shrines for the dead.

Death is perhaps the most convenient state of affairs for the fetishizing gaze. As Liberman describes the circumstances of his pilgrimage to Cézanne’s studio, we recognize the power of a fetish. To be fair to Liberman, it is a fetish that all art historians seek to know, the touch of the master:

The house he built himself … is a somber shell that still stands today. … The house is still intact more than fifty years after Cézanne’s death. By an accident of fate it was bought by a Provençal poet who lived in the lower rooms and did not touch the studio itself. Today Cézanne’s beret, his cape, his paint boxes, his rosary, his palettes and bottles of turpentine, all the objects that surrounded him during his work are there as he left them, untouched, unmoved throughout the years. [Emphasis added (by Jones).]

Because others have not touched these objects, they remain touched only by the artist. We want to touch them too, but ritual proscribes such sacrilege. The photograph is the fetish we can touch, and touch again, without havoc. Its connection with the sacred subject is also in the nature of an imperceptible touch, a trace, an imprint from the objects via light … .

… Michael Leja has argued, much of what each of these photographs has to say is framed in terms of the subjectivities of contemporaneous film noir. In these frames, the photographer (and viewer of the photograph) is constructed as voyeur, as spying penetrant of a private and hidden world. These precincts are both sacred and somehow sexual, conflating the two terms of solitude as the state of holiness and the site of “solitary vice.”

[ ... ]

Lie Down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
— W.B. Yeats

“The sublime” was a category of experience by its very essence difficult to define, but always located in the individual. It entered art discourse through the work of Longinus (Peri Hypsous), but it was given its greatest impetus through the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century publications of Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), which was in turn carried forward in Immanuel Kant’s magisterial The Critique of Judgment (1790) and his lesser known Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (1764). In Burke’s influential formulation, feelings of pleasure devolve from society, while the sublime belongs wholly to the individual, tied to basic and primitive drives of self-preservation and survival.

… Burke contrasted the idea of the sublime to beauty — the one great, the other small; the one rough, the other smooth; the one solid and massive, the other light and delicate.

… Instead of the topographic sublime that some critics would later locate in Abstract Expressionism, these artists’ experience seems logically described as an individual, subjective sublime (the “egotistical” sublime, as some term it) — echoed or induced by topography but personified in the artist himself. The sense of terror in the Burkean model was wedded, in these postwar artists’ terms, to the isolation of existential struggle, figured by the solitary individual under an empty American sky or the towering caverns of Manhattan, struggling like Yeats to climb out of the “rag and bone shop of the heart” (or, like Guston, to get the “rocks” out of their stomachs). The enforced solitude of the depoliticization that occurred in postwar American art was married to the darkness of a personal psychological search to create what Klaus Poenicke has termed America’s “Dark Sublime” …

My most recent previous post from Jones’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Their Imagination / Of His Imagination

……………..

Envy of Other People’s Poems
by Robert Hass

In one version of the legend the sirens couldn’t sing.
It was only a sailor’s story that they could.
So Odysseus, lashed to the mast, was harrowed
By a music that he didn’t hear — plungings of sea,
Wind-sheer, the off-shore hunger of the birds —
And the mute women gathering kelp for garden mulch,
Seeing him strain against the cordage, seeing
The awful longing in his eyes, are changed forever
On their rocky waste of island by their imagination
Of his imagination of the song they didn’t sing.

………

---

……..

This is the fifth verse (of six) from:

………

Poem with a Cucumber in It
by Robert Hass

[ ... ]

If you think I am going to make
A sexual joke in this poem, you are mistaken.

[ ... ]

………..

---

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

On Its Own

…  since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own …

This is from the essay ‘Some Thoughts on Painting’ by Lucian Freud (1954):

… A painter’s tastes must grow out of what so obsesses him in life that he never has to ask himself what it is suitable for him to do in art. Only through a complete understanding of his tastes can he free himself of any tendency to look at things with an eye to the way he can make them fit in with a ready-made conception. Unless this understanding is constantly alive, he will begin to see life simply as material for his particular line in art. He will look at something, and ask himself: “Can I make a picture by me out of this?” and so his work degenerates through no longer being the vehicle of his sensation. One might say that he has come to crystallize his art instead of his tastes, thereby insulating it from the emotion that could make it alive for others.

