On Writing About Art

Convener: Prashant Parikh
Speakers: Yashodhara Dalmia, Suresh Jayaram, Jitish Kallat, Anil Kumar, Geeta Kapur, Nalini Malani, Hans Mathews, Avani Parikh, Prabodh Parikh, Prashant Parikh, Shivaji Panikkar, Gieve Patel, Sudhir Patwardhan, Ashish Rajadhyaksha, Geeti Sen, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Gulammohammed Sheikh, Nilima Sheikh, Shubhalaxmi Shukla, Kavita Singh, and Vivan Sundaram

January 29 to 30, 2002 | 10.00 am to 6.00 pm
Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Mumbai

Concept Note: Prashant Parikh

I considered two ways of approaching this topic: one a formal laying out of the “space” of art writing, specifying a large subset of its components, maintaining as neutral a stance as possible; the second a substantive position on art writing that may serve as a starting point for our deliberations. I have settled on some combination of the two and I hope it both maps out some of the terrain and also stimulates others to alternative articulations or refinements of the orientation outlined below.

I will start by noting the large and old split that has existed between “art” and “science” or, put differently, between the humanities and the sciences, or yet again, between “culture” and “nature.” These, and other related distinctions, are all not quite the same, but they suggest to some the presence of two qualitatively different realities that constitute our world, requiring a corresponding qualitative difference in method and approach. Perhaps the phenomenological movement starting with Brentano and Husserl and Heidegger, and currently represented by Habermas and Derrida, is the most sustained attempt in the twentieth century to come to grips with this assumed duality directly.

Against the basic spirit of this movement, I want to counterpoise the other main method, the “analytic method,” which has proceeded by very different strategies and tactics deployed through a quite different sociology, that might be characterized most generally by the assertion that there is only one type of reality and all of it must be approached by the same broad type of method and outlook, allowing, of course, for many variations of actual “technique” for the many sub-domains of this single reality. By “analysis,” I mean of course something wider than philosophical analysis.

Both approaches, loosely called phenomenological and analytic, recognize at least one empirical fact, which is the enormous success of the sciences, quite unparalleled in any other domain of knowledge, though their interpretation of this success is usually quite different. The simple picture I have drawn is just for heuristic purposes and there are not of course two monolithic mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive “blocks” of methods and movements opposed to each other.

I want to suggest, perhaps somewhat provocatively, that the analytic method is the correct way to investigate and represent and communicate reality, and that art too is best served by this approach; when we write about art, which writing is a way of investigating and representing and communicating a domain, we should write “analytically.” I put this last word in quotes because I know of no simple way of characterizing what I mean by this. I do not mean, of course, that our writing should be devoid of judgments, values, emotions, and the use of our sensibilities and tastes and subjective experiences.

I turn now to the five sub-topics; the first day is about texts, the second about their place in the world.

To start with, something about the elements of the space of writing: we have art journalism, art history, art criticism, art theory, art philosophy and, in a somewhat separate category, literary writing. These cover, I think, the full range of contemporary types of writing on art. These could be further elaborated thus:

1. Art journalism typically covers exhibitions and other events and usually involves description and evaluation. Example: A statement that x represents y.
2. Art history and art criticism are about individual works, artists, groups of artists, movements, or entire periods, and usually involve some mix of description and argument, (though my sense is that in India, much criticism overlaps with art journalism and takes on its forms, namely description and evaluation with little argument). I include in this category the notes prepared by curators as well. Example: A statement about how and why x represents y. (e.g. Rosalind Krauss on Picasso)
3. Art theory is that heterogeneous body of works that are about theoretical constructs, where “theoretical” is construed widely to include both normative and descriptive elements. This type of writing is almost exclusively in the form of argument, though there are, I suppose, texts like manifestos which are a mixture of argument and hortatory components. Example: A statement about the larger social context of x’s representation of y or about how representation in general works in a certain social context. (e.g. Barthes in “Mythologies”)
4. Art philosophy (more commonly, philosophy of art) is almost exclusively about concepts and conceptual problems relating to art and is always in the form of argument. Example: A statement giving a definition of the concept of representation. (e.g. Goodman on representation)
5. “Literary” writing, which stands apart from the categories above, typically takes some aspect of art as a point of departure for either expressive purposes or for reflection. I include in this category also the writings of artists themselves when they write about their art. Its forms are many and varied, ranging from poetry to “imaginative” essays and involve a wider range of rhetorical devices. I exclude this last category from my suggestion above to write about art analytically, though there are many examples of analytic literary writing.

This might serve as a starting point for our laying out of the space of writing and its forms, which are usually either articles or essays and involve either description and evaluation or argument. Besides coming up with categories I may have missed, we could make finer subdivisions, so we get a map of this space.

Second, the role of knowledge: I’m using the word in a broad sense to include not just concepts and theories of art, but also tastes, sensibilities, practices of looking and observing – all kinds of “tacit” knowledge as well. The thing to examine and discuss here is how we come to read what we do or acquire the sensibilities that we do. My sense is that most art writers in India read writing of the phenomenological kind, though I want to repeat that there is no easy way to characterize writing as being of one kind or another. Why is this? Again, my sense is that this choice is based on perceived ideological affinities and partly, of course, just on peer pressure. This is a sweeping statement, but I offer it as a starting point. As far as sensibilities go, this is a much larger issue that I leave completely open for discussion.

