D SPERRY FINLAYSON

• The shift, in less than 100 years—from an “old-fashioned” view of art as restorative, as somehow beneficial to human beings, to a verbally intellectual appreciation of “ideas” (a conception “seductive to academics.”) • The avant-garde, and the “ugly-with-an-explanation.” • What the focus on “the next big thing” has brought us. • Art as “a wound that won’t heal”; the exploitation of shock. • Marcel Duchamp’s “wedding of the mental and the visual.” • Duchamp’s theory and its aporia. • Duchamp in America. R. Mutt’s Fountain. • Arthur Danto: “Interpretation…constitutes art as such.” • Duchamp in France: family, career, La Section d’Or. Cubism, Dada, Futurism • The Readymades and the Taj Mahal. • Duchamp the Trickster. • Theory and the art market. • The “Infrathin” difference. • Misunderstandings taught as dogma. Duchamp’s bitter last laugh. • Carl Jung: “[T]he creative act…can only be described in its manifestation. • The primacy of the Idea. Sol LeWitt. Art for talk’s sake. • Art and Pornography. Art and Chance. • Duchamp: chance as “almost a religious element.” • The Cunningham Dance Company’s use of chance. • Truth is manifested by form even when words are the medium. • Poincaré’s “truth test” in mathematics. • Arthur Danto and “the end of art.” Warhol’s Brillo boxes. • Rothko and the Golden Section. • “Outsider” art. • Richard Diebenkorn and the “cumulative excitement” when a picture is “right and complete.” Not a matter of talk.

[One] can be dishonorable [in everyday matters]…and yet preserve the kind of virtue that is necessary to a good artist. That virtue is the virtue of integrity….Bad art is of two sorts: that which is merely bad, stupid, and incompetent, and the positively bad, which is a lie and a sham.

[Aldous Huxley, “The Best Picture,” in The Piero Della Francesca Trail with The Best Picture, p 6]

What is essential in a work of art is that it should rise far above the realm of personal life and speak from the spirit and heart of the poet as human being to the spirit and heart of mankind.

[Carl Jung, “Psychology and Literature,” in Brewster Ghiselin ed., The Creative Process, p 220]

If [Robert Smithson’s]art is great…it is so in ways that do not meet the eye but take form in cogitation. In visual mediums, Smithson was some combination of the congenitally talentless and the allergic to sensory enjoyment.…

[B]y the mid-sixties, in New York, almost any radical gesture could gin up a constituency….[Smithson] was the firstcomer of the post-minimalist generation, which grounded itself in a cultural situation revolutionized by minimalism and Pop art—a violently expanded milieu, immediately seductive to academic intellectuals, in which critical attention and institutional backing tended to favor every latest thing, the farther out the better. [emphasis mine]

[Peter Schjeldahl, The New Yorker, 9/5/05 p 158]

The line dividing the second quotation here from the third represents a relatively short period of time: less than a hundred years. Mr. Schjeldahl, writing in the early 21st century, took a somewhat radical stance in suggesting that “sensory enjoyment” of forms that “meet the eye”—rather than a verbal/ intellectual enjoyment of “ideas”—could possibly be a requirement of serious visual art. At the same time, I’m certain he wasn’t asking for the pretty, the sentimental, the vapidly pleasant—for “beauty” in its debased sense.

In an earlier chapter I quoted Iris Murdoch’s description of art as being “a cunning mixture of coherence and incoherence,” capable of healing and restoring us in a life so often experienced as chaotic, arbitrary, and without meaning.[1] Professor Murdoch knew that when she proposed, in the 1990s, that art can defend us against materialism and “pseudo scientific” views of life, that it “calms and invigorates” and gives energy by “unifying, possibly by purifying, our feelings,” her views would be judged both old-fashioned and irrelevant. But her claims were proven true in the days after September 11th, 2001 by the crowds of New Yorkers and others all across the United States who sought solace and strength not only at religious services but at concerts and art museums. Eight thousand people visited New York’s Metropolitan Museum on the day after the disaster, the kind of attendance usually reserved for much-publicized blockbuster exhibitions.[2] Only great art suffices as response to, or commentary on, great tragedy. “Where were we before this dreadful event? Where can we find ourselves again?” There.

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For the past hundred years and more, artists and critics, academics and collectors have been running at the heels of the avant-garde, seeking work which is new above all. How to recognize the new? An easy way is to look for something shocking—in form, in subject matter, or in being what Adam Gopnick, writing in the New Yorker, once dubbed “ugly-with-an-explanation.” But there’s a major problem with this: when the motive, the generating force behind the work, is merely a craving to be situated “at the cutting edge,” doing what is most daring and controversial, the work will not offer us what great art in any form can provide: it will not give us our life. To achieve < >´ is a profound challenge; to conceive of something shocking requires only a few moments’ imagining.

In his 1997 book, After the End of Art, Arthur Danto quotes an audience member’s description of a performance piece presented by the impeccably avant-garde German artist Joseph Beuys in 1979. Beuys believed, Danto says, “not only that anything could be a work of art, but that everyone was an artist.” Danto’s witness reported,

[Beuys’s] actions are reduced to a minimum; he scribbles on a board and pushes it around with a stick in a forty-minute circuit…shows films by himself…and of Rannoch Moor drifting slowly past the camera at about 3 mph. He spends something over an hour and a half taking bits of gelatin off the walls and putting them on a tray, which he empties over his head in a convulsive movement. Finally he stands still for forty minutes.

Thus told it sounds like nothing, in fact it is electrifying. And I am not speaking for myself alone: everyone who sat through the performance was converted although everyone, needless to say, had a different explanation.

[Caroline Tisdale, in Arthur Danto, After the End of Art p 186]

This account persuades me. The experience was “electrifying”; people were “converted”…but to what? Perhaps they were convinced that the work was truth. Danto writes, “I think everyone who reads the description wishes they had been there to experience it for themselves.” The piece, exactly as it was performed in that instance, can never be seen again, but art could be made out of those ingredients—sounds, sights, choreography, boredom—and according to the testimony, it was. The artist knows, or discovers, where to put what, when to do what, and human beings, both as artists and as audiences, have the capacity to recognize < >´ when it is achieved.

Such a performance piece may be a creditable attempt, interesting, timely, and important; the formal and technical experiments undertaken may be valuable. If < >´ is not achieved, however, the work is perhaps visual or musical or literary journalism, a memento of something loved, the illustration of a theory, a commodity intended for sale, or a means of establishing the artist as an innovator. It may function as decoration or as entertainment, or it may be merely ugly or dull (with-an-explanation)—but it is not great art.

Examples of the condition to which the art establishment’s focus on the “next big thing” has brought us are easily found. Here is a description of another performance piece, from a 2001 New York Times review:

By way of introducing Paul McCarthy’s show opening tomorrow at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, here’s a mini-synopsis of “Painter,” one of his videos: Wearing a hospital gown, no pants, a bouncing bulbous rubber nose, blond wig, giant rubber ears and hands, and using paintbrushes the size of lances and paint tubes as big as sleeping bags, Mr. McCarthy plays the temperamental Action painter as a kind of psychotic Bozo.

He throws tantrums, berates his exasperated dealer, slops mayonnaise and ketchup together with paint in mixing bowls, chants “De Kooo-ning” like an owl and generally acts the part of a caged animal in his preposterously bogus wood-panelled studio.

The video, cheerfully low-tech and rough, rambles on for close to an hour. At one point Mr. McCarthy, sitting at a folding table, wimpering [sic] and cackling, hacks off the tip of one of his index fingers with a cleaver. This takes a very long time. The rubber is thick. The knife makes a repeating thud hitting the table. Fake blood pours out of the stump.

Funny, painful to watch, embarrassing, silly, periodically sleep-inducing, over the top: the video is unforgettable.

After this account, the reviewer reflects:

How’s that for a definition of art? Art, which often turns up in the most unexpected places, can occasionally be the equivalent of a wound that won’t heal, something unresolved, even annoying, that sticks in the brain notwithstanding your desperate desire to expunge it, and your firm belief that it has no merit.…The anger and frustration of your resistance is a secret sign of the work’s true value. Art that makes a lasting impression despite you is, after all, something noteworthy….

…Certainly [Mr. McCarthy] is out there. Way out there. Videotaped performances like “Santa Chocolate Shop” and “Heidi”…with their scatalogical and sexual antics, can’t even be roughly described here. We are talking about work at the distant reaches of acceptable cultural behavior, which is saying a lot…But from his far-out position…where even a jaded art world that exploits shock for attention’s sake can be taken aback, Mr. McCarthy is liberated to tap veins deep in the collective subconscious, far beyond where most shock artists have the audacity or intelligence to operate. Therein lies the unlikely beauty of the work…the beauty of commitment and absorption: [the artist’s] absorption in the act of performing and conceiving the work, and our absorption, reluctant or otherwise, in his crazy activities.

[Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times 2/23/01]

The critic’s response to the work is both a reaction to it and an encouragement to the production of more work that is equivalent to “wounds that won’t heal,” arousing further angry frustration, that “secret sign of the work’s true value.” Is the artist seeking the attention of the jaded critical establishment, or is he simply having fun (which he must be)? It doesn’t matter. “Shock me, offend me, wound me!” exults the critic, “It’s got to be art!” And of course it could be. However there is nothing in the review to suggest that it is—any child playing, any dog digging a hole, can be seen to be “committed and absorbed.”

The French/American artist Marcel Duchamp is credited with initiating all this by demonstrating, in 1917, that anything could be exhibited as art. Consenting theorists agreed then, and the art establishment teaches now, that this is what he did. By the late 1960’s, the New York philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto had emerged as an apologist and spokesman for works of art which were said to evolve from Duchamp’s ideas, in which the verbally expressible concepts represented by the work, the “intellectual” ideas said to be embodied by it, are its most important feature. Danto wrote in 1997 that the contemporary artworld is “almost defined by Duchamp as its generative thinker.”[3] Aesthetic quality, Danto claimed, is no longer essential to art, and no longer defines it, despite the “ontological [that is, being in the real world] success” of Duchamp’s works through time. It turns out, however, that the Duchampian works said to prove that anything whatever can be art if accepted as such by experts, actually embody a silent, hidden-in-plain-view denial of the idea. Such an inherent self-contradiction within a theory is known in philosophy as an aporia, the classic example being “A Cretan declares all Cretans to be liars.”

In 1913, the twenty-six-yesr-old Marcel Duchamp caused a sensation at the Armory Show in New York City with the exhibition of his large cubist/futurist painting Nude Descending a Staircase. Two years later he left Paris and moved to the seemingly more receptive art world of New York, carrying notes and sketches for his next major work, The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even, known as the Large Glass. He worked intermittently on that singular piece for eight years.[4] His complete notes on the various thought processes, mathematical calculations, technical innovations, and chance operations involved in arriving at its final “not-quite-finished” form, together with diagrams, drawings, and photographs, were gathered into a large cardboard box, known as the Green Box, and originally intended to accompany the Large Glass.[5] Calvin Tomkins quotes Duchamp as saying that the Large Glass was not only an object to look at; it was a “wedding of mental and visual elements” in which “the ideas are more important than the actual visual realization.”[6]

Another aspect of Duchamp’s artistic production in the years between 1912 and 1923 was a series of everyday objects which he selected from among machine-made, mass-produced (identified at the time as “ready made”) things, some of which he modified in one way or another. His criterion for choosing the objects, he said, was that he neither liked nor disliked them; he was attracted to them “neither for their beauty nor for their ugliness,” and they were therefore “objects of indifference.”[7] Since they were entirely unlike one another, they conformed to no obvious “style” and could appeal to no shared criteria of “taste.”[8] The first such work, made in Paris in 1913, was a standard bicycle wheel suspended upside down in its fork, which in turn was inserted into the top of an ordinary wooden stool. Duchamp said later that he had made it simply for his own interest and amusement; it was a sort of kinetic toy—something moving, like a fire in a fireplace.[9] Next, he bought a metal rack, multi-pronged and tower-shaped, standard in French households for drying washed wine bottles. More intentional selections followed at intervals, among them an ordinary American hardware store snow shovel, a glass perfume bottle, a metal dog comb presented in its open velvet-lined case, and a scaled-down wooden display model of a French window.[10] These later works, by then known as “readymades,” were given titles containing hidden jokes, naughty puns, and gossipy allusions. They were usually made as gifts for friends; he never exhibited them.[11]

The most notorious readymade was a white ceramic urinal, which Duchamp bought directly from its manufacturer, the J.L. Mott Ironworks. He laid the fixture flat on its back, crudely signed it “R. Mutt, 1917” in black paint, and titled it Fountain. He then submitted it anonymously to the ostensibly un-juried and therefore broadly inclusive Society of Independent Artists’ exhibition at New York’s City Palace. The show’s organizing committee, of which Duchamp was an official if somewhat subversive member, rejected the work as being “immoral and vulgar” and even “pornographic,” and as plagiarism, since it was merely a piece of plumbing, not something made by hand by an artist, and therefore not art. Fountain was hidden from public sight during the exhibition and was eventually thrown away, but it had already been photographed for posterity by Alfred Steiglitz. An editorial defense of the work, with the Steiglitz photograph, appeared in the short-lived American Dadaist journal The Blind Man (Duchamp was one of the magazine’s founders). The editorial’s unidentified author pointed out that the premise of the huge Independents show had been that anyone who paid the six dollar entry fee could exhibit, and continued,

Mr. Richard Mutt sent in a fountain. Without discussion this article disappeared and never was exhibited.

What were the grounds for refusing Mr. Mutt’s fountain:—

1. Some contended it was immoral, vulgar.

2. Others, it was plagiarism, a plain piece of plumbing.

Now Mr. Mutt’s fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers’ store windows.

Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view—created a new thought for that object. [emphasis mine]

As for plumbing, that is absurd. The only works of art America has given are her plumbing and her bridges.

[The Blind Man, number 2, May 1917]

The sentence italicized here suggests that a change in the interpretation of an object—a new title, a new categorization, a new idea of what it is—somehow affects its identity and function in the real world: that what is verbally thought or said about an object modifies what it is, for instance whether or not it is art. Decades later Arthur Danto asserted that “Nothing is an artwork without an interpretation that constitutes it as such.”[12] It follows then that anything at all can be art if an expert claims that it is. A “new thought,” it has been assumed, is a thought expressed in words; the work has been given a new name and a new “point of view.” The transformative power of words is an ancient concept in both folklore and religion. Abracadabra!!!

In 1964, Duchamp oversaw the production of a group of eight replicas of his Fountain by skilled ceramic craftsmen; these he again signed “R. Mutt,” dated “1917,” and sold to museums and collectors for $20,000 each.[13] Replicas of other readymades in small editions followed, and were eagerly collected. Forty years later, in 2004, nearly a century after Duchamp had bought, signed, and dated the original Fountain, five hundred British experts—critics, academics, artists, curators, collectors, gallery owners—elected it “the most influential work of art of the 20th century.”[14] That choice was possible because, in the interim, artworld opinion and theory had undergone a gradual but drastic change; the Readymades, and the abundant talk they engendered, were pivotal in bringing about that change.

Duchamp was born in France in 1887, and was brought up in a notably artistic family: his grandfather, his two older brothers, and his sister were all accomplished artists. As a boy he made paintings in many of the styles current at the time—Impressionism, Pointillism, Fauvism, and eventually Cubism and Futurism. Like the Futurists, he and his brothers and sister were fascinated by the new stop-motion photographic analysis of movement, and indeed by the machine age in all its manifestations. They were also interested in mathematical speculation and “esoteric” philosophy. In 1911 they formed an association of painters, sculptors, and critics which they named La Section d’Or, The Golden Section. Its members hoped to use classical phi (that is, golden) proportions and relationships to organize their abstract forms, thus placing their work in the grand tradition of Western art. The group met in an apartment in the Paris suburb of Puteaux. Many of its members were later well known—people like Fernand Léger, Marie Laurencin, Robert Delaunay, Juan Gris, and Marcel’s distinguished brothers, the printmaker and painter Jaques Villon and the sculptor Raymond Duchamp-Villon. London’s Tate Gallery tells us that

[Members of La Section d’Or] used the traditional Golden Section–a ratio associated with geometrical and aesthetic harmony…as a means of controlling their abstracted compositions. Tellingly they chose this term for the Salon de la Section d’Or, the large Cubist exhibition gathered [in Paris] in October 1912. As one of the most forceful responses to the Italians’ [Futurist] exhibition earlier in the year, this Salon separated the Cubist investigation of structure from the ‘psychological’ aspects that they attributed to Futurism.

[http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/exhibition/futurism/futurism-room-guide-room-1 (11/2/15)]

The young Marcel Duchamp entered his Nude Descending a Staircase in that Paris exhibition, but it was rejected as being too much influenced by Futurism. However a year later the painting achieved instant and enduring fame at the Armory Show in New York.

