Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics: The Legacy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 9781784533458, 9781350988125, 9781786732569

Citation preview

i

Sarah J. Lippert is Associate Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts Programme at the University of Michigan-​Flint, as well as the Director of the Society for Paragone Studies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in Art History and Criticism, as well as a Master of Arts in Art History, from Western University, and received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University. She has been the recipient of a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in the History of Art, as well as a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research expertise is as a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-​century French and British art, ­specialising in aesthetic theory, painting and sculpture, and the history of artistic competition, known as the paragone. Recent publications include articles in the international journals Artibus et Historiae and Dix-​ Neuf, whilst her forthcoming book The Paragone in Nineteenth-​Century Art will be published in 2018.

ii

‘Although Lessing’s Laocoön is his most celebrated text, cited in almost every discussion of time and space in the arts, it has not received such intensive, imaginative and challenging consideration by writers interested primarily in the visual arts until this thoughtfully assembled and fascinating group of essays.’ James H. Rubin, Stony Brook, State University of New York

iii

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics The Legacy of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

EDITED BY SARAH J. LIPPERT

iv

Published in 2017 by I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd London • New York www.ibtauris.com Copyright Editorial Selection © 2017 Sarah J. Lippert Copyright Individual Chapters © 2017 Chad Airhart, Franco Cirulli, Thomas Morgan Evans, Eric Garberson, Timothy W. Hiles, Gabriela Jasin, Sarah J. Lippert, Rob Marks The right of Sarah J. Lippert to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted by the editor in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions. References to websites were correct at the time of writing. International Library of Modern and Contemporary Art 23 ISBN: 978 1 78453 345 8 eISBN: 978 1 78672 256 0 ePDF: 978 1 78673 256 9 A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available Typeset by Newgen Knowledge Works Pvt Ltd Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY

v

This book is dedicated to Dr Brian Curran for his inspiring mentorship as a dedicated doctoral advisor, his masterful work as an extraordinarily accomplished art historian, and his generosity of spirit

vi

vi

Contents Contributors Acknowledgements List of Figures Introduction: The Tenets of Lessing and his Legacy

ix xii xiii 1

Sarah J. Lippert

1 Drawing the Line: Gender, Artistic Theory and Absolutism in Raoux’s Paintings and Lessing’s Words

8

Gabriela Jasin

2 Bridging Space and Time: Winckelmann’s Theory and its Aftermath (1754–78)

35

Franco Cirulli

3 Correcting Lessing’s Error: E.H. Toelken’s Addendum to Laokoon, 1822

74

Eric Garberson

4 The Temporality of Imitation in the Work of Moreau and Gérôme

97

Sarah J. Lippert

5 Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient: Flesh: A Look at the Work of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet and de Kooning

120

Chad Airhart

6 Almost: Greenberg and Lessing Thomas Morgan Evans vii

150

vi

Contents

7 In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time: Feeling Your Way Through Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time

172

Rob Marks

8 The Art of Becoming: The Symbiosis of Time, Space and Film in Pull My Daisy

202

Timothy W. Hiles Conclusion: Limit-​Imposing Systems

228

Sarah J. Lippert Bibliography 231 Index 248

viii

ix

Contributors Chad Airhart is Associate Professor of Art History at Carson-​Newman University. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Dallas in Aesthetics. As a professional painter and an accomplished art historian he possesses a unique background for explorations into the interaction of theory and practice in the history of aesthetics. His work centres on Contemporary painting in America and Europe. Franco Cirulli holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Boston University. His areas of specialisation are eighteenth and nineteenth-​century philosophy, and the history of aesthetics. His work includes Hegel’s Critique of Essence –​ a Reading of the Wesenslogik (2006) and he is currently working on a manuscript on the development of the aesthetics of painting in Germany, from Winckelmann to G.W.F. Hegel. Thomas Morgan Evans is a teaching fellow in the History of Art at University College London. He has recently completed a Henry Moore Postdoctoral Fellowship (2012–​14). His research interests include the work of Andy Warhol and he is currently working on Contemporary art from the 1970s in New York. Eric Garberson is Associate Professor of Art History and the director of the interdisciplinary doctoral programme in Media Art & Text at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. His research focuses on the historiography and institutional formation of art history as a discipline in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-​century Germany, with an emphasis on Berlin. Publication projects include ‘Art History in the University: Toelken –​ Hotho –​Kugler’ (Journal of Art Historiography 5, December 2011) and ‘Art History in the University 2: Ernst Guhl’. Timothy W. Hiles is an Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Tennessee. Hiles’s area of expertise is late nineteenth and early ix

x

List of Contributors twentieth-​century European art and the history of photography. He served as the university’s School of Art Associate Director from 2001 to 2005. In addition to dedicating himself to teaching and advising students, he has authored Thomas Theodor Heine: Fin-​de-​Siècle Munich and the Origins of Simplicissimus, as well as scholarly articles, papers and book chapters. He focuses his research on the intersection of literature and visual arts in the microcosms of turn-​of-​the-​century Vienna and Munich, and on American twentieth-​century photography. He is an advocate for accessibility on college campuses and recently co-​authored ‘An Integrated Information System for the Disabled’ in The International Journal of Diversity in Organizations, Communities & Nations. Gabriela Jasin is Professor of Art History at Savannah College of Art and Design. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Wesleyan University and a Master of Arts and Doctor of Philosophy from Rutgers, State University of New Jersey. She specialises in the art of the baroque and Rococo periods in Europe. She has taught courses on special topics including Gianlorenzo Bernini and the art of spectacle, and a graduate seminar that pictured Bernini’s sculpture, architecture and writing in terms of twentieth-​century film and theatre theory. Her published work includes ‘Newtonian Science and Lockean Epistemology in Chardin’s Soap Bubbles’, in an edited volume Visualising the Unseen, Imagining the Unknown, Perfecting the Natural (2007). Sarah J. Lippert is Associate Professor of Art History in the Visual Arts Programme at the University of Michigan-​Flint, as well as the Director of the Society for Paragone Studies. She holds a Bachelor of Arts Honours in Art History and Criticism, as well as a Master of Arts in Art History, from Western University, and received her Ph.D. in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University. She has been the recipient of a Samuel H. Kress Fellowship in the History of Art, as well as a fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Her research expertise is as a scholar of eighteenth and nineteenth-​century French and British art, specialising in aesthetic theory, painting and sculpture, and the history of artistic competition, known as the paragone. Recent publications include articles in the international journals Artibus et Historiae x

xi

List of Contributors and Dix-​Neuf, whilst her forthcoming book The Paragone in Nineteenth-​ Century Art will be published in 2018. Rob Marks is a scholar and arts writer who explores the nature and dynamic of the aesthetic experience. He regularly writes for the art publications Art Practical and Daily Serving and has written a Kantian analysis of Serra’s The Matter of Time, for a chapter on the activity of space and time in this installation, and articles about Serra’s site-​specificity. In 2012, Marks won the Hannah Arendt Prize in Critical Theory and Creative Research. Marks holds Masters degrees in Visual and Critical Studies from the California College of Art, and Journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania.

xi

xi

Acknowledgements From the Editor The editor would like to thank the following institutions for providing access to their collections: the Huntington Library in California, the Getty Research Institute, also in California, and the Musée Gustave Moreau in Paris. Additionally, Sarah J. Lippert would like to thank the Office of Sponsored Research at the University of Michigan-​Flint for supporting this project through the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme. Thanks to Mary Kelly, Heather Workman, Jessica Balazovich, Marta Watters, Fatima Hafez and Amanda Kimberly for their contributions to formatting and proofreading the manuscript. Sarah would like to thank Dr Melissa Geiger, Associate Professor of Art History at East Stroudsburg University, for assistance with the project in its genesis, including offering feedback on her abstract, to be used for application to conference sessions; co-​chairing a session on the book’s theme at the 2011 Association of Art Historians conference in Coventry, England; and assisting with e-​mail correspondence with authors, and certain organisational matters, in the book’s early stages of development.

xii

xi

List of Figures 1.1 Jean Raoux, The Virgins of Ancient Times, 1727, 92 x 72.5 cm (36.2 x 28.5 in.), oil on canvas, Palais des beaux-​arts at Lille, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​PD-​old 100.

10

1.2 Jean Raoux, The Virgins of Modern Times, 1728, 92 x 72.5 cm (36.2 x 28.5 in.), oil on canvas, Palais des beaux-​arts at Lille, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​PD old-​100.

12

1.3 Abraham Bosse, The Wise Virgins at Prayer, c.1635, 29.1 x 36.5 cm (11.4 x 14.3 in.), etching on laid paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (public domain, Washington, DC). Credit: Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. NGA Images open access.

16

1.4 Abraham Bosse, The Foolish Virgins Wasting Time, c.1635, 29.1 x 36.5 cm (11.4 x 14.3 in.), etching on laid paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (public domain, Washington, DC).

17

1.5 Thomas Bernard, Establishment of Saint Cyr, 1687, 4.1 x 3.1 cm (1.6 x 1.2 in.), silver medal, unknown location. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (public domain, Washington, DC). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​PD-​old-​100. This image has not been altered.

20

xiii

xvi

List of Figures 1.6 Jean Raoux, The Virgins of Modern Times (detail), 1728, 92 x 72.5 cm (36.2 x 28.5 in.), oil on canvas, Palais des beaux-​arts at Lille, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-Art/PD old-100.

26

2.1 Greek art (Hellenistic), Laocoön, c.200 BCE, marble, 1.84 m (6 ft.), Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican City. Photographic credit: Photographed by the editor. All rights released (public domain). This image has not been altered.

36

2.2 Leochares, Apollo Belvedere, c.120–​40 BCE, Roman marble copy of Greek bronze original dating to c.350–​325 BCE, 2.2 m (7 ft. 2 1/​2 in.), Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican City. Photographic credit: Photographed by the editor. All rights released (public domain). This image has not been altered.

40

2.3 Apollonius of Athens, Belvedere Torso, first-century BCE marble, 1.59 m (5 ft. 2 in.), Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican City. Photographic credit: Scala/Art Resource.

42

4.1 Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele, 1894–​5, oil on canvas, 213 x 118 cm (6 ft. 12 in. x 3 ft. 10 1/​2 in.), Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, France. Photographic credit: Photographed by the author. All rights released (public domain).

107

4.2 Gustave Moreau, Salomé Tattooed, 1874, oil on canvas, 92 x 60 cm (3 ft. 1/​4 in. x 1 ft. 11 1/​2 in.), Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​PD-​old-​100. This image has not been altered.

109

4.3 Jean-​Léon Gérôme, The Studio of Tanagra (L’Atelier de Tanagra), 1893, oil on canvas, 65.1 x 91.1 cm (2 ft. 1 5/​8 in. x 3 ft.), private collection. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​PD old-​100. This image has not been altered.

113

xiv

xv

newgenprepdf

List of Figures 5.1 Chaïm Soutine, Portrait of Moïse Kisling, 1919–​20, cardboard on masonite, unframed 99.1 x 69.2 cm (39 x 27 ¼ in.), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Arthur Wiesenberger, 1943.

127

5.2 Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950–​5, oil on canvas, 1.93 m x 1.47 m (75 x 58 in.), Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

129

5.3 Jean Dubuffet, Julie la sérieuse, 1950, 73 cm x 60 cm (28 3/​4 x 23 5/​8 in.), oil on composition board, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.

136

7.1 Richard Serra, The Matter of Time, 2005, weatherproof steel, variable dimensions, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain. Photographic Credit: Saul Rosenfield. License Information: Courtesy of the Artist, Richard Serra.

173

xv

xvi

1

Introduction The Tenets of Lessing and his Legacy Sarah J. Lippert

When Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–​ 81) wrote his treatise called Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry in 1766, the theory presented therein offered a systematic differentiation of the perceived strengths and weaknesses of two categories of art defined as poetry and painting. These labels were used to refer to textual versus visual media. Supposedly so that they could peacefully coexist, Lessing endeavoured to equitably carve out spheres for visual and textual media, in support of Horace’s ut pictura poesis tradition. Painting and poetry were divided based upon the notion that poetry belonged to the realm of time and painting to the province of space.1 Lessing’s motives have been carefully studied, such that only a brief consideration is necessary here. By the mid-​eighteenth century, even though Lessing wrote his original treatise in German, he was nevertheless a student of both French literature and art. Possibly motivated by a desire to raise the prestige of his culture’s art and literature, Lessing was perhaps frustrated by the dominance of French cultural traditions in his own time.2 Over a hundred years after its publication, Edward Bell was able to say that although Lessing drew heavily from pre-​existent theories, especially those of the Abbé Jean-​Baptiste Dubos (1670–​1742), he still offered something original in the concept that the work presented. Bell also contended that although the guidelines of the Laocoön were self-​evident to 1

2

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics proper critics of the arts, so as to make the work outdated nearly once it was published, it nonetheless was the case that artists continued to ignore its guidelines: ‘The fact that the leading idea of Lessing’s treatise, the limitation and distinctiveness of the spheres of art and poetry, is continually ignored even in quarters where special qualifications are looked for, is sufficient reason for its reassertion’.3 What makes Lessing’s legacy relevant to later generations of artists, historians and aesthetic theorists is that, as W.J.T. Mitchell predicted, his arguments and proscriptions for artists were never resolved. This is because although supposedly claiming to separate the arts into their ‘natural spheres’, Lessing was in fact relying upon age-​old precepts in binary thinking to nudge poetry (or the textual) towards the top.4 The fundamental separation between textual and visual art, rather than being neutralised by new media, such as movies, theatre, television or music videos, has in fact intensified. Such new media instead operate as competing media, attempting to supplant these earlier art forms with a gesamtkunstwerk identity. But, in this effort to replace, these art forms continued a cycle of hegemonic relationships with each other. Rensselaer Lee, who is a specialist on the history of the ut pictura poesis tradition, has explained that Lessing’s limits encouraged rebellion rather than acceptance, because they were too extreme.5 One could argue, as Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–​1564) did, that the artistic impulse is effectively a competitive impulse. In theorising that the artist must struggle to render his concetto (concept or idea) in material form, Michelangelo illuminated how the idea and process fight with one another for creative expression. In Lessing’s case, the paradigm that he established for the competition between time and space would continue to frustrate and inspire artists for decades. However, the reality was that even within the singular field of visual art, time and space had been employed, manipulated and labelled, so as to establish and promote a hierarchy of prestige within the art world. Given the close relationship between hierarchies of the arts in both theory and practise since Lessing’s time, it is rather remarkable that few studies have addressed the impact of Lessing’s theories upon actual artists. Although this is one of the goals of this book, influence need not be limited to those who demonstrate unequivocal connections to Lessing or 2

3

Introduction his works, since the concepts surrounding spheres for the arts became so pervasive in the Western tradition of modern art that many artists would have been operating under Lessing’s umbrella, without necessarily knowing from whence the rain was coming. The authors who have contributed to this study approach the issue of Lessing’s legacy in a myriad of ways, demonstrating the methodological and contextual variety represented in the topic. Given the interdisciplinary application of Lessing’s theories to diverse media, the contributors offer a wide range of approaches, exploring painting, sculpture, film, site-​specific installations and literature. Our examination of the legacy of Lessing’s theories begins with consideration of an artist from Lessing’s generation, whose work demonstrates how Lessing-​like distinctions between space and time, beauty and the sublime and femininity and masculinity were circulating in the art world in his own time. Gabriela Jasin’s chapter, titled Drawing the Line: Jean Raoux’s Painted Virgins and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Written Theories, explores the ways in which the arts may have prompted Lessing, and others, such as eighteenth-​century art critic Denis Diderot (1713–​84), to seek some kind of resolution for trespassed boundaries in the early part of the century. Specifically, Jasin looks at the relative status of the arts of painting and poetry through the lens of pendant works created by Jean Raoux (1677–​1734). In his depictions of ancient and modern virgins, Jasin finds the arts, but also all of the spheres of meaning into which Lessing would later separate them, present in the personifications of old and new virtues. In his analysis of Lessing’s treatise, Mitchell has found that Lessing was possibly reacting specifically to French modern art, when he took offence at the state of blurred boundaries in his own time. In this way, Jasin’s chapter elucidates the fundamental fears about femininity and the arts and how these impacted both artists and their chosen subject matter. In the second chapter, After Lessing: Beauty and the Unreality of Artistic Space and Time, author Franco Cirulli offers a foundational approach to Lessing studies, in that his topic considers figures and theories that were contemporaneous with the German theorist. One of the most important writers of the eighteenth century, Johann Winckelmann (1717–​68), is considered in the context of temporality in art criticism and ekphrasis. Winckelmann, heralded still today as one of the most important 3

4

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics art historians of the Western tradition, wrote in a poetic manner about Greek art, establishing its pre-​eminence amongst later Neoclassical circles. Cirulli’s chapter provides an essential framework for the subsequent studies by assessing the import of Lessing’s arguments amongst other theorists and in art criticism of the eighteenth century. Cirulli examines the temporal and spatial within Winckelmann’s ekphrastic reviews of the Apollo Belvedere and Belvedere Torso, demonstrating that the critical confrontation with time and space was a part of what made these works pivotal in the taste for noble simplicity and calm grandeur. Equally important to Cirulli’s contribution is his consideration of how Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–​1803) and his theories occupied Lessing’s world of binary hierarchies. Herder, who had written his treatise Pygmalion’s Creative Dream (1778) as a response to Lessing’s theories, quickly reacted to the ways in which Lessing’s limits constrained both artists and viewers, whilst attempting to rewrite those limits, to be more beneficial for his preferred medium of sculpture. Although Cirulli considers aesthetic theory in his analysis of Lessing’s legacy, his approach is necessarily art-​based, in that he demonstrates how art that was extant in Lessing’s time would have been received and reconsidered in the wake of his theories. Moving into the following century, Eric Garberson’s chapter offers a critical evaluation of the infiltration of Lessing-​like theories into the work of nineteenth-​century literature. In his chapter, E.H. Toelken’s Addendum to Lessing’s Laocoön (1822), one of the most important overt reactions to Lessing is considered. As few have done, Toelken responded directly to Lessing in his own text, which was published under the following title: On the Differing Relation of Ancient and Modern Painting to Poetry, an Addendum to Lessing’s Laocoön. As Garberson concludes, Toelken’s essay emerged just long enough after Lessing’s original German treatise (56 years) that numerous problems had already started to emerge in the ways in which artists were adapting to Lessing’s proposed limits. Perhaps motivated by the seemingly widespread rebellion taking place amongst the visual arts, Toelken sought to reaffirm the validity of Lessing’s principles. As a novelist and literary artist himself, it is not surprising to find Toelken on Lessing’s side, given the pro-​poetry bias that Mitchell has made so evident. Toelken’s own background as an aestheticist and academic instructor in the history of art make him an especially interesting figure to consider in 4

5

Introduction the context of Lessing’s legacy. Through this chapter, readers will consider how Lessing’s theories, which were based upon medium specificity, quickly became problematised by both new scholarship on the arts and modern painting. In the fourth chapter, titled The Temporality of Imitation in the Work of Moreau and Gérôme, readers will be introduced to rebellion against Lessing once more through a reconsideration of the careers of contemporaries Gustave Moreau (1826–​98) and Jean-​Léon Gérôme (1824–​1904). Moving into the nineteenth century, which was arguably when Lessing-​like theories were the most active in both art and art writing, artists became adept at circumventing the supposed limits of the arts. Although they worked in very different styles, and for distinct artistic goals, Moreau and Gérôme shared a concern for the labour-​intensive and temporal qualities of painting. Since temporality was ‘off limits’ for Lessing’s self-​respecting painters, artists who insisted on creating a sense of time in their works, whether literally or metaphorically, could expect critical responses to their pieces. Nevertheless, this chapter will demonstrate that seeking the apex of Lessing’s hierarchy of the arts was more important to some artists than playing by his rules. Advancing the consideration of Lessing-​like issues further into the Modern era, Chad Airhart’s chapter aids in establishing the seminal nature of time and space in art of the early twentieth century. In Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient:  Flesh:  A  Look at the Work of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet, and de Kooning, Airhart addresses the aggressively posed concerns of Modern art, with respect to the survival of Lessing-​like spheres into early abstraction and formal art. This analysis addresses an important and overlooked aspect of abstraction and formal painting from this period, since the majority of scholars have focused upon the purity of temporality and spatiality in a Greenbergian context only. Airhart identifies the ways in which flesh and its experience were part of the explorations of artistic limits, rather than being excluded from them, merely by virtue of their continued portrayal of flesh on canvas. Of great significance to the time and space debate, of course, is the advent of film and its dance with these facets of artistic expression. Confronting the legacy of Lessing’s time and space distinctions in film is Timothy Hiles’s Time, Space and Film: The Symbiosis of Pull My Daisy of 1959. As Hiles points out, film is a fascinating medium to consider in the 5

6

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics context of Lessing’s notions of time and space, given that it did not even exist as an art form during Lessing’s time. In this chapter, readers will learn about how the artists involved with this project, including Jack Kerouac (1922–​69), Robert Frank (b. 1924), and Alfred Leslie (b. 1927), went to the opposite extreme when compared to Lessing’s goals. Instead of keeping the sister arts of word and image as separate as possible, they obliterated the lines of distinction, creating a symbiotic relationship that shirked the assumptions about how time and space could relate to one another in cinematic incarnation. The final chapter, by Rob Marks, encourages us to delve deeply and intellectually into the work of Richard Serra. In a manner evocative of personal narrative, Marks’s In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time: Feeling your Way through Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time offers an intriguing analysis of the temporal and spatial experience of one of Serra’s most physically impressive works. As an artist who has been openly reflective about his explorations of temporality and spatiality, Serra offers an ideal end point to the book’s theme. Although well known for his site-​specific, and often controversial, approach to sculpture, Marks is able to highlight aspects of Serra’s work that are critical to the time and space debate, but which have often been overlooked in the ekphrastic and scholarly reception of his work. Overall, the goal of the studies presented in this book is to consider case studies of how Lessing and Lessing-​like theories about limits, rules and temporality and spatiality have impacted artists in diverse media since his time. As a theorist, it will become clear that artists who respond to Lessing-​ like limits typically are of a theoretical mind set and often develop artistic processes that prioritise theory as well as practise.

Notes 1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön:  An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore and London:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), p. 40. 2. Edward Bell, ‘Introduction’, Lessing’s Laokoon, trans. E.C. Beasley, ed. Edward Bell (London: George Bell and Son, 1888), pp. ix–​x. This issue would later be explored by W.J.T. Mitchell in Iconology:  Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 110.

6

7

Introduction 3 . Bell, ‘Introduction’, pp. xii–​iii. 4. Mitchell, Iconology, p. 107. 5. Rensselaer Lee, ‘Ut Pictura Poesis: the Humanistic Theory of Painting’, The Art Bulletin 22 (Dec. 1940), p. 215. I also discuss this in my forthcoming book The Paragone in Nineteenth–​Century Art (Routledge).

7

8

1 Drawing the Line Gender, Artistic Theory and Absolutism in Raoux’s Paintings and Lessing’s Words Gabriela Jasin

In 1727 and 1728, French Rococo painter Jean Raoux (1677–​1734) executed his best-known works, The Virgins of Ancient Times and The Virgins of Modern Times (1727 and 1728), respectively. Although executed at different moments, these two paintings share similar subject matter and dimensions, making them logical pendants.1 In this pairing, Raoux’s visual statement anticipated what German philosopher and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–​81) would codify in writing nearly four decades later: a strict boundary between the oppositional realms of painting and poetry, ancient and modern, and male and female. To modern eyes, Raoux’s paintings offer complementary images that illustrate honorable women, both past and contemporary, who engage in virtuous activity. For both Kathleen Nicholson and Guillaume Faroult, Raoux’s modern virgins are as morally upstanding as their antique counterparts.2 Nevertheless, a reading with a consideration of Lessing’s theories yields images that offer not a complementary pair of images, but paintings that work in opposition to each other.3 The contrast between these two paintings is not confined to subject alone. The formal qualities of each painting also reinforce a conflicted rather than a harmonious relationship 8

9

Drawing the Line between them. Raoux’s paintings of women, ancient and modern, anticipated the stringent boundaries that Lessing would reinstate between the genres of painting and poetry nearly 30 years later in his most important contribution to art-​historical theory and criticism: Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Although Lessing published his thoughts on painting and poetry well after Raoux had died, there were several artists and academics during Raoux’s lifetime who set out to define the natural limits or qualities of the arts. As an active member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, Raoux would have been familiar with such works as Roger de Piles’s (1635–​1709) Cours de peinture par principes (1708) and Dialogue sur le coloris (1673), Antoine Coypel’s (1661–​1722) Sur l’esthétique du peintre (1721) and, perhaps most influentially, Abbé Dubos’s Reflexions sur la poesie et la peinture (1719).4 In Section XL of his Reflexions, Dubos speculated if painting’s power is greater than that of poetry. He concluded that painting has greater emotional impact than poetry, because it is assessed through vision or sight, being for him the sense that has the greatest empire over our souls.5 Like Lessing, Dubos privileged poetry as an art of the intellect and ideas, whilst painting was more closely aligned with nature, requiring no education to appreciate it.6 This essential division is reflected in Raoux’s paintings and in Lessing’s theories.

Raoux’s Paintings In the Virgins of Ancient Times (Figure 1.1: 1727), the centre of the composition features an altar dedicated to Vesta, the Roman goddess of the hearth, home and family. This is clearly indicated from the text that appears on the altar: ‘Vesta’. In a setting that reproduces ancient and contemporary descriptions of the temple of Vesta in Rome, Raoux has placed six young women within a centrally planned temple, recalling a paragon of Roman architecture, the Pantheon, for French viewers.7 These young women work together tending to a burning flame. According to Ovid, fire was looked upon as sacred, sterile and pure; it was for this reason that virgins were chosen to maintain Rome’s sacred flame.8 These young women are united in a common purpose, each tending to a different aspect of the ritual maintenance of the sacred fire. They range 9

10

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Figure 1.1  Jean Raoux, The Virgins of Ancient Times, 1727, 92 x 72.5 cm (36.2 x 28.5 in.), oil on canvas, Palais des beaux-​arts at Lille, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​ PD-​old 100.

in age from adolescence to adulthood and all of these virgins wear long, loose-​fitting garments, whilst some of their veils are held in place by floral wreaths. They are circumscribed by a simple Doric interior, with no open windows, doors or garden view. Partially hidden by drapery, a statue of the goddess Vesta favours these maidens; she is seated and holds in her hand 10

1

Drawing the Line the palladium, which is a statuette of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom. In a vestal context, this mini-​Minerva refers to the statuette taken by Aeneas from Troy to the future site of Rome. For ancient Romans, the well-being of the palladium ensured the safety and well being of the Roman state.9 The vestals, whose tour of duty within the cult lasted 30 years, were in charge of the palladium, and of keeping the flame of Rome burning forever. If the flame was ever extinguished, it was considered a sign that one of the vestals had broken her vow of chastity, thereby placing Rome in a state of jeopardy. Therefore, virginity and female chastity were signifiers of the state’s political stability. This was as true in antiquity as it was during the eighteenth century. Several eighteenth-​century accounts of Roman vestals, who had transgressed sexually, reported that they were stoned to death or buried alive outside of the walls of the city as punishment.10 In contrast to their classical counterparts, the Virgins of Modern Times (Figure 1.2: 1728) are cast in a luxuriously decorated, eighteenth-​century interior with a gilt wood table, expensive decorative objects, and baskets of fruits and flowers; it looks as if these modern virgins are preparing for a party. Through an arch at the centre of the composition extends a vast hallway with a barrel-​vaulted ceiling, flanked by a marble colonnade with gilded ionic capitals. The ceiling fresco in this hallway depicts Apollo holding his lyre as the god of culture and, in particular, of music and poetry. He serves as a foil to Vesta, who is the patroness of everything domestic. Unlike their ancient ‘sisters’, these modern virgins are engaged in a number of seemingly unrelated activities. This lack of unity is emphasised by the way in which the women move or look out of the picture plane and by the self-​absorption of the girl who reads in the left foreground. Gone is the hearth of open flame in the Virgins of Ancient Times, leaving a conspicuous void at the centre of the composition. This void intensifies the liberating expansion of depth in the painting and contrasts with the circumscribed space occupied by the ancient virgins. The reading girl in the left foreground anchors the composition. Her book is of medium format and is almost certainly not a religious text or a novel. Those types of books were, more often than not, small in format. Most likely, she is reading a secular text, or perhaps a history or scientific 11

12

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Figure 1.2  Jean Raoux, The Virgins of Modern Times, 1728, 92 x 72.5 cm (36.2 x 28.5 in.), oil on canvas, Palais des beaux-​arts at Lille, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​ PD old-​100.

book.11 Behind the reading girl, a female servant carries a tray to a place that is located outside of the picture plane, while farther back in the composition, a woman adjusts her veil in front of a full-​length mirror. At the right side of the composition, four women are gathered around a fruit-​laden table. Each one performs a different activity, not all of which are identifiable. In fact, the only women in this picture who are actually 12

13

Drawing the Line performing useful tasks, and are also wearing costumes most similar to those of the ancient vestals, are the female servants. As such, Raoux’s pendants pit ancient integrity against contemporary decadence, and this contrast would not have been lost on eighteenth-​ century viewers, particularly in academic circles, where the rivalry between the ancients and the moderns had been raging since the seventeenth century.12

Lessing’s Theories Although his theories were anticipated, as has been discussed, Lessing’s Laocoön was, in part, inspired by the theories proposed by one of the progenitors and champions of Neoclassicism, the German art historian Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–​68). Lessing was intent on delineating the genres of poetry and painting. His essay was a response to or continuation of Winckelmann’s essays on the imitation and history of Greek art. In Laocoön, Lessing insisted that ‘Beautiful statues fashioned from beautiful men reacted upon their creators, and the state was indebted for its beautiful men to beautiful statues. With us [moderns], the susceptible imagination of the mother seems to express itself only in monsters’.13 Lessing’s statement on the superiority of ancient artists over those of his own time was a reaction to the perceived decadence, both artistically and socially, into which eighteenth-​century culture had fallen. For Lessing, this cultural decadence signaled a transgression of all sorts of well-​established boundaries. And, as one scholar has rightly noted, at the heart of Lessing’s philosophical meanderings is the most fundamental ideological basis for his laws of genre, specifically, the laws of gender.14 Although Lessing did not elucidate this explicitly in Laocoön, the above statement reveals Lessing’s gendered ‘contrast between the patrilineal production of ancient sculpture and the monstrous, adulterous maternity of modern art’.15 Further, Lessing associated antiquity with men and modernity with women. He also created a gendered binary between poetry and painting, insisting that ‘nothing obliges the poet to concentrate his picture into a single moment … every change, which would require from the painter a separate picture, costs him but a single touch’.16 By contrast, Lessing posited that ‘Objects which exist side by side … are called bodies. Consequently 13

14

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics bodies, with their visible properties are the peculiar subjects of painting. Objects which succeed each other, or whose parts succeed each other in time, are actions. Consequently, actions are the peculiar subjects of poetry’.17 According to Lessing then, painting is only capable of presenting bodies in space, whilst poetry can offer actions in time. These are the axioms upon which Lessing formulated the boundary between poetry and painting. For Lessing, painting is naturally confined to the depiction of beautiful bodies as practised by the ancients. On the other hand, Lessing gave poetry a wider girth, for it mines the imagination for novelty and invention, being not simply dependent on that which is well-​known, visible and beautiful. Even the greatest apologist for the transferences between painting and poetry accepted Lessing’s general distinction between space and time in these genres.18 Lessing’s distinction between these artistic genres corresponds with his notions on the past and the present. Poetry (of antiquity), is the art of heroic male action and, as such, is capable of suggesting the passage of time and the establishment of history; poetry is a discipline that requires intellect. By contrast, painting, which is modern, can only picture bodies, or that which is tangible, visible and presently sensual. Lessing’s alignment of sculpture with antiquity and painting with modernity was facilitated by the fact that very little painting had survived from antiquity. Dubos, amongst others, had already introduced this point of fact in Reflexions.19 Lessing was not interested in establishing equality between painting and poetry, but rather generated a hierarchy that was dictated by their ‘natural’ inequality. Poetry had the wider sphere and could contain painting within it: ‘In other words, if not every trait employed by the descriptive poet can produce an equally good effect on canvas or in marble, can every trait of the artist be equally effective in the work of the poet? Undoubtedly, for what pleases us in a work of art pleases not the eye, but the imagination through the eye’.20 And painting, with its irrational, unconscious power of images and ability to provoke fancy, required more regulation than poetry, according to Lessing. This distinction between the genres carries with it a whole host of political and gendered associations. Lessing attacked several different national representatives for failing to observe these boundaries between the arts, but he reserved his harshest criticism for the French, and particularly for the writings of the connoisseur and antiquarian Anne Claude Comte de 14

15

Drawing the Line Caylus (1692–​1765).21 Caylus, although maligned by his fellow academics, championed both modern and antique painting and wrote several books addressing the history of antique art and its techniques. For Lessing, the moment that painting encroached upon the domain of poetry it signaled an adulteration of that art. If painting were too ambitious, or too intent on narrative action, then its value would be tarnished.