The painter’s obsession with his subject is all that he needs to drive him to work. People are driven towards making works of art, not by familiarity with the process by which this is done, but by a necessity to communicate their feelings about the object of their choice with such intensity that these feelings become infectious. Yet the painter needs to put himself at a certain emotional distance from the subject in order to allow it to speak. He may smother it if he lets his passion for it overwhelm him while he is in the act of painting.

Lucian Freud, Frank Auerbach, 1975-76

… Painters who use life itself as their subject-matter, working with the object in front of them, or constantly in mind, do so in order to translate life into art almost literally, as it were. The subject must be kept under closest observation: if this is done, day and night, the subject — he, she, or it — will eventually reveal all without which selection itself is not possible; they will reveal it, through some and every facet of their lives or lack of life, through movements and attitudes, through every variation from one moment to another. It is this very knowledge of life which can give art complete independence from life, an independence that is necessary because the picture in order to move us must never merely remind us of life, but must acquire a life of its own, precisely in order to reflect life. I say that one needs a complete knowledge of life in order to make the picture independent from life, because, when a painter has a distant adoration of nature, an awe of it, which stops him from examining it, he can only copy nature superficially, because he does not dare to change it.

A painter must think of everything he sees as being there entirely for his own use and pleasure. The artist who tries to serve nature is only an executive artist. And, since the model he so faithfully copies is not going to be hung up next to the picture, since the picture is going to be there on its own, it is of no interest whether it is an accurate copy of the model. Whether it will convince or not, depends entirely on what it is in itself, what is there to be seen. The model should only serve the very private function for the painter of providing the starting point for his excitement. The picture is all he feels about it, all he thinks worth preserving of it, all he invests it with. If all the qualities which a painter took from the model for his picture were really taken, no person could be painted twice.

The aura given out by a person or object is as much a part of them as their flesh. The effect that they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different human individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and an electric light bulb.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

The Shade / Of a Cloud on Sand

… just as though all that we regard as decisive in the world did not depend precisely on this triviality.

This if from an essay ‘The Poetry of Wallace Stevens’ by Howard Nemerov:

… ideas, like books, have also fates, and Dryden finely says, “Every alteration of the design, every new-sprung passion or turn of it, is a part of the action, and much the noblest, except we conceive nothing to be action till they come to blows.” Every alteration of the design — it describes, I think, the “action” in Stevens’ poems. This too, of Paul Valéry, is relevant:

Within the mind, there is a drama. Drama, adventure, agitation, all words of this category can be employed on condition that several are used, and are corrected one by the other. Such dramas are usually lost, like the plays of Menander.

That defines something of Stevens‘ nearly unique preoccupation in poetry: the recording of that subtle drama of inductions of which we lose or throw away a thousand examples daily, so that we have formed the prudent habit of calling it trivial, just as though all that we regard as decisive in the world did not depend precisely on this triviality: “The poem of the act of the mind.”

[ ... ]

After all the pretty contrast of life and death
Proves that these opposite things partake of one,
At least that was the theory, when bishops’ books
Resolved the world. We cannot go back to that.
The squirming facts exceed the squamous mind,
If one may say so. And yet relation appears,
A small relation expanding like the shade
Of a cloud on sand, a shape on the side of a hill.

[-- from 'Connoisseur of Chaos']

The poem continues to debate these contrasts, which dissolve and re-form themselves in being debated — “Just one more truth, one more / Element in the immense disorder of truths,” — and concludes on a figure which for once is rigorously traditional in its combination:

The pensive man. … He sees that eagle float
For which the intricate Alps are a single nest.

… Beginning where he began, development was impossible except as abstraction, progressive refinement, development to a stripped simplicity; it is as though what he developed was primarily the sense of what he was about, the simplifying consciousness of his poetry as an assault upon conventions of meaning, conventions of language, upon those people who, as Valéry once wrote, are so little aware of the pains and pleasures of vision that they have invented beautiful views.