Soon after moving to America in 1915, Duchamp joined the New York Dadaists, who were dedicated to getting rid of false “bourgeois” ideas about art—such as that it should be beautiful (in the corrupted understanding of that word), and that it was something for the refined delectation of the cognoscenti, to be treated with a humorless reverence. At the same time, Duchamp and the Dadaists strongly objected to the commercial commodification of art, by then seen by the new rich as a profitable and relatively safe investment. They hoped to undermine such distortion of art’s true significance by producing “anti-art,” which substituted intelligence, humor, and an engaging zaniness for what Duchamp called the “prettinesses” of “retinal art.” This retinal art, he said, was “all art since Courbet”—art made only for the eye, and not for the mind. But anti-art itself became just another commodity, a safe investment and even a lucrative one. For several years, Duchamp functioned as a kind of consultant, advising rich friends who were also collectors of art.[15] I imagine they trusted his discerning eye in spite of his expressed contempt for the “retinal.”

Duchamp supposedly stopped making art in 1923, when he was in his mid-thirties, to play competitive chess and pursue his wide-ranging interests in science, mathematics, and philosophy. However he continued to be an admired and influential figure within the art world. He made things as presents for friends, and sometimes they were offered for sale. In 1936 eleven of his works were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in a show called, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism.”[16] Then, in the 1960’s, he was brought back into the public limelight by Pop Art, which in many ways grew out of his own earlier work. It was at this time that he commissioned replicas of some of his readymades, signing and numbering them as had long been standard practice with bronze castings of important sculpture.

Filmed interviews with the genial and charming Duchamp can be seen on YouTube.[17] In them, he notes that he made only thirteen readymades in 30 years, emphasizing that the machine-made objects he chose were not easy to find, that they were very different one from another, and had no unifying style—unlike, for example, Renoir’s paintings, which had a dependable commercial value as “a Renoir.” Furthermore, he again insists, the readymades were “objects of indifference,” conforming to no “taste,” although somehow, over the years, he had grown fond of them, “as one becomes fond of things looked at for a long time, unless one comes to hate them and throws them away.” All this is offered in the most straightforward and ingenuous manner.

But Duchamp was a Trickster figure, as Lewis Hyde has pointed out.[18] He loved word games and elaborate puns and puzzles and jokes.

Over the years, looking at documented photographs of the readymades (which is all we have), I have found them notably satisfying visually, a little like Shaker-made works in their unassuming and compelling simplicity. I never particularly wondered why this was so. But when at last I happened upon, and watched and re-watched, a videotaped 1968 BBC interview with the 81-year-old Duchamp, he somehow made me think of a child playing a game of hide-and-seek; the child is tired of hiding, and cold, and wants to be found—or of someone who has set his friends a riddle, and growing bored with it, keeps offering more and more revealing clues so as to be finished with the now-tedious questions and get on to other things. Why had the readymade objects been so hard to find? What made him choose those particular things? I looked again at photographs of Bicycle Wheel, the shiny, perfect circle supported upright in its fork, the ordinary four-legged wooden stool. I suddenly saw that the work might embody the proportions of the Golden Section. I measured it, and it did.

I then measured the photographic images of as many readymades as I could find, and all of them seemed to be examples of Golden, or Divine proportion, including the Fountain urinal and the snow shovel. Many also incorporate classical “sacred” shapes, like the circle of the bicycle wheel and the equilateral triangle of the urinal’s basin. They were thus constituted according to the same patterns of relationship as are the Taj Mahal, Notre Dame Cathedral, Pythagorean musical scales, the human hand, the helical path of the Earth around the sun as it moves through our galaxy, and the double helix of DNA—dependably harmonious relationships found again and again in nature, and apparently known since the Babylonian civilization, 1800 years before Pythagoras.[19] The great seventeenth century mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler called the ratio “The Divine Proportion.” He wrote, in 1611: “Geometry has two great treasures: one is the theorem of Pythagoras, the other the division of a line into extreme and mean ratio [the golden section]. The first we may compare to a measure of gold; the second we may name a precious jewel.”[20]

A discovery of golden proportions in manufactured objects should not be surprising, since industrial designers routinely make use of them, as do cabinet makers, web-page designers, and plastic surgeons. Double calipers for arriving at such proportions can be used in the design and formation of virtually any object. They make precise measurement unnecessary in determining golden proportions, since if one pair of arms is set to the size of one dimension of the object, the opposite pair necessarily opens to a golden complement. It is important to understand here that the measurements don’t have to be mathematically exact in order to achieve the desired effect. They are in any case inevitably affected by myriad other aspects and qualities of the parts of the work (such as material, color, form, texture, decoration, and so on).

A web site offers treatments for the enhancement of personal beauty:

To achieve the Golden Ratio for your facial measurements, we use the golden mean calipers, an instrument used by Leonardo Da Vinci to calculate Phi proportions. The calipers measure your facial features to define their most harmonious proportions based on universal notions of beauty. You will then receive just the right amount of…injectable filler to smooth, plump and recontour based on these ideal measurements. You get a reliable result that can be consistently achieved, time and time again.

[https://www.edelsteincosmetic.com/perspectives/golden-ratio.html (4/26/15)]

Human aesthetic intelligence prompts us to choose such proportions intuitively, whether or not we’re consciously aware of them.

I can find no evidence that the golden proportions of the Readymades have been recognized as such during the 100 years or so since Duchamp made them. Naturally then, no one seems to have thought about what those proportions might indicate as to his fundamental intentions. French art historian Hector Obalk wrote in 2002 that we have two ways (both of them verbal) of discovering Duchamp’s thought in relation to his works: one is to read the various stories told about the readymades, the other to read the artist’s written notes about them.[21] The visible reality, the “suchness,” of these essential works is ignored once again; looking at them is not suggested. But Duchamp’s mind was differently trained, and its breadth and flexibility allowed him to play in both the verbal and the visual realms, with words and with objects, to cross back and forth between those realms and to set them at odds when he chose to do so. The objects he selected for his readymades were appealing on the most essential level, but he said repeatedly that he didn’t know why he chose them, that they had nothing in common with one another. It’s possible that he believed this to be true, but I doubt it. He wanted to undermine the pieties and solemnities of the art theory of his time with a trick, and at the same time to amuse himself. However his talk about the readymades —his claims that they had no “retinal” appeal, no aesthetic value—was snatched up to become first the radical new theory, and eventually the new pieties and solemnities, of art theory. What the readymades looked like, what they actually were in their being, and the visual/verbal double-entendre which they embody—went unnoticed. Duchamp and the other Dadaists railed against the commercialization of art, yet they proved that if anything whatever can be validated as art anything whatever can be bought and sold as art. Theory helps in the manipulation of the market by obscuring, and even taking the place of, the real.

What Duchamp actually demonstrated was that anything with classic proportions attracts us, a fact long known, and that such entities—even a urinal! —can be valued by the art world and eventually accepted by the public once experts have validated them as art, even if for false reasons.[22] He seduced us into looking seriously at a selection of mundane objects. When they were moved to a new category, given a new “identity,” our unconscious, intuitive experience of their harmonious actuality allowed us to accept them as art. Hector Obalk believes, based on Duchamp’s notes, that his real fascination was with what he conceived as the “infrathin” (almost nonexistent, or existent only in the mind) difference between the hardware store commodity and the same object, cast from the same mold and in every physical quality identical, when exhibited as art—with a title, in the case of a replica a number, the signature of the imagined “artist” who “made it” art by choosing it—when given the authority and ambience of the gallery setting.[23]To me, this sounds much more convincing than the usual conclusions as to Duchamp’s motivation.

The claim that he had made machine-manufactured objects into art merely by choosing them and giving them new names has had both good and bad results. Ideas and beliefs about art, like all ideas and beliefs, must now and then be shaken up and changed, modified, or simply restated in contemporary form. Duchamp succeeded in doing that, with brilliant subtlety and inventiveness. Recognition of the importance of his role in setting all the arts free from the strictures limiting them to certain forms, to certain subject matter and certain media, grows day by day. However he and the other Dadaists failed in their attempt to resist the commodification of visual art; their works are now securely situated among the commodities. Further, much of the edifice of theory supporting contemporary institutional validation of otherwise valueless objects in the name of art rests on a misunderstanding of what Duchamp did. Such theory is current dogma, taught at every level in schools and museums; many of the nonsensical extravagances of the art market are fueled and enabled by it.

When Marcel Duchamp died, in 1968, it was revealed that he had long been working on a secret project—an installation called Étant donnés—in a small hidden room in his apartment. This assemblage was carefully dismantled, and was reassembled in the august and spacious galleries of the contemporary wing of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, for which it had been designed. The museum houses the world’s largest collection of Duchamp’s works; Étant donnés has been continuously on view there since 1969. The installation consists of a heavy wooden door set in a brick arch. Two small round peep holes allow views of a painstakingly constructed diorama in which an apparently headless naked woman lies on her back among weeds, legs splayed open, vulva prominent and crudely outlined in red. One arm stretches out to the side to hold a lighted lamp (a symbol! of what? a puzzle in a nest of puzzles!) into a dreary and fussily realistic landscape; the other arm and one and perhaps both lower legs have been amputated. The work is both pornographic and nasty, with nothing to recommend it as art. It is a bitter practical joke, played on the commercial and theory-ridden visual “artworld.” In 1917 that artworld rejected Fountain—which embodied proportional relationships recognized through the ages and throughout the world as beautiful, even divine—as being pornographic, and fifty years later reverently welcomed and honored Étant donnés, which is definitively pornographic (misogynistic, crude, and brutal). It is difficult to imagine the gifted, sensitive, and fastidious Duchamp working for so long on something so crass and meritless, no matter how sweet the sour triumph, or how hearty the last laugh. He probably enjoyed trying to get the peep-show tawdriness of the diorama just right. But it also may be that as he once observed of the eight years spent on The Large Glass, “It was very tedious, and I didn’t work on it all the time, you know.”