Virtue and Vanity As noted by Humphrey Wine, the contrast between ancient virtue and modern decadence in Raoux’s pendants is reinforced by their dependence on the popular Biblical parable of the wise and foolish virgins (Matthew 25:1–​13).22 This parable contrasts two sets of women who were all virgins, but were different in the way that they chose to conduct their affairs. The wise and practical virgins had their lamps ready with oil for when the bridegroom would call them to the wedding feast. The foolish virgins were not prepared, letting the light of their lamps die; they were not allowed into the marriage feast. Like the sacred flame of Vesta, a symbol of the vestals’ purity and the well-​being of the state, the lamps of the Biblical virgins function in a similar manner. Those whose flames were extinguished were not favoured by the Lord. Abraham Bosse (1604–​76), who was the most popular seventeenth-​ century French engraver, treated this parable in a series of widely circulated prints that serve as one source for Raoux’s pendants.23 Whilst Raoux depicted one set of virgins in antiquity and the other set in a contemporary context, Bosse chose to illustrate both wise and foolish virgins as modern, seventeenth-​century women (Figure 1.3 Wise Virgins at Prayer and Figure 1.4 Foolish Virgins Wasting Time: 1635). Like Raoux’s image of ancient virgins, Bosse’s wise virgins are gathered around a table with their lamps on a chair at the very centre of the composition. The Bible and the cross appear directly above the lamps, and all of these objects are perfectly framed by the hearth in the background. The composition, like Raoux’s, is balanced, symmetrical and centred. Raoux’s modern virgins find a parallel in Bosse’s foolish virgins. Both images share an off-​centre composition. The hearth in Bosse’s image is pushed to the far-right side of the picture plane and burns dangerously out 15

16

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Figure 1.3  Abraham Bosse, The Wise Virgins at Prayer, c.1635, 29.1 x 36.5 cm (11.4 x 14.3 in.), etching on laid paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (public domain, Washington, DC). Credit: Ailsa Mellon Bruce Fund. NGA Images open access.

of control; in Raoux’s painting, the hearth is absent altogether. In lieu of the Bible, lamps, and hearth of Bosse’s wise virgins, one of his foolish virgins stands in front of a mirror admiring herself, thereby implying that vanity is the chief failing of this particular group. The other foolish virgins read and play games, whilst a painting of Venus adorns the wall. On the far left of Bosse’s composition, an open doorway offers an escape from this poorly managed interior. By contrast, the window on the right side of the picture plane frames a seventeenth-​century domestic structure. The window is closed, as if to suggest that these virgins, although free to leave, do not have access to domestic bliss. The caption underneath Bosse’s print of foolish virgins reads as follows: ‘You see how these silly maidens uselessly amuse themselves in the frivolous pursuits in which they immerse themselves … oh how the senseless souls cherish worldly goods … games, feasts, music, dancing and romances’.24 16

17

Drawing the Line

Figure 1.4  Abraham Bosse, The Foolish Virgins Wasting Time, c.1635, 29.1 x 36.5 cm (11.4 x 14.3 in.), etching on laid paper, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, USA. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (public domain, Washington, DC).

Not surprisingly, the chief fault conferred on women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was vanity. François de Salignac de la Mothe-​ Fénelon (1651–​1715), as educational advisor to Louis XIV and author of an educational treatise for girls, Traité de l’éducation des filles (1681), set clear boundaries for a girl’s education that would resonate throughout the eighteenth century. Fénelon insisted that ‘The chief fault to be found in girls is vanity. They are born with an eager desire to please. As the avenues that lead men to positions of authority and to glory are closed to them, they try to compensate for this by graces of the mind or of the body’.25 For Fénelon, the line between female virtue and vice was clear: worldly pursuits, both corporeal and intellectual, were off limits to morally upstanding women. Consequently, Fénelon’s educational model for girls aspired to prepare them for lifelong devotion to either God or husband. Fénelon’s limitations 17

18

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics on female education and conduct were not exceptional; the educational prescription for seventeenth and eighteenth-​century girls promoted moral virtue and domestic skills. In the seventeenth century, the Counter Reformation in France fomented the rise of many monastic orders and, by extension, many convent schools for aristocratic girls. This emphasis on virtue and domesticity for aristocratic girls intensified in the last decades of the seventeenth century. For instance, Louis XIV (1638–​1715) and his mistress, Madame de Maintenon (1635–​1719), established the royal house of St Louis at St Cyr in 1686 as a political and charitable endeavor. This all-​girls school was founded to care for the daughters of aristocrats who had served in Louis’s military, or who had been taxed so heavily that they lost their fortune and could not provide for their daughters. In return, it was understood that these young ladies, like the vestals from the past, would serve their sovereign and their state by maintaining their piety, chastity and virtuosity. When the girls left the school at St Cyr, they were encouraged to marry and bear sons who would become the future soldiers of France.26 In the Édit de la foundation de la maison des dames de Saint-​Louis à Saint-​Cyr, the goals of this institution are made clear in 15 points. They dictate that [A]‌fter having been properly raised in this community, those who leave can carry with them in all of the provinces of the kingdom examples of modesty and virtue, and contribute through marriage to the well being of the family and to the edification of convents where they would consecrate themselves to God …27 Madame de Maintenon despised convent education and at St Cyr she stressed practical work and household duties that would prepare aristocratic daughters for wifehood.28 Nevertheless, Madame de Maintenon’s school emphasised a similar moral and educational curriculum to that of traditional convent schools, thereby setting the same limitations for girls who chose wifehood instead of life in the convent. Even Madame de Maintenon conceded that ‘If you put all your confidence in God … you will become … the true instruments of grace that sanctify secular families and convents; you will form excellent virgins for the cloisters and pious mothers for

18

19

Drawing the Line the world’.29 Each girl who left St Cyr was given a dowry and was discouraged from joining a convent. Even so, Madame de Maintenon’s emphasis on wifehood merely represented a shift in the locus of confinement for women; in essence, living as a good wife within the domestic milieu was as limited as living as a nun behind cloistered walls.30

Ancient Vestals and Modern Virgins The commemorative medal minted by Thomas Bernard on the occasion of the foundation of the royal house of Saint-​Louis at St Cyr establishes a strong connection between the cult of ancient vestal virgins and this newly created school for girls under the protection of the French crown (Figure 1.5 Establishment of Saint Cyr: 1687).31 On the obverse side, a profile bust of Louis appears with the words, LVDUVICUS MAGNVS REX CHRISTIANISSIMUS (Louis the Great, the most Christian king). On the reverse, a draped and veiled personification of Piety, who looks suspiciously like Vesta or one of her priestesses, stands at the centre of the composition. She is flanked by the girls of St Cyr and is framed by the building of St Cyr in the background; underneath her reads the inscription: PIETAS MDCLXXXVII (Piety 1687).32 This arrangement finds a parallel in ancient Roman coins that feature the cult statue of Vesta within her hexastyle temple. It seems that Louis XIV was intent on modeling his regime after the ancients and, in particular, that of ancient Rome. The special relationship between the cult of Vesta and the Roman state was established by one of its earliest rulers, Numa Pompilius, who brought the Vestals from Alba Longa to Rome and erected a temple to Vesta.33 From this point on, the cult of Vesta was responsible for maintaining the flame of Rome and, by extension, the well-​being of the Roman state. Like his ancient Roman counterpart, Louis XIV established the royal school for girls so that they could contribute to the wellness of the French state through marriage and motherhood. It is well established that Louis XIV, in an effort to secure absolute control, promoted himself and his achievements by appropriating the visual rhetoric and ritual practises of Imperial Rome.34 In 1688, shortly after the establishment of the school at St Cyr, Jean de la Bruyère (1645–​96), who was a French philosopher and moralist, 19

20

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Figure 1.5  Thomas Bernard, Establishment of Saint Cyr, 1687, 4.1 x 3.1 cm (1.6 x 1.2 in.), silver medal, unknown location. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art (public domain, Washington, DC). Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​ PD-​old-​100. This image has not been altered.

published his best-known work, Les caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les caractères ou mœurs de ce siècle. In it, La Bruyère translated an antique text on human characteristics and foibles, and supplemented it with his own assessment of modern human behaviour, which was aimed at his contemporaries at court. In his modern take on Theophraste’s characters, La Bruyère included a discussion on women and their character flaws, noting that: ‘Some women want to hide their conduct under the outward 20

21

Drawing the Line appearances of modesty; and all that one can gain from this continuous affectation, and it is never questioned, is that we might say of her: she could be mistaken for a vestal’.35 For La Bruyère, the false modesty cultivated by some modern women was an attempt at emulating virtue after an antique model, in this case, the vestal virgin. La Bruyère continued, A painter who works from nature forces and exaggerates a passion, a contrast, and attitudes; and he who copies, if he does not measure with a compass the grandeurs and proportions, inflates his figures, gives all items that enter his canvas too much volume that they are no longer like the original; similarly, prudery is an imitation of wisdom. There is a false modesty that is vanity … a false virtue that is hypocrisy, a false wisdom that is prudery.36

As understood by La Bruyère, women’s duplicitous behaviour is analogous to an unsuccessful painting; both stray too far from the chosen model and ultimately deceive the viewer. Neither is a true reflection of the original model.37 La Bruyère’s assessment of modern women and their duplicity was not an isolated criticism. The pitfalls associated with modern female piety compared to ancient vestal integrity are illustrated in a well-​known anecdote about the king’s mistress, Madame de Maintenon (1635–​1719). She endured a character assassination similar to La Bruyère’s slander of modern moral women. In 1797, Louis XIV banished the Italian theatre group, the Commedia dell’Arte, from France for the company’s play, La Fausse Prude. It was common knowledge that this performance was intended as a direct insult to the King’s mistress, calling out her veneer of cultivated piety.38 The fascination with the vestal virgin, particularly during the first decades of the eighteenth century, signaled a preference for the antique. As noted by Guillaume Faroult, Abbé Augustin Nadal’s Histoire de Vestales avec un traité de luxe des dames romaines, which was published in 1725, explicitly called for contemporary women to adopt the sobriety and modesty cultivated by ancient women. Although published in 1725, it was first presented in 1707 at the Royal Academy of Inscriptions and Medals.39 This institution was a place of refuge and propaganda, for those who favoured 21

2

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics absolutism and the ancients in the literary and ideological quarrel regarding the superiority of the ancients or the moderns.40 Nadal’s text, while providing descriptive information on Vesta and her cult, also signaled his preference for antiquity over modernity. Nadal published his text when France was transitioning from a Regency back into a monarchy. Although the Regency (1715–​23) after Louis XIV’s death was one of hedonistic excess and decadence, the Regent Duc d’Orléans (d. 1723) understood the special relationship between the crown, the vestal and its antique legacy. Evidence suggests that the Duc d’Orléans continued the visual tradition of the relationship between the king and the vestal established by Louis XIV in the previous century. Before 1623, Charles Antoine Coypel (1694–​1752), premier peintre du roi, (First Painter to the King), proposed a vast decorative plan for a salon at Saint-​Cloud, which was the Regent’s residence. The design is preserved in a print by Louis Surugue (1686–​1762), and by commentary made in the Mercure de France on the oil sketch that was presented at the Salon of 1725.41 The regent, like Louis before him, adopted the guise of Hercules in Coypel’s design. An author for the Mercure explains in this way: ‘The painter has illustrated above the top of the door, the Apotheosis of Hercules as the first hero who received immortality, and below, War and Religion. War is characterised by Mars who orders Vulcan to forge weapons and Religion by Numa Pompilius, who sends the sacred fire to the temple of Vesta’.42 War, represented by Mars, and Religion, symbolised by the sacred flame and vestal vigilance, are the two paths on which the Regent must travel to attain divine status. The Regent, shortly before his death, also commissioned a Sacrifice à Vesta from Sebastiano Ricci (1659–​ 1734), which is now at the Gemäldgalerie in Dresden.43 It too was destined for the residence of the Regent, but his death in 1723 thwarted the acquisition. For the Regent, like Louis XIV before him, the image of the vestal virgin celebrated antique female morality, as well as the absolutism of the French monarchy.44

Raoux’s paintings and Lessing’s words Raoux painted at least seven variants of the vestal theme between the years 1725 and his death in 1734.45 The Lille pendants of antique and modern 22

23

Drawing the Line virgins were most likely painted for the Comte de Sénozan, whose patronage has been securely tied to at least four vestal paintings by Raoux.46 The vestal theme was especially popular as a trope in Raoux’s portraits of courtly women. As Kathleen Nicholson has rightfully assessed, Raoux’s vestal variants, and particularly his portraits of contemporary female sitters, cast modern women as legitimately pious and modest. Nicholson extended her positive assessment of the vestal portrait to Raoux’s pendant of modern virgins. However, Nicholson did not consider that the chief symbol or attribute of Vesta, being the sacred flame or fire, is present in every other vestal variant attributed to Raoux, but is nevertheless conspicuously missing in The Virgins of Modern Times. For Lessing, the image of Vesta provided an opportunity to discuss the freedom of the artist in his choice of subject matter, and the confusion that arises in distinguishing visual representations of Vesta from those of her followers.47 Lessing devoted an entire chapter to his discussion of Vesta in his Laocoön, noting the artistic necessity of using attributes and symbols to identify figures. The poet, according to Lessing, should avoid such description and allegorical attributes at all costs, for description falls under the realm of painting. Following Lessing’s lead, and turning back to Raoux’s pendants, in The Virgins of Ancient Times and The Virgins of Modern Times, we see that Raoux took certain artistic liberties of which Lessing would likely have approved. Although eighteenth-​century descriptions of the Roman temple of Vesta stated that the deity was not represented within it, Raoux represented Vesta in his temple interior of The Virgins of Ancient Times. As Lessing would suggest in Laocoön, it is perfectly appropriate for an artist to create an image of a deity, provided that the appropriate attributes are included.48 Raoux painted a gilt sculpture of Vesta seated and holding the palladium, which as has been explained is the vestal attribute that conjures the relationship between the vestal cult and the well-​being of the Roman state. Moreover, Raoux included the chief signifier of vestal virtue by including a burning flame. There is no question that Raoux’s ancient virgins are the priestesses and followers of Vesta. By contrast, in The Virgins of Modern Times, there is no open flame or altar. In fact, its omission leaves a conspicuous void at the centre of the composition, which is filled with a perspectival view of a distant corridor. 23

24

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics The flaming altar in Raoux’s antique pendant, signaling confinement, and by extension virtue, gives way to the artifice of perspective in the modern pendant. Antique sculpture, description and limitation are abandoned for modern painting, perspective and expansion, thereby enhancing the illusionism and the deception of Raoux’s modern pendant. The perspective employed in Raoux’s modern pendant reminds us of the intellectual advances that modern artists had made beyond those of the ancients. It was, after all, during the Renaissance when perspective was developed and systematised. We might also consider that it is precisely this sort of knowledge that established painting as a liberal art, rather than simply a mechanical one.49 Once pictorial seeing had established itself along learned and scientific principles that were off limits to women, it became more difficult for them to pursue professional painting, or for that matter any other occupation requiring such knowledge.50 Scientific erudition and its expansion are present in Raoux’s modern pendant and, yet, none of the virgins actually occupy such a space. Although visually present, the perspectival view seems to be off limits for the modern virgins within the painting. Due to the absence of a flame or hearth, Raoux’s modern women are not cast as true vestal virgins. Instead, I propose that this coterie of modern virgins could be a representation of an eighteenth-​century convent, whose members had succumbed to the secularising influences of Rococo culture. More specifically, I am compelled to identify this particular group of girls as those from the Maison de Saint-​Louis at Saint-​Cyr; at the very least, the opulence and finery of the modern pendant identifies these as aristocratic women. It serves us well to remember that the King and his mistress deliberately cultivated a vestal association in the founding of this royal convent school. Moreover, the image of Apollo that graces the vaulted ceiling in the Virgins of Modern Times was a well-​known symbol of French kingship established by Louis XIV (1643–​1715). Raoux’s ancient pendant stays within the boundaries that Lessing would prescribe for painting. The vestals do not act; they are gracefully posed for the viewer’s pleasure and are united in a common, beneficial and legible purpose. ‘On that first glance’, Lessing asserted, ‘the chief effect depends [in painting]. If that necessitates a tiresome guessing and pondering, our readiness to be touched is chilled … What we see does not please us, and what it means we do not understand’.51 24

25

Drawing the Line According to Lessing then, Raoux’s painting of modern virgins encroaches on the domain of poetry. The self-​indulgent liberties taken by these aristocratic girls weaken Raoux’s painting. Because each girl is performing a different task, the viewer is left to question exactly what is happening in this scene. Raoux’s modern virgins are hustling and bustling all over the canvas. Charming though they are, Lessing would not have approved. In fact, Lessing believed that ‘Charm is beauty in motion and therefore less adapted to the painter than the poet. The painter can suggest motion, but his figures are really destitute of it. Charm therefore in a picture becomes grimace, whilst in poetry it remains what it is, a transitory beauty, which we would fain see repeated’.52 Because Raoux’s modern virgins are not merely beautiful bodies with legible attributes, but are acting as participants in a suggested narrative, Lessing would likely see this image as forced, or perhaps even as an adulteration of true beauty. Here, the painter breached the ‘natural’ limitations of his art, whilst the subjects within his painting transgress the social and cultural limits imposed on them by cultivating material and intellectual interests. Consequently, Raoux’s modern virgins are what Lessing would call ‘monsters produced by the susceptible imagination of the mother’.53 The only vestal attribute that Lessing would have been able to identify in Raoux’s modern painting is the singular veil worn by one of the virgins, which is the sole signifier of the vestal virgin and her modern counterpart, the convent-​educated girl or nun. Yet, the one symbol of true purity is adulterated or frustrated by the vanity of its owner. The mirror and its reflection call into question the veracity of this girl’s virtue; it circumscribes this vestal’s modesty, marking her as a hypocrite, or a false prude, and a poor imitation at best. The veiled virgin and the reading girl in the left foreground are united by the mirror’s reflection (Figure 1.6 detail of the Virgins of Modern Times). Directly above the head of the reading girl, the mirror’s reflection of the veiled virgin hovers like a spectre. These two virgins are bound by the reflection, reinforcing the belief that each girl manifests a different form of vanity: intellectual on the one hand and corporeal on the other. The luminous serving woman who separates them calls into question the utility of their endeavours. This working girl is bathed in brilliant light, whilst the reader and the false prude are ominously cast in shadow. 25

26

Figure 1.6  Jean Raoux, The Virgins of Modern Times, (detail), 1728, 92 x 72.5 cm (36.2 x 28.5 in.), oil on canvas, Palais des beaux-​arts at Lille, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-Art/PD old-100.

27

Drawing the Line Nicholson argued that the girl in front of the mirror functions as a symbol of modesty, rather than of vanity; she is not adorning herself with the veil, but instead, is chastely covering her décolletage. This detail is the very element that marks all of these girls as false vestals engaged in vain pursuits. The painted mirror reflection serves to remind us of the great distance between an original model and its imitation and replication. The modern virgins, like the mirror’s reflection and the painting itself, are weak and over embellished imitations of their antique counterparts. If antiquity is the original model for beautiful art and virtuous virgins, then Raoux’s paintings, interpreted through Lessing’s later theories, yield a foregone conclusion: that good contemporary painting, like modern female virtue, is an impossibility; it is a past that cannot be truthfully retrieved, nor properly imitated. By the end of the eighteenth century in France, the vestal virgin had expanded her subjective scope. Replacing the widely imitated vestal portraits that Raoux made popular in the first half of the century, the vestal began to appear as the protagonist in narrative paintings. As suggested by Faroult, it cannot be insignificant that the shift in the representation of vestals corresponded to the unraveling of the ancien régime and the onset of the Revolution. In the twilight years of the French monarchy, the most popular vestal subject in the visual arts was her public torture and execution as a consequence of her alleged sexual transgression.54

Conclusion In 1755, Winckelmann published Gedanken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Werke in Malerei und Bildhauerkunst (Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works in Painting and Sculpture). In it, Winckelmann delineated his theories on classical art and the modern artist’s necessary dependence upon it. Winckelmann’s ideas were crucial not only for Lessing, but also for all of the visual and literary champions of Neoclassicism. Nevertheless, his Gedanken only ran in a limited edition of 50 copies. It was his other texts, namely Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (The History of Art in Antiquity), published in 1764, through which Winckelmann’s ideas were disseminated. Winckelmann composed the ecstatic passages of Gedanken 27

28

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics before he had ever set foot in Rome.55 His enthusiasm for Greek art was inspired in part by his knowledge of and passion for Greek literature and by his exposure to the collection of art and antiquities in Dresden under the patronage of Augustus III (1696–​1763), who was King of Poland and Elector of Saxony. In Gedanken, Winckelmann presented at least one idea that was not subsequently repeated in his later and more widely disseminated work, Geschichte. In Gedanken, Winckelmann ascribed a central importance in the history of art, and in the formulation of Neoclassicism, to three antique statues that he had seen in the royal collection at Dresden in 1754. For Winckelmann, these three statues were the ‘three first statues from the Herculano’ and were ‘worth more than the entire Cabinet of Polignac’.56 He also credited them as examples of the ‘sublimest drapery’ produced by ancient artists.57 He continued by stating that It is to these three inimitable pieces that the world owes the first hints of the ensuing discovery of the subterranean treasures of Herculaneum … These great masterpieces of Greek art were brought to Germany and honored there before Naples had the good fortune, as far as we know, of possessing a single relic of Herculaneum.58

Winckelmann did assign identities to these three statues. And although later scholarship would show that Winckelmann most likely misidentified these three draped figures, his identification is suggestive. Winckelmann placed the venerable recovery of the past on the shoulders of what he thought were ‘drey Vestalen’, or three vestal virgins. For Winckelmann, vestal virgins may have been the only suitable women for this Herculean responsibility. Nevertheless, the question that remains to be answered is this: why did Winckelmann introduce the vestal statues as the progenitors of Herculaneum’s retrievable past in his earliest publication, whilst in subsequent publications, he completely abandoned the vestals’ relationship to Herculaneum and Neoclassicism? Perhaps by 1764, Winckelmann took his initial description of these ‘vestals’ to heart. As Winckelmann noted, these statues were ‘inimitable’. Raoux had already illustrated that the antique virtue and aesthetic value of these vestals could not be replicated by contemporary women or artists. 28

29

Drawing the Line

Notes 1. Both paintings measure approximately 92 x 72.5 cm and are housed in the Palais des beaux-​arts at Lille, France (inv. P1947 and inv. P1948, respectively). See Jean Raoux:  un peintre sur la Regence, exh. cat. (Montpellier:  Musée Fabre, 2010), pp. 152–​3. 2. See Kathleen Nicholson, ‘The Ideology of Feminine “Vertue”: The Vestal Virgin in French Eighteenth-​Century Allegorical Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject Joanna Woodall, ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997); Guillaume Faroult, ‘Jean Raoux, peintre des vestales’, in Jean Raoux, exh. cat., pp. 68–​77. See also Faroult, ‘Les Fortunes de la Vertu: Origines et évolution de l’iconographie des vestals jusqu’au XVIIIe siècle’. Revue de L’art 152 (2006): pp. 9–​30. For other studies on Raoux’s vestals and vestal imagery in France, see Michel Delon, ‘Mythology de la vestale’, Dix-​huitième siècle 27 (1995): 159–​70; and Ann-​Charlotte Steland, ‘Vestalinnen–​Ein zettypisches Thema des Malers Jean Raoux um 1730, angeregt durch ein Werk wissenschaftlicher Lituratur und ein Opera-​ballet’, Artibus et Historiae 29 (1994): pp. 135–​52. 3. This was first proposed by Humphrey Wine. See Humphrey Wine, Tradition & Revolution in French Art, 1700–​1880:  Paintings and Drawings from Lille, exh. cat. (London: National Gallery, 1993), pp. 165–​6. 4. For further research on the aesthetic theories that may have influenced Raoux and Lessing, see Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger, eds, Art in Theory 1648–​1815 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2000); Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily Varish (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1993). Sarah J. Lippert, Theory, Practice, and Competition in the Visual Arts: The Fortunes of the Paragone in French and British Nineteenth-​ Century Art, Ph.D. Dissertation (The Pennsylvania State University, 2009). 5. Abbé Jean–​Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la pöesie et la peinture. Sixième édition. Première partie (Paris: Pissot, 1755; first published 1719), p. 375. 6. ‘La peinture emploie des signes naturels dont l’énergie ne depend pas de l’éducation … C’est la nature elle meme que la peinture met sous nos yeux’. Dubos: Réflexions, p. 376. I would like to thank Sarah J. Lippert for calling this passage to my attention. 7. The earliest eighteenth-​ century publications on the cult of Vesta and the imagery associated with it are Abbé Augustin Nadal, Histoire des Vestales, avec un traité du luxe des dames romaines (Paris: Vve Ribou, 1725) and Bernard de Montfaucon, L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures …, 10 vols (Paris: F. Delaulne, 1719). 8. Ovid: Fasti, VI, trans. James Fraser (Boston: Harvard University Press, 1931): pp. 291–​4.

29

30

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 9. Ariadne Staples, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins:  Sex and Category in Roman Religion (London: 1998), p. 154. ‘[The Vestals], being unable to represent any individual ritual category, could without ambiguity or equivocation represent the state as a collectivity’. 10. See J.G. Dubois-​Fontanelle, Essai sure le feu sacré et sur les vestals (Amsterdam, 1768), p. 89. Dubois-​Fontanelle cited seventeen vestal transgressions (based on Abbé Nadal’s text), and provided a list of the most famous of the condemned vestals. As cited by Kathleen Nicholson, ‘The Ideology of “Vertue”’, p. 63. For excellent contemporary studies on vestals and Roman culture, see Staples, From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins; Mary Beard, ‘The Sexual Statue of Vestal Virgins’, The Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980): pp. 12–​27; and Holt M. Parker, ‘Why were the Vestals Virgins? Or the Chastity of Women and the Safety of the Roman State’, The American Journal of Philology 125 (Winter, 2004): pp. 563–​601. 11. For further research on the various avenues of female intellectual life and education in eighteenth-​century France, see Lesley H. Walker, A Mother’s Love: Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France (Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008); Nadine Berenguier, Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011); Roland Bonnel and Catherine Rubinger, Femmes savantes et femmes d’esprit: Women Intellectuals of the French Eighteenth Century (New York: P. Lang, 1994); and of particular interest for this paper, Hélène Jacquemin, Livres et filles à St. Cyr: 1686–​1793 (Angers: Presse de l’université d’Angers, 2007). 12. For an excellent assessment of the quarrel in France between the Ancients and the Moderns, see Marc Fumaroli, Le sablier renversé: Des modernes aux anciens (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 13. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Ellen Frothingham (New York: The Noonday Press, 1957), p. 11. 14. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoön’, Representations 6 (Spring, 1984), pp. 98–​115, 108. 15. Mitchell, ‘The Politics of Genre’, p. 109. 16. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 21. 17. Ibid., p. 91. 18. As documented by Mitchell, Rensselaer Lee concedes in his classic study, ‘Ut Pictura Poesis’ that ‘no one will deny the general rightness of his [Lessing’s] contention that the greatest painting, like the greatest poetry, observes the limitations of its medium; or that it is dangerous for a spatial art like painting to attempt the progressive effects of a temporal art like poetry’. See Mitchell: ‘The Politics of Genre’, p. 99. 19. See, in particular, section XXXVIII, ‘Que les peintres du temps de Raphaël n’avoient point de’avantage que ceux d’aujourdhui. Des peintres d’antiquité’, in Dubos: Réflexions, p. 336.

30

31

Drawing the Line 20. Mitchell, ‘The Politics of Genre’, p. 107. 21. Lessing, Laocoön, pp.  71–​6. ‘Count Caylus seems to require that the poet should deck out the creatures of his imagination with allegorical attributes. The Count understood painting better than poetry’. In particular, Lessing scrutinised Caylus’ Tableaux tires de l’Iliade, de l’Odysseé d’Homère, et l’Enéide de Virgile, avec des observations generals sur le costume (Paris, 1757–​8). 22. Wine, Tradition & Revolution in French Art, p. 165. 23. See André Blum, L’œuvre grave d’Abraham Bosse (Paris: A. Morancé, 1924). 24. My translantion of the following: ‘Tu vois comme ces Vierges Folles/​S’amusent inutilement/​Après des actions frivoles/​Elles font leur Elément … O que ces âmes insensées cherissent les mondadalités … les jeux, les festins, la musique, la danse, et les livres d’amour’. 25. François de Salignac de la Mothe-​Fénelon, De l’éducation des filles, edition contenant des extraits pedagogiques et comentaires par Gabriel Compayré (Paris: Ancienne Librarie Pickard-​Berheim Cie, 1888), p. 136. My translation of the following: ‘Mais ne craignez tante la vanité dans les filles. Elles naissent avec un désir de plaire; les chemins qui conduissent les homes à l’autorité et à la gloire leur entant fermés, ells tâchent de se dédommager par les agréments de l’esprit et du corps’. 26. For a comprehensive study on the history of the foundation of St Cyr, see Les Demoiselles de Saint-​Cyr: Maison royale d’éducation 1686–​1793, exh. cat. (Paris: Somogy editions d’art, 1999), pp. 8–​111. 27. Les Demoiselles de Saint-​Cyr, exh. cat., p. 22. My translation of the following: ‘après avoir esté bien elévées dans cette communauté, celles qui sortiront puissent porter dans toutes les provinces de notre Royaume des exemples de modestie et de vertu, et contribuer, soit au Bonheur des familles où elles pourrent entrer par mariage, soit a l’édification des maisons religieuses où elles voudront se consacrer à Dieu’. 28. Recueillis et publiés pour la première fois par Théophile Lavallée, 2 vols (Paris: Charpentier, 1861); Françoise d’Aubigne de Maintenon, Conseils et instructions aux desmoiselles pour leur conduit dans le monde. Introduction and notes by Théophile Lavallée, 2 vols (Paris: Charpentier, 1857). 29. Françoise de Aubigne de Maintenon, Lettres et entretiens, vol. 1, p. 141. 30. For the status of women and marriage at this time, see Leslie Tuttle, Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France (New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2010)  and Claire L.  Carlin, Le marriage sous l’ancien régime (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada:  Dalhousie University, 2010). 31. Faroult, ‘Les Fortunes de la Vertu’, pp. 15–​16. 32. Les Demoiselles de Saint-​Cyr, p. 27. 33. Livy: Ab Urbe Condita, 1.20.

