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| Durer using grid to draw |
In the first few pages of Santiago Zabala’s “The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic
Philosophy”, there are incessant quotes and statements about how Tugendhat and
other 20th c philosophers overcame the subject/object fallacy of
Western metaphysics. First Charles
Taylor in a heading states: “Tugendhat is very certain of the kind of construal
of self-consciousness he cannot accept. He calls it the subject-object model,
and its basic error is to construe consciousness as a relation to an
object.” The author in the first
paragraph goes on to quote Gadamer: ”….the subject as starting point, just as
orientation to the object, is contested by making the intersubjective
communication in language the new universal system of reference.” A few
paragraphs later he says: ”The impossibility of the mental eye means the end of
any pure subjectivity, the end of Cartesian subjectivity, which implies that
objects can be seen “objectively” or “scientifically”.”
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| Wade Guyton |
It is interesting to unpack this in relation to the
transition to abstraction at the beginning of the last century, and in particular a
rather recent recycle of minimalism that is cropping up in New York galleries
and has received an imprimatur by the Whitney with a mid-career show of Wade
Guyton, one of its practitioners. It provides an insight into the endless politics
of suspicion that permeate so much of Western Culture over the last century and
in particular painting. The ambition for the thinkers quoted above is to
liberate our consciousness from a subjectively based consciousness that for
various reasons is beholden to visuality. The first manifestation of this subjectivity
or the “mental eye” was first seen in the realism that commenced in the
Renaissance with the use of perspective and then in the Baroque with chiaroscuro.
It reigned confidently over painting until the end of the 19
th
century. This mental eye was built out of clear notion of a strong subject, that
shaped via a scientific understanding of perceptual processes, the world that surrounded
the artist. The imposition of the gaze of the individual on what surrounded him
seemed to parallel the thymotic excesses of Western Civilization as it
objectified via science and capitalism the whole world. The image of the
conquistador Aguirre in Herzog’s classic film “Aguirre, the Anger of God”
descending the Amazon and conquering solely with his imperious gaze all that he
surveyed is probably the most emblematic image for me of this attitude. A rather
powerful bit of information to support this notion of Western consciousness is that
the perspectival system of the Versailles gardens radiated from the bed of Louis
the XIV.
Sartre has a lot to say about
the withering gaze of his grandfather, who was an old world authoritarian type.
The counterattack on this sort of male gaze in 20th century philosophy is the
subject of Martin Jay’s “Downcast Eyes”. To make his point about the domination
of the visual in our culture, his first paragraph uses a laundry list of words
etymologically based in the visual. In the first two sentences he succeeds in
using: glance, demonstrate, vigilantly, keeping an eye out, illuminating
insight and mirroring.
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| Grotjahn |
Zabala goes on to say: “If the old philosophy only referred
to what could be seen clearly, the new philosophy refers only to what can be
clearly communicated.” Rorty and others call this transformation: the
“Linguistic Turn”. Science required that
objects be placed under the scrutiny of the researcher and submit to the
scientific method. A strange amalgam of suspicion
and arrogance worked together in a mighty cabal to turn the world inside out. A
naive acceptance of the world as it is presented on a day-to-day basis was
replaced by a vision that the world must be founded on a more solid basis
through the power of logos. The world became transformed into a series of
topics: geology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, grammatology etc.
The first crack in that stranglehold on the real appeared in
the phenomenological studies of
Husserl and Heidegger. Heidegger has a phrase
that always carried a lot of significance for me: “always already”. If we act on
the world in a certain way, we are always already in it as a participant with
other people using a language that we did not create. The pure cogito was
immediately problematized. Our relation to things is not one of subject to
object, but a more shared engaged reality of being in the world. His word for
that reality was “Dasein”, which roughly translates as “being there.”