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By now, the idea that serious contemporary art should make its audience uncomfortable is generally accepted. The “avant-garde” jazz trumpet player Raphe Malik acknowledged this in a 1998 interview:

R.M: …When you hit your thumb with a hammer, whether you’re an atheist or not, you go, “Oh, God”.…I think that when pressures mount internationally, globally…that stuff can effect [sic] the pressure that an average person feels subliminally, so that they're ready to accept abstract art and avant-garde music. Before, when everything was hunky-dory, they had less need for an outlet that expressed such a gruesome kind of reality…

[Journalist]: There's a lot of music out there with an underlying anger that pervades everything.

RM: Well I'm here to really stress that it's also beauty. People sometimes misinterpret what we're all about, because we're known for just screaming. If you really listen, I'm a composer and I have lots of different dynamics in my music. There are parts that are soft and slow. I have colleagues that are so indoctrinated that they would say that's a sell-out. I don't care. This is free music because it allows for things to change. It's supposed to be free and everything's cool, and everyone can play it. So don't lock me out.

[The Green Mountain Jazz Messenger, April/May '98, p 21]

Things have never been fully hunky-dory, anguish has never been absent, and the excesses of fashionable art are produced in the affluent market centers of a triumphant capitalism. If the relationships among the parts of a work—parts meaning characteristics of every kind (shapes, textures, vibrato, color, rhythm, silence, and so on) in relation to each other and to the whole—are not to some degree coherent, the work will function only as one more example of chaos and corruption, one more inarticulate scream. We are able to accept Duchamp’s Readymades as works of art because of the relationships they embody, not because of anything he or anyone else has said about them. When such relationships are what they should be—whether fairly simple, as in the Readymades, or vastly complex, subtle, and finally unknowable, as in the paintings of Pieter Breughel the Elder—contemplation of them is rewarding. A lidded vessel from ancient Greece (ca. 525-500 BC), decorated with a scene of the god Dionysus seated in a vineyard is in this way similar to a machine-made soup can labelled for identification of its contents and its manufacturer.[24] Each is a well-proportioned object decorated for the purpose it serves within the culture which values it. Each can be accepted simply for its golden proportions, which for millennia have been believed to be somehow coherent with the design of the universe—the Logos. Duchamp proved that we can be satisfied with simply that: that such an object, harmonious within itself, when properly presented in a setting which allows us to see or hear it as a “Made Being,” has a degree of presence, and can provide a degree of pleasure no matter what its usual function, or how it was made.[25]

Great art of any kind is finally mysterious. Music is a widely beloved art form—but what is it, in fact? That question was asked of a group of experts in a TV program produced for US Public Television by the Smithsonian Institution.[26] Musical authorities of various kinds from around the world were interviewed. They all made sincere and thoughtful attempts at a satisfactory definition, but eventually had to give it up.

We can certainly say what the arts are not: they are not their subject or their message or their shock value or any predictable set of relationships other than, sometimes, golden proportions. Carl Jung wrote: “The creative aspect of life, which finds its clearest expression in art, baffles all attempts at rational formulation. Any reaction to stimulus may be causally explained; but the creative act, which is the absolute antithesis of mere reaction, will for ever elude the human understanding. It can only be described in its manifestation….”[27] I expect that all creative thinkers know this.

Many of us automatically reject new forms, but how odd to claim that the fact that we have rejected them (or that some among us, probably the infamous bourgeoisie, have been made indignant by them) —makes them art! It is now understood that the brain learns by actually physically changing: it sets up new patterns, new paths and connections within its vast neural structure.[28] This can’t happen instantly, and it takes time for the mind to experience the radically new as anything other than weird or even dangerous—to precisely the degree that it is new and thus outside our habitual mental patterns. It may be that until we have in some sense “learned” it, we cannot fully encounter it, let alone evaluate it. But it appears that we tend to prefer novelty from our earliest days, provided that such novelty is coherent. One intriguing study found that two-month-old babies are more attracted to a drawing showing a fragmented outline of something they know than to a complete outline, presumably because it is more interesting; it asks something of them.[29] On the other hand, they show no interest in the chaotic, their minds being innocent of contemporary artworld opinion.

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The word “beauty” has been debased until it means that which is merely pretty and pleasant, rather than something strong, vital, mysterious, and absolutely essential. When the form is harmonious, the content had better be shocking if the work is to be considered important. The uproar in the 1980s over Robert Mapplethorpe’s homo-erotic photographs, and his now well-established fame, demonstrate that a body of work need not be formally ugly to be considered offensive by some and therefore certifiably avant-garde by others. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ, a luminous photographic image of a plastic crucifix submerged in the artist’s urine, is formally innoccuous; its “content,” what it appears to be “saying,” is enough to make it famous/infamous. In the early 1990s, the work of both artists served as ammunition for the conservative and Christian political right wing in the United States in its successful campaign to radically decrease federal support for the arts.

Sol LeWitt’s mural sized “wall drawings” were critically acceptable even though they are often richly decorative. Wall surfaces are divided into classic geometric shapes (squares, triangles, tetrahedrons, lines, curves and so on) which can be specified exactly and mechanically achieved. When there is color it is produced according to precise formulae (e.g. so much colored ink of brand X diluted by so much water). Although the conception was LeWitt’s, the actual painting can be done by anyone with the necessary hand skills; the work’s value, according to theory, inheres in the disembodied Idea.[30] Performers (painters and draftsmen) contributed labor and the required level of craftsmanship, but any personal “expressiveness” would constitute a flaw. However Mr. LeWitt was an artist, and apparently couldn’t resist modifying his work in the real world. His 2007 obituary in the New York Times reports that as time went by he became more and more concerned with the sensory qualities of his work in its physical manifestation, its actual being—that is, in what it looked like. The question remains: when the Idea has been made manifest, is it art or is it not?

With his wall drawing…[which] sometimes took teams of people weeks to execute, he might decide whether a line for which he had given the instruction “not straight” was sufficiently irregular without becoming wavy (and like many more traditional artists, he became more concerned in later years that his works look just the way he wished). But he always gave his team wiggle room, believing that the input of others —their joy, boredom, frustration or whatever—remained part of the art.

[Michael Kimmelman, “Sol LeWitt, Master of Conceptualism Dies at 78,” The New York Times, 4/9/2007]

In music and in theatre, dance, and architecture, of course, a similar relationship between author and performer (with the inevitable contingencies arising from it) has been accepted for centuries, however in drawing and painting it was a novelty. LeWitt’s design strategies were unsurprising, but when accompanied by his words, they provide fodder for interesting talk. They thus attract the interpretation which, according to Arthur Danto, “constitute” them as art.[31]

Chaos and decay are fully valid topics for art. Henry Miller wrote:

I felt compelled, in all honesty, to take the disparate and dispersed elements of our life—the soul life, not the cultural life—and manipulate them through my own personal mode, using my own shattered and dispersed ego as heartlessly and recklessly as I would the flotsam and jetsam of the surrounding phenomenal world….In an age marked by dissolution, liquidation seems to me a virtue, nay a moral imperative….I have always looked upon decay as being just as wonderful and rich an expression of life as growth.

[Henry Miller, “Reflections on Writing,” from Wisdom of the Heart ]

The writer is speaking here of chaos as subject, and even perhaps as an aspect of method. The artist serves as a sort of medium whereby chaotic elements of contemporary life are acted upon through his own “shattered and dispersed ego,” his being, to arrive at coherence. Miller’s prose, the form of his writing, is anything but chaotic. Many contemporary artists and thinkers on art share his view that the world must be presented as it is, not as we wish it to be, a rationale often offered in justification of work that in form is unrelievedly chaotic (either actively or passively) and therefore dead. The form of Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty, a flat spiral of crushed rock built in shallow water at the edge of the Great Salt Lake, is not chaotic in the usual sense; it is a manifestation of negative chaos.[32] The form has a deadly regularity; there is no gradation of space from the innermost curve outwards, as between the whorls of a shell—the width of the negative space is as unmodulated as the spiral itself. It is a meaningless cipher added to the utter bleakness of the site, a human sign that manages to intensify the desolation. “We were here, but there was nothing we could do.” It might be experienced as a powerful and even valuable expression of our loss of hope for meaning, but it is not art. Art makes life, and this is its opposite. It is “negative” chaos in “pessimistic” time, a kind of terminal inertia.[33] Theory has been substituted for art, a situation “immediately seductive to academic intellectuals,” as Peter Schjeldahl points out in the third epigraph to this chapter.