31

32

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 34. See, for example, Peter Burke, The Fabrication of Louis XIV (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994) and on court ritual and the cultivation of sun-​kingship, see Ernst Kantorowicz, ‘Oriens Augusti. Lever du roi’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): pp. 117–​77. 35. Jean de la Bruyère, Les caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec les caractères ou mœurs de ce siècle (Paris: E. Belin, 1888), p. 64. My translation of the following: ‘Quelque femmes ont voulu cacher leur conduit sous les dehors de la modestie; et tout ce que chacune a pu gagner a une continuelle affectation, et qui n’est jamais dementie, a été de faire dire de soi: On l’aurait prise pour une vestale’. 36. La Bruyère, Théophraste, pp. 64–​5. My translation of the following: ‘un peintre qui fait d’après nature force et exagère une passion, un contraste, des attitudes; et celui qui copie, s’il ne mesure au compass les grandeurs et les proportions, grossit ses figures, donne à toutes les pièces qui entrent dans l’ordonnance de son tableau plus de volume que n’en ont celles de l’original; de même, la pruderie est une imitation de la sagesse. Il y a une fausse modestie qui est vanité … un fausse vertu qui est hypocrisie, une fausse sagesse qui est pruderie’. 37. It is worth noting that the word, prude, initially had a positive connotation. In the first edition of Le dictionnaire de l’académie françoise, dedie au roy (Paris: Vve de J.B. Coignard, 1694), prude is described as those who are ‘wise, regulated and circumspect in their beliefs, their words, and their conduct’. Even well into the eighteenth century the term maintained its positive connotations in subsequent editions, despite the obvious negative connotations that the term had taken on in everyday speech. Only in the fifth edition of the dictionnaire in 1798 did the definition change to reflect the colloquial understanding of this term: as one who affects a wise air. Whilst early versions of the dictionnaire state that prude is both feminine and masculine, the fifth version, with its negative definition, states that the word prude was only used to describe women. 38. Thomas Kaiser, ‘The Monarchy, Public Opinion, and the Subversions of Antoine Watteau’, in Antoine Watteau:  Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of his Time, ed. Mary Sheriff (Newark, DE:  University of Delaware Press, 2006), p. 72. 39. Faroult, ‘Les Fortunes de la Vertu’, p. 17. 40. See Marc Fumeroli, ‘Les abeilles et les araignées’, in La Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), Théophraste, pp. 181, 198. 41. Faroult, ‘Jean Raoux, peintre de vestals’, p. 72. 42. Mercure de France 2 (September 1725), p.  2267. As cited in Faroult, ‘Jean Raoux: peintre des vestales’, p. 72. ‘Le peintre a exprimé dans le haut au-​dessus de la porter, l’Apothéose d’Hercule, comme le premier héros qui a mérité l’immortalité & dans le bas, La Guerre & La Religion. La Guerre, caractérisée

32

3

Drawing the Line par Mars, qui ordonne à Vulcan de forger des armes, et la Religion par Numa Pompilius, qui fait porter le feu sacré au temple de Vesta’. 43. See Dresde ou le rêve des Princes, exh. cat. (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des musées nationaux, 2001), pp. 226–​7. We know of this commission from a letter that was written by Italian antiquarian, Francesco Algarotti to the Saxon court in July 1743. In it, he tells us that Zanetti, being an artistic consultant to the Regent, acquired the canvas along with its pendant (the Sacrifice to Silenus). At the death of the regent in 1723, the Ricci pendants had only made it as far as Livourne. 44. Faroult, ‘Jean Raoux: peintre de vestales’, p. 72. 45. For a comprehensive list of the variants, see Jean Raoux, exh. cat., pp. 150–​8. 46. Faroult, ‘Jean Raoux’, p.  73. Faroult bases Sénozan’s probable patronage of Raoux’s pendants on an inventory of the collection of the marquise de Sénozan, rue des Saints-​Pères, in 1794. In it, there is a description of pendants by Raoux that corresponds closely to the paintings at Lille. 47. See Chapter IX in Lessing, Laocoön, pp. 62–​6. It is worth noting that Lessing’s discussion on the representation of Vesta turns on the argument that, according to Ovid, she was never represented in her temple in Rome. Lessing believed this to be true, but insisted that outside of Rome she was represented in her temple and that the artist need not confine himself to the religious dictates of vestal culture and practise. 48. Lessing, Laocoön, pp. 62–​3. 49. Probably the single most influential text to establish this intellectual perspective on the visual arts was that of Leon Battista Alberti, Della Pittura (1436), which included the first scientific study of perspective. The implications of illusionism are explored by Norman Bryson, Vision and Painting: The Logic of the Gaze (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983). 50. Whitney Chadwick, Women, Art, and Society (London:  Thames & Hudson, 2012), p. 74. See also Linda Nochlin’s seminal article, ‘Why have there been no great women Artists?’ in Art and Sexual Politics, eds Thomas Hess and Elizabeth Baker (New York: McMillan, 1973). 51. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 74. 52. Ibid., pp. 137–​8. 53. Ibid., p. 11. 54. Faroult, ‘Les Fortunes de la Vertu’, p. 23. 55. David Irwin, ed., Winckelmann: Writings on Art (London: Phaidon, 1972), p. 4. 56. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Briefe, vol. 2, ed. Walther Rehm (Berlin, 1752), pp. 112–​13 (letter no. 381, dated 10 January 1761, to Stosch). As cited in Jens Daehner, ed., The Herculaneum Women: History, Context, Identities (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007), p. 27. Daehner, Herculaneum Women, p. 27.

33

34

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 57. The statues were unearthed sometime between 1706–​13 by a Frenchman, but it was only with Winckelmann’s publication of Gedanken that these forgotten sculptures were given their proper credit as the first works unearthed at Herculaneum. For a comprehensive study on these sculptures, see Daehner: Herculaneum Women. 58. Daehner, Herculaneum Women, p. 27.

34

35

2 Bridging Space and Time Winckelmann’s Theory and its Aftermath (1754–​78) Franco Cirulli

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s notorious insistence on expunging temporality from the province of the visual arts was in part also designed as a critique of historian, theorist and art critic Johann Winckelmann (1717–​68).1 Winckelmann had been right in claiming noble simplicity and calm grandeur as sculptural desiderata, but the reasons for this had eluded him –​overt expressive intensity is to be avoided only in a static medium like stone, where the viewer would soon feel cloyed by an emotional maximum repeating itself at every moment.2 In other words, because the figure is trapped in a particular moment of the narrative, that moment becomes perpetual, or inescapable, as that captured in the Laocoön sculpture of ancient Greece, to which Lessing’s treatise owes its title (Figure 2.1). But, in a quintessentially temporal medium like poetry, moments of intense pathos can have their place, precisely because it is possible to counterbalance them with calmer ones. A sculpted Laocoön must only sigh, but the Laocoön of the Aeneid fascinates us all the more when he jolts us with the occasional blood-​c urdling scream.3 Lessing’s quarrel with Winckelmann took as its starting point the famous sculptural group of the Laocoön, generally ascribed (following Pliny) to the Hellenistic artists Agesander, Athenodorus and Polydorus. 35

36

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Figure 2.1  Greek art (Hellenistic), Laocoön, c.200 BCE, marble, 1.84 m (6 ft.), Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican City. Photographic credit: Photographed by the editor. All rights released (public domain). This image has not been altered.

It represents the Trojan priest Laocoön and his two sons, as they vainly oppose the deathly grip of a monstrous snake. Excavated in 1506, its grandeur immediately sparked the imagination of artists like Michelangelo, who even sculpted a replacement for the missing right arm of the central, titular figure (today, the right arm of the Laocoön consists of a readapted fragment found in 1905 by Ludwig Pollack). As Winckelmann saw it, the emotional and ethical climax of the whole statue resides in the mouth, nose, and brow of the priest: each of them made visible a tension-​filled unity of terror and noble self control.4 36

37

Bridging Space and Time Yet, although Lessing’s remarks were intended to cut Winckelmann’s aesthetics down-​to-​size, by framing them within a more comprehensive theory, they had the unintended effect of bringing into clearer focus some of its truly seminal elements.5 The originality of Winckelmann’s History of the Art of Antiquity of 1764 lay also in its implicit refusal to obey those strictures that Lessing was to outline two years later, in his Laocoön of 1766. How? Some of the History’s most celebrated descriptions of sculpture hinge on a quasi-​hallucinatory encounter, where the marble is animated and set into motion by the spectator’s transfiguring gaze. In the second half of the eighteenth century, these descriptions became an influential prototype of aesthetic experience, where the spectator (not the artist), becomes a Pygmalion-​like figure, imaginatively quickening stone into life.6 And, insofar as motion is a successive process, this experience involves what we could call a temporalisation of the visual artefact. Ever wary of philosophical abstraction, Winckelmann did not care to extract an overarching theory of sculptural temporality from his specific descriptions. There was nonetheless such a theory waiting to be distilled: this, as I see it, was paradoxically made clear to Winckelmann’s readers by a thinker (Lessing), who reminded them that time was not the business of the figurative arts. Such prohibitions had the unwitting merit of contrastingly casting in relief the temporally inflected nature of Winckelmann’s aesthetics, inviting thinkers like Frans Hemsterhuis (1721–​ 90) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–​1803) to raise Winckelmann’s insights to the level of a philosophy of sculpture.7 And so, when Herder claims that ‘sculpture occupies the middle ground between poetry and painting’,8 he suggests that the aesthetic fruition of sculpture is just as much a temporal as a spatial affair; he fleshes out Winckelmann’s originality precisely by showing how he rubs against the grain of Lessing’s purism. Or, consider Lessing’s idea that the ‘signs must bear a suitable relation to the thing signified’;9 for him, this means that the static signs of the visual arts cannot represent temporal succession. By contrast, for Herder, Lessing’s principle of semantic suitability is precisely what legitimates the temporalisation of sculpture. Since here the sign signifies not only the immediate physicality of a beautiful body (this is Lessing’s thesis), but also a primordial force expressing itself therein, it 37

38

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics stands to reason that the sign itself became temporally inflected under the Pygmalionic gaze of the spectator. In this chapter, I will first briefly outline Winckelmann’s seminal ‘temporalisation’ of sculpture.10 I then proceed to consider a few striking moments in Lessing’s text, where he allows –​if implicitly –​the figurative to be ‘dynamised’ by the transfiguring work of the spectator’s imagination. By ‘kinetisation’, I mean the way in which –​under the gaze of a deeply absorbed spectator –​the contours of a statue lose their fixity and quiver. The imagination of the spectator is of course central to this process, though not in the sense of a gratuitous, arbitrary projection. Rather, the assumption is that the spectator brings to fruition a capacity for apparent movement that the statue already contained, albeit only as mere potential. Then, I move to the respective philosophies of sculpture for Hemsterhuis and Herder, where I not only consider how (and with what success) they try to give greater conceptual transparency to Winckelmann, but I will also highlight those moments in which they lean upon Lessing in the very act of challenging his dichotomies. I will close with a brief glance at German Romantic theories of painting, noticing how their own involvement with temporality stems from a tacit cross-​pollination with sculptural aesthetics of a Winckelmannian stripe. I chose to focus on this specific quartet of eighteenth-​century theorists because of the shared conceptual horizon in which they moved, and which they helped to bring about. These theorists were responsible for a momentous paradigm shift in the construction of aesthetic experience, which marked a seminal break with French models. If we look at the respective aesthetic theories of Jean-​Pierre de Crousaz (1663–​1750), Abbé Jean-​ Baptiste Dubos (1670–​1742) and Denis Diderot (1713–​84) we note one important commonality: the point of figurative art is to titillate an erudite connoisseur, offering to him or her an evasive entertainment that will prevent him or her from experiencing a dreadful ennui.11 Despite their various disagreements with one another, Lessing, Winckelmann, Hemsterhuis and Herder all sought to move beyond the escapist divertissement aesthetics of their French counterparts, in the belief that looking at a statue could also catalyse potentially life-​changing epiphanies. As we will see, the cornerstone of this ethically inflected aesthetics was the idea that figurative art could intimate a mythical temporality, or a time that was different from 38

39

Bridging Space and Time and superior to ordinary chronological time. Fleshing out this temporality required also a significant break with traditional understandings of painting and sculpture, which saw them beholden to the n ­ arrative time of a story. The ethical inflection of their theories explains also their new perspective on artworks like the Laocoön and Apollo Belvedere (Figure 2.2). These artworks had already been celebrated for centuries, but merely as models of artistic excellence.12 But from the mid-​eighteenth century forward, these classics were seen also as something like a genomic repository of the exemplary ethical and religious values of the anciens –​a role previously reserved for the writings of the ancients, and now taken over by figurative art.13 This shift explains also why painters like Jacques-Louis David (1748–​1825) show an extraordinary attention to ancient sculpture and why Napoléon Bonaparte (1769–​1821) filled the Musée Napoléon (otherwise known as the Musée du Louvre in Paris before and after his reign) with looted sculpture (including the Laocoön and the Apollo): because it was believed that this ancient beauty had the power to preserve and possibly recover for the present the ethos of the ancients.14 It remains open to question, of course, how much of this discourse was ideological (especially in the case of Napoléon) and how much was not. But for better or worse, without the cumulative efforts of Lessing, Winckelmann, Hemsterhuis and Herder, this discourse would have never happened in the first place. Winckelmann’s theory paved the way for a distinctively Romantic appreciation of the visual arts, where the artwork invites the spectator to imaginatively animate (in other words, set into life-​like motion) the surface of the artwork itself.15 In its most general form, this insight is not new, going back to fifth-​century BCE Greece. There, we find talk of the legendary sculptor Daedalus, whose statues had the capacity to speak and move, and needed to be tied to the pedestal, lest they escape. Scholars attribute this myth to the rise of a new sculptural style, such as that of the Classical period, where a figure’s limbs became less confined to the torso (previously statues bore a formal stance that could be visually contained within a block of wood or stone), gave the impression of locomotion and even the effect of speech.16 But, it is important to note that in this ancient topos, the spatio-​temporality that the statue seems miraculously to acquire is not its own. Rather, it literally intrudes into the space and time of the observer; the 39

40

Figure 2.2  Leochares, Apollo Belvedere, c.120–​40 BCE, Roman marble copy of Greek bronze original dating to c.350–​325 BCE, 2.2 m (7 ft. 2 1/​2 in.), Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican City. Photographic credit: Photographed by the editor. All rights released (public domain). This image has not been altered.

41

Bridging Space and Time need to tie down Daedalus’ statues is a sign of precisely that anxiety. Yet, just what is meant by the idea of a spatio-​temporality being intrinsic to the artwork? In short, it is one generated by the agency of the Pygmalionic gaze. It is not so much the gaze of the spectator that defines it (although it would not come to be without that gaze). Rather, ‘intrinsic’ means that it is a spatio-​temporality of a signifier that detaches itself from its original signified. In other words, the quivering is not just the quivering of Apollo, but a quivering that –​as it were –​steals the show and captures the viewer’s attention in its own right. On the other hand, this is not Abstract Expressionism. This quivering ends up being also, in some way, the imagined coming-​to-​life of the figure. That is to say that the signifier (or the sculptural line) is the matrix of two spatio-​temporalities: the one of the figura (that is the traditional object of mimesis), and the one of the contour taken per se. The latter detaches itself from the former, but is also modified. Firstly, the artwork does not just sit in space; instead, it actively constitutes its own space; secondly, through its own tempo of self-​constitution (this tempo is the rhythm with which individual parts seem to coalesce into a whole) the artwork is symbolically emancipated from the temporal matrix that washes over all physical objects (at any moment of ordinary time, the ‘togetherness’ of parts is something that just happens to them. Against this necessary foil, the syncopation of Pygmalionic quivering stands out as a different sort of time, where each part actively constructs its being-​together with the other parts), the spectator included. Lest this remain terribly abstract, let me appeal at once to Winckelmann’s groundbreaking ekphrasis (1758) of the Belvedere Torso (Figure 2.3): The action and reaction of its muscles are equated with a skilful measure of alternating movement and swift strength, and the body, on account of them, had to be made massive and suitable for everything which he wished to accomplish. As in a swelling movement of the sea, the previously smooth surface sprouts with a vague unrest into rippling waves, whereof one swallows another and again throws it out and rolls it forward, so, with the same soft swell and ripple, does the one muscle pass into the other, and a third, which rises between them and seems to strengthen their movement, loses itself in the first, and our gaze is, as it were, swallowed up at the same time.17

41

42

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Figure 2.3  Apollonius of Athens, Belvedere Torso, first-​century BCE marble, 1.59 m (5 ft. 2 in.), Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican City. Photographic credit: Scala/Art Resource.

In itself, the Torso is a static aggregate of stony parts; nothing other than mere contiguity connects each part to the others. Here we have space as the mutual indifference of neighbouring elements: space as a fact. Nonetheless, once we bring to bear a Winckelmannian gaze upon them, these parts coalesce into and separate from one another; this constitutes a quasi-​hallucinatory temporal inflection –​quasi-​hallucinatory, because the perception of motility superimposes itself on the perception of fixity, 42

43

Bridging Space and Time but does not erase it –​(an example would be Jean-​Paul Sartre’s [1905–​80] description of Henri Matisse’s [1869–​1954] reds, which seem red patches yet at once feel also wooly, warm and voluptuous. Synaesthesia imposes itself on raw perception, but without canceling it altogether). The impression of motion is at once necessarily temporal. The quasi-​hallucinatory element consists also in the tension between imagined time and the timeless fixity of the statue as an object of raw sensation. The temporality embedded in the perceived oscillation does not mark only the disintegration of a previous whole. It also appears as the process whereby the overall Gestalt coalesces into a unity –​and this time all by itself, and not because of the artisan’s chisel. In this respect, the Torso creates its own spatiality; space becomes an autonomous deed. This pendular time stands out from real chronological time, not simply because it is imagined, but also because it is a time produced by, and exclusive to, the artwork itself: the pulsations of the sculptural contours taken in by the eye yield a rhythm –​ notice how Winckelmann picks out this aspect in the Torso: ‘In the Torso of the deified Herakles, these … muscles have a highly idealised form and beauty, but they are like the surge of a calm sea, flowing sublimely in a gently changing beat’.18 Winckelmann’s temporalisation of space entailed also a transformation of the time of the fabula (of the story). Before him, phenomenological time was merely subservient to narrative temporality; the former was supposed to bring the latter to life, but not alter its nature. Let me make this point clear, by invoking an example in which imagined temporality is subordinated to mimetic constraints. An example in which perceptual time ‘activates’ the original narrative time, but does not alter it, lies in 1719, when the theorist Abbé Dubos remarked that ‘the eye, bewitched by the work of a great painter, believes sometimes to perceive even some movement in the figures’.19 Here, the image comes across as temporally inflected, but it does not, as a result, lose its strategy –​ if anything, it becomes even more life-​like. To understand this principle, Dubos refers us to the example of Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577–​1640) Crucifixion, where the crucified thief on the right, upon receiving a blow to the leg by a soldier, violently arches his body in pain, and –​thanks to the magic of chiaroscuro –​leaps out of the picture’s corner.20 Here, pictura is temporalised, yet in a way that remains faithful to the temporal flow of a pre-​existing story. 43

4

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics Even Lessing, who himself delivered a fatal blow to the ut poesi pictura theory, remained significantly bound to it. True, he did recommend the choice of a ‘pregnant moment’ such that inert temporality of the artwork could be quickened by the phenomenological time of the imagination. But Lessing’s imagination-​time remains subservient to the poet’s time, as we can infer from his claim that the pregnant moment is the one that best allows us to grasp what happened before and after –​the point is to jolt into life the petrified narrative of the poet, but not to rewrite it. Presumably, Virgil’s (70–​19 BCE) Laocoön screamed with an ever-more bestial voice –​Lessing commends the sculptor for an expressive understatement that is best suited to trigger an imaginative recreation of the poet’s emotional crescendo. But in all this, again, the poet’s temporal sequence remains authoritative. Against the traditionalism of Dubos and Lessing consider Winckelmann’s reading of the Torso. It is supposedly an image of Hercules’s trunk, and its powerful play of muscles indeed reminds one of his heroic sequences of labours, (it is ‘massive and suited for everything he wished to accomplish’.)21 And yet, under the devoted gaze of the art lover, these contours become suddenly imitations of an aquatic surface. Not that Winckelmann becomes completely oblivious to the artist’s mimetic intentions, or what we could call the ut poesi sculptura (as poetry does, so does sculpture) principle –​he still believes that he is looking at a simulacrum of Hercules’s torso. Crucially, however, the imaginative transmogrification entails also a new ekphrasis of the original narrative: the wave-​like movement of the contours has a circular, pulse-​like temporality, and is therefore unsuited to the description of imperfect sublunary time, which is linear. Hence, Winckelmann begins with a reverie where the powerful limbs evoke several Herculean tasks, but he ends by remarking that this is a torso of someone who has ascended to heaven and no longer thinks of mighty labours, or less humble ones like digestion.22 Here, phenomenological time is no longer subservient to narrative temporality; it changes it. The calm oscillation of the torso’s contours entails a rewriting (or maybe outright cancellation) of the fabula. What emerges finally from Winckelmann’s enchanted gaze? It is no longer a torso depicting Hercules in the midst of his labours, but the hero after his apotheosis, in which he enjoyed perfect happiness. Reverie cancels linear time (the stuff of any narrative), where we move from a deficient past to 44

45

Bridging Space and Time a hoped-​for future fulfillment, and installs the circular time of Olympus, where every moment is as perfect as the previous one and the next. It may well be asked, what are the ultimate payoffs of this temporal inflection of visual space, where the intense focus on formal properties pushes into the background traditional concerns with mimetic content? One of them is an aesthetic one –​it allows Winckelmann to free some space for the discourse of beauty. Seventeenth-​century theory had, under the excessive influence of the newly discovered Aristotelian Poetics, claimed that the chief business of the figurative arts was to tell a story.23 Even as late as 1719, Dubos could essentially marginalise aesthetic values, by declaring that the chief business of the visual arts, and of poetry, is to recreate situations that powerfully stir our emotions.24 This is perhaps why Winckelmann reconceived visual beauty through the lens of the non-​discursive art of music. For instance, he compares human physical beauty to the quintessentially temporal nature of music. He states that this beauty is [L]‌ike an image separated from matter by fire that seeks to create a being conforming to the exact image of the first intelligent creature sketched in the mind of God. The forms of such an image are simple and uninterrupted, manifold in their unity, and thus they are harmonious –​just as a sweet and pleasing tone is brought forth by bodies whose parts are uniform … The harmony that delights our spirit resides not in infinitely broken, linked, or slurred notes but in simple and long-​sustained tones.25

These lines imply a tacit break with the rationalist tenet (shared even by Lessing) according to which visual beauty, because of its sensuous character, is but a superficial presentation of higher, invisible truths –​and in this respect the inferior of poetry.26 For the rationalist, the schematic nature of ideal beauty is a telling sign of its poverty vis-​à-​vis the rich detail of which narrative is capable. Winckelmann upends this claim by a Neo-​ Platonic mythology, according to which the divine archetypes are marked by simplicity, not complexity –​in this light, it is the endless invention of poetic fabula, not the simplicity of the beau ideale, that is superficial. Winckelmann strengthens the point by casting chordless, tonally pure 45

46

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics music as the privileged trope for beautiful sculpture. Doing so allows him to claim for sculptural beauty a temporality that Lessing denied to it: the beauty of an aria and the quivering beauty of a statue deploy themselves in time. Equally crucial is Winckelmann’s preference for the temporally invariant tone over the temporally variable melodic line. How so? Arguably, the latter functions as a metaphor for narrative time, which reaches closure only at the end. But, the former is a trope for mythical time, meaning a temporality that is perfect at every moment. The net effect of this musical analogy is to imply that visual beauty can gesture towards mythical time, whereas poetry can only articulate narrative time, where the ‘now’ strives towards a ‘not-​here-​yet’. Even Winckelmann’s famous tenet about the ‘unspecifiability’ (Unbezeichnung)27 of beauty rests upon the latter’s temporality. If, by looking at a statue, the viewer is capable of perceptually isolating lines and/​or points, then he or she seizes upon geometrical features that are by definition a-​temporal. For Winckelmann, beauty’s unspecifiability resides precisely in its having forms ‘defined by neither points or lines’.28 It is precisely the perceptually ‘kinetic’, perceptually unstable, nature of visual beauty that is the bane of anyone attempting to draw a copy of the Torso: The artist will admire in the contours of this body the ever-​ changing flow of one form into another, and the gliding features that rise and fall like waves and are engulfed by one another. He will find that no one can be sure of accuracy when copying them, as the undulation whose direction he thinks to trace will diverge imperceptibly and cause the eye and the hand to err by taking another path.29

It is this temporalisation of figurative space that allows Winckelmann to put forward a more groundbreaking idea of figurative beauty than Lessing. The latter’s idea of beauty, just as his notions of artistic time and space, is mimetically beholden to another reality that it signifies. When he defines charm as ‘a transitory beauty that we desire to see again and again … it comes and it goes’, he is situating it in physical, if imagined, realities like those in Alcina’s (Ariosto’s beloved) seductive play of eyes (pietosi a riguardar, a mover parchi –​compassionate in gazing, slow in moving).30 Since charm is a feature of moving objects, Lessing coherently says that 46

47

Bridging Space and Time its depiction is ‘less suitable to the painter than the poet’.31 Conversely, Winckelmann’s imaginative ‘dynamisation’ of contour, (and its attendant lessening of representational burdens), allows the visual artist to inject time into the beauty of the figurative. Despite its programmatic separation between poetry as the art of time, and painting as the art of space, Lessing’s Laocoön contains noteworthy germs of the aesthetic revolution to come, that is to say of visual beauty as a powerful allusion to mythical time. This is first noted in the following passage, in which Lessing explains his doctrine of the choice of the ‘single moment’ in both painting and sculpture: [If] the works of both painter and sculptor are created not merely to be given a glance (erblickt) but to be contemplated (betrachtet) –​contemplated repeatedly and at length –​then it is evident that this single moment and the point from which it is viewed cannot be chosen with too great a regard for its effect. But only that which gives free rein to the imagination is effective. The more we see, the more we must be able to imagine. And the more we add in our imaginations, the more we must think that we see. In the full course of an emotion, no point is less suitable for this than its climax. There is nothing beyond this, and to present the utmost to the eye is to bind the wings of fancy and compel it, since it cannot soar above the impression made on the senses, to concern itself with weaker images, shunning the visible fullness already represented as a limit beyond which it cannot go. Thus if Laocoön sighs, the imagination can hear him cry out.32

This passage is striking in several respects. For one, it distinguishes between what is immediately visible in the artwork, and what is perceptible to the viewer’s projective imagination. If the first is a temporal fragment, then the second is something that is gradually revealed in an attentive perusal. The more the viewer sees, the more he or she must be able to imagine: notice that the intentionally understated image (the sighing Laocoön) is –​ and this is Lessing’s Dubosian side –​a trampoline to imagining a maximum of emotion, (such as the screaming Laocoön). On the other hand, the image itself becomes transformed; the more we add in our imaginative response, the more we must think that we see. Is Lessing implying a 47

48

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics virtuous circle of sorts, where the image acts upon the imagination and is acted upon in return? To be sure, the artwork’s theme should be instantaneously intelligible (and here the artist is urged to eschew the arcane, and draw upon a stock of familiar themes); Lessing says that ‘the greatest effect depends on the first glance’.33 Yet –​again –​the artwork is not ‘to be given merely a glance’: the function of this Blick (‘glance’) is that it ‘induces us to linger’ before the work, and start a transformative process of Betrachtung (‘contemplation’).34 As well, Lessing makes other pronouncements that unwittingly betray new, if inchoate, ideas of pictorial temporality. The old tradition insisted on verisimilitude as a constraint upon mimesis: the imagination could only be taken in by simulacra that did not trespass the boundaries of the possible. Consider now Lessing’s praise of Raphael’s (1483–​1520) handling of drapery, whereby he notices how its position is sometimes artfully unrealistic, suggesting a motion that the limbs have not yet undertaken.35 Despite the fact that such a depiction of drapery and limbs illustrates an impossible conflation of two different points in time, Lessing praises Raphael for having had ‘the courage to commit such a minor error for the sake of obtaining greater perfection of expression’.36 No longer a shorthand for the sequential nature of narration, but a site of an expressive concentration that is beyond the means of the verbal –​here Lessing is almost anticipating the art historian Aby Warburg’s (1866–​1929) idea of moving drapery as a window into a Dionysian energy that is inaccessible to linear narrative. Sometimes, the artwork’s temporal concentration is aesthetically relevant, because of the symbolic victory it stages over real time. Consider Lessing’s critical assessment of Timomachus (c. first century BCE), a painter who [W]‌as able to combine two things: that point or moment which the beholder not so much sees as adds in his imagination, and that appearance which does not seem so transitory as to become displeasing through its perpetuation in art. Timomachus did not represent Medea at the moment when she was actually murdering her children, but a few moments before, when a mother’s love was still struggling with her vengefulness. We can foresee the outcome of this struggle; we tremble in anticipation of seeing Medea as simply cruel, and our imagination takes us far beyond what the painter could have shown us in this

48

49

Bridging Space and Time terrible moment. But for this very reason, we are not offended at Medea’s perpetual indecision, as it is represented in art, but wish it could have remained that way in reality. We wish that the duel of passions had never been decided, or at least had continued long enough for time and reflection to overcome rage, and secure the victory for maternal feelings.37

This is a great example of how Lessing straddles an older and newer critical tradition. On the one hand, he is the Dubosian spectator, who wants to get the greatest emotional mileage out of the encounter with the picture; he likes the emotionally restrained face of Medea, precisely because it enables the imagination to soar into the future of Medea’s full-​blown rage. On the other hand, the under-​determination of the immediately visible becomes important per se, by crystallising the moment in which Medea is suspended in existential doubt; the image stages some sort of symbolic victory over time. The imagination no longer wishes to soar beyond the immediately visible Medea and picture her incipient bestial madness; the humane, conflicted mother painted by Timomachus is the real Medea, and it is on her that our gaze tarries. The viewer no longer appreciates her understatement, not because it enables his or her free flights of fancy, but because he or she is mindful that a painted rage would have endowed ‘her brief instant of madness with a permanence that is an affront to all nature’.38 Here Lessing strays significantly from his official position, which is that painted figures must show emotional restraint for the sake of beauty. But Medea’s expressive muteness makes a metaphysical point, not a merely aesthetic one. Here, the imagination no longer reconstructs the embedded nature of the painted moment in the preceding and successive actions; rather, with a complete reversal, it truncates those connections, and lifts the visible moment out of time, eternalising it. So, it is possible to move closer to Winckelmann’s ecstatic engagement with the artwork, where the spectator him or herself is lifted, even if merely symbolically, out of temporal fragility. However, neither Winckelmann nor Lessing asked why the artwork’s disruption of the spectator’s ordinary temporality could be perceived as liberating, nor how beauty was implicated in that subversion. Nevertheless, for a philosophically minded reader, these questions seemed to naturally arise from Winckelmann’s History of Art –​Frans Hemsterhuis’s 1765 Letter 49