It is the tragedy of poetry so conceived that, in a certain sense, it produces beautiful views despite itself, and a greater tragedy that all success is briefly sustained upon failure.

… I should be sorry to have my reader take this opinion as pontifical, for in a certain, generally undervalued sense poetry is what you like. If there was a failure, it followed many noble poems, and followed them not merely in time but as their consciously accepted consequence … In considering the sense of his own parable, “How the honey of heaven may or may not come, / But that of earth both comes and goes at once,” he rejected all easy solutions …

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Readiness

… Things we overlook in one frame of mind another renders salient. Emotions are sources of salience.

This is from Considered Judgment by Catherine Z. Elgin (1996):

… if the occurrence of wayward convictions does not justify banishing all beliefs from the epistemic realm, the occurrence of unruly passions ought not constitute grounds for the wholesale exclusion of emotions. Instead, I suggest, we should investigate the cognitive functions that emotions perform to see how they affect epistemic tenability. … My aim is not to anesthetize emotion but to sensitize cognition — to show that the understanding we achieve is not indifferent to emotion but that understanding is none the less objective for that.

… An emotion affects both the configuration and the constitution of a system of thought. It provides focus, highlighting some aspects of the domain, obscuring others, engendering relations of relevance and irrelevance. Free-floating anxiety, for example, brings alarming features to the fore and overshadows innocuous ones. It might point up the possibility and downplay the improbability of contracting rabies from a gerbil. On the one hand, it might latch onto and provide insights into something well worth worrying about. Should it light on the issue of global-warming, for example, it might effect a realignment of information that constitutes a genuine contribution to the science of ecology.

What we notice is a function of our interests. Things we overlook in one frame of mind another renders salient. Emotions are sources of salience.

… an attitude is a complex, context-sensitive stance. Whether or not belief involves a relation to a propositional object, it supplies an orientation — a perspective that highlights some objects and aspects, some dimensions and characterizations, while obscuring or overshadowing or discrediting others. Expectations, states of perceptual readiness, patterns of salience, and dispositions to utter, accept, reject, and deliberate all figure in the attitude — each informed by the matrix of commitments it belongs to.

… Undeniably, overwhelming emotions sometimes short-circuit reason. The question is what to make of this. We might take it to demonstrate that emotion as such is antithetical to the advancement of understanding. If emotion ever short-circuits reason, emotion is never to be trusted. Before drawing such a drastic conclusion, though, we should recall certain parallels with perception. Very bright light is blinding and often causes after-images. Very loud noise is deafening and may occasion a variety of subsequent auditory distortions — echoes, a buzzing in the ear, and so on. But even though the visual and auditory systems can be overwhelmed, it would be unreasonable to expect epistemology to exclude all their deliverances. Rather, we need to learn when perceptual deliverances are not to be trusted. Likewise, I suggest, with emotions.

My most recent previous post from Elgin’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

 

Confronting the Particulars

… There are various levels where your mind can make connections.

This is from A Critical Cinema 5: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers by Scott MacDonald (2006). This is from his interview with Nathaniel Dorsky:

[ ... ]

Dorsky: … My [film] cutting is … an attempt to create resonance without taking sides. I don’t want to produce mental linkages that can be reduced to language. When Steve Anker saw Variations in my apartment, he remarked that to build a montage based purely on the visual and poetic seems so obvious that it’s shocking that no one has done it until now, at least not quite in this balance.

Every film I work on to earn money — or 95 percent of them — is using images to illustrate language. I do it for money, but it’s painful. In my own work, the world itself is the articulation, and film helps us to experience its magic and mystery, its beauty and complexity. I think that’s what Ozu does, and Ford, and Antonioni, and Rossellini.

[ ... ]

MacDonald: What do you see as the changes between Triste and Variations?

