… The process of discovery transforms the medium into form.
… The medium of art renders the creation of forms at once possible and improbable. The medium always contains other possibilities and makes everything determined appear to be contingent.
… the artwork directs the beholder’s awareness toward the improbability of its emergence.
Continuing through Art as a Social System by Niklas Luhmann (2000):
… The unity of art resides in that it creates for the sake of observation and observes for the sake of being observed, and the medium of art consists in the freedom to create medium/form relations.
… The determination of one side [of a form] does not entirely leave open what can happen on the other side — this accounts for the specificity of individual art forms. While it does not determine the other side, it renders it nonarbitrary. What can happen there must “fit” or it will cause dissonance, a flaw or disruption (which can, of course, be intentional, in which case it requires a balancing fit on its part).
… Whenever an object is intended to be a work of art, the indication does not refer merely to itself (to this and no other object). It also refers to the crossing of the boundary that divides the form into two halves and instructs the observer to search for and fix what has not yet been decided. This holds for the artist as well as for the observer of art, and ultimately for any observation that depends on time. The indication, we might say, is used as meaning.
… Forms play with forms, but the play remains formal. It never arrives at “matter,” it never serves as a sign for something else. Each formal determination functions simultaneously as an irritation that leaves room for subsequent decisions, and advancing from one form to the next is an experiment that either succeeds or fails. This is why, as we shall elaborate below, a “code” emerges in art, a continuously maintained binary orientation concerning the “fit” or “lack of fit” of forms. This is why every artwork contains “information” in Gregory Bateson’s sense — differences that make a difference. And all this holds for any kind of art!
Accordingly, for all genres the medium of art is the sum total of possible ways of crossing form boundaries (distinctions) from within toward the outside and of discovering fitting indications on the other side that stimulate further crossings by virtue of their own boundaries. The medium of art is present in every artwork, yet it is invisible, since it operates only on the other side — the one not indicated — as a kind of attractor for further observations. The process of discovery transforms the medium into form. Or else one fails. In working together, form and medium generate what characterizes successful artworks, namely, improbable evidence.
… The medium of art renders the creation of forms at once possible and improbable. The medium always contains other possibilities and makes everything determined appear to be contingent. This improbability is emphasized when everyday purposes and utilities are bracketed as the guiding principles of observation. Artistic form (backed by aesthetic reflection) goes out of its way not to appear useful.
In this way, the artwork directs the beholder’s awareness toward the improbability of its emergence.
… When focusing on the improbability of form itself, one is primarily concerned with the observer’s fascination, his staying-put-with-the-work in a sequence of observations that attempt to decipher it.
… Eventually, one begins to experiment with the idea of declaring everything a work of art so long as an artistic claim can be asserted and maintained. The work’s probability then boils down to the credibility of such a claim.
But artistic credibility is still a relationship between medium and form. The difficulty of creating forms shifts to the difficulty of claiming a work as art and maintaining this claim. Yet the medium remains a medium of art by virtue of its ties to the history of art; it continues to function as a medium that propels the historical machinery of the art system beyond its current state with new and ever more daring forms. The medium might absorb decontextualized historical references, as it does in postmodernism, whereby the improbability resides precisely in this decontextualization, in free selection from a historical reservoir of forms. What used to be bound historically is now up for grabs on the condition that it remain recognizable as such.One might equally well continue the project of the avant-garde in an effort to expand, via the production of art, the concept of art itself. In both cases, art turns into the artistic medium insofar as, and so long as, it is capable of making the observer recognize the improbable as improbable. In the end, the observer might even be challenged to comprehend the incomprehensibility — created especially for him — of an artwork as a reference to an incomprehensible world.
… The art system is a special system of social communication. It has its own self-reference and hetero-references that indicate forms existing exclusively in a medium unique to art. This medium is the improbability of the combinatory structure of form that art wrests from everyday life and that refers the observer to other observers.
These reflections eventually raise the question of whether an artwork has to be difficult and, if so, why. Like everything else, this proposition can be questioned today, and there is a tendency to separate art from craftsmanship. Pushed to its extreme, difficulty might ultimately boil down to the problem of how one can work as an artist in a manner that is still recognizable. Pointing to the essence of art — to the idea of art, the rarity of genius, or the like — is of no help in this matter. The question, rather, is whether and for what reasons the medium’s potential for creating forms must be limited, and how this limitation is accomplished.
Within a theory of symbolically generalized media, Talcott Parsons assumed that each of these media, just like money, requires a real backing that can be overdrawn by confidence but not expanded at will. Using the medium below or in excess of its capacities is certainly possible, but it leads to an inflation or deflation of the medium that jeopardizes its functioning. If we follow Parsons suggestion, then what would be the backing of art, especially of modern art? Obviously, nothing external to the medium can fulfill this function; what backs the medium of art is the work’s triumph over its own improbability.
This is why the trend toward facilitating the creation of forms and reducing forms to simple distinctions cannot be countered by judgments of taste or values. Even the concept of art apparently no longer sets limits to what can count as art. But one can know that the medium/form dynamic requires constraints and that expansive trends lead to inflation. How much inflation the art system can tolerate boils down to an empirical question. Sanctions are evident not in the reaction against violations of the norm but in the loss of interest in the observation of observations.
My most recent previous post from Luhmann’s book is here.
-Julie