50

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics on Sculpture is an attempt to answer them.39 As we will see, the Letter will also have an important impact upon Herder’s aesthetics of sculpture. Hemsterhuis begins with the provocative idea that time is precisely what makes complete human happiness impossible. Why? In short, the human animal yearns to eliminate all division between self and other; in other words, it yearns to be infinite. This means that the self wants to know itself as infinite, or as being one with itself; and, it cannot do so by introspection, as it can only (if at all), do so through an external object that exhibits the twin properties of infinity and unity. As Hemsterhuis sees it, happiness would be just the experience of such an object, and love would be the feeling drawing the viewer towards it. Unfortunately, the sense-​organs stand in the way of such an experience: since they operate in time, they always parcel the unity of the object into successive bits of experiential intake.40 There are, however, limited cases in which the viewer feels as if he or she experiences the unity that ordinarily is always deferred; this occurs when he or she encounters objects that offer a maximum of sense-​ data in a minimal amount of time. For Hemsterhuis, beauty is precisely the experience of ‘the greatest number of ideas (meaning sense-​data) in the shortest time possible’;41 the soul has an innate desire for this sort of visual encounter. At this point, Hemsterhuis also sought to convince the viewer by induction, or via a comparison between two vases. The two vases are roughly equivalent in terms of contour length, but everyone who was asked to deliver an aesthetic judgement upon them, so Hemsterhuis reports, found vase A  to be more beautiful.42 The reason for this is in the fact that the smoother contours of A allow it to be perceived more quickly than B, (which has a far less seamless profile). This should be a strong clue to the claim that perceived beauty is inversely proportional to the time required to apprehend the object as a totality or whole. For Hemsterhuis, the paradigmatic site of beauty so conceived was sculpture; sculpture is superior to painting, because its tri-​dimensionality allows it to present more of a maximum of sense-​data, which painting can only adumbrate through the use of chiaroscuro.43 The requisite of a temporal minimum, however, is provided above all by Classical sculpture, which –​thanks to its ‘easy and agile quality of contour’,44 lends itself to the quickest apprehension. Strong expressive values would increase the 50

51

Bridging Space and Time time of recognition, not only for the reason that grimaces present themselves as jagged (and hence less perceptually fluid) but also because they would burden the observer with the additional, and time-​consuming, task of guessing just which specific emotions are being signified. It is for these reasons that the paradigmatic sculptural contour should give an impression of ‘stillness and majesty’,45 which is, as we know, precisely the quintessence of Greek sculpture, according to Winckelmann. Consequently, it should be clear that Hemsterhuis is trying to provide a theoretical underpinning for a theory: Winckelmann’s, which had a strong grip on his imagination. Like Winckelmann, Hemsterhuis likes the idea that a statue can stage a symbolic victory over temporality. Both of them believe that the viewer cannot simply be catapulted into eternity; rather, he or she is inescapably a temporal creature, and the best for which he or she can wish is an intimation of eternity within time. Nevertheless, as I see it, Winckelmann’s aesthetics do more justice to that insight. Consider what Winckelmann’s dynamic sculptural contour accomplishes: it both gives the illusion of movement (and in this respect it is temporal) and at the same time it appears at rest (and in this respect it suggests eternity). Conversely, since it hinges on a lightning-​like perception of the whole, Hemsterhuisian beauty offers itself as the symbolic and wholesale suppression of temporality. The author of the History of Art never got a chance to read Hemsterhuis’s Letter, because Winckelmann died in 1768, and Hemsterhuis published his work in 1769. However, it is reasonable to think, staunch Shaftesburian that he was, that Winckelmann would have abhorred a theory claiming that ‘beauty has no reality in itself ’,46 which reduced beauty to a subjective projection triggered by objects that are found to be –​quite literally –​easy on the eyes. Winckelmann’s truly ground​breaking insight, the ontological reading of William Hogarth’s (1697–​1764) line of beauty meant that, apart from the time of content, or the narrative, one needed to consider also the time of the artwork’s own form (because the quivering line of beauty had something specific to say in its own right –​whereas Hogarth explicitly resisted saddling the line of beauty with extra-​aesthetic content).47 In the attempt to explain Winckelmann, Hemsterhuis reduces talk of figurative temporality to the time of human perception. Nevertheless, Hemsterhuis did have the 51

52

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics merit of making clear that the aesthetics of the History of Art of Antiquity were temporally inflected, even if Hemsterhuis distorted the nature of that inflection. Furthermore, Winckelmann’s effusions on the quivering beauty of Greek statuary questioned why looking at them could be so compelling. Untrue as it may have been to its Winckelmannian muse, Hemsterhuis’s reductivism was based on the correct insight that an aesthetics of sculpture required also an account of the spectator. Herder was a careful and passionate reader of Hemsterhuis. In particular, in 1770 he translated Hemsterhuis’s Letter on Desires into German and in 1778 he even wrote a commentary on it titled Love and Selfhood (Liebe und Selbstheit).48 Herder liked Hemsterhuis’s cosmic or theological inflection of aesthetics, but he thought that such inflection hinged on an unrealistic dream of human omnipotence. It cannot be denied that Hemsterhuis’s sculptural beauty does, to use a Hegelian metaphor, shoot us into the Absolute as from a cannon. By short-​circuiting (if briefly) the feeling of existential time, it collapses the difference between the human spectator and a divine archetypal intellect that intuits everything at once. The same identification is implied by Hemsterhuis’s conspicuous suppression of even an ideal movement in the statue. Herder’s Sculpture is an aesthetics of mediation and is in self-​conscious opposition to Hemsterhuis’s aesthetics of immediacy. A sign of this opposition is its systematic (and occasionally heavy-​handed) emphasis on tactility, and its corresponding excoriation of a sight-​centred approach to sculpture. Both of these are –​I suggest –​an implicit polemic with Hemsterhuis, whose sculptural aesthetics are thoroughgoingly ocular.49 The slowness of tactile fruition functions as a critique of Hemsterhuis’s ‘fast’ sculptural beauty. But in 1769, Herder was still a committed Hemsterhuisian, as we can see from a work that he penned that year:  the First Critical Grove. This work is particularly relevant to our discussion, since it is Herder’s attempt to take critical stock of Lessing’s Laocoön. Note how this passage implicitly takes Lessing to task; here, figurative art’s presentation of a temporal moment is not just a token of its intrinsic semiotic limits, it is also a sign of its unique capacity to present a supernaturally saturated temporality: Every work of plastic art is, if we accept the classification of Aristotle, a work and not an energy: it is all there at once in

52

53

Bridging Space and Time all of its parts; its essence consists not in change or succession but in coexistence. If an artist has made it perfectly so as to be grasped entirely and exactly in the first glance, which has to deliver a complete idea, then its purpose has been achieved, the effect endures forever: it is a work. It is there all at once, and that is how it shall be viewed; the first glance shall be permanent, exhaustive, eternal, and only human frailty, the carelessness of our senses, and the disagreeableness of prolonged effort make necessary, where works demand to be examined more deeply, perhaps the second, perhaps the hundredth viewing. Yet each occasion is but a single glance … these works must therefore make their moment so agreeable, so beautiful, that nothing exceeds it, that the soul, sunk in contemplation of the same, as it were, comes to a rest and loses the sense of time passing. Those beaux arts and belles lettres, however, which produce their effect through time and change, which have energy [i.e. force] as their essence, are not obliged to deliver a single moment; they need never devour our soul in this momentary climax [italics mine].50

Like the author of the Lettre, Herder embraces the idea that the figurative arts work precisely by giving the illusion of arrested time, and that this illusion rests on the ease with which the visual media may be instantaneously comprehended; the apparent negation of perceptual time entails the liberating feeling that existential time itself has come to a standstill. To experience a suspension of existential time involves the dialectic of the sublime; figurative artwork devours our soul and elevates it at the same time; it destroys the very conditions of experience, but this destruction is also emancipating. This is because existential time, as Hemsterhuis pointed out, parcels objects into temporal parts and therefore systematically frustrates the self ’s desire for unity. Still, when it comes to the temporal dimension of expressive values, Herder manages to go deeper than Hemsterhuis. To be sure, both thinkers tow a Winckelmannian line, according to which a marble figure should not be in the throes of unbridled passion.51 But for Hemsterhuis, the aura of grand simplicity is prised simply because it enables quick comprehension, (‘any passion expressed in any figure must diminish a little this loose quality of contour that makes it so easy to run along it with one’s gaze’).52 Herder, as well, believes that such emotional balance allows a symbolic 53

54

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics victory over temporality, but for an additional reason that Hemsterhuis neglects to consider: This tranquility [which] lies midway between lifeless activity and passionate, exaggerated movement; the imagination can continue to hover between both extremes and therefore derives the longest pleasure from this glance of the soul … [painting or sculpture can give us] the first stirring of a movement, the dawning of the day, which allows us to see across both extremes and thus alone grant us an eternal glance.53

Although an individual’s emotional range is vast, he or she can never fully actualise all of it at once; a person cannot be simultaneously angry, joyful and serene. It is as if time imposes its sequential nature on the different parts of an emotional orchestra, preventing them from resonating in a symphonic tutti. Yet, exposure to the noble restraint of classical sculpture can afford a liberation from this sequential nature, by suggesting an experience in which all of the emotional palette is engaged at once. The imagination can take the serene face of the Greek Apollo Belvedere (second-​century Roman copy of a fourth-​century Greek statue) as the median point of an invisible emotional spectrum and project upon it all of the emotional states between the two extremes. Herder then is clearly rethinking Lessing’s discourse on the transformative engagement of the imagination, but with an attentiveness to temporality that is Hemsterhuisian. Doing so allows him to have a more sophisticated approach than either of them. That being said, the First Grove confers on poetry more emphatically the honour of being the art that bridges space and time, in that poetry is viewed as a hybrid of painting and music. It is like music, in that it ‘operates in time’, since it achieves its dynamic effect by constructing a ‘single whole whose parts express themselves little by little’.54 Like painting, poetry ‘operates in space’,55 because, and here Herder sticks to the ut pictura poesis tradition, its task is ‘to lead the object before the eyes of the imagination, and to deceive the latter with the spectacle’.56 On the other hand, does this not this fly in the face of Lessing’s caveat that poetry’s ‘little by little’ must dismember the physical beauty it seeks to describe, and thus fail in its aim to offer the imagination the illusion of a palpable presence? Herder 54

5

Bridging Space and Time resolves the issue through a revised description of the specific nature of poetic beauty. Herder claims that ‘if the poet imbues physical objects with energy, he can also describe them –​what more do we want’?57 It is true that all descriptive poetry dismembers the object, but good descriptive poetry can transfigure the parts, so that they appear as irradiations of a unitary force.58 The parts, despite having been parceled by the sequential narrative of the poet, are not reduced into an unpalatable rubble, because each radiates with the light of the same erotic charge. The parts of the body remain linked, although the bond of spatial contiguity has been replaced by a libidinal bond. As case in point, when Lessing criticises Ariosto’s enumeration of the beauties of his ravishing Alcina,59 he fails to see that the poet is not a drawing master who is asking his pupils to envision Alcina’s parts as a visible whole; rather, Ariosto is showing us the temporal unity of the erotic charge that transmutes teeth into pearls, neck into snow and breasts into waves.60 A decade later, Herder’s ‘energetic’ interpretation of poetry would also bear fruit as a new sculptural aesthetics. It is now appropriate to turn to Herder’s 1778 Sculpture. Herder’s mature thought on sculpture is crucial to our overall argument, insofar as its argumentative strategy reveals how, by Lessing’s premises more seriously than Lessing did, one could go beyond Lessing’s conclusions. In the First Grove, Herder followed the letter of Lessing’s medium-​based discussion of phenomenological time: sequential for poetry, instantaneous for visual media. In Sculpture, Herder realises that, had Lessing really been faithful to his principle of medium-​specificity, he would not have lumped painting and sculpture together: the tri-​dimensional physicality of the latter imposes on the spectator a specific phenomenological time, being that of careful, fastidious perambulation. This slow time is something that Hemsterhuis had completely ignored in his sculptural aesthetics, but upon which Winckelmann insisted emphatically. Just like Winckelmann, Herder thinks that the ecstatic, mythic temporality of sculpture cannot hinge on a denial of the plodding phenomenological time of the spectator. As we will see, Sculpture offers two different constructions of the relation between phenomenological and mythical time in sculpture. According to the first, phenomenological time is simply the precondition for the epiphany of the latter. According to the second, phenomenological time is the medium of 55

56

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics that epiphany: it is in the viewer’s failure to reach an overall grasp of a sculpture’s Gestalt that the viewer thinks of a perfection that does not let itself be grasped in existential time. Let us begin by seeing how by pushing Lessing’s semiotic approach to its extreme, Herder focuses on the specific differences between marble and canvas, which enables him to go beyond the Laocoön’s discussion of the nature and scope of the ‘visual arts in general’.61 According to Herder, We have one sense that perceives external things alongside one another, a second that perceives things in succession, and a third that perceives things inside one another [in einander]. These senses are sight, hearing, and touch. Things alongside one another constitute a surface. Things in succession in their purest and simplest form constitute sounds. Things at once inside-​ alongside one another [auf einmal in-​neben-​bei einander] are bodies or forms … [Painting, music, sculpture:] All three arts are related to one another as surface, sound, and body, or as space, time, and force, the three great media of all-​embracing Creation itself, through which they encompass and delimit everything there is.62

For sculpture, the key concept here is the deliberately paradoxical one of things ‘being-​at-​once-​inside-​alongside-​one-​another’. This is Herder’s way of spelling out Winckelmann’s aesthetics of the quivering line, where the spectator is baffled with spatial juxtaposition of the neighbouring line; these are pieces that at the same time seem to melt into each other. Here, perceptual unity (or the unity of neighboring contour-​bits) is something that is felt more than seen. Winckelmann underscored this by referring us to the sense of touch. For example, in the Apollo Belvedere the ‘[M]‌uscles are subtle, blown like molten glass into scarcely visible undulations and more apparent to the touch than to sight’.63 In Sculpture, Herder appropriates this idea, by declaring that sculpture addresses primarily touch, or better, a sight operating haptically.64 Its general premise aside, Sculpture presents us with two differently accented philosophies of sculpture, which themselves stem from a change in Herder’s humanistic sensibilities. In the first three chapters (penned in 1770)  Herder plied a middle way between anthropocentrism and theo-​ centrism, but in chapters four and five (written in 1778) his balance tilts 56

57

Bridging Space and Time towards the divine. This shift has aesthetic resonances; circa 1770, Herder emphasises the gentle flow of the line of beauty, as symbolic of a ‘user-​ friendly’ divine that makes itself completely at home in a sensible medium. In 1778, there is an increased expressive burden; the agile contour is to express ‘indeterminacy … power … mighty will that resides in the structure as a whole’.65 Here the closure of the line of beauty is in part disturbed by sublime excess, representing a partly retreating god. As I see it, Herder’s aesthetic paradigm shift, from unalloyed to a sublime-​inflected beauty, appears to slide from a musical to poetic understanding of sculpture’s spatio-​temporality. The musical model of sculpture is now relevant to consider. It has already been shown that Winckelmann develops, as a metaphorical key to his visual theory, an ad hoc musical aesthetics, where the single, sustained melodic line of a homogeneous timbre is more beautiful than the more complex dimensions of chords.66 One rhetorical payoff was, naturally, that of celebrating the visual economy of Classical sculpture over what, to Winckelmann’s eyes, were the unacceptable excesses of Baroque sculpture. Another, though less obvious, point of this analogy was to place sculpture above painting. A canvas, by presenting us with a simultaneous ensemble of spatial relationships that are available to an instantaneous gaze, stands as a visual translation of a musical chord; but the Pygmalionic spectator, by extracting the statue’s simple element of a line that deploys itself in time, gives a visual trope of an unmixed tone, such as a flute’s, which remains unmistakably itself, even as it goes up and down a scale in a single melodic line. The analogy is further developed by Herder. In the following remarks, recorded in 1770, which was the same year in which he authored the first three chapters of Plastik, he gives us a musical aesthetics that, inflected as it is with tactile values, works very well as a counterpoint to a philosophy of sculpture. He writes that Sound Schall –​i.e. a plurality of simultaneous tones, as body, or its element, tone, as line, therefore strikes its string as the ear plays … That tone is agreeable which touches and flows through the nervous fibers homogeneously and thus harmoniously; obviously, there are thus two main varieties of agreeableness. Either a homogeneous tension is produced in the nerve

57

58

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics and the fibers are at once braced more tightly, or the nerve is relaxed and the fibers gradually melt as if in gentle languor. The former is identical to the feeling that in the soul we call the sublime; the latter is the feeling of the beautiful, or pleasure. Behold: hence issues the main division in music between hard and soft sounds, tones, and keys this demonstrates the analogy between the entire sensibility of body and soul, in the way that all inclinations and passions are revealed therein.67

The key to this thumbnail tonal aesthetics is a tactility that is –​so to speak –​always a tactility that –​by its thematic mastery of its auditory objects –​is a metaphor for Herder’s pre-​1778 robustly anthropocentric aesthetics. First, tones are said to ‘touch’ the auditory hairs lodged in the cochlea. The single tone, whose simplicity makes it analogous to a line, is more congenial to these fibres than a mass of tones, whose complexity gives it a quasi-​corporeality. The more the tone is homogeneous, the more it can be compared to a continuous line, whereas comparatively alloyed tones ‘might be expressed through irregular lines’.68 It should come as no surprise that the first are said to be agreeable, and the second disagreeable. It is true that Herder comments that ‘hard tones’ (such as the deep texture of a bassoon as opposed to the sweet colour of a violin) evoke a sublime feeling. But, this is not the somewhat disquieting and quantitative Burkean sublime, where the spectator’s imagination is checked with the frisson of an insurmountable limit. Rather, Herder’s musical sublime has much in common with what Friedrich Schiller (1759–​1805) would call ‘tensing beauty’, which is an austere line, whose effect on the self is positively bracing and unambiguously fortifying. (Schiller has a merely ‘therapeutic’ idea of the sublime. Whilst the numinously inflected romantic sublime undoes the spectator as much as it elevates him or her, Schiller sees sublime friction as unambiguously empowering –​like being ruthlessly massaged on the back with a wiry brush. We squirm, but we leap from bed energised.) This being said, in the first three sections of Plastik, the fingertips of an art-​lover are almost always compared to the melting tones of a beautiful line; it is the ‘flow and fullness of that delightful, gently softened corporeality that knows nothing of surfaces, or of angles and corners’.69 There is also another way in which music is the master metaphor of Herder’s philosophy of sculpture, circa 1770. The eighteenth-​ century 58

59

Bridging Space and Time thinkers firmly stood by an idea of music as mimesis of human passion. This affected also the view of music’s specific temporality; what gave unity to the various moments of a musical piece was above all the unity of a mood. To be sure, the listener had to respect a piece’s temporality and let it deploy uninterrupted until its end. Nonetheless, once the piece was over, it was possible to get some sort of instantaneous glimpse of the musical whole, to the extent that one reflected on its all-​permeating mood. As an example of a similar logic, consider this passage from chapter one, where the art lover is said to [S]‌hift from place to place: his eye becomes his hand and the ray of light his finger, or rather, his soul has a finger that is yet finer than his hand or the ray of light. With his soul he seeks to grasp the image that arose from the arm and soul of the artist. Now he has it! The illusion has worked; the sculpture lives and his soul feels that it lives. His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as if it feels. A cold description of a statue no more offers us appropriate ideas than would a pictorial representation of music; better to leave it be and pass by.70

The closing association between the experience of a statue and that of a musical piece is telling. In both cases, one must experience firsthand the temporality of the artwork. A thorough perambulation around the Apollo Belvedere is as crucial as listening to a violin sonata in its entirety. But in both cases, one reaches a point at which one can go beyond the preparatory, temporally diluted process of comprehension and engage the artwork as a totality. What allows for these eureka moments in which the viewer is ‘done with’ the temporality of the artwork? At least in part, it may be that, in both cases, the artwork is seen not as a temporal expression of divine infinity, but of the human soul. As a clue, consider this theo-​centrically-​ inflected passage written by Herder in 1778: With articulated forms, the work of the hand is never complete: it goes on feeling, so to speak, infinitely. This is true above all of the form of the human body, even when it appears on the smallest crucifix. The colossus is thus as familiar and natural to the sense of touch as the colored panel with its single viewpoint

59

60

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics as foreign … Further, we should take into consideration the obscurity and night in which this sense feels, the gradually discovered unity and indeterminacy that such a form provides, the idea of power and plenitude, and the gradual and mighty will that resides in the structure as a whole: every great and strong god, every goddess of sublimity and awe, not merely can but must appear colossal to our imagination, as more than human in comparison to our own, dwarf-​like stature. Sculpture occupies the middle ground between poetry and painting … The poet has no other limits than those dictated by the range of his imagination and the creative powers that dwell within him.71

Here, the consummation of the aesthetic experience is no longer a Hemsterhuisian imaginative fusion between the soul of the spectator and that of the statue. In an inversion of the previous Pygmalion logic, the statue responds to the viewer’s prolonged perceptual engagement by holding him or her at an ever increasing distance. By not letting the viewer’s imagination ever feel that it enjoys a firm grasp of the overall Gestalt –​ each part seems so infinitely rich in absorbing detail, that he or she has a hard time moving to the next –​once this is done, his or her enjoyment of a new, infinitely saturated segment blots out the memory of the previous one. It is true that sculpture’s salient aesthetic property remains the same: Unbezeichnung (indeterminacy), may be understood as a regularity that refuses to be distilled into any mathematical formula. Still, this is no longer the salubrious lack of definability of Winckelmann’s Unbezeichnung, which was like ‘purest water drawn from the source of a spring: the less taste it has, the healthier it is seen to be, because it is clear of all foreign particles’.72 Rather, watery clarity becomes ‘obscurity and night’, as a token of an ultimate lack of rules of a divine force that resists the viewer’s attempts to comprehend it; he or she must feel as if a ‘power … plenitude … mighty will’ is foiling the viewer’s desire for perceptual closure.73 The closing remark placing sculpture between painting and poetry suggests that this intimidating plastic power is rooted in a new type of spatiality. Herder claims that the poet is the type of artist best suited to represent the quantitative infinite (which is infinite by its boundlessness … the qualitative infinite is infinite because perfectly bounded: the viewer can neither take nor add anything from it … the Grand Canyon is an example of the 60

61

Bridging Space and Time former, whilst a beautiful rose may be an example of the latter), because he or she is not held to those standards of spatial consistency that are rightfully imposed on the painter.74 Poetry’s power to move the reader resides also in the huge discrepancy between the small actual spatiality of a printed poetic line, and the imagined infinite space that it can evoke. Developing the analogy with poetry, Herder remarks that ‘The sculptor remains indifferent to the space in which this feeling is to be expressed and given shape. Let Jupiter be the height of one measure or six, as long as his majesty and dignity are grasped by the senses of the artist and by those who look upon him; this will give him his space and his limits’.75 Certainly, even earlier, Herder thought that the viewer tapped into a statue’s magic by, as it were, catching it in the act of ‘nihilating’ its own physical space, and constituting its own autonomous spatiality. (Under Herder’s pre-​1778 Pygmalionic gaze the statue transforms itself by itself from dead marble to a quivering quasi-​flesh –​the statue emancipates itself from the ossified space of the antique and conquers for itself a living corporeality –​a perfect vicarious fantasy for a disenfranchised bourgeois, like Herder, who felt hemmed in by the stifling old mores of the dominant Junker aristocracy.)76 Previously, this spatiality would generously let in the spectator-​midwife, as suggested by fusion images (‘His soul speaks to it, not as if his soul sees, but as if it touches, as if it feels’).77 Now, the space of the statue comes across as essentially dis-​homogeneous, meaning ‘more than human in comparison to our own dwarf-​like stature’. Even here, the analogy with poetry is instructive; poetry can provide a feeling for the infinite, but it can be gloriously disrespectful of the imagination’s capacity to visualise that space and, in so doing, it thumbs its nose at an individual’s finitude. With Herder’s Sculpture, the brief, but extraordinarily intense, heyday of sculptural aesthetics in Germany may have closed. In the years following, there would be a gradual shift towards a distinctively pictorial sensibility, whereas sculpture was increasingly perceived as a medium that could not speak to modernity. In his 1809 lectures, the influential Romantic literary critic August Schlegel (1767–​1845) officially registered this historicist change of critical attitude, calling the modern age picturesque and, by contrast, designating the ancients as the ‘plastic’ (meaning ‘sculptural’) age.78 What is remarkable is that, in my view, this shift from one paradigm to the other was prepared by the very nature of the discourse on sculpture 61

62

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics that Winckelmann had initiated. His discourse was remarkably unconcerned about what the art critic Herbert Read (1893–​1968) would call the values of sculptural mass and gravity, and of volume as the space that a shape displaces in the air. Winckelmann looks only at the crust (as opposed to the solid core), but he even seeks to dispense with that! So he is at the absolute antipodes of Read’s sculptural values.79 It is true that Herder emphasises more than does Winckelmann the tactile aspect of sculpture, but not as a tool whereby mass can reveal itself by the resistance that it opposes to one’s fingertips; instead, it is used to bring out even more clearly the elusiveness of contour! And, though Herder defines sculpture as the objectification of the feeling of force (against painting as the medium of space), it is a force that displays itself as surface movement and not, again, as the sentiment of a ponderous mass. In short, Herder more than shares Winckelmann’s pictorial bias in the evaluation of sculpture. However, this particular pictorial bias was later fruitfully transplanted onto the territory of the aesthetics of painting. It was fruitful, because it allowed painting’s critique to free itself from the stranglehold of the ut pictura poesis principle and to pay attention to how there was more to a painting than the temporality and space of the fabula (story) –​there could be also the transfigured spatio-​temporality of the painted signifier. In this respect, Herder himself got the ball rolling, with this ‘kinetic’ reading of the ostensibly static medium of painting: It is light alone that gives painting unity, a vast, unutterable, miraculous unity that brings together everything new and diverse. A statue does not have its own light: it exists constantly in light and is designed for another, more comprehensive sense. By contrast, an enchanted ocean flows in every direction from a single point of light on a flat canvas, binding together every object into a new and unique creation … Chiaroscuro, as long as it is not made to depend on the fixity of sculpture, borrowing from what is dead, creates a magic panel of transformation, a sea of waves, stories, and figures, each of which dissolves into the other.80

It is true that what is being dealt with here is light, and values as opposed to the serpentine sculptural line; yet, the principle of the illusion of movement 62

63

Bridging Space and Time that was at the heart of the latter has been retained in the former. The spectator’s transfiguring gaze transforms what was a timeless plethora of objects fixed into a specific space (the visual narrative) and into a temporally inflected negation of that space (chiaroscuro melts original difference into a quasi-​hallucinatory unity). As I hope to show in another project, this principle has an important role in the pictorial writings of Friedrich Schlegel (1772–​1829), Friedrich Schelling (1775–​1854) and G.W.F. Hegel (1770–​1831). Equally significant would be to show how this group’s grafting of the kinetic paradigm onto pictorial theory went pari passu with a fundamental change of attitude towards the reconciliatory potential of sculpture.

Notes 1. For a comprehensive, authoritative and up-​to-​date biography of Lessing, see Hugh Barr H. Nisbet, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: His Life, Works, and Thought (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). For Winckelmann, see Wolfgang Leppman’s Winckelmann (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970), which, although dated, remains the standard biography in English. For a critical account of Lessing’s critique of Winckelmann, see Victor Rudowsky, ‘Lessing Contra Winckelmann’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44/​3 (1986), pp. 235–​43; Élisabeth Découltot, ‘Le Laocoön de Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. De l’imagination comme fondement d’une nouvelle méthode critique’, Les Études Philosophiques (P.U.F.) 2/​65 (2003), pp. 197–​212. 2. Lessing’s charge was false:  as Rudowski points out (Rudowski, pp.  237–​8), Winckelmann himself claimed that emotional restraint in sculpture depended on media-​ specific aesthetic constraints. In his 1764 History of the Art of Antiquity, we read that In representing heroes, the artist is allowed less latitude than the poet. The latter can portray them as they were in their own time, when the passions were as yet unrestrained by authority or by the artificial decorum of life, because the attributes represented in poetry have a necessary relation to the age and the condition of man but not to his figure. The artist, however, because he must select the most beautiful parts of the most beautiful appearances, is limited as to the level of expression of the passions, which must not become detrimental to the appearance (p. 205). Astonishingly, as Rudowski has shown, Lessing knew this two years before Easter 1766, when the Laocoön was published; the smoking gun is in the 1763

63

64

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics or 1764 draft of the Laocoön, where Lessing admits that ‘Herr Winckelmann himself has come, in his history of art, to the realisation that the sculptor is obliged to depict his subjects in a state of tranquility, so as to preserve the beauty of form, and that this is no law for the poet … On this matter we [i.e. Lessing and Winckelmann] are in agreement’ (quoted from Rudowski, p. 237). Why, then, does Lessing’s Laocoön charge Winckelmann of being fatally ignorant of media–​specific constraints upon expression? Rudowski suggests that Lessing’s argumentative style required the foil of intellectual opponents, be they real or imaginary (Rudowski, p. 235). 3. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön:  An Essay on the limits of Sculpture and Painting, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins, 1962), pp. 23–​4. 4. Winckelmann’s description of the work reads as follows: The mouth is full of sorrow, and the lowered bottom lip is heavy with it; in the upwardly drawn top lip, this sorrow is mixed with pain, which in a stirring of discontent, as at an undeserved and unworthy suffering, runs up to the nose, swelling it and manifesting itself in the dilated and upwardly drawn nostrils. Beneath the brow, the battle between pain and resistance, as if concentrated in this one place, is composed with great wisdom, for just as pain drives the eyebrows upward, so resistance to pain pushes the flesh above the eye down and against the upper eyelid, so that it is almost completely covered by the overlying flesh (HAA, pp. 313–​14). 5. It may readily be objected that the bulk of the Laocoön could not possibly address the Geschichte, since at the end of his book Lessing declares that Winckelmann’s magisterial treatise has finally appeared, and that he will not ‘venture another step without having read it’ (Lessing, Laocoön, p. 138). But there is clear evidence that Lessing was already familiar with that work: the so-​ called Paralipomenon 7 fragment (which Lessing penned in 1764), makes clear reference to the Geschichte. (I owe this information to Inka Mülder-​Bach, Im Zeichen Pygmalions Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der ‘Darstellung’ im 18. Jahrhundert (München: Fink Verlag, 1998), pp. 32–​3.) 6. The most famous version of the Pygmalion story is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, book X. The myth of Pygmalion functioned also as the key trope of a peculiar aesthetics of reception, explored in cogent detail by Oskar Bätschmann in his Pygmalion als Betrachter –​Die Rezeption von Plastik und Malerei in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts, in Wolfgang Kemp ed., Der Betrachter ist im Bild –​ Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionästhetik (Berlin: Dietrich Reimar Verlag, 1992), pp. 237–​67.