Dorsky: By Variations I’d really begun to understand how to make a montage that opens up yet accumulates. A shot can’t relate conceptually to the previous shot because if it’s too similar or too parallel or too literal , or ironic, then a reductive connection manifests. If the shots don’t connect at all, then it’s nothing. It’s easy to do nihilism in film; you just put things together that are so different that the imagery is not solidifying around meaning, like the “eye candy” of TV ads and MTV. At a certain point that kind of filmmaking wears you out. Strangely enough, the way the business world co-opted the avant-garde only emphasizes what in the avant-garde did not have deep roots in some kind of truly wondrous expression.

I want successive images to be disparate and connected, and I want each shot to link back to earlier shots. The connection can be as simple as the return of a certain red or of a particular pattern. Sometimes it’s the iconography. There are various levels where your mind can make connections. They say that grandchildren are actually more like their grandparents than their parents; my method feels something like that. I want each shot to continue to play a role, after the next shot, and the next, have passed. At first I could only do it by chance, but slowly I learned how to make this kind of movie, and by Variations I’d begun to understand my method.

[ ... ]

Dorsky: … I make a living. I’ll work intensely for maybe three weeks, and then I don’t work for six weeks. I stay poor, but I stay me. It does take you a while to untangle your mind from those jobs before you can go back into your own film.

… The only way for me to deeply enjoy myself now is to live humbly, be with the sunlight, be with my camera, using my senses, confronting the particulars. When I go to sleep at night, I like to feel my being, without language as an interpreter. Getting close to something is one of the genuinely human experiences.

You said something earlier that I think is very important: that without the film industry there could be no avant-garde film, since we’re dependent on the equipment and film stock that are manufactured for the industry. We avant-garde filmmakers are like poignant weeds growing up in the cracks of the sidewalk. We would not exist if it were not for the ecosystem that supports emulsions and projectors.

MacDonald: Right. You can’t be monastic without a world to leave. You can’t be pure in comparison to nothing.

Dorsky: Exactly!

My previous post from MacDonald’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Weather Is a Language

… there are no referents in haiku … : it only sets out the surrounds … , but the object evaporates, is absorbed by the circumstance: what surrounds it, for a lightning-quick moment.

This is from The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes (2003). These are from Barthes’s lectures given between 1978 and 1980 at the Collège de France:

… Producing haiku (as a popular pastime): a kind of classless “national sport” (Sieffert). Still, today, it plays a big part in the daily life of Japan: sixty magazines, many of them with a very large readership + columns in the papers + every Sunday, the Asahi (The Dawn): the achievements of amateur haikists are introduced by three eminent poets.

This intense pleasure taken in producing haiku, this ardent desire for haiku: perhaps linked, in Japan (which is why it would be literally unthinkable here), to the genre’s (metrical) constraint: the seventeen syllables selected from the fifty possible consonant + vowel groups in Japanese phonetics → combinations of the fifty elements, mathematically calculable; however, if it’s meaningful combinations we’re after: the number of possibilities is reduced, whence the collections of thousands of haiku, enabling the poet to check that his composition hasn’t already been composed by someone else → Essentially a board game, but what’s at stake is not a dull performance (crosswords, Scrabble) but a vibration of the world (that we can call: the poetic): ancestral code + modern materials.

… To get us moving … toward haiku: the weather (or so I now think) not only has a phatic function but also an existential charge; it brings the subject’s feeling-being into play, the pure and mysterious sensation of life. This can be said within the framework of a semiological description: the Weather is a Language (and a language is not simply a means of communication but also a means of instituting the subject — of creation): (1) a code (a law): the Season + (2) a performance (speech, discourse) that enacts the code: the Weather = the code spoken by the moment, the day, the hour, the individuation of existence, which is to say, by what enacts, or what baffles [déjoue] (still the remunerating, compensating, rectifying function of discourse with respect to language): in France, which is a country of subtle, complex, variation, you sometimes (often?) see a season being disputed by the weather (winter in summer, etc.) while still being enacted, confirmed by its products (flowers, fruit etc.): here the dialectic of code and performance is very clear — the disparity between the code and the subject: the disparity and the link: I’m cold in June (performance: my epidermis, the light that my eyes see), yet there are peonies (code) → haiku, in the form of a very brief notation, will often endeavor to situate itself on the quietly surprising border between the code (of the season) and the weather (as it’s received, spoken, by the subject): a season’s precocious awakenings, the languidness of a season drawing to an end: produce false impressions [de fausses impressions]: Isn’t discourse the false impression of language, as it were? And, at the same time, doesn’t language distort [fausse] discourse (all laws distort [fausse] the subject)? Dramatic contradiction that we’re condemned to wrestle with.