As I proposed in chapter 10, we may need new classifications for certain contemporary works, which, though perhaps not art, are strong visual presentations of verbal ideas. They could be categorized as “Un-art,” or “Polemic art,” (or, forthrightly, “Art for Talk’s Sake.”) This might allow appropriate attention and respect to expressions of our alienation from the relentlessly commercialized and degraded environment in which so many of us now live out our lives, or to filmed documentaries exposing the vandalism practiced by various groups and corporations as they pillage (our) natural world for (their) profit. However if most Un-art were recognized as being not only alien but toxic to human beings (poison but popular, like junk food), we might perhaps begin to focus on, and even to honor, those things that dependably nourish and sustain us: Nature, and the arts. [34] What we have instead is the mall and its parking lots, the acres of computer-centered office cubicles, the constant invasion of our minds by advertising of every kind, the on-beyond-bleak aisles of the superstore, and epidemics of obesity and depression, illness and addiction among the citizenry. We are lulled into acceptance of our situation by digitally perfected images of fantasies like the beautifully groomed young man or woman living the life of the urban sophisticate and equipped with the latest electronic gadgets—but always prepared to drive a heavily polluting SUV into “freedom” and “individuality” in what little remains of the unspoiled landscape.

Art historians of the future, if there are any, may conclude that the significance of the contemporary gathering of the banal, the sordid, and the commercial into “art” (as in so-called “graphic novels,” public television retrospectives of old TV sitcoms with their canned laughter, and the lifeless “visual effects” found in so many computer-animated feature films and computer games) is simply a pitiable effort to claim as art the detritus of our poverty-stricken cultural life, because we still hope to save our souls. We are like songbirds weaving strips of plastic into their nests because that’s what they find along country roads, or pelicans feeding trash bound for the Pacific Gyre to their young until the fledglings starve to death.[35]

The relationship between art and pornography mentioned in chapter 10 is also relevant here; once again, it is a question of form versus content. Beautiful pornography is rare or hidden in western culture—except in the worlds of fashion, advertising, and film. Something can most definitely be both art (in its form) and pornography (in its content), but to allow anything-at-all into the public arena—if a band of experts will claim, and a band of non-experts can be persuaded, that it is ART—would be ridiculous in the real world outside the courtroom, and is not yet the case; neither the sexual molestation of children, nor the eating of feces or human flesh, for example, is currently considered tolerable in public display. Passionate and righteous speeches are made against the very thought of censorship, but there are limits nevertheless. Are the explicitly sexual passages in Lady Chatterly’s Lover pornographic or not? It is a matter of taste and judgement (are they now perhaps a little dated?) and can be argued over at length. Whether the novel as a whole is art is an entirely separate question. It is the foolish idea that art somehow cancels out pornography that makes the difficulty. If books of exquisite Japanese pornographic woodcuts were given place on the shelves of school libraries there would be a public outcry no matter how many experts might determine the images to be art. Yet a flirtation with pornography, whether as voyeurism or sadism, is one of the most easily successful strategies of the avant-garde. Acceptance of material instinctively found offensive is a sure sign of sophistication, as children know when they smoke their first cigarettes. As more and more is allowed, the outer boundaries of the tolerable are redrawn—and our children have easy access to all of it.

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New form, when it is art, is cause for celebration. It has been achieved by a combination of inspiration and effort which can never be taken for granted. Artists are drawn to anything which might inspire them to new expression, whether it be a different medium, the use of various stimulants, an idea from another discipline such as science or philosophy, or the intentional courtship of chance.

We gain in understanding and new skills as we live, but from birth on we form habits—of perception, thought, and action—which tend to cramp and distort the possible scope and flexibility of mind and body. We repeat ourselves, and what we do seems predictable and stale. However human fallibility, in combination with inherent and unforeseen variations in real materials of every kind, and with opportunities discovered in the process of making, must now and then produce something unexpected, something potentially revelatory or at least helpful. This used to be known as the “happy accident.” The respected British craftsman David Pye points out,

There is an element of chance in all art, considerable in some instances, possibly negligible in others. But because art is the work of man, and particularly where it is the work of man's hand, the element I think, is necessarily present. There may be nothing of chance about the design of the work but there must be about its execution. It is hard to believe that chance played any part in Bach's forty-eight preludes and fugues; but before they can be heard they must be played, and I shall make bold to say that when they are played there is some slight element of chance, no matter who is playing them….

[David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design, p 110]

Furthermore, forms we might never imagine—limited as we are by our individual, ordinarily-inescapable, patterns of being—can be discovered by the conscious use of chance.

The admirable Bert O. States has written of certain gestures made by actors, produced in the moment without forethought, and yet essential:

We have all sat in the theatre and marveled at the power of a single gesture, of an expression of surprise, that would have passed unnoticed in a living room but in the theatre takes one’s breath away. How is it that such a small event can be so astonishing? It is, of course, the act of control and economy: we all know that it is not easy to be surprised on cue and that the actor, presumably, spends much of his life observing how we express surprise, lift coffee cups, and grow old. But beyond these marks of genius we come back finally to the fact that the surprise was the single and uncontaminated center of everything taking place on the stage at that instant. It occurred at precisely the right moment (“timing”) and at the right pitch (“delivery”); it was precisely clear enough to command our attention and natural enough to be seen as having escaped unintentionally from the character’s interior. It was a perfect balance of nature and art.

[Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms, p 137]

An artist is someone who knows, or discovers, where to put what. The inspired gesture of surprise comes out of what could be called the genius of the actor’s unconscious mind, one among many possible place-names for the source of < >´—none of which can in fact identify what or where it is. The gesture is more than logical within the action, more than expressive of the character being played. It is coherent within the play as a whole, in that specific performance, and available only in that particular moment.

The struggle toward < >´ is an adventure, and usually a harrowing one. To be in some sense in love with the subject gives courage and impetus, whether a painter is smitten by a plate of oranges on a table, or an actor by a mental and physical intuition of the full complex reality of the play. Virginia Woolf said that to write well is to have the subject fully and constantly in mind; for such focus an intensity of feeling is essential. The artist loves, is excited by, craves, new forms—but is crippled in the search for them by his habits. The hand tends to make the same mark in the same way, again and again, which is why we can be identified by our handwriting. The conscious mind produces a limited choice of forms.

Artists have often said that Nature is their school, teacher, muse. Nature offers an endless array of forms and relationships, far beyond anything we can imagine. Bringing chance into the creative process may serve to catch the new and unexpected out of that infinite reservoir, whatever it may be—one could say out of Nature—providing the excitement of new patterns of behavior, of sequence. To use it is to venture into reality outside oneself, in hope of finding orders of which one is unable to conceive. Marcel Duchamp, who used chance extensively in the making of his Large Glass, observed that for “the Divine Brain” there is no chance, “because it knows what will happen.” However, “we don’t have the brains for that!” By introducing chance to the service of art production, he had brought “almost a religious element” into it, he said, and it was “very interesting” to do that.[36]

Later, composer John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham worked extensively with what they called “chance operations,” in which aesthetic decisions were made, one after another, by throwing dice, consulting the I Ching, producing random numbers by computer, and so on. In Cunningham's dance compositions (performed as they were by dancers of exemplary technical discipline and purity), the sequences of movement and the overall form had a wonderful freshness and unexpectedness, combined with an effect of classic “rightness.” Music and choreography were composed completely separately, as was the stage décor, which was abstract. The dancers learned and followed the temporal structures of the work by counting; they would not hear the music or see the set until the first performance. To both dancers and audience, moments when dance and music were accidentally synchronic in actual performance seemed charged with an intense though not verbally expressible meaning.[37] Cunningham thus freed himself from traditional dance forms, within the limits of what is possible for the human body. However to work this way is almost never to take the “found” form exactly as it appears. It was his exercise of the necessary aesthetic discrimination, his choices among patterns and sequences arrived at by chance—and in actual performance the aesthetic judgement of the dancers and their meticulous technique, their craft—that allowed the achievement of < >´, of art.