64

65

Bridging Space and Time 7. For the aesthetics of Hemsterhuis, see the old, but still extremely valuable, study by A. Funder, Die Ästhetik des Frans Hemsterhuis und ihre historischen Beziehungen (Bonn: Peter Henstein Verlag, 1913); also, E. Matassi, Hemsterhuis: Istanza Critica e Filosofia della Storia (Napoli: Guida Editori, 1983). For a thorough discussion of Herder’s aesthetics, see Hans Adler, Die Prägnanz des Dunkeln. Gnoseologie –​Ästhetik –​Geschichtsphilosophie bei Johann Gottfried Herder (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990); Mülder-​Bach, Im Zeichen Pygmalions. 8. Johann Gottfried Herder, Sculpture:  Some Observations on Sculpture’s Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, trans. Jason Geiger (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 95. 9. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 78. 10. That Winckelmann’s aesthetics hinge on a perceptual setting-in-motion of sculptural contour is a well-​worn topos of secondary literature. See Jeffrey Morrison, Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 56–​62; Walter Bosshard, Winckelmann –​Aesthetik der Mitte (Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1960), pp. 40–​4; Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 171. To my knowledge, however, only the late Gianni Carchia identified this movement as the site where different temporalities (whether phenomenological, historical or mythological) are felt to overlap and/​or diverge. See Gianni Carchia, Immagine e verità. Studi sulla tradizione classica, ed. Monica Ferrando (Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003), pp. 253–​63. 11. ‘The human spirit is essentially drawn toward variety … it [the human spirit] is made for variety, which animates it and prevents it from falling into boredom and inertia (dans l’ennui et dans la langueur)’ (Crousaz, Traité du beau, p. 12); ‘The soul has its needs, just as the body. One of the greatest human needs is to have one’s soul occupied. The boredom (ennui) which soon follows upon the inactivity of the soul is so painful, that one often engages in the most labourious tasks, so as to spare oneself its [ennui’s] torments’ (RC 6). Diderot makes the same point indirectly, through a revealing analogy: ‘everyone who walks through a picture gallery is really unconsciously acting the part of a deaf man who is amusing himself by examining the dumb who are conversing on subjects familiar to him. This is one of the points of view with which I always look at the pictures’ (Diderot, ‘Letter on the Deaf and Dumb’, p. 173). Note Diderot’s essentially ludic construction of the gaze: the point is to be amused by pictorial inventiveness (analogous to the curious gesticulation of the dumb), not to discover any truth: the sophisticated Salon spectator already knows all the stock topics by heart (just as the subjects discussed by the dumb are already familiar to the deaf man who ogles at them). On the idea of art as an antidote to ennui, and its central role in French aesthetics, see Ermanno Migliorini, Studi

65

6

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics sul pensiero estetico del settecento:  Crousaz, Dubos, André, Batteux, Diderot (Firenze: Il Fiorino, 1966), pp. 11; 84; 106; 156. Also, Bätschmann, pp. 245–​50. 12. The Académie royale de peinture et sculpture touted the Laocoön as a paradigm of technical excellence, as we can see in Gérard van Opstal’s seminar on the Laocoön group: Conférences de l’académie royale de peinture et de sculpture (Paris: A. Quantin, 1883), pp. 19–​27. 13. On this paradigm shift (from the ethical exemplarity of ancient writing to that of ancient sculpture), see the classic study by Ernst Busch, ‘Das Erlebnis des Schönen im Antikebild der Deutschen Klassik’, Deutsche Viertelsjahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistegeschichte XVIII (1940), pp. 26–​60. 14. Pierre-​Jean Cabanis (1757–​1808) and Pierre-​Charles Levesque (1736–​1812) offer striking illustrations of this belief. Both were convinced that certain human gestures had the capacity to condense and make visible ethical values and that Greek sculpture provided the most compelling examples of this significant corporeality. Along the same lines, Antoine Mongez (1747–​1845) claimed that an ancient cameo called Ajax Meditating on the Death of Achilles could offer to the illiterate Parisian masses a compelling glimpse of ancient warrior-​like virtue; quoted from Salvatore Settis, Futuro del classico, new edition (Torino: Einaudi, 2004), pp. 51–​2. 15. This Pygmalion-​aesthetics was seminal for Romanticism as a whole and it functioned as an index of the Romantic desire to animate the past in order to draw from it a meaning that seemed to be absent in the present. A 1766 letter by Swiss artist Hans Heinrich Füssli (known as Henry Fuseli: 1741–​1825) provides an astonishing testimony of the quickness and power with which Winckelmann’s aesthetics captured the European imagination. In the letter, Füssli remembers his encounter with the Niobe, which was a sculpture of a mother embracing her daughter, in the vain attempt to save her from murderous gods. The account reaches a climax in the imaginative transfiguration of the mother and the young maiden: Be quiet, wanderer! Young man eager to know, keep a silence of amazement! She is no Venus casting amorous glances. Fear not, she does not want to perturb your senses, but fill your soul with veneration, and edify your mind. Look at the honest grace on her face, the unimitable simplicity (Einfalt) in the sharp forms of the daughter’s head. No part of her is heightened or deepened by any excessive passion. Her eyes do not display the squinting of drunk desire, her gaze is not languorous, but open with innocent serenity. Her virginal breasts rise softly, swollen only by a child’s love. This has been granted to you, young man! Breathe deeper at this sight, enjoy a pure pleasure, and crown your delight with the quiet wish that you may find a bride just like her’.

66

67

Bridging Space and Time Cited in, Oskar Bätschmann, ‘Pygmalion als Betrachter. Die Rezeption von Plastik und Malerey in der zweite Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Der Betrachter ist im Bild. Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, ed. Martin Kemp (Berlin: Dietrich Reimar Verlag, 1992), pp. 238–​9. 16. Cf. Giuseppe Pucci, ‘L’Antichitá Greca e Romana’, in Estetica della Scultura, ed. Luigi Russo (Palermo: Aesthetica, 2003), pp. 9–​11. 17. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, ‘Description of the Torso of Hercules of Belvedere’, in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, trans. Theos. Davidson 2/​3 (1868; first published 1763), p. 188. 18. Johann Joachim Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity, trans. Harry Francis Malgrave (Los Angeles:  Getty Research Institute, 2006), p.  203. Hereafter, HAA. 19. Abbé Jean-​Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la pöesie et sur la peinture (Paris:  Pissot, 1755), p.  417. On the aesthetics of Dubos, see Charlotte Hogsett, Jean Baptiste Dubos on Art as Illusion (Institute et musée Voltaire, 1970). Jean-​Baptiste Dubos e l’estetica dello spettatore, ed. Luigi Russo (Palermo: Aesthetica 2003). 20. Dubos, Réflexions critiques, p. 235. 21. Winckelmann, ‘Description of the Torso’, p. 4. 22. Ibid., p.  189. It is worth noticing the withering criticism that the Goncourt brothers (Edmond de Goncourt [1822–​96] and Jules de Goncourt [1830–​70]) leveled at Winckelmann on precisely this point: The only work of art in the world to have given us the complete and absolute sensation of a masterpiece [is] … the Torso –​Yes, here in this Torso, so admirably human, is the divine sublimity of art; it draws its beauty from the representation of life: this breathing fragment of chest, these muscles at work, these palpitating entrails in a stomach that is digesting. For its beauty is that it is digesting, despite Winckelmann’s imbecilic encomium; he thinks he is honoring the masterpiece by saying that it does no such thing. Cited in Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Blind Spot:  An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008), p. 156. 23. The classic study of this phenomenon is Rensselaer W. Lee, Ut Pictura Poesis. The Humanistic Theory of Painting (New York: Norton, 1967). 24. Dubos explains it this way: The real, genuine passions that offer the most vivid sensations to our souls have such painful consequences, because the joyous

67

68

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics moments they afford are followed by such sad days. Could not art find the way to separate the nasty consequences of many passions from whatever pleasure they can afford us? Art could not, as it were, create beings of a new nature? Could it not produce objects that produce in us artificial passions capable of enthralling us when we feel them, but incapable of causing us real, authentic pains later? Poetry and painting succeed in doing this. (Réflexions critiques, p. 27.) 25. Winckelmann, HAA, pp. 195–​6. 26. This is how Lessing makes this rationalist point: since the whole infinite realm of perfection lies open to his (or the poet’s) description, this external form, beneath which perfection becomes beauty, can at best be only one of the least significant means by which he is able to awaken our interest in his characters (Lessing, Laocoön, p. 23). 27. Winckelmann, HAA, p. 196. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., p. 323. 30. Orlando Furioso, Canto VII, p. 12. 31. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 112. 32. Ibid., pp. 19–​20, italics mine. 33. Ibid., p. 64. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., p. 92. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., pp. 20–​ 1. Timomachus’ painting of Medea is not extant. Lessing’s acquaintance with it was through several ekphrastic fragments (135 to 139) of the Greek Anthology. The common motif of these fragments is wonder at how Timomachus’ Medea managed to combine persuasively sentiments that are ordinarily mutually exclusive (see, for instance, n.138: ‘The sword is in her hand, great is her wrath, wild is her eye, the tears are falling for her most unhappy children. The painter has made a medley of all, uniting things most uncombinable’, emphasis mine). For a contemporary critical reconstruction of Timomachus’ Medea, see Kathryn J. Gutzwiller, Seeing Thought: Timomachus’ Medea and Ecphrastic Epigram, American Journal of Philology 125/​3 (Whole Number 499), (Fall 2004), pp. 339–​86. 38. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 21. 39. Frans Hemsterhuis (1721–​90) was a Dutch polymath and philosopher. He was also an art lover and collector and shared in his century’s passion for ancient sculpture. By spelling out a ‘law of visual beauty’, his Letter on Sculpture is a remarkable attempt to integrate the quantitative approach of the scientific method with the first-personal, affective dimension of aesthetic experience.

68

69

Bridging Space and Time For a biography of Hemsterhuis, see Hans Moenkemeyer, Frans Hemsterhuis (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1975). 40. This is how Hemsterhuis puts the point in his 1768 Letter on Desires (which was an explanatory follow-​up to his 1765 Letter on Sculpture): If the soul could be affected by an object not through the organs, the time necessary to form an idea of the object would be reduced exactly to nothing. If the object were such that the soul could be affected by all the totality of its essence, the number of ideas would become absolutely infinite. If we imagine these two cases together, the totality or sum of these ideas would represent, directly and without temporal or spatial succession, all the totality of the object; or such an object would be united, in the most intimate and perfect way, to the essence of the soul –​and it is in that moment that we could say that the soul enjoys that object in the most perfect way. My translation of Frans Hemsterhuis Lettre sur les désirs, in Œuvres philosophiques de M.F. Hemsterhuis –​Tome Premier (Paris:  Imprimerie Jansen, 1790), p. 62. 41. Frans Hemsterhuis, Lettre sur la sculpture, in œuvres philosophiques de M.F. Hemsterhuis –​Tome Premier (Paris: Imprimerie Jansen, 1790), p. 12. 42. Hemsterhuis, Lettre sur la sculpture, p. 11. 43. He writes that ‘The imitation of all contours … pertains to sculpture alone’, Hemsterhuis, Lettre sur la sculpture, p.  9. My translation. Chiaroscuro is the pictorial suggestion of tri-​dimensionality via a mixture of light and dark values. 44. We read that ‘La qualité facile et deliée du contour total’, Hemsterhuis, Lettre sur la sculpture, p. 44. 45. ‘Le repose et la majesté‘, Hemsterhuis, Lettre sur la sculpture, p. 43. 46. Hemsterhuis, Lettre sur la sculpture, p. 25. 47. Hogarth’s 1753 The Analysis of Beauty famously distilled the essence of visual beauty into two formal properties: the bi-​dimensional, wavering ‘line of beauty’ and the tri-dimensional, serpentine ‘line of grace’. Hogarth says that ‘For as amongst the vast variety of waving-​lines that may be conceived, there is but one that truly deserves the name of the line of beauty, so there is only one precise serpentine-​line that I call the line of grace’ (p. 52). But Hogarth preemptively criticised any attempt (such as Winckelmann’s) to load the formal lines of beauty and grace with an ethical content; he saw such hybridisation of discourses as reproachable evasion from the difficult task of accounting for aesthetic properties. Many treatises on figurate art have lamentably done just that: faced with a seemingly ineffable je ne sais quoi of beauty, many authors found themselves ‘obliged so suddenly to turn into the broad,

69

70

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics and more beaten path of moral beauty; in order to extricate themselves out of the difficulties they seem to have met with in this: and withal forced for the same reasons to amuse their readers with amazing (but often misapplied) encomiums on deceased painters and their performances; wherein they are continually discoursing of effects instead of developing causes’ (Hogarth, p. iv). Winckelmann’s debt to Hogarth is clear, as Carl Justi had already pointed out in his monumental biography of the German scholar. See Carl Justi, Winckelmann, III, pp. 189–​96; quoted from Morrison, p. 32. But equally important is his implicit disagreement with Hogarth’s belief that aesthetics should be insulated from ethics, and focus only on pleasant formal dimensions (Morrison: Winckelmann, p. 32). To my mind, this disagreement emerges most vividly in the way in which Winckelmann reinterprets Hogarth’s aquatic imagery. For Hogarth, to follow with our eye the ins-​and-​outs of beautiful muscles is like a delightful nautical romp through playful waves ‘as pleasantly as the lightest skiff dances over the gentlest wave’ (Hogarth, p. 61). Against this, consider what happens to Winckelmann as he gazes upon the quivering contours of the Belvedere Torso: ‘As in a swelling movement of the sea, the previously smooth surface sprouts with a vague unrest into rippling waves, whereof one swallows another and again throws it out and rolls it forward, so, with the same soft swell and ripple, does the one muscle pass into the other, and a third, which rises between them and seems to strengthen their movement, loses itself in the first, and our gaze is, as it were, swallowed up at the same time’ (Winckelmann, ‘Description of the Torso’ p. 188, emphasis mine) –​formal perfection, with good peace of Hogarth, is not just a source of refined, harmless pleasure; it can also overwhelm us (and inspire us) with the force of the sublime. 48. The translation and the commentary were published together in 1781 in Der Teutsche Merkur, pp. 211–​35 (now in Herder, Sammelte Werke 15, pp. 304–​26). Herder never met Hemsterhuis personally, nor did they ever entertain any correspondence with each other. Nevertheless, Herder thought of Hemsterhuis as a congenial ally, as is also evinced by two letters. The first one is to H. Ch. Boie, dated 6 October 1772, in which he expresses an interest in the Letter on Sculpture: ‘Please help me find Hemsterhuis’s Essai sur l’homme et ses rapports, and his Lettre sur la Sculpture. Everyone tells me that I have much in common with this man. This book has still hundreds of my favourite ideas –​in the antechamber of life, we must have sat at the desk of the same master!’ (in J.G. Herder, Briefe. Gesamtausgabe, Zweiter Band Mai 1771–​April 1773, bearbeitet von W. Dobbek und G. Arnold, Weimar, Hermann Bohlaus Nachfolger, 1977, p. 240). The second letter is to Hamann, dated 2 January 1773, in which the formulation is slightly changed. Here he writes that ‘It is as if in the Platonic hyperuranium we have shared the same desk (p. 287)’. I owe the reference to

70

71

Bridging Space and Time these letters to Michele Cometa (see his Postfazione, in J.G. Herder, Plastica, trans. Elio Matassi (Palermo: Aesthetica 1994), p. 88, n.8). 49. In a passage of the Lettre sur la sculpture, Hemsterhuis avers that sculpture addresses two senses, those of touch and sight (OP I, p. 43). But this remains an isolated claim within a quintessentially ocular aesthetics. It had to remain an isolated claim, because tactility’s effective inclusion in the doctrine would have been destructive; the sense of touch requires time to do its job, whereas for Hemsterhuis the aesthetic power of a statue rests on the feeling that its apprehension requires no time. In the later 1779 dialogue Simon, or The Faculties of the Soul, the character of Socrates chastises his interlocutor, the sculptor Mnesarchus, for associating sculpture with the sense of sight and of touch. For Socrates, sculpture addresses sight alone. He reminds his audience of the old saying that –​in the eyes of the statue of Polyxena carved by Polyclitus –​one could see the entire Trojan war. He then wryly notices that Mnesarchus could hardly see it by laying his fingertips on Polyxena’s eyes (OP II, p. 96). Naturally, Socrates’s elenchus is question-​begging, as it presupposes premises that Hemsterhuis does not share (meaning sculptural form as the expression of the invisible). Nevertheless, Hemsterhuis may here be –​in a spirit of playful palinody –​implicitly retracting his earlier association of sculpture with tactility. 50. Johann Gottfried Herder, First Grove, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), pp. 99–​100. 51. This is how Herder puts the point: ‘A ravaged, ugly, or distorted form, is torn to pieces, Hippolytus in Euripides’ play, Medea contorted with rage, Philoctetes in the worst convulsions of his illness, someone in the throes of death, or a decomposing corpse struggling against the worms –​all these are repugnant when encountered by the feeling hand as it advances. Instead of encountering ideas, it encounters horror, and instead of the imitation of the things that are, it encounters the terrible degeneration of that which is no more. Atrocious art that bestows form upon deformity!’ (Herder, Sculpture, p. 57). 52. Hemsterhuis, Lettre sur la sculpture, p. 22. 53. Herder, First Grove, pp. 100–​1. 54. Ibid., pp. 100–​1. 55. Ibid., p. 140. 56. Ibid., p. 141. 57. Ibid., p. 160. 58. By this I mean that lyrical or erotic poetry can imbue various corporeal features with the energy of the desiring gaze. This shared energy is the common

71

72

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics denominator that holds these parts together in the reader’s imagination. We do not feel that the sequential narrative disintegrates the object because, just as a string holds pearls together, the ‘glue’ of erotically inflected language holds together the various sites of the desired body. 59. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 105–7. 60. Even Lessing, in another notable exception to his own principles, allows for the transposition of the spatial into the temporal unity of erotic desire: ‘It is not because Ovid shows us the beautiful body of his Lesbia part by part –​“What arms and shoulders did I now see and touch! And how her bosom offered itself, heaving, to be squeezed! Below the slender breast the body tapered in perfect moderation, Oh, how youthfully slender hips and thighs arched!” (Amores I.5.19ff) –​that we believe we are enjoying the sight that he enjoyed, but because he does it with an intense sensuousness that so easily stirs our passions’, (Lessing, Laocoön, p. 112). 61. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 6. 62. Herder, Sculpture, pp. 43–​4. I am amending Jason Geiger’s translation of ‘ineinander’, which he renders as ‘in depth’, as well as his translation of ‘auf einmal in-​neben-​bei einander’, which he poses as ‘in space’. What Herder has in mind is the Winckelmannian quasi-​hallucinatory phenomenology of contours seeming simultaneously distinct and collapsing into each other. Geiger’s translation flattens this point, missing the force of sculpture’s specific impact on the spectator. 63. Winckelmann, HAA, p. 203. 64. I note in passing that the nineteenth-​century Kunstwissenschäftlers (Konrad Fiedler [1841–​95], Alois Riegl [1858–​1905], Adolf von Hildebrand [1847–1​921], Heinrich Wölfflin [1864–​1945] will upend Herder’s association of tactile values with temporality; in their view, time is the province of the so-​called ‘optic’ values. When these theorists of ‘pure visibility’ spoke of optic elements, they thought of fuzzy contours, sfumato, aerial perspective –​in a word, of rather indeterminate perceptual values whose ‘glissando’ cannot be a matter of an instantaneous apprehension. Conversely, crisply delineated forms were taken to be within the immediate purview of a sight that is operating ‘haptically’. 65. Herder, Sculpture, p. 96. 66. Winckelmann, HAA, p. 7. 67. Johann Gottfried Herder, Fourth Grove, in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, trans. Gregory Moore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 244. 68. Herder, First Grove, p. 244. 69. Herder, Sculpture, p. 40. 70. Ibid., p. 41. 71. Ibid., pp. 94–​5, italics mine. 72. Winckelmann, HAA, p. 196. 73. Herder, Sculpture, p. 95.

72

73

Bridging Space and Time 74. This is a point that Burke stressed well in advance of Lessing. See Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and the beautiful, ed. Adam Philips (Oxford: OUP, 1998; first published 1756), p. 55–​6. 75. Herder, Sculpture, p. 95. 76. I owe the idea of the (spectator-​assisted) artwork’s annihilation of real space to Sartre. See Jean-​Paul Sartre, The Imaginary: A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination, trans. Jonathan Webber (New  York:  Routledge, 2004), pp. 189–​ff. 77. Herder, Sculpture, p. 41. 78. August Schlegel, Über Dramatische Kunst und Literatur –​Vorlesungen. Erster Teil (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1809), p. 15. 79. The classic statement of this view is by Barbara Maria Stafford, ‘Beauty of the Invisible: Winckelmann and the Aesthetics of Imperceptibility’, in Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschichte, 43 Bd., H. 1. (1980), pp. 65–​78. 80. Herder, Sculpture, p. 62.

73

74

3 Correcting Lessing’s Error E.H. Toelken’s Addendum to Laokoon, 1822 Eric Garberson

In 1822 the Berlin professor E.H. Toelken (1785–​1863) published the text of a lecture delivered that year under the seemingly innocuous title On the Differing Relation of Ancient and Modern Painting to Poetry, An Addendum to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s Laokoon.1 Never mentioning the Laocoön sculpture, or key issues that had so concerned earlier commentators (such as the moment depicted, idealism versus realism),2 it focuses on Lessing’s failure to recognise a fundamental difference between the ancients and the moderns. Although silently omitting the terms time and space, Toelken mostly follows Lessing’s identification of the different means employed by painting and poetry in their representations: forms and colours versus sequential speech. The error he seeks to correct is Lessing’s assumption that the natural laws arising from these means remain always and everywhere the same. For modern painting, as Lessing recognised, these laws necessarily require depicting the world as it actually appears to the eye and, consequently, restriction to a single moment. Subject to different historical conditions, however, ancient painting naturally borrows from poetry, employing personifications and freely combining several moments and places. Because such borrowing is inappropriate to the profoundly different conditions of modernity, Toelken limits the modern imitation of ancient painting to formal properties alone. He thus stands somewhat outside of 74

75

Correcting Lessing’s Error the main line of reception of Laokoon, advancing a primarily historical, rather than theoretical, framework for considering the relation of visual and literary representation to each other and to their cultural context. At the same time, however, he takes up positions that promote, or at least anticipate, the movement of nineteenth-​century art away from the imitation of ancient models and towards modes of representation that not only maintain but also extend Lessing’s strictures. Aside from a short but positive review in 1822, and scattered minor references, the text has attracted little scholarly notice.3 Its significance lies in demonstrating the wider critical and popular reception of Lessing’s Laokoon in the early nineteenth century. Now virtually unknown, Toelken was a prominent figure in the Berlin art world, well into the 1840s. Through teaching and professional activities, he reached a broad audience of students, artists and the educated public. After briefly introducing Toelken and the venue for his lecture, this essay provides a close contextual reading of his addendum to Laokoon, showing how he both corrected and reinforced Lessing’s conclusions.

E.H. Toelken Like many of his contemporaries, Toelken was broadly educated across fields now defined as philosophy, philology, history and archaeology.4 From 1804 to 1807 he attended classes at the Georg-​August-​Universität in Göttingen before embarking on an extended period of travel that included a semester to study painting at the art academy in Dresden and a long stay in Italy. Residing mainly in Rome, he studied in the city’s libraries, visited its many collections of ancient and modern art and associated with the large expatriate community of German and Danish artists and scholars. Back in Göttingen, he received his doctoral degree in November 1811 with a dissertation on Plato’s political theory; in March 1812 he defended his Habilitation (the second dissertation required to teach in a German university) on the statue of Zeus in the Temple at Olympia (c.590 BCE). Drawing on his broad preparation, he offered a range of courses, but with an emphasis on ancient art and religion. Having been refused a permanent position in Göttingen, Toelken moved to Berlin in 1814. By November he had defended another Habilitation at 75

76

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics the Friedrich-​Wilhelms-​Universität, published in 1815 as On Bas-​Relief and the Difference between Composition in Sculpture and Painting.5 He immediately began teaching as a Privatdozent (adjunct lecturer), supplementing his meager income with projects in the royal art collections. In 1823 he secured an appointment as full professor and in 1830 a full-​time position in the antiquities department at the newly opened Royal Museum. At the University he offered an irregular rotation of courses that focused primarily on the history of art. In the summer semester he usually offered a survey, initially developed in Göttingen, on the arts of design in antiquity (Archaeologie der zeichnenden Künste), covering architecture, painting and sculpture through Roman times. He often supplemented this with courses devoted to a specific period, medium or collection in Berlin; in the 1820s he taught ancient painting three times, once by popular demand, and modern painting twice. In 1825 and 1828 he taught a well-​attended course on Horace’s Ars poetica (c. first century BCE). Toelken’s other regular course bore the title General Art Theory or Aesthetics (Allgemeine Kunstlehre oder Aesthetik). From 1818 until 1855 he offered it almost every winter semester, when, due to the shorter days (which restricted studio time) students from the neighbouring art academy (Akademie der Künste) would be more likely to attend. Although art students could, and often did, enroll in the University’s courses, Toelken also taught his aesthetics for a short time at the art academy (1832–​7), where he also served as Secretary for many years. Judging from the title, ‘General Art Theory’, his course had a more practical orientation than those taught by Hegel (Philosophy of Fine Art) in the 1820s or Heinrich Gustav Hotho (1802–​73, Philosophy of the Beautiful and Art) beginning in the 1830s. Toelken, like his colleagues, most likely covered both art and literature as aesthetics was, then as now, not exclusively identified with the visual arts.6

The Venue and the Text Toelken delivered his Lessing lecture on 12 January 1822 at the yearly anniversary celebration (Stiftungsfest) of the Gesellschaft der Freunde der Humanität (Society of the Friends of Humanity), known as the Humanitätsgesellschaft. Founded in 1797, this was one of the oldest and most active of the many societies and associations that flourished in Berlin 76

7

Correcting Lessing’s Error from the late eighteenth well into the nineteenth century.7 Its membership was drawn from the growing educated middle class and consisted mainly of government officials, doctors, lawyers, successful merchants, artists and architects, teachers at the city’s elite secondary schools (Gymnasien) and, after the founding of the University in 1810, professors in disciplines across the humanities and natural sciences. The purpose of the society was the open, disinterested exchange of ideas in a collegial atmosphere free of life’s distractions (such as business, politics and women, who were not allowed to join). At the regular Saturday evening meeting one member would present a brief paper on a current topic in his field, followed by questions and a dinner with musical entertainment. Talks were generally accessible and unencumbered with specialised jargon, with topics drawn from the full range of pursuits represented by the membership. Over the fifteen years that he was a member (1819–​34), Toelken spoke 28 times on both ancient and modern art.8 His Lessing lecture, however, reached a much broader audience as the ceremonial address at the Stiftungsfest. Open to special honoured guests and invited friends (both male and female), this celebration was held in a room that could accommodate up to 200 persons at the Royal York Masonic lodge, where the society also held its regular meetings. Culminating in a banquet with musical entertainment, it also included opening remarks by the director and the secretary’s account of the year’s activities. Both often took this opportunity to reflect on the Society’s traditional and statutory commitment to the fostering of humanity through free sociability and active, but non-​specialist, engagement with the arts and sciences.9 This interest in human intellectual and spiritual development, within the individual and society at large, enjoyed broad currency around the time of the Society’s founding, but it was particularly associated with Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–​1803), who had put forth a broad definition of humanity and philosophical principles for his historical study, most notably in his Letters on the Advancement of Humanity, (1793–​7) and Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind, (1784–​5).10 In keeping with the occasion, Toelken’s lecture begins by relating the topic at hand to the Society’s mission. Drawing on, but not naming Herder, it quickly outlines how the proper appreciation and historical study of ancient and modern art contribute to a deeper understanding of human 77

78

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics nature. This also makes evident the critical framework for identifying and correcting Lessing’s error, which might otherwise have remained implicit, as in Toelken’s similarly conceived study of bas-​relief. His introduction to Herder probably came through Christian Gottlob Heyne (1729–​1812), who was a renowned and prolific scholar of ancient literature and art in Göttingen. A longtime friend of Herder, Heyne was engaged in editing volumes in his complete works during Toelken’s student years. Heyne is himself known for taking a rigorous critical-​historical approach to antiquity in its entirety. He trained many young scholars in the philological seminar and taught an influential introduction to ancient art attended by generations of young amateurs and artists.11 Toelken’s published text is very short, being barely 32 pages, with no illustrations, like the original lecture.12 Minimal footnotes provide specific references to ancient textual sources (by author and passage, not edition) and reproductions of specific monuments. The text falls into four sections: a four-​paragraph introduction; a recap of Lessing’s argument with an initial comparison of ancient and modern painting; a long list of ancient examples collapsing Greek, Etruscan and Roman into one undifferentiated category; and a more developed comparison leading to final conclusions. Following current usage, ‘modern’ refers to the period stretching back from the present to about the fifteenth century. Addressed to an educated, but non-​specialist, audience, the tone is engaging but professorial and polemical. Moving swiftly from point to point in artful, often opaque turns of phrase, the argument is not always internally consistent or fully developed.

Introduction: Art, History and Natural Laws Toelken opens with a strong assertion about the proper study of art, which, after a digression, he develops as the basis for his addendum to Laokoon: Engagement with the products of ancient and modern art only becomes truly satisfying and praiseworthy when it rises above the always limiting amateur concern with the singularly excellent, or the explication of mysterious monuments, to the seeking out and recognition of universal laws, by which human nature appears to be inextricably bound throughout its advancing development in race after race.13

78

79

Correcting Lessing’s Error The thinly veiled charge of dilettantism and insufficient scholarly rigor directed at those who focus on singular masterpieces or lose themselves in sorting out iconographic puzzles was broadly applicable at the time. It also encompasses, somewhat circumspectly, the many treatments of the Laocoön sculpture by Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–​68), Lessing and their successors, which posit sweeping generalisations from the analysis of a single work. In a more direct jab at the intense, often myopic German fascination with ancient Greece, Toelken also proclaims that so-​ called golden periods of brief artistic flowering are just as limited in meeting the requirements of good scholarship. As our knowledge increases, he concludes, the number of masterpieces declines and our judgement becomes more indulgent, albeit only apparently. Gradually, and in everything, we seek and honour man (den Menschen) more than his work. Before developing this central idea, Toelken inserts a pre-​emptive strike against those who would privilege textual sources.14 Obliquely acknowledging such opponents, he states that, with greater knowledge, the incomplete and offensive become meaningful and instructive in their own right. Painting and sculpture offer clearer, more direct insight into the spirit of an age or people than any other remnants of human production, even learned texts. The painted picture places the past directly, and palpably, before the bodily eye (4). Here, Toelken demonstrates, but does not explain, his acceptance of the widely held view, expressed but not originating in Lessing, that visual perception is the most immediate.15 This view underlies his acceptance of Lessing’s principles and their continuing validity in the modern period. Toelken then turns to the contrast between the limited study of individual works and the wider study of man himself. If one surveys all at once, in a single series, the products (Hervorbringungen) of peoples widely dispersed in time and space, something slowly becomes evident that might at first seem strange, but is really a mysterious law (ein geheimnißvolles Gesetz). Namely, the rules (Vorschriften) that every period considers essential, natural and indisputable are only conditionally valid. Man’s development over time and in different places produces the laws of his action (Verfahren), not arbitrarily (willkürlich), but necessarily (nothwendig) under always different conditions, yet in full accordance with more general laws of a higher order (4–​5). 79

80

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics Wrapping up his introduction, Toelken addresses his audience members directly, asking them to put aside all recent philosophical speculation about art and beauty, so that they might understand the example that he presents to demonstrate this mysterious law. Mixing his metaphors, he denounces the preceding several decades of aesthetic discourse as a blinding sleep or fog and advocates jumping back to pick up the torch where Lessing and Winckelmann set it down16 (5). In effect, Toelken has sketched for his audience a philosophically grounded method for the study of art that draws broadly on the work of Herder and his own teacher Heyne.17 Toelken’s ‘mysterious law’ restates the fundamental insight advanced by both that the products of human culture arise under local conditions, yet remain subject to universal laws, not just of human nature, but also of other independent entities, including art with all of its medium and genre subdivisions. Each in his own way rejected pure speculation, or the deduction of particulars from first principles without recourse to observation. They advocated instead the careful examination of many particulars across time and space in order to discern universal laws.18 In effect, however, all particulars are measured against largely a priori conceptions of humanity, art and so forth; because locally contingent, nothing ever exactly complies with all universal laws, or perfectly embodies true humanity. Thus, no single period, genius or masterpiece can reveal, or be taken to establish, all laws definitively. As Toelken seems to recognise in his cryptic remark that critical judgement becomes only apparently more indulgent, this is decidedly not cultural relativism, in which all times and cultures are of equal value. Still, it is a call to examine each on its own terms, which, by bracketing out contingencies of time and place, allows glimpses of the otherwise invisible universal laws of human nature, of the arts individually and as a group and so forth.19 Toelken’s addendum to Laokoon is a contribution to this larger project and thus to the mission of the Humanitätsgesellschaft.