Corot, Road to Sèvres [image from Wikipaintings]

There’s an art (historically: for it’s no longer practiced) that consists in the eidetic expression of the Weather: Romantic painting. I’m thinking of Corot and, in particular, of his Road to Sèvres (not exactly high culture! You can find it under “Realism” in the Petit Larousse dictionary): the individuation of the sky, the shadows, the figures, as if the painting were saying: “It was intense and yet it’s gone forever”; it’s unrepeatable yet intelligible (again, the dialectic of language — of the code — and discourse) → At the end of the day, the communicable essence of the Weather is, paradoxically, what the Weather was like → the Weather: of the order of Memory. Example:

What happiness
Crossing the river
Sandals in hand!

(Buson, Blyth)

Strange: the certainty that I’ve lived out this scene — childhood or Morocco: a summer’s day or a picnic, etc. The haiku is produced by the bedazzlement of a personal involuntary Memory.

[ ... ]

…Media culture can be said to be defined by its (aggressive) rejection of nuance. I’ve spoken of the nuance as a fundamental practice of communication a number of times; … I add these words of Walter Benjamin: “things are, as we know, technicalized, rationalized, and nowadays the particular is only to be found in the nuance.”

… Nuance = difference [diaphora]. Let’s explore the notion a little further through a paradox formulated by Blanchot (and to which Blanchot provides the key): “Every artist is linked to a mistake with which he has a particular intimate relation. … Every art draws its origin from an exceptional fault, every work is the implementation of this original fault, from which comes to us a new light and a risky conception of plenitude.” Indeed: from an endoxal point of view, the nuance is what’s flawed [raté] … the most beautiful ceramics where a flaw, where firing the glaze for too long has produced incomparable nuances; unexpected, sensual streaks. In a way, the Nuance: that which irradiates, diffuses, streaks (as a beautiful cloud streaks the sky). … [I]n the Nuance there’s something like a torment of the void (which is why those of a “positive” disposition dislike it so much).

[ ... ]

… Thus far, I’ve spoken of contingency: this fits with Basho’s definition: a haiku “is simply what happens in a given place, at a given moment.” — But in truth this isn’t quite sufficient: I’d like to introduce a nuance: a haiku is what happens (contingency, microadventure), but only in that what happens surrounds the subject — who, moreover, only exists, and can only claim to be a subject, through this fleeting and mobile surrounding (individuation ≠ individuals) → So, rather than contingency, think circumstance (think of the etymology), — Thus, after “instant / memory” and “immobility / movement,” this is the third dialectic (contradiction) that I want to draw your attention to: although the haiku establishes the certainty of a referent, it also invites us to speak of circumstants (a clumsy word) rather than referents. In a (extreme) sense, there are no referents in haiku — so, strictly speaking, no thetic: it only sets out the surrounds (circumstants), but the object evaporates, is absorbed by the circumstance: what surrounds it, for a lightning-quick moment.

I think you’ll grasp this nuance if we compare a haiku (that I’ll provide) with the notation of the cries from the streets of Paris in In Search of Lost Time.