In preparing his 1989 Norton lectures at Harvard, John Cage began with texts that he “liked,” scrambled them by computer, chose individual words and phrases that attracted him from out of that scramble, and strung them together into new “texts.” These were read as his lectures, in a small uninflected voice. The result was minimalist in the extreme—an overall aural field, relieved only occasionally by a group of words that seemed to signify in some way, even if only as abstract sound shapes (in alliteration, rhyme, etc.). This “overallness” soon produced indignant frustration in many in the audience, and they left the hall. After one lecture, the stalwarts who had stayed to the end moved to an upstairs room in another building, where Mr. Cage, with an almost childlike friendliness and simplicity, explained his process and the reasoning behind it. The lecture itself had been a kind of aesthetic object, a composition in sound rather than a dissertation.

New form has always been discovered in that which is experienced as arising somewhere outside our conscious minds—in the objects, landscapes, and cultural artifacts of the real world, or in our dreams, or even appearing unbidden from the subconscious when we’re awake. I have already quoted the 19th century mathematician Henri Poincaré’s observations on creative thinking; they are relevant here as well:

"Among the great number of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are also without effect on the aesthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful. They will be capable of touching this special sensibility of the geometer of which I have spoken, and which, once aroused, will call our attention to them, and thus give them occasion to become conscious.”

[Henri Poincaré, Science and Method]

The “blind” unconscious mind of the mathematician offers up vast numbers of possible combinations. Only those experienced as harmonious, beautiful—and thus likely to be useful—will engage the attention of the conscious mind, the others being “without interest and without utility.”[38] The well-known last lines of John Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn come to mind:

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," —that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

A few lines before this, the poet addresses the work of art itself, in this case the Grecian vase, directly:

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity…

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man…

To be “teased out of thought” is to be enticed away from the verbal. The work of art does this for us; it is in this way our friend, and remains so through time. Its truth is expressed not by words but by form, even when the medium is words. Creativity is in the search for new forms, and when such forms, such combinations of relationship “touch this special sensibility” they seem to some degree familiar, because they are coherent with what we have loved before—with the natural world, with great art of all kinds and times, and with our own essential being. As Iris Murdoch wrote, “The great artists…make us feel that we have arrived; we are at home.”[39]

All manifestations of < >´ will somehow harmonize with one another, given enough individual space, and their very juxtaposition can produce new and unexpected delights, as experienced in a program of music designed by a great conductor, or a menu designed by a great chef, or a group of disparate objects collected by one careful and attentive enthusiast. To drive through beautiful countryside with great music playing on the car radio is to experience two formal systems, apparently unrelated, and yet each enriched by the other, existing together in a complex harmony which can be glorious.

German/French printmaker, sculptor and poet Hans or Jean Arp, a co-founder of the Dada movement, described a discovery of form this way:

Since the arrangement of planes and their proportions seemed to hinge solely on chance, I declared that these works were arranged “according to the laws of chance,” as in the order of nature, chance being for me simply a part of an inexplicable reason, of an inaccessible order. . . . Is chance mere chaos or an order that escapes our understanding?

[Jean [or Hans] Arp, in Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own, The Spiritual in Art p 119]

John Cage considered such “play,” as he called it, to be an affirmation of life, “so excellent once one gets one's mind and one's desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.”[40] But play is not enough; the aesthetic judgment of the artist must be as discriminating and sensitive as in any other kind of art-making. Contemporary art historian Roger Lipsey writes,

What music does [John Cage’s use of chance operations] foster? Difficult, often unlistenable. The beauty of Cage's thinking and its rich promise of a fundamental art cannot be fulfilled by work in which chance plays the central role. Conscripted to serve as the composer—to select notes, timbres, durations—chance behaves badly like the idiot it is. Cage's ideas are effective cultural criticism, forcing basic questions, and his music is effective as a full-dress working-out of his critical ideas. It cannot be denied that he has brought authentic spiritual ideas and a liberating attitude of play to the enterprise of Western art. But his art for the most part doesn’t work. It represents the reduction to absurdity of the surrender of intention to chance…it has pedagogic rather than ultimate value.

[Ibid., p. 124]

Certainly Mr. Cage’s Norton lecture, described earlier, was experienced as a generally inert object, interesting as an idea, but in its actuality only occasionally and briefly so. It appeared to be some sort of musical composition made of spoken words, without the distraction of any verbal meaning. Dr. Lipsey goes on to give a notably intelligent and sympathetic description of the play of chance in the creative process within the mind of the artist. He says that there, chance is the creative partner of intention, that:

In my experience…[a]t the beginning of the creative process, an artist's intention can be extraordinarily immaterial—nothing more than an odd pressure [as in Einstein's identification of non-verbal “elements in thought…of visual and some of muscular type”], a need that cannot define its object, a dim awareness of a gap that might be filled. Or, on the contrary, intention can spring fully-formed into the mind, together with much or all of the materials needed to fulfill it. However clear or ghostly it may be initially, intention comes to outward expression through a blending of the artist's present awareness with varied materials from the past stored in his or her mind, feelings, and physical being. Literally embodying the intention, these materials are assembled from what the artist often experiences as an unlimited collection of memories and associations. However short and dreary one's life has been, artist and nonartist alike have accumulated enough memories to generate infinite patterns of recombination….A “truth” test allows us to evaluate new patterns in terms of their relationship to established ones.

[Ibid., p 125]

That “truth” test is obviously the activity of Poincaré’s “special sensibility that all mathematicians know.” It is the capacity which allows us to recognize < >´ when we encounter it, or to intuit that something may be useful on our way to it.

Dr. Lipsey identifies the source of forms as “the varied materials from the past [i.e. memory] stored in [the artist’s] mind, feelings, and physical being,” while Poincaré calls it simply “the unconscious.” Creative inspiration is commonly experienced as coming somehow from outside one’s own limited conscious being.[41] To call it a “reservoir of

< >´,” as I have done, is always merely symbolic: “source,” “reservoir,” and “the unconscious” are simply metaphors for something unidentifiable, mysterious—not labels for something known.[42] It cannot be reached by an act of will; we can only prepare ourselves to receive it. But whether in our own work or the work of another, < >´ is experienced as being somehow an expression of the way the world is—that is, of truth. Yes, we say, applauding.

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In his Mellon lectures of 1995 and in various other writings, Arthur Danto proclaimed that the history of art had come to an end. He meant that the logical account of the sequence of changes in the forms of art through time—the story taught as Art History—had ended. When all possibilities have been realized, and anything-at-all can be exhibited as art, that reasonable story cannot be continued, Danto said. What could be the next step once Andy Warhol’s reproductions of grocery store Brillo cartons, or Roy Lichtenstein’s enlargements of comic strips, or Piero Manzoni’s cans of his own excrement, had in all seriousness been displayed as art?

Contemporary art theory claims that half a century earlier, in 1917, when Marcel Duchamp signed the urinal with a jokey pseudonym and paid the six dollars necessary to enter it in an avant-garde exhibition in New York, two things happened to it. It lost its significance as a useful object of plumbing and commerce; given a new name, and assigned to a a new category, it metamorphosed into something else. By the power of the word, it magically became a work of sculpture named Fountain, destined for ever-increasing fame and fortune. It had become a fetish, an inanimate object inhabited by a spirit (in this case, an Idea) and worshipped (feared, celebrated) for its magical powers. However we can now see that it simultaneously embodied Duchamp’s trick—the unnoticed aporia, the fact that in its actual physical being (whether urinal, bottle rack, perfume bottle, comb box, model of a French window) the thing contradicts the theory it is said to illustrate. The objects Duchamp chose for his readymades were not just “anything.” They embodied dimensional relationships known from ancient times to be fundamental to that which human beings find beautiful in nature and the arts, relationships which for a variety of reasons have long been characterized as “divine.”[43]

Andy Warhol’s Brillo cartons were first shown in 1964, the same year that Duchamp’s “replicas” of Fountain were offered for sale, but half a century after the older artist’s first attempt to exhibit the original. Warhol’s boxes were also multiple identical replicas of commercially made objects. They were manufactured of meticulously joined pieces of wood in a special factory, and were painted and silk-screened with assembly-line efficiency and precision. As in the case of Duchamp’s readymades, their exhibition in spaces designed for undistracted looking can wake us up, both to their humbly poignant ordinariness and fundamental thingness, and to harmonies and relationships between form and decoration that go unnoticed in the visual cacophony of the supermarket or plumbing store. The original commercial Brillo cartons were in fact designed by the abstract expressionist painter and commercial artist James Harvey. Harvey considered suing Warhol, but the design was owned by the corporation that had paid for it, and company executives were, if anything, glad of the publicity generated by Warhol’s use of it.