Lessing: Right but also wrong To help his audience pick up Lessing’s torch, Toelken restates, positively but selectively, the basic premise that opens chapter sixteen of Laokoon, where Lessing developed, with the clarity and grace unique to him, the 80

81

Correcting Lessing’s Error essential difference between poetry and painting as arising from the different means that each employs: measured speech for poetry and form and colour for painting. Missing here are three key terms still central to most discussions of Laokoon: ‘sign’ (Zeichen), ‘time’ (Zeit), and ‘space’ (Raum). Rhetorically, omitting these terms allows Toelken to exclude deeper semiotic and philosophical considerations that are not appropriate to the ceremonial occasion or to his specific argument. As that argument develops, however, it becomes apparent that the latter two no longer work as a pair to ground the difference between poetry and painting. Linking back to his opening premises, Toelken grants the self evidence of the principles derived from this revised difference in means: ‘All known laws announce themselves therein as universally valid; that which does not follow them is mistaken’.20 But, he immediately qualifies this assertion, noting with gentle irony that whilst Lessing did not devote the same fond attention to modern as to ancient art, his laws apply in full only to the former. Amongst the ancients, the difference between poetry and painting was wholly different. To support this contention, Toelken begins by addressing what the anonymous reviewer called the ‘known conflict’ (die bekannte Widerstreit) between Lessing’s assertions and the Greek saying ‘painting is mute poetry’, known to all and attributed to Simonides (c.556–​468 BCE).21 To demonstrate that Lessing had been wrong to dismiss this as a misleading conceit in the preface to Laokoon, Toelken quickly summarises passages from several sources, showing that amongst the ancients mention of one art nearly always included the other (6–​7). Horace opens his Art of Poetry with a simile from painting and more than once subjects painting and poetry to the same laws, as does Aristotle his Poetics (c.335 BCE).22 In their descriptions of paintings, the elder and younger Philostratus both appeal to poetry.23 Plutarch asserts that the two arts were identical in the purpose and objects of their representations, despite differing in their means and modes of mimesis.24 That other writers say much the same is a bald assertion that Toelken supports with only a single footnote to the compilation of ancient sources in Franciscus Junius’s Painting of the Ancients.25 Playing on the idea of error (Irrtum), Toelken concludes that such general agreement amongst the ancients arose not from an error, as Lessing assumed, but rather from the real relation that then existed between painting and poetry. Still, Lessing, from whom one does not expect errors, was completely 81

82

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics correct about all other periods. Living more in antiquity than the present, Winckelmann, too, had failed to bring out the difference between ancient and modern painting26 (6–​7). Drawing an implicit but damning contrast, Toelken states flatly that simply looking at ancient and modern painting together will make the difference between them immediately apparent. To ground this comparison, he provides a condensed summary of the specific principles, or laws, set forth in chapter sixteen of Laokoon. Time and space are still missing, but the synopsis is otherwise accurate: The proper object of poetry is actions; the proper object of painting is bodies with visible properties. Poetry depicts bodies only in so far as they act; painting can represent actions only in so far as they appear visible in bodies. Representation in poetry is successive, showing what occurs sequentially; representation in art always shows only a single moment.27

He then contrasts how these laws manifest themselves in the respective periods. In modern painting they are so self-​evident as to need no explanation: ‘A painting that seeks to change the visible appearance of objects and to represent all at once more than what occurs in a single moment in a single place would be for us not just bad but nonsensical and utterly impossible’.28 Also limited in its means to form and colour, ancient painting could only show visible appearances. However, with the transfer of metaphor from poetry into art, objects are not always depicted according to their visible properties. Instead, animate human forms represent places and geographic features, times of day, human attributes and other abstract concepts. In a last comment before beginning his recitation of examples, he observes dryly that the extent of this practise often surprises even those who know to expect it (8–​9). In setting the contrast up in this way, Toelken sought to make his audience more receptive to ancient painting, by drawing its members’ attention to the expectations that he knew that they brought with them; for instance, he points out the disgust that moderns naturally feel at departures from pictorial naturalism and how foreign the ancients’ use of visual metaphor remains. Similar derogatory views recur in the literature on ancient painting. Toelken does not engage this directly, but he cites from it in the notes 82

83

Correcting Lessing’s Error to both the Laokoon lecture and the study of bas-​relief. A brief examination of this literature indicates that whilst it anticipates some of his specific concerns, the impetus for his correction of Lessing’s error came principally from the historical method set forth at the start of the lecture. Indeed, Toelken’s reminder regarding modern expectations recalls Herder’s admonition, also offered in response to Lessing’s Laokoon, that ‘[n]‌othing is more dangerous than making a delicacy of our taste into a universal principle and elevating it to a law’.29 Toelken, like Herder in the Shakespeare essay and elsewhere, sought to distinguish between historically contingent manifestations and the universal principles of a given art form, be it tragedy or the ode, painting or relief.30 In Toelken’s day scholars had only just begun to examine ancient painting on its own terms. Surprisingly, there was little explicit engagement with Lessing’s Laokoon and no attempt to resolve the ‘known conflict’ between it and the ancient sources. Eighteenth-​century publications of the new discoveries at Herculaneum present the ancient works as isolated images and in conformity with the modern hierarchy of genres and distinctions between painting and decoration.31 The accompanying text is primarily descriptive, with much antiquarian detail and minimal formal analysis. Little attempt is made to understand, historically, the modes of representation employed and the ancient use of allegory is disparaged as ‘distorting’.32 Much the same is true of publications of vase painting, which, building on statements by Winckelmann, had been integrated into the history of painting as a fine art.33 Around 1800 scholarly surveys began to move beyond an earlier view of ancient painting as inferior. Some concerns were primarily technical (restricted palette, limited command of chiaroscuro), whilst others drew broader conclusions from the lack of perspective and rudimentary, relief-​like composition seen in surviving works. In lectures delivered between 1799 and 1803 in Berlin at the Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Humanitätsgesellschaft, Aloys Hirt, professor at the Akademie der Künste and later at the University, examines materials and techniques (fresco, encaustic, mosaic, pigments), as well as the relative sophistication of ancient painting. Working deductively from general definitions of the arts, he argues that the same developmental scheme must have held in antiquity as in the Renaissance, and so ancient painting must have been 83

84

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics as good as ancient sculpture, and thus ancient painters must have exact modern counterparts.34 Hirt discounts the known monuments (wall and vase paintings) as lower-​quality decorative works, and does not let their insufficiency stand in the way of an argument based in a general theory of the arts. In a series of lectures delivered to an audience of prominent men and women in Dresden in 1811, Carl August Böttiger provides a thorough overview of past scholarship, strongly endorsing the change to more positive views.35 Not surprisingly, for a close friend of Heyne, he specifically rejects the idea that the ancients should be judged using the criteria of the moderns, suggesting instead that they be studied on their own terms. In another set of lectures delivered in 1810, Böttiger challenges his non-​specialist audience not to impose its modern expectations on the Aldobrandini Wedding, a large copy of which was displayed before its members in the lecture hall.36 From its discovery in 1600–​1, until the excavations at Pompeii and Herculaneum, this late-​Augustan work had been one of the very few ancient paintings known to scholars and artists, and its fame and importance continued well into the nineteenth century.37 Satisfied with the symbolic indication of place, Böttiger observes, the ancients would not have found the lack of perspective a particular disadvantage, nor would they have been troubled by the simultaneous representation of successive moments in a sequence of undefined spaces. Echoing Levesque, Böttiger attributes this to the sculptural principle of ancient art (which privileged the beautiful rendering of a single figure) and ancient painting’s dependence on both relief sculpture and conventions of theatrical scenery. Although he does not address the broader question of visual metaphor raised by Toelken, Böttiger identifies the figures as both real and allegorical-​mythological at the same time. Here he specifically argues against the past error of interpreting the painting as either the mundane representation of a wedding or, following Winckelmann, the marriage of Peleus and Thetis. The same move towards a more historical approach is seen in changing interpretations of the descriptions of ancient paintings by Philostratus the Elder (c.190 BCE).38 In his Observations on Painting of 1762, Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn advances the fundamental principle that a painting could naturally show only: 84

85

Correcting Lessing’s Error (1) the event(s) of a single moment; (2) what the eye can grasp in a single glance; (3) a coherent setting appropriate to the action depicted.39 The wise ancients would have been horrified by offences against these principles, and so Philostratus must have been looking at pictures in series when he described multiple events and places together. In the text of a lecture published two years later, the Comte de Caylus also states that painting cannot show succession and must limit itself to what the eye can grasp all at once. He questions Philostratus’s knowledge of painting and calls his descriptions impossible, ill-​conceived fictions.40 In the introduction to the German translation of Caylus’s collected essays, Christian Adolf Klotz states with outraged indignation that Philostratus invented these fictions simply to serve the mania for description (Schilderungssucht) of his degenerate age. Following only the rules of his own verbal art, Philostratus describes paintings that violate the unities of action and time; for Klotz, such pictures exceed what painting can, or at least should, actually do.41 It should be noted here that in chapter 21 of Laokoon Lessing took a very similar approach to the interpretation of Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles (although Toelken does not mention this passage). Past commentators were wrong, Lessing says, to assume that everything Homer described was actually on the shield. In accordance with the principles of his own verbal art, the poet filled out his description (couched as the narrative of the shield’s making) with elements in between the single pregnant moments that the artist, bound by his own principles, must have shown. Although he denies painters of Homer’s time any command of modern techniques, like perspective, Lessing assumes that they were still bound by the timeless underlying law that painting could depict only a single moment. In the 1790s, reception of Philostratus was shifted in a decisive, but not yet definitive, way by Heyne in lectures delivered to his university colleagues in Göttingen.42 He identifies Philostratus’s descriptions as pedagogical demonstrations of rhetorical techniques occasioned by real paintings, which can be revealed by stripping away the rhetorical overlay.43 Heyne remarks that Philostratus described much that cannot or should not be painted and he cautions against taking the descriptions as models for 85

86

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics what painting should be, since even painters of the best periods of antiquity painted things better left to the poets. He does not, however, give any historical specificity to this rather stark assertion that poetry and painting each have their own proper sphere. This brief survey of the earlier literature also suggests why Toelken omitted the terms space and time from his synopsis of Lessing’s laws. If the depiction of space was not found amongst the ancients, then it could not be one of painting’s universal characteristics, like the forms and colours that it always used. Although Toelken does not explicitly engage in the debate about whether the ancients knew and used perspective, his discussion (especially in the presentation of examples) shows that he shared the view that they were unconcerned with the naturalistic rendering of space. In his earlier study of bas-​relief, he followed Böttiger on the overriding sculptural principle of ancient art, which led it to privilege the beautiful rendering of a single figure over the spatially coherent arrangement of several figures.44 Space is absent from the sequential principle of ancient painting and included only in the principles of modern naturalism, which require that painting depict the world as it appears to the eye, showing no more than what can be seen in one place, (Ort) in one moment (Moment). In effect, time and space are collapsed into a single principle, as in the German word Augenblick, which implies the temporal and spatial unity of a single viewpoint (Toelken uses this more often than the Latin-​derived Moment). The terms time and space no longer function as a pair to ground the difference between poetry and painting in antiquity or later.

Examples of Ancient Painting Although essentially an organised list, Toelken’s presentation of examples is enlivened with brief but evocative descriptions, liberal use of adjectives and the occasional direct address (‘do we not see’). The examples are either descriptions in ancient textual sources or known works of ancient art as illustrated in publications dating as far back as the early eighteenth century (9–​25). He accords each equal value as evidence, often citing one to confirm the prevalence of a particular ancient practise demonstrated in the other. Ancient authors are cited by name alone and without comment 86

87

Correcting Lessing’s Error on their reliability. In the text, most works are only vaguely identified with brief phrases, such as ‘amongst the paintings at Herculaneum’, or ‘the most wonderful example’. Ancient descriptions come from three main textual sources: the Imagines of the two Philostrati, mainly the Elder; Pausanias, Description of Greece; and Pliny the Elder, Natural History; supplemented with single references to a few others. For reproductions, Toelken most often refers to his own translation of Aubin Louis Millin’s Galerie mythologique (Paris, 1811), which was a standard reference work at the time. Reprinted from the original plates, simple line drawings reproduce works across media; numbering of individual works on the plates corresponds to brief descriptions arranged as a running list of gods and heroes.45 Toelken also cites sources that reproduce works in specific media. Somewhat surprisingly, he has only one reference to the Pitture d’Ercolano, but several to publications of ancient vases.46 Without comment he includes many examples of relief from publications of the Capitoline Museum and the Museo Pio-​Clementino in Rome and descriptions in his own (un-​illustrated) study. Here, he had explained that relief employs the materials and techniques of sculpture, but the compositional principles of painting.47 Toelken presents his examples in four loose groups, describing a few in detail, yet sketching most with no more than a sentence or two. He occasionally inserts remarks pointing out how his interpretive framework solves past iconographic puzzles, or makes sense of the surprising or strange. The first group (9–​14) demonstrates the use of personifications to represent locations and geographic features. For example, in the depiction of Hercules and Telephos from Herculaneum, the location of the story is indicated not by an actual mountainous landscape, but rather by an imposing female figure who personifies the highland region known as Arcadia.48 In other instances, the painter, no less than the poet, allows mountains to lament and rivers to mourn, as in the Death of Hippolytus described by Philostratus (II.4). The second group (14–​17) shows the use of personifications to represent a range of abstract concepts: times of day, as in the figure of night in scenes of Diana and Endymion; qualities of depicted persons and deities, as in the figures described by Pausanias on the throne of Zeus at Olympia (V,II.2); or personified mental states, as in the Calumny of Apelles described in Lucian’s Slander (c. second century BCE). 87

8

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics Moving into his third set of examples (17–​21) Toelken remarks that it is not surprising to find that, in ancient art, space and place (Raum, Ort) had a completely different meaning than in modern art.49 Where the modern painter would never think to show more than the eye could see at once, the ancients, working with merely symbolic and suggestive forms, felt no such compunction. They freely juxtaposed geographically distant ‘places’, as on a vase showing Hercules carrying the wounded Jupiter from the figure of Sicily towards that of Libya, or arrayed personifications representing the entire earth beneath Helios riding across the sky on his chariot.50 Where a modern painter like Claude would represent the idea of spring in a landscape with a clear sky, flourishing foliage, the sowing of the fields and the union of the sexes, the ancients employed complex, conceptual arrangements of personifications, as on the famed Poniatowski vase.51 Only in his fourth group of examples (21–​5) does Toelken explicitly develop the distinction between poetry as successive and painting as limited to a single moment. He concedes that most ancient paintings naturally followed this limitation. A few figures joined in a single action could easily represent the Greek fables, because these were so well known through frequent repetition in poetry and there was a specific genre of paintings depicting single figures of youthful gods and heroes. When the complexity or richness of the narrative required it, however, ancient painters did not hesitate to show a sequence of events, creating a poetic, spiritual unity rather than the unity of the moment (Augenblick). This use of the term ‘poetic’ is not an inconsistency in Toelken’s argument, as indicated by an afterthought added at the end of the lecture; the newly common requirement that every painting possess poetic spirit (poetisher Geist) refers to the universal spirit of art expressible in any medium (31). The prime example of a multi-​scene painting is the Battle of Marathon (c. fifth century BCE) by Panaenus, brother of Phidias, which showed the whole course of the battle from beginning to end. Without this multiplication of the moment (Verfielfältigung des Augenblicks), many of the descriptions in Philostratus (specifically I.4, II.2, 17, 18, 21, 22) are incomprehensible; these descriptions also recall the sequential narratives commonly seen on sarcophagi, like that depicting the Death of Meleager in the Capitoline Museum. 88

89

Correcting Lessing’s Error

Ancient versus Modern Painting These easily multiplied examples, Toelken concludes, demonstrate the full truth of the ancients’ expression ‘painting is mute poetry’, whilst also confirming Lessing’s laws. Returning to his main comparison, Toelken asserts that ancient and modern painting each have their own advantages. What ancient painting lacks in truth to nature, which is the principal advantage of modern painting, it richly makes up for in more animated expression (beseelterer Ausdruck), and the spiritual unification (geistiges Zusammenfassen) of things widely separated in time and space.52 From this the question arises: how far may modern art go in attempting to compete with or revive ancient art on its own terms (25–​6)? His answer is ‘not very far at all’, because this spiritual unification of time and space is culturally specific to the Greeks and cannot be imported into a profoundly different modern world. Toelken’s initial demonstration of that foreignness is mean-​spirited, formulaic and not very original. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, he claims, over-privileging of ancient models led to their unselective imitation. Learned men made it their business to bring painting, through the invention of clever allegories, closer to the didacticism (Belehrung) of text and discourse. From this came an unending host of nonsense. Echoing decades of German animosity towards the French, which had only intensified with the Napoleonic occupation, Toelken singles out what he calls the superficial ‘Gallicizing’ imitation of the ancients. Long held up as unsurpassable, Charles Le Brun’s (c.1619–​90) history of the wars of Louis XIV at the Château du Versailles are indeed painted poetry, in that they can be dissolved back into the words from which they were painted. Despite Le Brun’s gift of invention, however, these insipid, bombastic decorations are but riddles, incomprehensible without inscriptions and textual explanations (26–​8). Such misguided attempts to imitate the ancients are bound to fail, Toelken argues, because the mode of representation (Darstellungsweise) described above was not arbitrarily assumed by the Greeks, but belongs inextricably to their limited, but pleasant, worldview, from which their religion, art and poetry developed at every stage. The Greeks did not just paint this way, they thought this way, recognising their gods in the 89

90

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics immediately sensible. It was a duty to depict things not in their raw materiality, but in animated human form. Consistent with the essence of religion and poetry, everything is symbolic, without losing its original being. The fables were not allegories, but rather living interpretations of reality or of actual belief (28–​9). All this, Toelken concludes, shows us Greek art in a new light, revealing how it retained its connection with the original hieroglyphic nature of Greek culture, in which everything was just a sign. Painting, in concert with sculpture, served only instruction through discourse. The invention of the alphabet freed Greek art from this limitation, but owing to their thoroughly symbolic religion they never lost the habit of using art as a didactic means to communicate intellectual messages (29). Coming back to his earlier question, Toelken asks again: how can all this be transferred to our own time? The answer:  by retaining the body of ancient art, rather than its spirit and meaning. Nature is no longer full of gods; it has revealed its true face. The abstract concept (Begriff) no longer needs a sensuous garment (sinnliches Kleid) to become graspable. A painting poetic in the Greek sense, invented now, would be ten times more enigmatic than those of the ancients could ever be. Mere imitation is appropriate only in student exercises. ‘Being true to its own time is the highest task of art, and this neither increases nor decreases its majesty’, according to Toelken.53 In a final flourish, Toelken resoundingly restates the ongoing significance of Laokoon, whilst also indicating how his correction serves the Society’s commitment to honoring humanity itself. We moderns, he says, drawing in his audience, must commit ourselves with ever more spirited conviction to the laws that Lessing established for painting, undeterred by the foregoing demonstration that amongst the ancients other laws were in force. Whilst undeniable advancements in the inner drive of human activity may have a rightful claim to our solemn astonishment, humanity, coming ever more to consciousness of itself, may, with equal justice, rejoice in all its deeds, for all are grounded in eternal laws (30–​1). With its borrowing of poetry’s visual metaphor and sequential representations, ancient painting is of universal value as a manifestation of the human spirit to be appreciated, but of limited value as a model for imitation in the profoundly different modern age. 90

91

Correcting Lessing’s Error

Conclusion Although he himself did not draw the distinction, Toelken was concerned with both the production and reception of painting. At the Humanitätsgesellschaft he was addressing an audience that included artists, as well as men and women who were likely to visit collections of ancient and modern art, and to purchase works, both new and old, on the emerging art market. The readership of the published text, which was really little more than a pamphlet, would have been similar. Likewise, his university courses provided a foundation of historical and theoretical knowledge for artists in training at the neighboring academy, whilst also contributing to the general education of relatively wealthy young men. The larger question remains to be pursued, however; how many in these varied audiences, and amongst scholars of ancient and modern art, agreed with the anonymous reviewer that Toelken presented ‘an estimable addendum to Lessing’s magnificent text, a true correction of it?’54

Notes 1. E.H. Toelken, Ueber das verschiedene Verhältniß der antiken und modernen Malerei zur Poesie, ein Nachtrag zu Lessings Laokoon (Berlin: Nicolai, 1822). All translations are my own. For clarity, I refer to Lessing’s essay by its shortened German title (Laokoon) and to the ancient sculpture by its commonly accepted English title (Laocoön). 2. A still useful overview of primary-​source texts before and after Toelken is provided by H.B. Nisbet, ‘Laocoön in Germany: The Reception of the Group since Winckelmann’, Oxford German Studies 10 (1979), pp. 22–​63. 3. Allgemeine Literatur-​Zeitung (December 1822), pp.  865–​ 72. The review is unsigned but internal evidence suggests that it was written by Friedrich Creuzer (1771–​1858), professor of philology in Heidelberg and author of a standard text on the history and theory of myth. 4. This brief summary of Toelken’s education and professional career is drawn from Eric Garberson, ‘Art History in the University: Toelken–​Hotho–​Kugler’, Journal of Art Historiography 5 (December 2011), 30ff; Tables 3 and 4 provide an overview of his university teaching. 5. E.H. Toelken, Ueber das Basrelief und den Unterschied der plastischen und malerischen Composition (Berlin: Realschulebuchhandlung, 1815). 6. See Garberson, Table 5, for an overview of aesthetics courses at the University. A  distinction between aesthetics as practical art theory and aesthetics as

91

92

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics philosophical reflection is drawn in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, ed. H.G. Hotho, 3 vols (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1835–​8), 1 (1835), pp. 20–​52. For the relation of art theory and aesthetics, as well as the object field of aesthetics, see Karlheinz Barck, Jörg Heininger and Dieter Kliche, ‘Aesthetik/​ästhetisch’ in Aesthetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in Sieben Bänden, 7 vols (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000–​5), 1 (2000), pp. 308–​400. 7. A thorough history of the Humanitätsgesellschaft, based on the extensive archival materials in the Landesarchiv Berlin, is provided by Uta Motschmann, Schule des Geistes, des Geschmacks und der Geselligkeit. Die Gesellschaft der Freunde der Humanität (1797–​1861), with an introduction by Conrad Wiedemann (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2009). 8. See Motschmann: Schule des Geistes, pp. 19–​65, for an overview of the society’s activities; 465–​890, for a list of members and their presentations (pp. 851–​3 for Toelken). 9. Motschmann: Schule des Geistes, pp. 76–​83, 361–​77, 921–​83. 10. Wiedemann in Motschmann:  Schule des Geistes, pp. xiii–​xv; Motschmann: Schule des Geistes, pp. 48–​64. Johann Gottfried Herder, Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität (1793–​7); Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–​5). 11. On Heyne see most recently Daniel Graepler and Joachim Migl, eds, Das Studium des schönen Altertums. Christian Gottlob Heyne und der Klassischen Archäologie (Göttingen:  Niedersächsische Staats-​und Universitätsbibliothek, 2007) and Marianne Heidenreich, Christian Gottlob Heyne und die Alte Geschichte (Munich-​Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2006). 12. The venue was too large for the display of drawings, graphics and casts as was usual at smaller public and especially academic lectures, which could draw on institutional library and art collections. 13. Toelken: Verhältniß, p. 3: Die Beschäftigung mit den Hervorbringungen alter und neuer Kunst wird erst wahrhaft befriedigend und ehrenwerth, wenn sie von der immer beschränkenden Liebhaberei des einzeln Vortrefflichen, oder der Ausdeutung geheimnißvoller Denkmäler, sich erhebt zu der Ahndung und Erkenntniß allgemeinerer Gesetze, wovon die menschliche Natur, in ihrer fortschreitenden Entwicklung durch aufeinander folgende Geschlechter unablösbar gebunden erscheint. 14. There was, and continues to be, acrimonious debate amongst scholars of antiquity regarding the proper objects of study, with some promoting text, some works of art and others material culture. 15. David Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoön. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984).

92

93

Correcting Lessing’s Error 16. This anticipates Toelken’s denunciation of speculative aesthetics in his scathing attack on Hotho’s first, unsuccessful Habilitation, discussed in Garberson, pp. 21–​3. 17. As opposed to the responses each wrote to Laokoon. Although they exemplify the method sketched here, these address issues more common in the essay’s reception. Herder:  Erstes Wäldchen (1769) in Sämtliche Werke zur schönen Literatur und Kunst 4 (1806). Heyne:  ‘Prüfung einiger Nachrichten und Behauptungen vom Laocoon im Belvedere’ in his Sammlung Antiquarische Aufsätze, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Weidemanns Erben und Reich, 1778–​9), pp. 1–​52. 18. Herder’s general programme is set forth clearly in the Ideas for the Philosophy of History of Mankind and condensed in Heyne’s review of the 1806 edition in Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen (1807.60), pp. 593–​9. For a cogent explication see Katherine Arens, ‘History as Knowledge:  Herder, Kant, and the Human Sciences’, in Johann Gottfried Herder. Academic Disciplines and the Pursuit of Knowledge, ed. Wulf Koepke (Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1996), pp. 106–​19. For its guiding role in Herder’s writings on art see Robert Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell, 1991), especially chapter two. Manifest throughout his vast œuvre, Heyne’s programme is most clearly expressed in the introduction to his Sammlung Antiquarischer Aufsätze, 1, pp. iii–​x, and Akademische Vorlesungen über die Archäologie der Kunst des Alterthums (Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1822), the posthumous (and somewhat problematic) publication of his course on archaeology. 19. Norton, Herder’s Aesthetics, pp.  53, 72–​3, on the question of relativism in Herder. In his review of the Ideen, Heyne stresses the search for universals. 20. Toelken, Verhältniß, p.  6:  ‘Alle gesunde Gesetze kündigen dabei sich an, als allgemein geltend; was ihnen nicht entspricht, ist verfehlt’. 21. Allgemeine Literatur-​Zeitung, p.  865. The dubious attribution to Simonides was first made by Plutarch, and long repeated, without reference to a specific text. See the discussion in Plutarch: De Gloria Atheniensium, édition critique et commentée par J. Cl. Thiolier (Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-​Sorbonne, 1985), pp. 73–​4, n. 27. 22. Horace, Ars Poetica (Loeb ed.), pp. 9–​10; Aristotle: Poetics (Loeb ed.), 1447a, pp. 17–​20: ‘Just as people (some by formal skill, others by knack) use colours and shapes to render mimetic images of many things, whilst others use the voice, so too all the poetic arts mentioned produce mimesis in rhythm, language, and melody, whether separately or in combination’. 23. Philostratus the elder, Book 1 (Loeb ed. p.  3); Philostratus the younger, Proemio (Loeb ed. p. 285). 24. Plutarch, De Gloria Atheniensium, p. 41. 25. Franciscus Junius, De pictura veterum (Amsterdam, 1637; Rotterdam, 1694), book 1, ­chapter 4; The Painting of the Ancients (London, 1638), reprinted as

93

94

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics The Literature of Classical Art: The Painting of the Ancients. De pictura veterum, according to the English translation (1638), ed. Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl, Raina Fehl (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 42–​59. 26. This assessment is largely correct. For Winckelmann on painting, see Carol Mattusch in Johann Joachim Winckelmann, Letter and Report on the Discoveries at Herculaneum, introduction, translation, and commentary by Carol Mattusch (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2011), pp. 43–​50. 27. Toelken, Verhältniß, p. 8. Der eigentliche Gegenstand der Poesie sind Handlungen; der eigentliche Gegenstand der Malerei sind Körper mit ihren sichtbaren Eigenschaften. Die Poesie schildert Körper nur in sofern sie handeln; die Malerei kann Handlungen darstellen, nur in sofern sie durch Körper sichtbar geschehen. Die Darstellung der Poesie ist eine fortschreitende, sie zeigt nach einander das auf einander folgende; die Darstellung der Kunst dagegen zeigt immer nur einen einzigen Augenblick. 28. Toelken, Verhältniß, 8:  ‘Ein Gemälde, das die sichtbare Erscheinung der Gegenstände verändern, und auf einmal mehr, als das an Einem Ort in Einem Moment Geschehende darstellen wollte, würde für uns nicht sowohl schlecht als widersinnig und ganz unmöglich seyn’. 29. First Kristiches Wäldchen (1806), p.  121:  ‘Nichts ist gefährlicher, als eine Delikatesse unseres Geschmacks in einen allgemeinen Grundsatz zu bringen, und sie in ein Gesetz zu schlagen’. 30. Herder, ‘Shakespeare’ (1773), in Sämtliche Werke zur schönen Literatur und Kunst, 13 (1815), pp. 240–​67; Norton: Herder’s Aesthetics, pp. 71–​2. 31. Tina Najberg, ‘From Art to Archaeology:  Recontextualizing the Images from the Porticus of Herculaneum’, in Antiquity Recovered. The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, eds Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl (Los Angeles:  J.  Paul Getty Museum, 2007), pp.  61–​3; see also Mattusch in Winckelmann: pp. 13–​18. 32. Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano, 5 vols, Naples, 1757–​79, and subsequent editions. 33. Stefan Schmidt, ‘“Ein Schatz von Zeichungen”, Die Erforschung antiker Vasen im 18. Jahrhundert’, in 1768. Europa á la grecque. Vasen machen Mode, ed. Martin Flashar (Munich: Biering und Brinkmann, 1999), pp. 29–​47. 34. Aloys Hirt, ‘Ueber die Mahlerey bey den Alten’, in Sammlung der deutschen Abhandlungen welche in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (und schönen Künste) zu Berlin vorgelesen worden in den Jahren 1798–​1800 (1803), pp. 209–​30; 1801–​2 (1805), pp. 137–​54, 155–​70, 171–​86; 1803 (1806), pp.  193–​215. Motschmann:  Schule des Geistes, pp.  624–​5. Hirt occasionally taught courses on ancient art at the University (see Garberson, Table 1); his teaching at the art academy cannot be precisely documented.