It’s been said (Coyaud) — rightly — that these are almost haiku:

“Prawns, lovely prawns,
Alive, alive-o”

“Lettuce, cos lettuce, not to hawk
Lovely cos lettuce out for a walk”

Compare with:

Waking from a siesta
I hear the knife grinder
Go by

(Bakunan, Coyaud)

The nuance is clear: in Proust, the notation remains realistic, it refers to a sort of reality in itself; it’s an inventory, a catalog ≠ in the haiku, the notation: absolutely subjective; the “referent” is a circumstant: the enunciator’s torpid body, which is stated by what surrounds it → Of course, if we were to put the cries from the streets of Paris back into the surroundings of the Proustian enunciator, his half-sleep, the shut-up bedroom, etc., then we’d rediscover the absolute subjectivity of the body listening to those cries; we’d rediscover a circumstant – but, in Proust, that would require a whole narrative → It’s a question of the choice of form — and, on that level, of macroculture: we’re not attuned to the short form; for us, subjectivity can only ever be prolix = it is an exploration ≠ the haiku: a kind of implosion.

My previous post from Barthes’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

This Tension

This is from The Experience of Freedom by Jean-Luc Nancy (1993; 1988):

… This tension is visible as soon as two gazes cross (it is not even certain that this has to be limited to human gazes, or that it must exclude what in our gaze looks at itself or is observed by the “inert” objects of the world): it is materially visible, or more than visible, “tangible,” as the very invisibility of that which, in the gaze, gazes — and which is not a thought, not a face, but the singular inactuality of this very act of the gaze, of this intense opening of an existence-in-the-world (well prior to any perspective-taking by a subject). … It is always freedom that gazes, perhaps from the endless depth of the “starry sky,” but also in a look exchanged by chance, or from the depths of a prison, or even into the eyes of someone who has just died. And if it is always freedom that gazes, it is undoubtedly also always the same gaze.

My most recent previous post from Nancy’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Professionals

… They are using a game, to be sure, but they are using a game by playing it.

Continuing through The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia by Bernard Suits (2005). Picking up where we left off last week, Skepticus has a question for Grasshopper:

… Your account of lusory [Skepticus continued] is expressed by that part of your definition* which states that a game player accepts the limitation of means which the rules demand ‘just because such acceptance makes possible such activity.’ Now consider, if you will, a professional athlete. He is playing hockey, let us say, as a means of earning his livelihood. That is, his reason for playing hockey is to make money. Now, in order to play the game of hockey he must accept the rules of hockey. It therefore follows that one, anyway, of his reasons for accepting the rules is that such acceptance is a necessary condition for earning his salary. but if that is so, then it is false to say that he accepts the rules of hockey ‘just because such acceptance makes possible such activity.’ And so the existence of professional game players appears to falsify your account of lusory attitude. Unless, of course, you want to maintain that professionals, precisely by virtue of the fact that they do not have lusory attitude, are not really playing games.

Grasshopper offers several minor arguments against Skepticus’s claim (primarily clarifying the meaning of ‘just’ in his definition) before getting down to his primary defense:

… My account of lusory attitude is intended to rule out not ‘professional’ players of games, but the following kind of quasi-game player. Smith arrives at the starting line of the 200 meters finals just as the race is about to begin. He has only that moment learned that a time bomb has been planted in the grandstand at the finish line (which is located on the other side of the oval track at a point directly opposite the starting line), and that it will go off in a matter of seconds. The information has so shocked Smith that he is temporarily bereft of speech and so cannot warn anyone of the impending catastrophe. His first impulse is to run straight across the infield and defuse the bomb, but he sees with dismay that the infield has been fenced off with a high chain-link barrier, evidently to protect spectators and participants from the fifty or so man-eating tigers that roam hungrily inside the enclosure. At the instant Smith realizes that his only hope of getting to the bomb in time is to make a half circuit of the track, the starting gun is fired, and Smith and the other entrants are off and running hard.