This became the start of a hundred years of philosophers trying
to decenter the scientific gaze by deconstructing the language of metaphysics,
with each new generation of philosophers accusing the previous one of still being
subject to it. Wittgenstein added to this deconstruction by moving our focus
away from the metaphysical to an analysis of how we use language in the real
world. During the most recent era of French Deconstruction one adjective that
you didn’t want attached to your ideas was “logo-centric”. Initially, the
problem was that behind the strong ego was the belief in God as the origin of
everything in a well-ordered universe, which still supported Descartes
rationality. After that everything logical was perceived to be just a trace of
that divine belief system, which had to be expunged from wherever in our
language it was still hiding. And of course it got extended to the objectifying
gaze, which was found most obviously in the male ego, responsible for all that
was wrong with the world from slavery, sexism to the despoliation of the
environment.
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| Sarah Morris |
I got off on this tangent after reading
John Yau write in“HyperAllergic” about what he called the latest “look” in Abstraction. The work
of its practitioners, Morris, Guyton and Kassay looks very much like the Abstraction
of Stella, Reinhardt and Kelly, which is decidedly logo-centric. Greenbergian ideas about reducing forms to
basic elements and constructing abstract realities went hand and hand with
the positivists who believed in the superiority of mathematical language over
the language of poets and mystics. “What you see is what you get” Stella is
purported to have said. The early spirituality of Rothko and Mondrian is gone. These
artists are laconic macho painters. They give you the least amount of what
might be construed to be a painting and then pull up the ladder behind them. I
suspect that this paring down of painting to simple terms embodies in some
manner the analytic analysis of language, which reduces language to its
grammatical elements and then submits it to validity tests. They want to see
how painting functions as shapes on a wall. Or as they loved to say in grad
school: does it work.
Already Yau, who is not a fan of these artists, does accept
the premise that we should not go back to the days of the gigantomachia of
Gorky and de Kooning. And there may be some truth that this generation of
artists is too imbued with the culture of deconstruction to attempt to overcome
Kelley, Stella and Reinhardt or in the case of Kassay, Ryman, at least on their
own terms. Something else is going on here: There seems to be a need to push painting
toward something totally inert, that could be simply part of a common language,
no longer power-laden as the last word of something irreducible, which was the
goal of Kelly, Reinhardt and the early Stella. The work of these artists becomes
as common as money, just a token of exchange, like baseball cards. By shifting
the terms of painting away from any lingering notion of being an object and
pushing it into the realm of language and in the case of Guyton producing the
painting mechanically with an inkjet printer, sets the painting free from its
roots in science and objectification.
If the influence of Tugendhat and analytic philosophy is as
pervasive as I think it is, the primacy of language theory would give
permission to this generation to take painting further down the road to just
words and sentences. Rorty who had his role in this winding down of the
metaphysical, critiques Heidegger because “he treats language as a brooding
presence rather than as a string of marks and noise emitted by organisms and
used by them to coordinate their behavior.”
Heidegger placed importance on the ignored copula “is” that
we use without acknowledging its role in grounding our day-to-day use of
language in something more numinous. It backgrounds it and in poetry approaches
the foreground. In the case of our contemporary practitioners of abstraction it
has been excised.
These works of art look like paintings, act like painting
but on closer inspection are as bloodless and lifeless as zombies. That the New
York culture allows this kind of painting to rise to the top is no surprise:
the
New York financial world is known for creating zombie loans and the NY Fed
has succeeded in creating a
zombie economy.
Simone Weil said that culture moves in grand
arcs either ascending or descending. Assuming the movement is down, could it be
we have reached the bottom?
I can be followed on twitter
@mugar49
References to this article on line and in hard copy:
Raphael Rubinstein references my role in coining the notion of Zombie Formalism in paragraph 19 in this article in "Art in America", another reference to the sequence of events here:
About:Content, Another reference:
capscripts, and at
Paint This Desert and most recently on
Hyperallergic
 |
Question appeared on Jeopardy! noticed by Jerry Saltz who helped propagate the notion of Zombie Formalism
although he still claims that Robinson coined it. |