The issue of clarity: I’m all for it, despite all that Adorno has said in favor of difficulty and obscurity. To be provocative again, I think much phenomenological writing often masks somewhat simple thoughts in convoluted language; analytic writing tries to simplify ideas that are sometimes complex. This is not, of course, to say that we don’t need technical terms in art as we do in the sciences.

This brings us to the second day, where we move from texts to the embedding world.

On writers and readers, I want to start with the truism that art writers write for the artworld (a technical term in need of greater definition) more than for the general public. One would have to map out for each category of writing its corresponding market. What are the goals for each kind of writing? For example, how much does art criticism function as advertising within an art market? I’m suggesting that we treat art writing as a kind of “abstract commodity” that circulates within a market framed by the artworld and the larger world. How does it function? What is its economics and sociology? This requires that we step outside the contents we looked at on the first day and examine the “social space of interpretations.” What happens to an interpretation once it becomes public?

This takes us naturally to the last topic – the larger context, made up of the context of ideas and the context of social institutions. Regarding ideas, I’m reminded of the ancient Chinese curse “May you live in interesting times!” We live in fascinating times, where the fault lines dividing disciplines are shifting and dissolving in slow but definite ways. There is far greater borrowing of models and methods, of ideas and metaphors from one another, and this will undoubtedly result in the forging of new paradigms for knowledge. I will leave open the issue of the institutional context.

I want to consider two further substantive suggestions: one, that much art writing is implicitly information-theoretic. If this were to be made explicit and writers were to consciously adopt an information-theoretic stance, art discourse would benefit immensely. The information theory I’m advocating is not just the old quantitative communication theory of Claude Shannon, but rather a new, as yet nascent, development coming out of the cognitive sciences that is both qualitative and quantitative.

In any case, this perspective is far from absent in art. Gombrich, amongst others, is very conscious of the information content of aesthetic representations. The basic idea is relatively simple to express: write about an artwork as if it were a field of “information” with logical relations of various kinds amongst its components; consider the artist and the viewer both as part of this field, consider also the larger context of the artwork as part of the field – none of this is to be left out, but rather treated informationally, no differently in principle from someone extracting information from a computer database or, more to the point, from investigating how and why the apple fell on Newton’s head.

The second substantive suggestion is that many of the insights of phenomenological writing be examined by recasting them in analytic terms. This would force writers to think through their claims with a rigor and clarity that is missing in much phenomenological writing. It would reduce needless obfuscation, and weak arguments could be strengthened or the conclusions simply discarded. For example, Derrida in “The Truth of Painting” discusses the debate between Meyer Schapiro and Heidegger on the matter of van Gogh’s shoes, part of whose argument (if he can be interpreted as offering an argument at all in that piece) can be recast in analytical terms thus: Heidegger claims that van Gogh’s painting was about a pair of country shoes (call this proposition p), Schapiro claims that the painting was really about a pair of city shoes (call this proposition q), and Derrida asks if it was really about a pair of shoes at all (call this proposition r) thereby purportedly undermining the distinction between p and q (or pair of country shoes/pair of city shoes). When expressed thus, the logic of Derrida’s argument becomes clearer and can in fact shown to be valid if Derrida is right that the painting does not depict a pair, by expressing p, q, and r in terms of their component parts. Indeed, this is a common type of argument structure, going back at least to Socrates (e.g. p could be expressed thus in a “first-order language”: “about (painting, a) and pair (a) and country (a)” where ‘a’ stands for the two shoes in the painting. Since the middle conjunct “pair (a)” is false if Derrida is right, the entire sentence is false. Similarly, q is also false. Since both p and q are false, the distinction between the two and the debate between Heidegger and Schapiro is undermined, if Derrida is right that the shoes do not form a pair. Of course, this is what Derrida would like us to think, that the debate is undermined. But both Heidegger and Schapiro could come back by saying that the shoes forming a pair is not germane to their debate and that what they are really asserting is “about (painting, a) and country (a)” and “about (painting, a) and city (a)” respectively. Many of Derrida’s moves are inconclusive in just this way.). A further advantage beyond clarity of extracting the argument form from the argument is that the form can be reused in other contexts more easily. (Note: I should say here that it doesn’t matter if I have read Derrida correctly or not – whatever that might mean in Derrida’s own ludic terms – my point is that such analytic recasting can be of immense value.)

To close then, what I suggest we do over the two days of the symposium is to create a map of the terrain of writing about art. The exercise is a “meta-level” one: it is not only to articulate one position or other, though this is part of it; it is also to identify alternative orientations for each of the sub-topics. For example, within the phenomenological method I have cited above, we could point to Husserl’s reductions, Heidegger’s “thought,” Adorno’s negative dialectics, Habermas’s ideal speech situation, Derrida’s deconstuction; all these are ways of treating the world dualistically, restricting the empirical analytic sciences to some narrower sub-domain. My suggestion is that while we are of course free to espouse our own positions, we also adopt a partly neutral stance that enables us to identify and describe other positions. In a word, our goal is to have at the end a conceptual geography, a map, of the space of writing.