Now, I put it to you, Skepticus, that the other runners are playing a game but that Smith is not, and that this is so because the other runners have lusory attitude and Smith does not. Let me explain. Two rules relevant to lusory attitude are at issue in this episode: the rule which requires entrants to begin running at the same time from the same point, and the rule which requires that they do not cut across any part of the infield. Now, through a series of uncanny coincidences, Smith finds himself observing both of these rules. But his reason for doing so is quite different from the reason that the other contestants have for observing the rules. If Smith had arrived at the starting line earlier he would have begun running earlier, and if the infield had not been barred by a tiger-filled enclosure he would have cut straight across the infield. But the other runners, who could have started running before the starting gun was fired, did not do so, and if the infield had been neither fenced nor tiger-infested, they still would have remained on the track. That is, they accepted the rules just because they wanted to participate in a competitive game. But Smith acted within the constraints because that was the only way he could get speedily to the bomb. Clearly his attitude towards the rules was not that they made possible a foot race, for if he had found his voice or if the infield had been safe and clear, he would not have been running around the track at all.

Smith’s attitude, I suggest, puts the difference between amateurs and professionals into proper perspective. For although professionals and amateurs admittedly have different attitudes towards the games they play, they have the same attitude towards the rules of those games, an attitude which is the opposite of Smith’s. For let us suppose that the other runners had all been professionals rather than amateurs. They still, unlike Smith, could not jump the gun or cut across the infield without utterly defeating their professional purposes, for it is excellence in playing a game, and in playing a game alone, which serves those purposes. They are using a game, to be sure, but they are using a game by playing it. Smith is using a game without playing it. They are contestants: he is an opportunist. And so when Smith, after getting to the finish line ahead of the other runners and defusing the bomb, is disqualified from the race for having interfered with another runner at the second turn, he simply chuckles to himself and goes about his business.

Grasshopper uses that difference to further argue against the related idea of radical instrumentalism (which is “the view that games are essentially instruments”):

… The attitude demanded by radical instrumentalism is inevitably one of radical ambivalence. … This can be seen by making some modifications in the bomb-defusing episode. Let us replay that race, but with the tiger-filled enclosure eliminated and under the supposition that Smith is keen upon winning the race as well as upon getting to the bomb in time. As the starting gun is fired, he believes that these two purposes can be accomplished by the same means, that is, by running as fast as he can around the track. But scarcely has he left the starting blocks when he realizes that these two goals are in conflict with one another. For he sees that cutting across the infield is a better way speedily to defuse the bomb than running all around the track. Faced by this choice Smith will do one of three things. 1) If he values winning the race more than defusing the bomb, he will stay on the track. 2) If he values defusing the bomb more than winning the race, he will cut across the infield. 3) If he values each of these things equally, he will be reduced to a state of gibbering indecision.

Radical instrumentalism, therefore, is a theory of games which needs only to be understood in order to be shunned, for it cannot be put into practice. Because of the equal but irreconcilable demands of the game and of what may be called life, although it is possible to meet the demands of the game or of life or of neither, it is not possible to meet the demands of both.

To be continued.

[*The 'original definition' was/is: 'To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]. I also offer the following simpler and, so to speak, more portable version of the above: playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles.’]

-My most recent previous post from Suits’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/

Contained In the Act

… ” … The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world.”

… “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. … What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.”

This is from Machine in the Studio: Constructing the Postwar American Artist by Caroline A. Jones (1996):

… Photographs and films, often used unproblematically by art historians as mere containers of historical facts, were in fact constitutive of the trope of the isolated studio for much of the twentieth century. Particularly for Americans, I want to argue, the photographic or filmed portrait had greater impact than its canvas progenitor. Often distributed through mass media outlets such as Life, Look, Vogue, and eventually television (and before that to more targeted audiences through [Steiglitz's] Camera Work or the Studio), the camera’s statement, whether in still photograph or moving cinema, was pervasive and influential in reaffirming the image of the American artist as isolated genius in his studio. As I discuss in greater detail in chapter 2, the camera was believed and its images taken as transcendent (even prescriptive) truths about the modern artist and the studio sanctuary.

Edward Steichen’s 1901 self-portrait is an appropriate place to begin interrogating these images. Its imagery assimilates the photographer to the status of creative fine artist even as its technology situates it in the realm of “photographic truth.” The artist looks down imperiously at the camera/viewer from within his old-fashioned, neo-Romantic collar and cravat, posing for his own camera to produce “photography’s answer to Titian’s painting Man with a Glove,” which he had earlier admired. Steichen seductively presents the equation studio = individual genius = brushstroke, manipulating the photographic plate to blur certain outlines and enhance others, so that his brush “has become a physical extension of his fingers” and his head floats in a nimbus of inspiring light within the sanctum of the studio.