94

95

Correcting Lessing’s Error 35. Carl August Böttiger, Ideen zur Archäologie der Malerei. Nach Maasgabe der Wintervorlesungen im Jahre 1811 (Dresden: Walther, 1811), pp. 1–​132. Böttiger does not discuss Lessing, except to remark at the outset (1) that the tag from Simonides, when correctly understood, encompasses Lessing’s whole theory in Laokoon. For the range of Böttiger’s lectures and their role in promoting general interest in archaeology see René Sternke, Böttiger und der archäologische Diskurs (Berlin: Akademie, 2008), pp. 234–​41. 36. Carl August Böttiger, Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit:  Eine archäologische Ausdeutung. Nebst eine Abhandlung über dies Gemälde von Seiten der Kunst betrachtet von H. Meyer. Dresden, Walther (1810), pp. 17–​22. Meyer’s analysis employs the traditional categories of academic discourse on art (expression, colour, composition, etc). 37. For a comprehensive reception history see Giulia Fusconi, La Fortuna dell ‘Nozze Aldobrandini’ Dall’Esquilino al Vaticano (Vatican City:  Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1994). 38. For the eighteenth and nineteenth-​century reception see the introduction to Philostratos:  Die Bilder. Griechisch-​Deutsch, ed., trans., and exp. by Otto Schönberger, ‘Introduction’, Philostratos:  Die Bilder. Griechisch-​Deutsch, ed., trans., Otto Schönberger (Munich: Ernst Heimeran, 1968), pp. 7–​83. Recent views are summarised in Michael Squire, ‘Review of Mario Baumann’, Bilder Schreiben:  Virtuose Ekphrasis in Philostratos ‘Eikones’, Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.12.32. I  follow Schönberger:  ‘Introduction’, p.  26, in avoiding the misleading term ekphrasis. Although often applied indiscriminately to all verbal description, the term properly refers only to a later genre of literary description of works of art, which the Imagines only partially anticipate. 39. Christian Ludwig von Hagedorn, Betrachtungen über die Malerey, vol. 1 of 2 (Leipzig: Johann Wendlern, 1762), pp. 172–​6. 40. Anne-​Claude-​Philippe de Tubières, Comte de Caylus, ‘Sur le tableau de Cébès, sur l’antre de Coryce, et sur les tableaux de Philostrate’, Histoire de l’Academie royale des inscriptions et belles-​lettres 29 (1764), pp. 149–​60. Caylus allows allegory that does not violate this principle but gives only modern examples. 41. Des Herrn Grafen von Caylus Abhandlungen zur Geschichte und zur Kunst, intro., Christian Adolf Klotz, vol. 2 of 2 (Altenburg: Richterische Buchhandlung, 1768–​9), unpaginated. 42. Schönberger, ‘Introduction’, pp. 27–​33. Despite the decisive arguments by Friedrich Jacobs and Theophilus Welcker in the commentary to their critical edition (Leipzig, 1825), some scholars continued to deny the existence of the paintings for the same reasons as Hagedorn, Caylus and Klotz. Jacobs and Welcker cite Toelken only in passing, and then mostly for his study of bas-​relief. 43. Christian Gottlob Heyne, ‘Philostrati Imaginni illustration’, in Opuscula Academica Collecta, vol. 5 of 6 (Göttingen:  Dieterich, 1785–​1812), (1802), pp.  1–​195, here pp.  14–​18. German summaries by Heyne in Göttingische

95

96

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen 1796.41: 409–​12; 1796.162: 1609–​10; 1797.151: 1497–​9. 44. Toelken, Basrelief, pp. 82–​4; 97–​103. 45. A.L. Millin’s Mythologische Gallerie (Berlin, Nicolai,1820; reissued 1848). The work grew out of Millin’s public lectures on ancient art conceived as the history of representations of gods and heroes, as explained by Carl August Böttiger, ‘Skizzen zu Millin’s Schilderung’, in Aubin Louis Millin geschildert von Kraft und Böttiger (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819), pp. 70–​1. For Millin’s reputation in Germany see the essays in Geneviève Espagne and Bénédicte Savoye, eds, Aubin Louis Millin et l’Allemagne (Hildesheim: George Olms, 2005). 46. James Christie, A Disquisition on Etruscan Vases (London:  T.  Becket, 1806); Giovanni Battista Passeri, Picturae Etruscorum in vasculis, 3  vols. (Rome:  Johannes Zempel, 1767–​75); Filippo Buonarroti, Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi di vetro ornati di figure trovati ne’ cimiteri di Roma (Florence:  Jacoppo Guiducci, 1716). Wilhelm Tischbein, Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases, Mostly of Pure Greek Workmanship, 2 vols (Naples: W. Tischbein, 1791–​4). 47. G.G. Bottari, Del Museo Capitolino, vol. 4 of 4 (Rome: Calcografia Camerale, 1741–​82), I Bassirilievi; E.Q. Visconti, Il Museo Pio-​ Clementino (Rome: Visconti, 1818–​20). 48. Pitture d’Ercolano 1:6; Aubin Louis Millin, Galerie mythologique, 2  vols. (Paris: Soyer, 1811), number 451. 49. This use of ‘space’ is merely incidental. The next set of examples demonstrates the principle of ‘time’, but Toelken uses the terms previously introduced: poetry is sequential, while painting shows a single moment. 50. Millin, Galerie mythologique, number 81, p.  104; Christie:  A Disquistion, p.  53, pl. 10; Passeri:  Picturae Etruscorum p.  2:  pl. 104. Visconti, Il Museo Pio-​Clementino, p. 18. 51. Millin, Galerie mythologique, number 219; Toelken quotes loosely from the explication on p. 250, which largely repeats Ennio Quirino Visconti, Le pitture di un antico vaso sittile (Rome: Paliarigni, 1794). 52. Here time and space refer to properties of the natural world beyond representation. 53. Toelken, Verhältniß, p. 30: ‘Der vollen Bildung der eignen Zeit entsprechen, ist die höchste Aufgabe der Kunst, die in dieser Hinsicht an Würde weder wächst noch abnimmt’. 54. Allgemeine Literature Zeitung, p. 865: ‘ein sehr schätzenswerther Nachtrag zu Lessings herrlicher Schrift, eine wahre Berichtigung derselben’.

96

97

4 The Temporality of Imitation in the Work of Moreau and Gérôme Sarah J. Lippert

Imitation, illusion, affectation and effect –​these are harmless enough words in today’s world; in the nineteenth century, however, these were amongst the most debated notions. Although such semantic warfare existed long before the birth of the philosophical tradition of aesthetics, the rise of aesthetic theory, art criticism and art history (in the eighteenth century) as entrenched modes of intellectual inquiry surrounding the visual arts generated intense scrutiny of their satellite vocabulary. These concepts had indeed been debated since at least Greek antiquity, when the likes of artists such as Zeuxis and Apelles attempted to capture the illusion of real life in their works. Skilled imitation, also known as mimesis, has been a coveted accomplishment throughout the ages, even if theorists on the arts, and the artists themselves, continuously debated the best methods and manner of imitation. Of all the debates, however, one of the most common notions embedded in imitative objectives is that of time, both in terms of that needed to perfect an imitative form, and that required to capture the effects of nature. In either case, a truly worthy imitative product has been normally deemed possible only when the artist has invested considerably in the effort to imitate. This chapter will explore how the temporal was developed in the work of nineteenth-​century painters, two in particular, 97

98

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics who presented its mastery in painting in diverse and challenging ways. An examination of their works will reveal that temporality was a coveted, if illicit, goal in the visual arts, and that the manner in which it could be represented in two-​dimensional media was far from limited, irrespective of the fact that most aesthetic theorists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had adamantly maintained that temporality was, in the strictest sense, not within the realm of painting. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–​81) theories regarding poetry’s ownership of temporality, and painting’s dominion over spatiality were reincarnated in the theories of Charles Blanc (1813–​82), Antoine Chrysostrome Quatremère de Quincy (1755–​1849) and others, but on their own represented one of the most forceful efforts to create distinct categories for the arts.1 His Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (first published in German in 1766) was pivotal in codifying the notion that artists should circumscribe their practise within the ‘natural’ properties of their medium. Lessing’s theories had also been published in French in 1802. Temporality is not naturally a property of the visual arts, which typically requires the artist to choose a single moment in time to represent (as noted by the Abbé Jean-​Baptiste Dubos (1670–​1742) in his Réflexions critique sur la poésie et la peinture of 1719); and yet, this did not stop artists from trying to imply temporality in a myriad of ways.2 Indeed, it is through an analysis of the modes of imitation that such efforts to capture temporality will be revealed. In the arts, imitation and illusion have suffered a tidal wave of both popularity and insult, even occasionally at the same time. Both concepts connoted great facility and technical skill. Nonetheless, theorists and critics remained ambivalent regarding the signification of imitation and illusion. Were they, for instance, evidentiary of a wealth of imagination, or rather a poverty of genius? For instance, was a perfect imitation a hallmark of great dedication to nature, or did it rather signify an inability to apply imagination to the inevitably flawed natural world? As the seventeenth-​ century academician Gian Pietro Bellori (1613–​96) claimed, one could, like Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (c.1571–​1610), trespass too far into the territory of imitation. Also problematic was the notion of imitating existing artworks. Although one could interpret an artist’s inclusion of iconic works from 98

9

The Temporality of Imitation art’s history as a poverty of original ideas, the first President of the Royal Academy in London, Sir Joshua Reynolds (1723–​92), explains how such ‘dependence’ upon the imitation of other artists does not in fact reflect poorly on the artist’s ‘genius:’ We come now to speak of another kind of imitation; the borrowing of a particular thought, an action, attitude, or figure, and transplanting it into your own work: this will either come under the charge of plagiarism, or be warrantable, and deserve commendation, according to the address with which it is performed … It is generally allowed that no man need be ashamed of copying the ancients: their works are considered as a magazine of common property, always open to the publick, whence every man has a right to take what materials he pleases; and if he has the art of using them, they are supposed to become to all intents and purposes his own property.3

In the tradition of the paragone, or artistic competition, Reynolds even framed imitation as a form of comparison between artworks across the ages: It must be acknowledged that the works of the moderns are more the property of their authors; he, who borrows an idea from an ancient, or even from a modern artist not his contemporary, and so accommodates it to his own work, that it makes a part of it, with no seam or joining appearing, can hardly be charged with plagiarism:  poets practise this kind of borrowing, without reserve. But an artist should not be contented with this only; he should enter into a competition with his original, and endeavour to improve what he is appropriating to his own work. Such imitation is so far from having any thing in it of the servility of plagiarism, that it is a perpetual exercise of the mind, a continual invention.4

In this mindset, mastery of the ideal and a perfect illusion becomes the appropriate way to demonstrate artistic genius, as it reveals how to surpass nature’s flaws through imagination and education. On the other extreme, was extreme illusion, often confusingly cited as achievable only through great imitation, actually the best method to demonstrate artistic genius? And how does one measure illusion if not by an exact 99

10

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics reproduction of nature, thereby forcing one into the pitfall of being perceived as genius-​impoverished? It is through an examination of this dilemma that the problematic debates may be addressed regarding how illusion and imitation manifested themselves in the works of two contemporaries in the latter half of the nineteenth century: Gustave Moreau (1826–​98) and Jean-​Léon Gérôme (1824–​1904). Moreau is an interesting figure in the history of nineteenth-​ century art, as his work preceded the Symbolist movement to which he is most associated, such that he does not fit comfortably within any ‘ism’ of the century. The breadth of his career, coupled with his impressive productivity, made him a fixture at the Salon; however, he begrudgingly associated himself as a professor with the official academy in Paris towards the end of his career,5 after a long period of struggle and disappointment as both a student of painting and mature artist.6 Combining an interest in the figural and the abstract, Moreau’s methodology involved intensive studies of archaeological artifacts and copious readings of both past and present literature. As the inheritor of the largest personal library ever acquired by any artist in his time, he became expert at finding synaesthetic correspondences between iconographic and cultural traditions.7 Most of his subjects involved seemingly well-​known narratives from the conventional fare of history painting; yet, the manner in which he portrayed such narratives was often imbued with an enigmatic and layered meaning that could only be teased out by labourious application of intellect and concentration on the part of the viewer.8 As I have shown elsewhere, his methods are notably resistant to critical ekphrases, which is a logical response to the intense criticism that he received throughout his career from art critics.9 Deeply invested in the superiority of painting in the hierarchy of the arts, Moreau expounded upon his thoughts, however disjointedly, in his writings, which were penned over the course of his career.10 In Moreau’s work we will find that this well-​read painter had throughout his career adopted objectives in painting that were intended to shatter the limits set by aesthetic theorists in the preceding century and which were often still upheld by art critics and theorists in his own time, including the preeminent critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–​67).11 Although contemporaries, aside from their shared retention of narrative principles in their art, these two painters were quite different from 100

10

The Temporality of Imitation each other. Both capable of tremendous illusion, Moreau’s painterly approach caused him to revel in the marriage of prominent abstraction and exquisite, almost hieroglyphic detail, whilst Gérôme, often labelled an Orientalist, Néo-​Grèc and realist, preferred a comparably intense, if more photographic, approach. And, unlike Moreau, Gérôme was known for his long and strong association with the academy in Paris; Moreau on the other hand preferred to operate on the boundaries of academic and non-​academic life. Despite their differences, an analysis of these two artists may reveal some important discoveries about how weaving the temporal into their work offered an effective defence of their reputations and artistic goals. First, however, let us consider how imitation and the ideal operated at this time. One of the most prominent theorists to impact the arts of the nineteenth-​century French academy was Quatremère, who was Perpetual Secretary to the Académie des beaux-​arts in Paris.12 The tenets of Quatremère’s theories, as a well-​known leader within the academy, would have been known to academicians such as Gérôme and Moreau, and would have circulated in many forms throughout the nineteenth century. Quatremère, as a prolific historian and theorist of the art world, entered into the rocky terrain of vocabulary-​based arguments in numerous treatises on the arts that he wrote throughout his career. In particular, his Essay on the Nature and Means of Imitation concerns us here, as well as his Essay on the Nature of the Ideal. Quatremère’s definition of imitation is as follows: ‘To imitate in the fine arts, is to produce the resemblance of a thing, but in some other thing which becomes the image of it’.13 He adds that ‘It is not nature that imitates; it is she that is imitated’.14 Notable in Quatremère’s most central characterisations of imitation is his insistence upon its relationship to industry, or, in other words, labour: ‘Every one will say that such would assuredly be the case, because, in the first instance, that of natural productions, the resemblance is the result of organic power, and in the second, of a mechanical operation’.15 Imitation was equally caught up in debates regarding originality and genius. A brief passage from Quatremère’s treatise on the ideal demonstrates the type of semantic consideration typical of his style: Par exemple, le sens que l’on donne au mot idéal, ou dans le langage ordinaire, ou dans la langue de l’imitation, sera soit un blâme, soit un éloge, selon la nature des objets auxquels on

101

102

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics l’appliquera. //​Dans son acception simple ou vulgaire, ce mot peut signifier ce qui est fantastique, ce qui est le résultat d’un caprice ignorant, ou qui sort de la nature des choses.16

Amongst many deeply interwoven principles regarding the nature of imitation and illusion, Quatremère attempted to establish that mental labour was an essential task necessary to work one’s way through the gamut of theoretical definitions about the arts. For example, he tells us that mental labour is elicited when trying to understand how the idea is synonymous with the image, at least when it comes to understanding the reception of each. One must contemplate the function of imitation, in order to fully appreciate its potential uses. The obvious association between imitation and labour is also part of Quatremère’s analysis of its role in visual media. Labour, he says, is the path to the kind of imitation that will bespeak the genius that most artists so desperately desired. Further, Quatremère ties the pursuit of imitation via labour to the antique notion of the microcosm and the macrocosm. According to him, labour brings together the small and the compound objects and entities of the world, through a superlative achievement of imitation and the ideal.17 This metaphysical component of such an effort is also acknowledged in his treatise on the ideal: Let us say that what we mean by the word ideal, in the work of imitation, by and through the forms of matter, or saying what is the very essence of the ideal, and what is, in the means and manner by which it is produced, the function of art and of the spirit of the artist, are two completely different things. One is easily understood by simple demonstrations in a physical sense; the other is but the result of metaphysical analysis.18

However obvious, it should be noted that labour is synonymous with the passage of time. Only with the investment of time can labour happen, and the relative difficulty of a given labour is often directly proportionate to the amount of time required to complete the task. As such, connoting labour in an artwork, whether physical or mental, correlates unequivocally with the temporal process of art making. Despite its potential to evoke temporality, labour had long been a much contested issue for artists. A serious problem would have been posed by 102

103

The Temporality of Imitation Quatremère’s approach to the notion of imitation and the idea for the nineteenth-​century artist, had it not been for the theoretician’s masterful reconciliation of a much-begrudged circumstance for visual artists. Celebrating the labour of art making was anathema to artists since the Renaissance, as their exclusion from the esteemed, if often amended, list of liberal arts made many desperate to eschew any association between art making and labour. The physicality of work had, since the mediaeval era if not before, forced artists to settle for craftsmanship status in society, at least until such heroic agents for the cause, including Leonardo da Vinci (1452–​1519) and Giorgio Vasari (1511–​74), argued for a more illustrious view of the visual arts.19 Railing against the association between painting and labour, Leonardo declares the following: You have set painting amongst the mechanical arts! … If you call it mechanical because it is by manual work that the hands represent what the imagination creates, your writers are setting down with the pen by manual work what originates in the mind. If you call it mechanical because it is done for money, who fall into this error –​if indeed it can be called an error –​ more than you yourselves?20

In order to make this argument, all reference to banish the thought of real labour from artistic production was stripped away in favor of a forceful emphasis on the intellectuality of art making. A classic example may be offered in the story of Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–​1564). A rival of Leonardo, the latter argued that sculptors were less intellectual than painters, because sweat, dust, and physical exertion were part and parcel of the marble and bronze sculptural traditions. To combat such an anti-​ glamorised view of his work, Michelangelo promoted the notion of the concetto, or concept, equating the art making process to that of the idea being conceived in the artist’s mind, rather than any subsequent physical enactment. The artist, like God, could fashion something from nothing, and in such a way that demonstrated divine intellect through the perfect idea. As a result of such traditions, which were alive and well into the nineteenth century, it had become quite unpopular for artists to admit how labourious their work could actually be. Indeed, to avoid such associations an anti-​labour rhetoric developed whereby the viewer’s effort, instead of 103

104

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics the artist’s, became the focus of temporal discussion. For example, one of Leonardo’s central arguments is that a painting can reveal love and knowledge about the world in a single glance, whereas the individual’s effort is needed to acquire the same knowledge through reading, which takes much more time. That these issues were still be debated in Moreau and Gérôme’s time is evident in countless critical reviews of the nineteenth century, including that of Théophile Gautier (1811–​72), who, regarding a Gérôme painting, notes that ‘L’exécution a cette finesse précise qui n’exclut pas la largeur et dont M. Gérôme a le secret. On en apprend plus sur la Russie en contemplant un quart d’heure ce petit cadre qu’en lisant vingt volumes de relations; la peinture, avec sa langue muette, en dit souvent beaucoup plus que les écrivains les plus bavards’.21 In light of this history, Quatremère’s treatise on the nature of the ideal and imitation would seem to offer a rather remarkable departure from the typical theories expounded upon the artistic method. In fact, however, Quatremère had found a loophole. His treatise is, indeed, littered with references to labour, but it is the labour of the mind rather than of the body from which he draws his arguments. By claiming that imitation may only be the result of intensive mental labour, he diverts attention from the real, painful and even agonising degree of labour that we see in the work of artists such as Moreau and Gérôme, whose exorbitant detail and exquisite brushwork bewitched many viewers. Yet this convenient loophole in the traditional conflict between the physical and metaphysical nature of art, of which Quatremère seems to have taken advantage, does not fully account for the extreme and painstaking imitation that we see in the works of these two artists. Something else must have motivated them. Imitation, as Quatremère tells us, is not the same thing as illusion; but still, the interdependency of these concepts demonstrates their probable alignment amongst the practitioners of the arts. For Moreau, illusion could be constructed through a palpable tension between imitation and the ideal, and even between the labourious and the conceptual. Famous for conflation of the ideal with the grotesque, Moreau similarly reveled in the hitherto ignored possibilities that came forth in the pairing of great imitation with extreme abstraction. In his writings, Moreau’s cosmological view of the world was that it was torn between opposing dualities: Apollonian and Dionysian; material and spiritual; good and evil; 104

105

The Temporality of Imitation the ideal and the corrupt.22 Endeavouring to illustrate this duality in his work, Moreau tended to create highly illusionistic and imitative passages in his scenes, often with respect to the representation of bodies in space, or sensual portrayal of jewels and adornments, whether in vestments or architectural settings. He would frequently, however, undermine his own carefully crafted imitations of the ideal with a sort of cryptographic and pictographic writing, thereby heightening the tension between the illusionistic space and the pictorial surface. Additionally, whether in the imagistic writing or the bodily portrayals, Moreau often aggressively, in a manner worthy of Willem de Kooning (of the New York School, 1904–​97), scraped the canvas with shockingly abstract gestures. Abstraction and illusion embodied, by the end of Moreau’s career, the very tensions and problems that were erupting both within and outside of the academic and gallery systems in Paris, where viewers debated the legitimacy of expressive, but not labour-​ intensive, styles such as Impressionism and Post-​Impressionism. Why not dispense with the figure altogether though? Perhaps Moreau clung to the human figure, as did Gérôme, because it had been invested in French artistic theory with the power of art to manifest the physical in a way that poetry could not. For example, Quatremère tells us that [T]‌he painter has the advantage of being first of all judged by the eye; and he has a means of raising a belief in the existence of the beings he creates, by exhibiting them invested with corporeal forms, each with its own characteristic figure set in motion and co-​operating to an action … [I]n the painter’s composition, the allegorical person plays by no means so active, so extensive a part, or one which requires so much power as that imposed on it by the epic poet, who rests on it the chief conduct of the events of his poem. Its interversion in painting is limited, at one time, to a particular action, at another, to a co-​operation that the mind of the spectator must look upon as understood.23

Moreau’s own career ended with his supervision of many up-​and-​coming conceptual rather than skill or labour-​based artists, including his student Henri Matisse (1869–​1954). Art historian Peter Cooke convincingly explains that Moreau was in pursuit of l’arabesque and l’art pur, or a desire to revel in pure form, as long as it was paired with narrative meaning. It is clear from Moreau’s writings that these were important concepts in his development 105

106

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics as an artist, but an acknowledgement of his interest in the beau idéal, or ideal figure, which accounts for his retention of the figural, does not go far enough to explain this duality in his work. Although scholars have yet to adequately justify the odd pairing of extreme illusionism and abstraction in Moreau’s work, it begs the question as to whether this was Moreau’s solution to the labour-​mind conflict in theoretical debates surrounding the role of imitation, illusion, the ideal and physical skill in the production of art at the end of the nineteenth century. Moreau’s style seems to resolve this issue by demonstrating both pain-​staking labour and conceptual expression. Yet the idea of labour-​ intensive mental productivity is not only expressed through Moreau’s stylistic blend, but also through the iconographic and complex meaning of his work. I and other Moreau specialists have identified numerous ways in which Moreau’s ambiguous messages served many purposes in meeting his artistic objectives. Including stumping art critics, avoiding literal narrative in favour of Symbolist esotericism and demonstrating the continued modern preeminence and relevance of history painting as a genre, another motive lies in his ambitious attempts to illustrate his mastery of imitation in a pictorial mode. Exemplifying this feature of his work is his Jupiter and Semele (Figure 4.1: 1894–​5). Crowded with iconographic layers that span Christian and pagan to eastern symbols, the work’s most notable feature is quite simply the profusion of imagery. As a visual language, such a work demonstrates Moreau’s penchant for the evasion of singular meaning through an over-​the-​top imitative task. What would normally have required at least one highly educated iconographer for a Renaissance artist, Moreau’s work reveals a compendium of knowledge about traditions from across human history. The painting’s references to Greek, Roman, Christian and many other iconographic traditions, even if portrayed in Moreau’s own hybrid synaesthetic manner, bespeak the artist’s commitment to the conceptual preparation and research process involved in his works.24 With a magnum-​opus quality, the Jupiter, which was created towards the end of Moreau’s life, represents a host of characters from his earlier works and from art’s history. A good example of the repetition of iconic motifs is evident in Moreau’s Jupiter, where both by title and the formality of the composition it recalls Phidias’ Olympian Jupiter (fifth century BCE) from the Temple at Olympia in ancient Greece.25 106

107

Figure 4.1  Gustave Moreau, Jupiter and Semele, 1894–​5, oil on canvas, 213 x 118 cm (6 ft. 12 in. x 3 ft. 10 1/​2 in.), Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, France. Photographic credit: Photographed by the author. All rights released (public domain).

108

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics With dozens of comparable iconic references, the viewer is prompted to ask: just how long did it take to select, organise and depict all of this iconography? Clearly the task necessitated copious knowledge of diverse international traditions and typologies. For example, Apollo appears as a Christ-​like icon in a supernatural burst of light, whilst Pan and Hecate are manifested below. The layered and complex iconographic references prompt the viewer to consider the intensive dedication, and investment of time, that would have been required to create such a work. Therefore, by testifying to Moreau’s intensive artistic methods, the work refers not just to the finished product, but to the temporal process of artistic creation. Scholar Pierre Mathieu, in his article on Moreau’s library, tells us that he was by far one of the most well-​read artists of his time, in large part because he owned one of, if not the most, expansive private library of any artist in the nineteenth century. As such, Moreau wanted to advertise the years of mental labour that prepared him for this deep understanding of a wide of array of periods and cultures. Labour is certainly quickly associated with the experience of this painting, when in only a few minutes of contemplation the typical viewer becomes exasperated by the depth of meaning, and gives up and walks away. In this moment of defeat, the viewer, one might imagine for Moreau, is the loser, and Moreau the victor, as he triumphs in proving his comparative mental prowess and ability to master the patience required for the productive passage of time. Although the expanse of iconographic traditions represented in Moreau’s works is certainly impressive, other features of his work defy Lessing-​like limits on the temporality of painting. For example, Moreau’s penchant for variety of meaning was also paralleled in a multiplicity of styles. As aforementioned, his scenes abound with references to traditions from across the ages. In Salomé Dancing before Herod (c.1874), the jewel-​ like encrusted surfaces recall the splendours of mediaeval liturgical vestments, whilst the architecture suggests a Byzantine context and the jewel tones and rich ephemera evoke the exoticism of the Orient.26 Another curious feature of Moreau’s style, which I have argued also functions as a convenient barrier between Moreau’s works and the art critic, is the cryptographic writing that appears scrawled over some of is scenes, such as in Salomé Tattooed (Figure 4.2: 1874) and the Apparition (c.1874–​6, oil on canvas version). In the latter, white, near-hieroglyphic writing 108

109

Figure 4.2  Gustave Moreau, Salomé Tattooed, 1874, oil on canvas, 92 x 60 cm (3 ft. 1/​4 in. x 1 ft. 11 1/​2 in.), Musée Gustave Moreau, Paris, France. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​ PD-​old-​100. This image has not been altered.

10

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics superimposes the illusionistic spaces created by the artist. Notwithstanding the popularity amongst artists at this time to describe painting as a language, the manner in which Moreau inscribed imagery with pictographic script likewise implies a type of progression. The viewer is left to mentally recreate the scribe’s process, as the curvilinear and iconographic designs boast a dedication to intensive interaction with the medium that is both impressive and daunting. The way in which this writing challenges the illusion and imitation of the artist offers a metaphor for the ongoing tension between the verbal and visual in Moreau’s time, which was predicated, as we have seen, upon the notion of division between spatiality and temporality. In fact, a new interpretation of this pictographic writing is offered here, which is that it served as an allegory for both the fight between, and eventual reconciliation of, painting and poetry. Although admittedly a conjectural stretch, could we not even consider that Moreau may have been referencing the long-​standing, indeed centuries-​long, battle between word and image, which he may have believed was finally reconciled in his own work. Moreau was certainly heavily invested in the word and image battle, as in his own writings and public commentaries he decried the necessity of words to explain his scenes, which he thought could speak for themselves through the universal language of imitation and the ideal.27 This is evident in his response to a patron’s request for a written description of the Jupiter, in which Moreau chafes under the burden of explaining images with words: Aux bavards, aux critiques de profession, cette désolante dissection des lois, des conditions de l’art. Et combien d’effroyables erreurs, de niaiseries, de contre-​sens, à chaque mot, à chaque phrase. Et la raison de cela et la cause de cette facilité pour les critiques à écrire, à pérorer, à bavarder sur cette terrible question, c’est justement leurs insuffisances de vue, leurs insuffisance de sentiment, leurs insuffisance d’amour profond et vrai. … Winckelmann, Diderot, Gautier, et tutti quanti. Et quelles erreurs effroyables dans ces jugements contemporains! Quelle ignorance navrante avec l’audace insolente, c’est à confondre!28

Gérôme may have been as sensitive to critics as Moreau, but for different reasons. As a long-​standing member and teacher within the academy 110

1

The Temporality of Imitation in Paris, this painter-​sculptor was known for his exacting realism and dedication to both the ideal and imitation. Although Gérôme was a contemporary of Moreau, as I have mentioned, he played with another aspect of Quatremère’s argument surrounding illusion and the limits of painting.29 Whilst Moreau demonstrated the superiority of his art through the mental labour of imitation and the temporal quality of his script-​like decorations, Gérôme attempted to concentrate more explicitly upon illusion. For the latter, manufacturing illusions of illusions was the key to revealing the work behind his processes. Unlike Moreau, Gérôme did not experiment with a marriage of abstraction and imitation; rather, he concentrated on reproducing through imitation his own illusions in a myriad of repetitive forms. Peppered throughout Gérôme’s œuvre is the cyclic treatment of scenes wherein the artist reenacts the imitative and illusionistic processes of both artists and sculptors. Countless canvases depicting the artist at work demonstrate his obsession with a reconciliation of imitation and illusion. In scenes such as The End of the Séance (1886), we find Gérôme in self-​portrait likeness packing up his tools from a session sculpting a standing marble figure from the model. Similarly, in 1895, Gérôme portrays himself in the act of sculpting his Tanagra statue from a live model in The Artist and his Model.30 It is a self portrait, and the painting of Pygmalion and Galatea on the back wall by Gérôme also situates the scene within his own studio. In these works, which show statues often in the final stages of completion, the emphasis is upon the concentration and solitude of the artist. Even when a living model is present, a profound commitment to solitary thinking is perceptible in the artist’s depiction. I would argue that these scenes of the artist at work are intended to expose labour and as a result the temporality of the artwork coming into being. But more importantly, by referencing this process so repetitiously, the single moment shown becomes but one of many inferred in the experience of the artist. Furthermore, the number of works repeating the theme, even if not formally intended as part of a series, speak to a body of work that becomes greater than the sum of its parts in forcing the reader to view in the collection the passage of time over the artist’s career; in other words, works that are known to be complete are repeated in manner that implies a canonical status. Since this convention of illusions of illusions had been a well-​known trope since the Renaissance, when 111

12

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics artists began to paint other artist’s works on the back walls of illusionistic spaces, often as a kind of homage to earlier masterpieces, Gérôme’s conceit suggests that his works too hold a place in the chronology of canonical masterpieces. Similarly, Gérôme’s emphasis on the reinvention of antique motifs, such as his interest in creating modern versions in marble and other sculptural media of the Tanagra statues, which were found in Boetia, Greece during the 1870s, offered yet another kind of temporality to his work.31 Rekindling the poses and types of figures from such ancient examples, which often depicted young women in playful or domestic activities, Gérôme tied contemporary sculpture to an ancient past. Even if the revival of antiquity had been commonplace for artists in the Western traditions since ancient Rome, by virtue of Gérôme’s resurrection of a specifically unknown ancient tradition (before the Tanagra statues were rediscovered, most people did not know that the Greeks produced these small polychrome, terracotta figures), the artist was staking a claim to his spot in the continuum of art’s history in his time. Gérôme’s style, being based upon the tenets of imitation, produced a kind of jarring realism at times, which emerges from the doubling of the image and the object represented. An artist’s ability to repeat nature is not itself, according to Quatremère, what generates pleasure for the viewer; rather, it is the comparison made in the viewer’s mind’s eye between the object and image that captivates. As Quatremère explains, It is the identical repetition of an object which produces the resemblance that may be called real, and which, from that very circumstance, is incapable of affording us pleasure; for it has been already seen that the pleasure arising from resemblance proceeds from the comparison instituted between two objects … It is, on the contrary, the very essence of imitation in the fine arts, to represent reality by its appearance alone. Here then are two distinct objects. The pleasure of resemblance arises from the parallel itself, existing between the model, and its appearance or image. Since it is a necessary condition of imitation, that it furnish occasion for comparison, and since the art of comparing ceases where identity is present, it is necessary that we should be aware that what is offered to us by imitation, is only the appearance of the object.32

112

13

The Temporality of Imitation

Figure 4.3  Jean-​Léon Gérôme, The Studio of Tanagra (L’Atelier de Tanagra), 1893, oil on canvas, 65.1 x 91.1 cm (2 ft. 1 5/​8 in. x 3 ft.), private collection. Photographic credit: Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons (public domain). PD-​Art/​ PD old-​100. This image has not been altered.