We can assume that the original commercial Brillo carton was designed to be attractive to shoppers, but in no way challenging. Its function is to contain and protect smaller, similarly designed boxes, while being cheap to manufacture and ship. In a grocery store, its message is “Look at me, I’m good-looking! Buy me, I won’t bite! You’ve seen innocuous me many times before in all those predictable cartons decorated with printed names and bland shapes.” In the museum, it carries another message: “Even though I look identical to a mass-produced commercial product, familiar and unthreatening, I’m a Work of Art!” Duchamp’s “infrathin” difference is real, but perhaps only on condition that the object is well-proportioned. Such an object, no matter how mundane and humble, can be accepted as important art by many gallery goers, if given the proper setting and authenticated as such by experts. It can be seen to be worth looking at and sometimes even beautiful. At the same time, its harmonious banality allows it to carry endless scholarly (verbal) analysis and interpretation, and therefore to serve, in Danto’s phrase, as “an icon of modern art.” Today, antique French bottle racks and contemporary supermarket Brillo boxes may be infrathinly different from what they were to us before we were told that they are “icons of modern art,” whether we believe it or not.

There is now a museum in Pittsburgh grandly referred to as “The Warhol.” On one of its Web pages we find this remarkable statement by Professor Danto:

“What Warhol taught was that there is no way of telling the difference [between art and non-art] merely by looking. The eye, so prized an aesthetic organ when it was felt that the difference between art and non-art was visible, was philosophically of no use whatever when the differences proved instead to be invisible.”

[Arthur Danto, Beyond the Brillo Box: The Visual Arts in Post-historical Perspective, p 5]

In fact it is still the artist’s eye/mind which chooses, and the observer’s eye/mind, or the listener’s ear/mind, which sees or hears. The Brillo cartons were designed to be liked (red-white-and-blue, precisely square fronts and backs, pleasant curvaceous logo, etc.). Warhol chose them, and we may like them, as we do Campbell’s homey soup cans (with their golden, or phi proportions), and pretty images of movie stars and flowers in comfortable square formats and bright colors. They’re bland-with-an-explanation, and yet they please us. But imagine someone solemnly announcing that “the ear, so prized an aesthetic organ when it was felt that the difference between music and non-music was audible, was philosophically of no use…when the difference proved instead to be inaudible.” Invisible in dance-as-art, inaudible and invisible in theatre-as-art or film or opera-as-art? It is clearly nonsense.[44]

In Danto’s view, visual art had abandoned its “aesthetic pretensions” in favor of verbal “meaning,” thereby becoming a philosophical enterprise dependent on the interpretations of art historians, critics, and various other experts. One result of this is the fact that today every artist must be skilled in the writing of “artist statements,” a standard prerequisite in even the most provincial and amateur situations if visual work is to be taken seriously. Such requirements often lead to flights of gassy rhetoric unrelated, or only tenuously related, to the work itself. The statement: intended to be intriguing, radical, but often incoherent or irrelevant. The actual work: often inept, predictable, silly, chaotic, boring, or shocking-to-be-shocking, in various combinations or all together at once.

The history of visual art is not over, of course. Art can exist in any and all media, and should be valued for exactly what it is. We experience it with our full mental and sensory capacity. Words, however entertaining and enriching, are supplementary—unnecessary to art except when words are its medium. Danto had at one time considered a career as a printmaker, but in a 2007 interview he testified that in 1961, when visiting an exhibition of Roy Lichtenstein’s comic strip images, he hadn’t been able to imagine “that such things could be on view anywhere or that anybody would be interested in looking at it seriously….” “In those days,” he said, “people were very high-minded about art.…I just started to think that I wasn’t interested in being an artist in a world where that is what art is.…Art used to demand something more….”[45] Roy Lichtenstein meticulously reproduced and enlarged well-composed images taken from familiar comic strips. They were exhibited as “paintings,” and demonstrated that they too, like well-designed cans of soup, could be accepted by the art world as “art” and duly commodified.

Mark Rothko’s renowned paintings of soft-edged, vertically stacked rectangles of glowing color could be described as “visual play with golden proportions.” In them, phi ratios are variously employed, in relationships within the image and between the image and the dimensions of the canvas itself. Admirers regularly describe these paintings as mystical, deeply spiritual, and majestic. On the website of a major auction house, an unnamed author praises the “tragic grandeur” of the paintings Rothko made when he was “at the height of his powers,” observing that they present a “tense and ultimately surprising equilibrium,” which, “like a pictorial music, both resonates and is unconsciously understood by the human psyche….” Contrasts within Rothko’s #36: Black Stripe are “miraculously contained by some mighty ordering force into a dynamic and harmoniously structured, Apollonian whole.”[46] Like the Parthenon? Yes, exactly. Of course, phi proportions are not the whole story, but as in Duchamp’s Readymades, they are fundamental to our experience of the work.

Much twentieth century art will survive, not because of its incorporation of any verbal message, or of art-historical stories or theoretical claims for it, but because it is meaningful in the sense proposed in chapter 8. However, once a formal system has been categorized, analyzed, and celebrated, we no longer explore its full possibilities; the critical, academic—and, crucially, commercial—machine must be fed new species of form to talk about, to “interpret.” In a very different time, Henri Matisse wrote of “that deep gravity which persists in every human being:”

A work of art must carry in itself that complete significance and impose it upon the beholder even before he can identify the subject matter. When I see the Giotto frescoes at Padua I do not trouble to recognize which scene in the life of Christ I have before me but I perceive instantly the sentiment which radiates from it and which is instinct in the composition in every line and color.[[47]]

[Henri Matisse, in Herschel. B. Chipp ed., Theories of Modern Art, p135]

This “sentiment,” this “complete significance” is meaning. It is < >´, and it can sometimes be recognized from the other end of the gallery, or with just the first few bars of a musical composition or the first few minutes of a film. We feel that the experience we embark upon has potentially been formed by someone who, as we say, “knows what they’re doing.”

So-called naïve art, or “outsider” art, the art of people who haven’t been to art school or theory school, can carry such deep gravity, rooted in the Logos. It too comes out of the integrity that Aldous Huxley identifies in the epigraph to this chapter. But irony, the opposite of sincerity, is what is wanted now, a cynicism and mockery thought to be sophisticated. When will we expect more of ourselves than to caper as naughty children, thumbing our noses at the “bourgeoisie,” while justifying our antics with misunderstandings of Duchamp?

A great work of art is a living wholeness, made up of the relationships among its parts, be they seemingly simple or manifestly complex. All its other attributes, intriguing though they may be, are secondary. Duchamp’s Fountain was denied a place in the New York Independents exhibition in 1917 as being immoral, pornographic, and vulgar. In itself, it was not: it was a blandly harmonious white ceramic object embodying proportions recognized and treasured for millennia, enlivened by a crude signature in black paint. Duchamp and his contemporaries—Picasso and Braque, the Dadaists, the Constructivists, and major figures in the arts of music, architecture, theatre, dance, and so on—objected to the stultifying reverence then given to the arts, as well as to the presumption that those arts were fully accessible only to the cultivated tastes of the enlightened few.[48] They managed to subvert beliefs that the visual arts are obliged to imitate the world, or that the character and “hand” of the artist must be discernible in the work, or that what Duchamp called “prettinesses” are necessary to art. They opened the world of the arts most wonderfully to include hitherto unappreciated works and new form of all kinds. In the visual arts, however, the misconceptions they cleared away were replaced by others even more absurd.[49]

Here is Matisse again:

I myself am fully convinced that the best explanation an artist can give of his aims and ability is afforded by his work.…

The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive. The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty space around them, the proportions, everything plays a part.…In a picture every part will be visible and will play the role conferred upon it, be it principal or secondary. All that is not useful in the picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements.

[Ibid. p 131]

The American non-objective painter Richard Diebenkorn—working far from the New York art world and its belief systems, but within his time and under the influences that came his way—does not fit easily into the art-historical story of a sequence that “ended with Warhol,” any more than do the “realists” Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper, and Andrew Wyeth. Mr. Diebenkorn eloquently and precisely identified the real project of both the artist and the receiver of great art:

When a picture is right and complete, there is a cumulative excitement in the sequential encounters with the parts until the work is completely (or as completely as possible) experienced. The pitch of ‘right response’ mounts, if the chain isn’t broken, to an extreme and almost physical sympathy with the presentation.

[Wall text from a show of Diebenkorn drawings & watercolors at M.O.M.A., New York, 1988]

This “cumulative excitement,” this emotion, is the by-product of our insightful recognition of what Longinus called “the Sublime.” If we are still and quiet, and fully attentive, all our senses alert and the monkey mind silenced, we can experience it—but only if it’s inherent in the work of art, and not just a matter of talk.

[1] Chapter 7, “Arts and Sciences,” p 88.

[2] The New Yorker, October 2001

[3] Arthur Danto, After the End of Art, p 85

[4] The Large Glass was designed using all kinds of intellectual games, from elaborate mathematics to the operation of chance—for instance, Duchamp shot lit matches out of a toy cannon to determine the placement of some elements.