Self-Portrait, 1901

Steichen’s suite of photographs of Rodin, made the same year as the self-portrait and published in the same issue of Camera Work, further enshrine this iconography of male genius, particularly as it was presented to the American audience. Rodin’s powers of cogitation seem to split the earth itself, which hisses with vapors and mists that congeal into art … as if formed by sheer mental will. Steichen’s photograph was the culmination of a year’s worth of weekly visits to Rodin’s studio; although the young artist-photographer was as aware as any savvy European of the practiciens and assistants populating Rodin’s busy workshop, it is the isolated genius he portrays.

Rodin, 1901

[ ... ]

… there were important American traditions for the highly social studios that would emerge in the 1960s. These include the Ashcan school of painters, and the Eight, whose journalist backgrounds encouraged the development of the studio as a site for frequent gathering and exchange of information and opinions. Before that, nineteenth-century American artists such as Whistler, Chase, and Sargent held aesthetic sessions, conducted business, or entertained in their elegantly appointed studio salons. But as I hope to show, the American painters of the 1940s and ’50s had little or no interest in such precedents, if they were even aware of them.

[ ... ]

If I stretch my arms next to the rest of my self and wonder where my fingers are — that is all the space I need as a painter.
— Willem de Kooning, 1951

The public role played by the private studio in postwar American art was both paradoxical and crucial to the development of an international modern art in New York. The Manhattan studio was a public figure for all that was private, a visible yet inaccessible source for all that was meaningful in the abstract art object. Tropes of the studio functioned in myriad ways, all of them important for The Triumph of American Painting (as one 1970 history would exultantly proclaim). When even the ends of one’s fingertips seemed distant, alienated from the core of meaning (the self), then the world beyond the studio was impossibly remote. The studio figured this by signifying, variously and often simultaneously: solitary retreat from the demands of society, sanctuary for private creation, metaphor for the individual artist, metonym for his psyche (storehouse of images and site of encounters with the unconscious), and invisible arena for the “action painting” destined to become public statement of the quintessentially private act.

… The presiding genius of this inviolate studio would have no intercourse with, and its creations would make no reference to, the world outside its walls. In describing this space in 1952, Harold Rosenberg suggested it as the privileged location for “The American Action Painters.” In the framework of Rosenberg’s essay, the depoliticized, isolated studio had a newly national role to play: “The gesture on the canvas was a gesture of liberation from Value — political, esthetic, moral. … The lone artist did not want the world to be different, he wanted his canvas to be a world.” (Emphasis added [by Jones].)

In the space of his paint, in the realm of his canvas, the lone artist would create his world; in the place of the studio, he would live it. The connection between art and social activism was severed; indeed, a painting’s connection to the world was so fraught that, in the words of Mark Rothko, “It is … a risky and unfeeling act to send it out into the world.” A risk, in fact, for art or artist ever to leave the studio; Rothko’s solution was to recapitulate such a closed world in more public space, within the mechanism of sublime transcendence, or through requirements that his works be hung together in their own sequestered galleries.

… Just as seventeenth-century natural philosophers invoked “holy solitude” to legitimate their pursuit of a depoliticized science and their withdrawal from civic duty, the Abstract Expressionists and their colleagues dipped into Romantic concepts of divine madness and individual genius to defend their cultivated isolation.

… Isolated by choice from others’ demands, their painting became an existential act, according to Rosenberg. In his famous words of 1952: “At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act — rather than a space in which to reproduce, re-design, analyze, or ‘express’ an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. … What matters always is the revelation contained in the act.” … Although subsequently challenged, Rosenberg’s ideas had an enormous impact in the American art world, in part because their source was probably the artists themselves.

My previous post from Jones’s book is here.

-Julie

http://www.unrealnature.com/