[5] In 1934 Duchamp published 320 copies of the Green Box and the 94 individual fragments (mixed up in no special order) it contained. For an intriguing discussion of this laborious undertaking and of the artist’s claims for it in comparison with the original, see biologist Stephen Jay Gould and his wife’s Marcel Duchamp Studies Online Journal “tout-fait,” December 1999: http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_1/News/GreenBoxNote.html

[6] Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, Five Masters of the Avante-Garde, p 55

[7] This idea of the “undifferentiated” is important in Buddhism. Soetsu Yanagi, who founded the modern Japanese craft movement in 1926, wrote: “Since [the undifferentiated] does not concern itself with a preference for the beautiful over the ugly but rather pertains to the realm that precedes the birth of opposition between the two, it does not permit a situation in which either the ugly, or by the same token the beautiful, exists. Here there is neither: here everything is an integrity that is unique, that is itself, that is without distinction. Here, in the Buddhist idea, is the realm where art must abide.” [emphasis mine] [Soetsu Yanagi, The Unknown Craftsman: A Japanese Insight Into Beauty, p 131] Similarly, Martin Heidegger recommended a kind of thinking which would “let [the thing] rest upon itself in its very own essence.” Duchamp was interested in what were considered “esoteric” philosophies, and probably knew of this principle of Buddhist aesthetics. One of his projects, lasting several weeks, involved gambling at Monte Carlo using a system he devised, allowing him to neither win nor lose, but to break even. [Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, Five Masters of the Avante-Garde, p 54]

[8] BBC Interview with Joan Bakewell, June 5th, 1968 [www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwk7wFdC76Y] (4/12/12) As we have seen, the idea of aesthetic “taste”—a refined and educated sensibility cultivated among members of an elite group—arose with Rationalism and the Enlightenment in the 18th century, as an antidote to “mystical” ideas about universal harmonies. See chapter 5, part II, p 57, and chapter 12, p 171.

[9] Duchamp’s living and work spaces, as seen in photographs, were monastically spare.

[10] The perfume bottle and its case, titled Belle Helaine-Eau de Violette, sold at Christie’s auction in 2009 for 11.5 million dollars. [http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/sculptures-statues-figures/marcel-duchamp-belle-haleine-eau-de-5157362-details.aspx [4/22/15] For a thorough exposition of the many puns and innuendos it embodied, by the well-known evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, see http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/News/garner.html [8/19/15]

[11] The French art historian Hector Obalk believes that this is one of a number of indications that Duchamp never really claimed that the readymades were full-fledged works of art. See his interesting article at www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/obalk.html (5/16/15)

[12] Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p 135

[13] BBC Interview, 1968, www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwk7wFdC76Y (4/12/12)

[14] Participants in the survey were asked to choose from among 20 works, which included Matisse’s Red Studio and Picasso’s Guernica. Warhol’s Marilyn Triptych came in third. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/fountain-most-influential-piece-of-modern-art-6156702.html Duchamp would have been amused by the fact that at the time the honor was bestowed, the BBC referred to Fountain as “a gentleman’s urinal.”

news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4059997.stm

[15] Calvin Tomkins, The Bride and the Bachelors, pp 52, 61

[16] Ibid., p 58

[17] For example, the BBC interview in1968, to be found at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwk7wFdC76Y (4/12/12)

[18] Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World

[19] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IemLpxJ5SI. For a succinct and thorough discussion of the Golden Section, with drawings of some of the geometries it makes possible, see Scott Olsen’s densely informative little book The Golden Section: Nature’s Greatest Secret. I have referred to it in chapter 5, Part 1, and in chapter 11.

[20] Johannes Kepler, “On the Six Cornered Snowflake,” http://www.keplersdiscovery.com/SixCornered.html, (4/27/15)

[21] Hector Obalk, “The Unfindable Readymade,” http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/obalk.html (4/25/15

[22] Classical style: simple, pure, restrained, plain, austere; well-proportioned, harmonious, balanced, symmetrical, elegant. [The Oxford Dictionary of American English] The American artist Richard Pettibone: “My response to Duchamp hasn’t changed at all in the last 34 years. His work is just as beautiful. Being a visual artist I feel that it’s very important what things look like & in spite of all that talk about chance & giving up taste, etc. Duchamp’s work is still drop dead gorgeous.” http://www.toutfait.com/issues/volume2/issue_5/articles/girst2/girst1.html (5/14/15)

[23] Hector Obalk, “The Unfindable readymade,” http://www.toutfait.com/issues/issue_2/Articles/obalk.html

(4/25/15)

[24] http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Crater_psykter_Louvre_MNE938.jpg (5/17/15)

[25] See the quotation from a Native American potter, chapter 3, p 28

[26] Smithsonian Film: 1980s or 90s

[27] Carl Jung, Modern Man in Search of a Soul, Psychology Press, 2001 p 157

[28] Among many sources, neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight.

[29] Talk show, NHPR 11/6/01, 1:30 pm: referring to an article in journal Nature, I believe.

[30] Paul Goldberger has claimed that “Architecture is an idea, as all art is an idea;” although he then qualifies that by adding “[but] it is a constructed object first.”( (See quotation p 113 here.) I would say instead, “Architecture is a constructed object, not an idea; ideas are essential to the process both of the conceiving and of the making of objects, even when they are made by machines. The ideas are inherent in the building; they are expressed by it.” According to LeWitt, in conceptual art “The idea becomes a machine that makes the art.” [Sol LeWitt, “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art.”] http://www.tufts.edu/programs/mma/fah188/sol_lewitt/paragraphs%20on%20conceptual%20art.htm (4/27/15)

[31] Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, p 135

[32] See chapter 8, “Order and Chaos”.

[33] Ibid.

[34] I hesitate to propose that we “develop” them, as “develop” is one of the Ruined Words, the words used in relation to a money goal until they have lost much of their meaning beyond that. In property law, “wisest and best use” of land means its commercial exploitation and usually its ruination.

[35] See Chris Jordan’s deeply shaming series of photographs, “Bearing Witness:” www.yesmagazine.org/planet/midway-atoll-message-from-the-gyre (4/27/15)

[36] Marcel Duchamp, 1968 BBC interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bwk7wFdC76Y (5/2/15)

[37] It is obvious that this is because they are moments of coherence, which give us a place to stand within a sea of apparently unrelated elements. But where are we standing when we stand safely in coherence? For human beings, coherence indicates meaning, a meaning that we can only grope for in words (as discussed in Chapter 9, Meaning and Motive).

[38] I will discuss contemporary research into the neurophysiology of this process, known as “insight,” in chapter 19.

[39] Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, p 8.

[40] John Cage, in Roger Lipsey, An Art of our Own: the Spiritual in Twentieth Century Art, p 124

[41] Charles H. Townes, Professor of Physics at MIT and a Nobel Laureate, has pointed out that “Scientific knowledge, in the popular mind, comes by logical deductions or by the accumulation of data…. But such a description of scientific discovery is a travesty of the real thing. Most of the important scientific discoveries come about very differently and are much more akin to revelation.…In scientific circles one speaks of intuition, accidental discovery, or says, simply, that ‘he had a wonderful idea.’” [Think, March-April 1966, p 5]

[42] Apparent early clues (leading to further mystery) seem to have been found by neuroscience, as we will see later.

[43] See p 192. For an accessible discussion of the great 17th century mathematician Johannes Kepler’s views on it, see http://www.keplersdiscovery.com/DivineProportion.html (4/1/15)

[44] In his 2011 book, The Future of Art in a Postdigital Age: From Hellenistic to Hebraic, Melvin L. Alexenberg quotes Danto’s claim that the difference between art and non-art are now invisible, as validation of his own belief that “The contemporary redefinition of art is emerging from a Hebraic biblical consciousness as expressed through the oral Torah.” Danto’s “radical” proposal that “concept and context rather than visual appearance gives meaning to images and objects,” Alexenberg says, had been discussed and decided centuries earlier by rabbis in the Talmudic tractate Avodah Zarah (Strange Worship).

[45] Interview with Zoe Sutherland in online journal Naked Punch, posted 10/07/10. http://nakedpunch.com/articles/88 (5/12/15)

[46] http://www.christies.com/features/Mark-Rothkos-No-36-Black-Stripe-5977-3.aspx (8/28/17)

[47] In illustrating the nuances of the word “sentiment,” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary offers the American critic Meyer Shapiro’s reference to “an almost religious sentiment of the dignity of art.”

[48] See chapter 12, “Critics and Cognoscenti” p 172.

[49] Examples: the claim that “interpretation” makes art, and that the aesthetic eye is now redundant. Interpretation is to art much as provenance is to antique furniture; it is interesting, and affects the commercial value of the piece, but it has no effect on actual inherent meaning or on real, as opposed to commercial, value.