Whilst technical skill is certainly just one of many connotations related to the iconology of these scenes, another leitmotif similarly reveals itself, which is once again the narrative of both physical and mental labour. Scenes like The Studio of Tanagra (Figure 4.3: 1893) and Painting Breathing Life into Sculpture (1893), speak to the prolific nature of Gérôme’s body of work, and to his investment in physical labour to generate their precision and number. Both scenes portray young women, personifying painting, in the act of applying colour to statuettes. Featured throughout the space are examples of Gérôme’s work as a sculptor (Corinthe, Joueuse de boules and the Hoop Dancer), which when combined with this medium for the subject in painting become a unified testament to his multi-​faceted skill and to his years of productivity in both media.33 An even more relevant argument is being made through Gérôme’s scenes regarding the artist’s capacity for intellectual labour. In each, because of the drab and unimpressive qualities of the artist’s environs, the message becomes one of imaginative prowess, in addition to imitation of nature, 113

14

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics because only through imagination could one hope to generate in such a circumstance an ideal work and convincing reference to an alternative historic moment –​these are set in ancient Greece. Simply put, a contrast is being highlighted here between what the artist sees and what they depict. For Gérôme, if pure imitation were the sole evidence of productivity and genius, there would be no need to document the process of imitation, as the finished artwork would alone testify to this accomplishment. But by adding the reality of the artist’s work space, Gérôme makes visible through contrast the mental work needed to transform raw nature into the ideal illusion. Conversely, by reconstituting the factual into the repeated form, he underscores another tenet of Quatremère’s comparison between the arts of painting and poetry, which is that poetry is for him a fictional art that does not relate truth through its medium: ‘Those who feel surprised that poems are not composed on contemporary events, forget that poetry is an art and that all art is fiction’.34 This was not, however, a notion held by some of his critics, who indeed credited him with being able to capture centuries of truths in a single canvas. This was the nature of Gautier’s comments when he noted the following about Gérôme’s Siècle d’Auguste: ‘Nous allons essayer de rendre, autant que les mots le permettent, l’aspect de cette vaste composition, qui renferme tout un siècle et tout un monde sous une forme synthétique’.35 By the turn of the twentieth century, debates would continue to be waged over the temporal investment of the artist in imitation and labour. In 1916 theorist Kenyon Cox wrote that The business of the painter as imitator is to give us, temporarily, the benefit of his power of vision, of his training and knowledge, of his perception of the significance of things, and by so doing to give us an unwonted sense of physical and mental efficiency which is in the highest degree pleasurable. We feel ourselves, for the moment, possessed of clearer senses, of more lively emotions, of greater intellectual powers, than we had imagined; we live more intensely, and rejoice in our perception of this intensity of life. This the painter effects.36

So, whilst the debates over imitation continued to evolve well past the end of the nineteenth century, Moreau and Gérôme’s works expose the 114

15

The Temporality of Imitation importance of a metaphysical kind of productivity that took place within the mind of the artist and, ideally and correspondingly, in that of the viewer, and one that provided, at least momentarily for each in his or her own way, a path to harmony between the long-​opposed principles of physical and mental labour in art making and theory and the long-​standing exclusion of painting from the realm of the temporal.

Notes 1. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön:  An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore and London:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984). For a study of how Lessing’s boundaries for poetry and painting privileged the former and were predicated upon binary oppositions see W.J.T. Mitchell, Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology (Chicago and London:  The University of Chicago Press, 1986). For Charles Blanc’s discussion of the limits of each art see Grammaire des arts du dessin (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1880). 2. The Abbé Jean-​Baptiste Dubos explains that La composition Poëtique d’un tableau, c’est l’arrangement ingénieux des figures inventé pour rendre l’action qu’il réprésente plus touchante et plus vraisemblable. Elle demande que tous les personnages soient liez par une action principale, car un tableau peut contenir plusieurs incidens, à condition que toutes ces actions particulières se réunissent en une action principale, et qu’elles ne fassent toutes qu’un seul et même sujet. Sur la poësie et sur la peinture (Paris: Pissot, 1770), p. 255. 3. Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art: Sir Joshua Reynolds, ed. Robert R. Wark (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), pp. 106–​7. Even if Reynolds hailed from the British rather than French tradition, he was, nevertheless, drawing from French theory, however inconsistently, in order to raise the profile of his own academy, as compared to that in Paris. 4. Reynolds, Discourses on Art, p. 107. 5. Philip Hotchkiss Walsh, The Atelier of Gustave Moreau at the École des beaux-​ arts (France), Ph.D. Dissertation. (Boston: Harvard University, 1995). 6. Sarah J. Lippert, Gustave Moreau and the Paragone: The Legacy of the Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition in the Work of a Nineteenth-​ Century Painter, M.A. Diss. (London, ON: The University of Western Ontario, 2002). 7. Pierre-​Louis Mathieu, ‘La bibliothèque de Gustave Moreau’, Beaux-​arts (April 1978), pp. 155–​62.

115

16

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 8. See Julius Kaplan, The Art of Gustave Moreau: Theory, Style, and Content (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982). 9. Sarah J. Lippert, ‘Gustave Moreau’s Dying Poets: A Message to the Art Critic’, Images and Imagery: Frames, Borders, Limits –​Interdisciplinary Perspectives, eds Corrado Federico, Leslie Boldt-​Irons and Ernesto Virgulti (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2005), pp. 45–​78. For critical reviews of his work see Gustave Moreau par ses contemporains, eds Bernard Noël and Frédéric Chaleil (Paris: Les éditions de Paris, 1998). 10. See Assembleur des rêves: Écrits complèts de Gustave Moreau, pref. Jean Paladilhe, ed. Pierre-​Louis Mathieu (Fontfroide: Fata Morgana, 1984). On Moreau’s hierarchy of the arts see Peter Cooke, ‘History Painting as Apocalypse and Poetry: Gustave Moreau’s Les Prétendants, 1852–​1897, with unpublished documents’, Gazette des beaux-​arts 127/​1524 (January 1996), pp. 27–​48. 11. For example, Charles Baudelaire lamented the trespassing of the arts into each other’s spheres in his essay ‘L’Art philosophique’: Est-​ce par une fatalité des décadences qu’aujourd’hui chaque art manifeste l’envie d’empiéter sur l’art voisin, et que les peintres introduisent des gammes musicales dans la peinture, les sculpteurs; de la couleur dans la sculpture, les littérateurs; des moyens plastiques dans la littérature, et d’autres artistes, ceux dont nous avons à nous occuper aujourd’hui, une sorte de philosophie encyclopédique dans l’art plastique lui-​ même. Charles Baudelaire, L’Art romantique (Paris: Michel Lèvy Fréres, 1879). 12. For Quatremère de Quincy on Lessing see Antoine Chrysostrome Quat­ remère de Quincy, An Essay on Imitation in the Fine Arts, trans. J.C. Kent (London: Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, Booksellers to their Majesties, 1837), pp. 86, 90. And, on the Pygmalion narrative as best-​suited for painting see p. 88. 13. De Quincy, Essay on Imitation, p. 11. Italics from translated text. 14. Ibid., p. 12. 15. Ibid., pp. 12–​13. 16. My translation: For example, the meaning that we give to the word ideal, whether in ordinary language, or the language of imitation, will be an accusation or praise, based upon the nature of the objects to which we apply it. In its simple or vulgar meaning, this word can signify that which is fantastic, that which is the result of ignorant caprice, or that departs from the nature of things … De Quincy, De L’Idéal dans les arts du dessin (Paris: Librairie d’Adrien Le Clere et Cie, 1837), p. 3.

116

17

The Temporality of Imitation 17. De Quincy, Essay on Imitation, p. 219. 18. De Quincy, De L’Idéal, p. 4. My translation of the following: Cependant dire ce que c’est qu’on doit entendre sous le nom d’idéal, dans l’œuvre de l’imitation, par et sous les formes de la matière, ou dire ce qu’est l’essence même de l’idéal, et ce qu’est, dans les moyens et la manière de le produire, l’opération de l’art et de l’esprit de l’artiste, sont deux choses fort distinctes. L’une se fait facilement comprendre par de simples demonstrations au sens physique; l’autre ne peut être que le résultat de l’analyse métaphysique. 19. For more on the development of the theory of artistic invention as an intellectual process see: Marc Gotlieb, ‘The Painter’s Secret: Invention and Rivalry from Vasari to Balzac’, The Art Bulletin, 84/​3 (September 2002), pp. 469–​90. 20. Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-​Books, arranged and rendered into English with Introductions by Edward McCurdy (London and New  York:  Duckworth & Co., and Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906), pp. 157–​8. 21. Théophile Gautier, Les Beaux-​arts en Europe (Paris: Michel Lèvy Frères, 1855), p. 228. 22. On the Apollonian and Dionysian in Moreau’s work see Dorothy M. Kosinski, Orpheus in Nineteenth-​Century Symbolism (Ann Arbor, MI:  UMI Research Press, 1989); and, Kosinski, ‘Orpheus in the Context of Religious Syncretism, Universal Histories, and Occultism’, Art Journal 46 (Spring 1987), pp. 9–​14. 23. De Quincy, Essay on Imitation, p. 418. 24. For an examination of the figures and their identities see Julius Kaplan, ‘Gustave Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele’, Art Quarterly 33/​4 (1970), pp. 393–​414. Kaplan cites the following passage from Moreau’s notes on the painting: Semele, penetrated with the divine waves, transfigured, regenerated and purified by this consecration, by this vision of the eternal, dies, overcome in this divine ecstasy, and with her dies the genius of earthly love, with his goat’s feet. Divine love overcomes earthly love. Then, under this incantation and sacred exorcism, all transforms, purifies, and idealizes itself. Immortality begins, the divine fills everything … All are taken up, animated, and lost in the joy of enthusiasm and love, enflamed by contact with the divine and eternal. They disengage from their earthly mud, they go up the rising summits towards the light and are transfigured by this divine incantation and take the form of superior geniuses and pure spirits with broadly spread wings. A  breath of superior ideality, of divine purity spreads out in everything … Under his aegis and

117

18

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics not far from Death and Sadness sits the great Pan, symbol of the earth, who wrinkles his saddened brow in sorrow, on account of his slavery and exile … The silent and fatal Moon, Hecate, with green eyes and distracted, oblique glances, rests pensively in her eternal and terrible dream –​the griffins, lemurs, hydras of blood, monsters, dragons with hybrid forms, fatal gods of night, all the world of shadows rests petrified in its nocturnal melancholy at the bottom of the chasm and in the abyss of Shadow … It is an ascension toward the superior spheres, a raising of purged and purified beings towards the divine; an earthly death and immortal apotheosis. The great mystery is accomplished –​all of Nature is impregnated with the ideal and the divine –​all is transformed. It is a divine hymn. Details of Christianity are in this composition: this death of the senses, this destruction of matter in order t achieve immortality. This haste of beings at the apparition of divine light, in contact with the divine ideal –​all this is Christian. Paganism is withered in its essence by a reverse, a deviation of its symbolism (pp. 404–​5). 25. Although the Greek sculpture of Zeus at Olympia (called Jupiter by later viewers) was lost by Moreau’s time, its fame throughout the ancient world became the focus of a major treatise by De Quincy on the subject, with which Moreau could have been familiar. Moreau would certainly have been aware through popular prints of the Jupiter from antiquity, which was hailed as a wonder of the ancient world. See De Quincy, Le Jupiter Olympien (Paris: Firmin Didot, Imprimeur de l’Institut, 1814). 26. On Moreau’s interest in diverse cultures see Marie-​Laure de Contenson, ‘The Middle Ages as Reinvented by Gustave Moreau’, Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream, exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), pp. 22–​32. Larry J. Feinberg, ‘Gustave Moreau and the Italian Renaissance’, Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream, exh. cat. (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1999), pp. 5–​14. Rae Beth Gordon, ‘Aboli Bibelot? The Influence of the Decorative Arts on Stéphane Mallarmé and Gustave Moreau’, Art Journal 45/​2 (Summer 1985), pp. 105–​12. ‘Gustave Moreau et le Japon’, Revue de l’art 85 (1989), pp. 64–​75. Odile Sébastiani-​Picard, ‘L’Influence de Michel-​Ange sur Gustave Moreau’, La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France 27/​3 (1977), pp. 140–​52. 27. For consideration of contemporary cryptography as it relates to Moreau’s work see my article ‘Salomé to Medusa by Way of Narcissus: Moreau and Typological Confl’ation’, Artibus et Historiae 69: XXXV (2014), pp. 233–​66. 28. Assembleur des rêves, p. 146. My translation: To the gossips, to the professional critics, this distressing dissection of laws, and the conditions of art. And how many appalling errors,

118

19

The Temporality of Imitation foolishness, of nonsense, with each word, with each sentence. And the reason for this is the cause of that aptitude for the critics to write, to hold forth, to chatter about this terrible question, which is rightly their deficient views, their deficient sensitivity, their deficient deep and true love … Winckelmann, Diderot, Gautier, and the whole lot of them. And what appalling errors in their current judgement! What upsetting ignorance with insolent audacity, it is confounding! 29. Gülru Çak’mak, ‘The Salon of 1859 and Caesar: The Limits of Painting’, Reconsidering Gérôme, eds Scott Allan and Mary Morton (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum), pp. 65–​80. 30. Other examples of the artist at work include the following: The Model and the Artist (1892), Mon Portrait (1902), Self-​Portrait completing the Joueuse de boules (1902), not including his three versions of Pygmalion and Galatea, which are less obviously self-​portraits, but demonstrate artists with their works. 31. On the discovery of the ancient Tanagras see Guy Ducrey, ‘Tanagra ou les anamorpho’ses d’une figurine béotienne à la fin du XIXe s’iècle’, Anamorphoses déca dentes: l’art de la défiguration 188 0–​1914: études offertes à Jean de Palacio, eds Isabelle Krzywkowski and Sylvie Thorel-​ Cailleteau (Paris:  Presses de l’Université de Paris-​Sorbonne, 2002), pp. 207–​24. 32. De Quincy, Essay on Imitation, pp. 19–​20. 33. For more on G’érôme’s relationship to polychrome sculpture and interpretations of these works see my article ‘Jean-​Léon Gérôme and Polychrome Sculpture: Reconstructing the Artist’s Hierarchy of the Arts’, in Dix-​Neuf 18/​1 (April 2014), pp. 104–​25. For his experience as a sculptor see Gerald Ackerman, ‘Gérôme’s Sculpture: The Problems of Realist Sculpture’, Arts Magazine, 60/​6 (1986), pp. 82–​9. 34. De Quincy, Essay on Imitation, p. 362. 35. Gautier, Beaux-​arts, p. 219. 36. Kenyon Cox, ‘What Is Painting? I: Painting as an Art of Imitation, Reviewed Work’, The Art World, 1/​1 (October 1916), p. 31.

119

120

5 Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient Flesh: A Look at the Work of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet and de Kooning Chad Airhart

In Towards a Newer Laocoön of 1940, famous American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909–​94) built an argument that the history of advanced art was a ‘progressive surrender to the resistance of its medium’.1 In other words, avant-​garde painting restricted itself to the materiality of pure paint, surface and the autonomy of process. After identifying Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s recognition of a ‘theoretical confusion of art’ and the pitfalls of poetry’s ‘invasion’ of painting,2 Greenberg identified the errors of painted representations, nature-​imitation and narration. Yet, Greenberg admitted to the eventual possibility to ‘dispose of abstract art by assimilating it, [and] by fighting our way through it’.3 His self-​critique found justification in the works of Chaïm Soutine (1893–​1943), Francis Bacon (1909–​92), Jean Dubuffet (1901–​85) and Willem de Kooning (1904–​97), all of whom were painters who embraced the independence of process and the physicality of paint, whilst integrating this nearsighted painterly myopia as a means to express the corporeal world. Ideologically, all four artists practised a dualistic recipe of process versus representation. However, their respected attitudes about the importance of medium and process varied, as did the relative or direct influence 120

12

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient of Greenberg’s formalism. Three years after Greenberg began to cultivate the American taste for abstract art, Soutine died in France from stomach ulcers. By the reign of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s, Soutine was a legend amongst artists and viewed as a modern master of the painterly style. In his own life and work, Soutine never mentioned Greenberg or wanted to leave France. Soutine’s allegiance to European Old-​Master painting, and his use of tonal shifts to model form, revealed a personal theory that needed tactile flesh and body as much as the liberal use of painterly brushstrokes. Greenberg’s many remarks on Soutine indicated the importance of the artist in Modern art, but, in the end, Greenberg found Soutine’s work disappointing on the basis of Soutine’s apparent lack of focus on the pure and decorative elements of paint.4 With regards to Bacon, none of the Greenberg’s published material of the critic revealed a comment or persuasion, though Greenberg inevitably knew his work. The absence of remarks on Bacon showed that Greenberg perhaps like many Americans, was disinterested in Bacon’s pessimistic and ferocious distortions of human representation. However, several statements by Bacon demonstrated the artist’s awareness and rejection of a medium-​centrist theory. Although Bacon’s expressionistic images used an aggressive brand of painterly gestures, he battled against the predominance of a pure medium-​centric theory.5 By contrast, Greenberg embraced Dubuffet as one of the finest postwar European artists, even though Greenberg’s formalist beliefs never fully championed the French painter’s images of the human body. Nevertheless, Dubuffet gained enormous success in America and, indubitably, Greenberg’s judgements played a role.6 Dubuffet knew of the limits concerning abstract art and his ability to work within and without was a prime example of the combination of painterly myopia with images of flesh.7 Greenberg’s many positive critiques of de Kooning helped to establish one of the most successful artists of the twentieth century. Further, Greenberg and De Kooning worked together in the triumph of postwar America that would make New York City a capital of the art world. Both critic and artist became salient forces of the influential movement called Abstract Expressionism. Hence, de Kooning relied on and struggled against Greenberg, as the chief spokesman of formalism and abstract art. From my experience, as an art historian and practicing painter, the motif of flesh offers the best site for the mixture of formalism, representation 121

12

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics and intense expression. The aforementioned artists employed flesh as an impetus for an existential performance that generated unpredictable, visceral and individual aesthetics. This chapter will connect figuration and abstraction as a tantalising and riveting experience located in the motif of flesh and body. To this end, I organise this chapter of painting about painting with the main ingredient flesh in four topics: first, the conflict between process and motif; second, haptic and tactile space; third, composition restriction; and, fourth, cannibalism, or an artist’s tendency to destroy his or her own work. These issues appear in the paintings of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet and de Kooning. The work of these four artists proves the vitality of theoretical paradox and conflict in artistic practise. That is, the limitations of theory, such as shown in Greenberg’s reductive formalism, challenged the artists to express the subject matter of flesh. In the throes of Modern art as a progressive march to crown the painterly medium as end unto itself, we have four artists as counter-​currents. Mediated by Greenberg and the Abstract-​Expressionist movement, or in Soutine’s case, the mediation of formalist essentials, these artists exposed a post-​Lessing manner of situating the medium within the act of representation. They offered a personal, material and customised response to flesh and body as a kind of painterly reading that never forsakes the impact of physical performance on art making. With remarkable intensity, formalist notions of medium and process are grafted to an idiosyncratic flesh-​mediation. Before beginning a theoretical investigation, a brief historical account of each artist is warranted. Chronologically, Soutine preceded the other three artists and was one of the first Modern painters to insist on the stressful clash between motif and process. The presence of Pablo Picasso (1881–​1973) at Soutine’s untimely funeral in Paris, 1943, represented an affinity of artistic spirits, for Picasso made famous the depiction of Modern humanity mediated through the autonomy of personal style. Yet, Soutine exhibited a greater theoretical contradiction, in order to express his vision of humanity and the role of flesh and paint as joint carriers of meaning. The acknowledgement of his work’s significance to later artists can be assessed in The Impact of Chaïm Soutine (1893–​1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon, where the three later painters of this chapter examined Soutine’s influence.8 Born in a poor Jewish family and from a Russian-​controlled Lithuania, Soutine immigrated to Paris in 1913. He associated with the 122

123

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient circle later known as The School of Paris, which included artists Amedeo Modigliani (1884–​1920) and Marc Chagall (1887–​1985). After the wealthy American art collector Albert Barnes (1872–​1951) discovered his work, Soutine began to gain admiration and success. In the history of art, Soutine’s work is usually seen as ‘expressionist’ and, with his bold use of colour, is often linked stylistically to that of Post-​Impressionist Vincent van Gogh (1853–​90).9 Originally from Ireland, Bacon was self-​taught and did not begin to paint seriously until his thirties. He socialised with several famous artists, such as the well-​known painter Lucian Freud (1922–​2011), and was known for his two main motifs: The Crucifixion and The Scream. For his part, Bacon found incredible success with major shows all over the world,10 whilst Dubuffet had a brief and unhappy stint at the Académie Julian in 1918; he was basically self-​taught. After experimenting with music, theatre, puppetry and running a successful vineyard, Dubuffet began his art career in his forties. Since then, Dubuffet’s paintings and sculptures have increased in fame and during his lifetime he gave numerous interviews, lectures and published statements. His work, along with Bacon’s, belongs to the era of European figuration after World War II, which is noted for its sense of immense despair and trauma.11 Born in Holland, de Kooning underwent a rigorous education at the Rotterdam Academy. In 1926, he moved to the United States and, like Bacon and Dubuffet, did not have a one-​man show until in mid-​life. His mix of abstraction and representation lured countless admirers, including Greenberg, as mentioned above. Alongside Jackson Pollock (1912–​56), de Kooning was the most recognised artist of Abstract Expressionism. His work acquired global appreciation with single pieces selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars.12 Despite working in different places and, in Soutine’s case, a different time, the four artists held the inherent material qualities of paint as a kind of myopic concentration of abstracted flesh engaged with a general mission of expressing the unpredictable body. Distinct from the traditional ‘figure’, the term ‘body’ here refers to a direct experience of a specific person, animal, appendage, corpse or a particular being ‘fleshed out’, whereas ‘figure’ refers to traditional associations of public and moral values, which are usually embodied in the ideal male hero or beautiful female nude. For the myopic painter of abstracted flesh, the body operated from a void to a state of recognition and hence had the potential to fracture, dislocate, 123

124

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics deconstruct and challenge the vain assumption of human unity. Since wholeness was inevitably a priori in the depiction and memory of the human body, the necessity of predetermination loomed over the artists of this chapter as a deterrent to self-​discovery and self-​assertion. In turn, the bi-​focus on medium and representation called into play an extremely personal process as signs of flesh referred to the perceptions and sensations of the external body: the body of the artist during the performance of painting, the gestures of the hands and arms and the overall expression of the artist in action. The representation of flesh accrued the subjectivity of the artist. The tension between painterly process and bodily motif relied on the absolute recalcitrance from the formalist camp. Without the radical and extreme conviction that art should remain a closed system of formal elements, the fixation on the body would have lost the conflict it needed in order to stay fresh and capable of perpetual renewal. In effect, painterly myopia fixed on flesh held to something with which it could not fully agree; it required the theories of formalism. The concentration on medium and process owes a long history to the foundation of this tradition, such as Lessing’s influential essay, Laocoön or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766), where, in front of a reading of the famous Hellenistic sculpture by the same name, he argued for the need to understand the freedoms and limitations of the separate disciplines and medium-​specific qualities of poetry and painting, in that ‘artists should prefer to depict him (the subject of Laocoön) in whichever form best satisfied the demands of their art’.13 In this way, Lessing posited an aesthetic that incorporated the effects of medium into the portrayed subject and, by doing so, applied a layer of interpretation and speculative theory. Yet, Lessing’s call for a universal and predetermined beauty omitted the direct moments of the process; in contrast, the Modern art of Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet and de Kooning revealed a deep concern for the stages of process as important happenings with potentially lasting results. Nevertheless, and as other contributors to this anthology have shown, Lessing spawned a new aesthetic response and awakened the integrated relationship between process and representation. He helped to launch the belief that the formal attributes carried the essential meaning of a work of art, which eventually led to the explanation of art as an expression of relative subjectivity. 124

125

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet and de Kooning, however, lived in a different world than that permeated by Lessing’s optimism for the rational intellect and universal good. In fact, these Modern artists arose from a context of pessimism and a world where art exposed the contradictions and paradoxes of the human condition. For them, the mind was never rational. In the early twentieth century, Henri Bergson’s (1859–​1941) philosophy explained that ‘we experience life not as a series of continuous rational moments, but as intuited random memories and perceptions that we then piece together to form ideas’.14 Coupled with the impact of ideas like those of Sigmund Freud (1856–​1939) and the irrational unconscious, these artists dwelt in a situation where human consciousness was irrevocably fragmented and chaotic. To recover a sense of order and control, Bergson expounded on the notion of the élan vital (vital force) and the importance of human intuition. From all written evidence related to the four artists, the emotions and decisions of creation were hard-fought, even agonising, and intuition served as the guiding virtue. But intuition was inconsistent, and the painters of flesh were never content with the sanctity of the spontaneous gesture, or the painterly symbols of body and flesh; they flourished in the conflict between process and iconography, just as they prospered in the clash of art versus interpretation. To find a consistent stance on art and a theory that the aforementioned artists could retaliate against, we have to look to another critic, the opportunist American, Greenberg, who championed the New York School and a victorious country into the limelight of cultural advancement. As the most aggressive and distinct of all formalists, Greenberg demanded an individual art that could be bold, large and against the so-​called dreary Social Realism of the Soviet Union.15 The desire for an a-​contextual art came at a time of intense political and social divide: World War II and a virtual void for the art world; this would be a void filled by the Abstract Expressionists (also known as the New York School) and Greenberg’s radical formalism.16 Greenberg’s mission was founded in a clear and concise reading of history, as shown in his Towards a Newer Laocoön (1940), wherein he called for the omission of subject matter with an emphasis on the freedom of painterly process as inherently pure and pictorial. The citation of Lessing’s title was purposeful; it gave Americans the weight of tradition in the spirit of progress. Greenberg established a 125

126

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics similar kind of pre-​determination in his preclusion of naturalism, mimesis, representation and narration, yet the restriction was against external subject matter in lieu of the autonomy of process. Though the four artists considered here celebrated the inherent materiality of paint, and the intrinsic effects of process, they never acquiesced to any predestined ban on literal imagery. On the contrary, they revealed a creative process that owes its destiny to chance and accident, as well as to a direct encounter with the human body. Greenberg’s radical formalism served as a theory –​ or perhaps better identified as a counter-​theory –​that helped to define the methods and attitudes of these four artists. Without the concrete image made by the creative artist, no theory that wrestled with formalism would have any meaningful effect. Soutine’s Portrait of Moïse Kisling (Figure 5.1: 1919–​20) exhibits an example of the dual approach of fleshy body mixed with painterly autonomy. Here we see a compact man with particular characteristics, seen in Kisling’s confident posture and attentive gaze. It is a portrait of a disproportionate and contorted body with small head and large hands, and the shoulders and thorax stretch in an awkward diagonal from lower left to upper right. The man dons a red scarf and jacket with hands resting on a table, as if purposely displayed for the artist. A closer look at the hands shows the push for gesture and the recognition of surface that exposes the nervous reaction of Soutine and his heightened sense of excitement and pressure. The act of representing hands ‘presents’ the hands of Soutine with the swooshing motion of the longer fingers; we also behold the span of Soutine’s swooshing wrist, and in the compact and stodgy fingers, the quick jabs of Soutine’s hand. The amalgamation of iconography and formal effects encourages the respondent to see –​more than transcribed flesh –​imagined flesh and the fleshiness of paint, inspiring art historian Jacques Élie Faure (1873–​1937) to declare Soutine the painter of ‘flesh more like flesh than flesh itself, nerves more like nerves than nerves, … as a wondrous flame that wrings matter to its depths’.17 Soutine had an incredible ability to let go of optical data, whilst staying attuned to the unambiguous sensations before his eyes. Like a Zen Buddhist master, he added himself into the visual world that he represented. His work shows a represented and a projected body (sitter and artist) and is full of vibrant, lively, flesh tones and tactile naturalistic textures. His portrait radiates with the complexity of the immediate encounter 126

127

Figure 5.1  Chaïm Soutine, Portrait of Moïse Kisling, 1919–​20, cardboard on masonite, unframed 99.1 x 69.2 cm (39 x 27 ¼ in.), Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Arthur Wiesenberger, 1943.

128

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics fixed by haptic surfaces and the act of painting. Over and above, the unreal and real intermingle with the unrealistic aspects denoting the uneasiness felt between the artist and sitter, and the difficulty to freeze the moment in plasticity. The blend of painting and empathy resulted in an extremely evocative and conspicuous portrait, or an event that found Soutine joining the autonomous pictorial act with the sensitive impact of another human. A similar tension between representation and process exists in Bacon’s Self-​Portrait of 1978. Here, the artist recreated the visage as an ambiguous abstraction or mutation of the human face. Bacon’s work exemplifies the ambiguity of paint as maker of flesh, and paint about paint, in the sense that at one reading, we as viewers see distortion and an expression of anguish. Meanwhile, in another look, we as viewers witness the exploration of process and the effects of the medium. When asked about the issue of abstraction, Bacon explained about painting that ‘materials are in themselves abstract, but painting isn’t only the material, it’s the result of a sort of conflict between the material and the subject’.18 Bacon needed the ingredient of flesh to set up a conflicted process. The subject and the process were held together in a duel. An absolute painterly myopia eliminated the effects that Bacon sought, since paint itself was abstract and medium-​ tunnel-​vision reduced painting to ‘something purely decorative’.19 In this vein, the term ‘decorative’ signified a formal object of colour, line and texture that enhanced a wall, whilst Bacon’s disdain for the ‘purely decorative’ revealed the intention for his work to remain outside of interior decoration and mainstream home design. Bacon’s work was too ferocious and unsentimental.20 He incorporated the incongruity of figuration and abstraction –​ as a kind of absurdity –​and his visceral and dramatic effects were a result of paint and flesh being twisted together. Whilst Soutine and Bacon emphasised process, they painted from direct experience and often directly in front of the motif, to the extent of being labelled ‘realists’.21 Although discrete, a similar bond between the world of things and paint existed for de Kooning. His statement that flesh is ‘the stuff people were made of ’ and ‘why oil painting was invented’,22 echoed the inner contradiction between his extreme medium-​centrism and his desire to paint flesh. In Woman I (Figure 5.2: 1950–​2), de Kooning unleashed representation into a formal display of violent gestures and shape collision. We see sweeping motions, tactile surfaces and a vast range 128

129

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient

Figure 5.2  Willem de Kooning, Woman I, 1950–​5, oil on canvas, 1.93 m x 1.47 m (75 x 58 in.), Museum of Modern Art, New York City, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art.

of applications that exhibit art about process, activity and a Dionysian experience. Yet, the symbol of a woman with Sumerian goggle eyes and exposed teeth communicates a distressed and unstable eroticism. She is not sexualised, but is rather strangely feminine and powerful and, in some 129

130

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics ways, communicates the ambiguity of recognisable gender associations in the midst of abstract painting. For on one level, she is put together enough to be aggressive and angry, but dislocated enough to seem uneasy and sick. On another level, she functions merely as an armature for de Kooning on which to hang his slabs of paint. Painterly abstraction evoked a special sort of neurosis that bemoaned the contemporary deconstruction of ‘beauty’, as it fit into the American abstract movement. However, the representation of woman did not reach the universal; she was arrived at through formal and personal choices; it is therefore futile to see de Kooning’s woman as a critique on contemporary culture.23 The unequivocal subjectivity expressed in a body, such as shown in de Kooning’s woman or Soutine’s portrait, challenge the claims that art and art theory support unselfish, detached and aesthetic principles. Artists such as de Kooning pluralised and complicated the issue of abstract painting, by virtue of his ambiguous themes, which are part painterly abstraction and part image of figure. de Kooning’s statements alluded to the problems of theory and overreaching definitions saying that the ‘word “abstract” comes from the light tower of philosophers’.24 de Kooning’s damaged iconography abolished Greenberg’s association of abstract formalism and Immanuel Kant’s (1724–​1804) unbiased, ‘disinterested’ aesthetic.25 Greenberg knew that an art completely divorced of subject matter appeared purposely misunderstood or completely subjective, and his insistence that abstract painting related to Kant’s notion of the ‘disinterested’ revealed the critic’s determination to anchor American art in the throes of traditional aesthetics, and to counter the individual pragmatism found in America. Greenberg admitted that Kant had ‘more insights into the nature of esthetic experience than anyone else’26 and, just as Greenberg borrowed Lessing’s historic medium-​awareness in Laocoön, he championed Kant’s historic notion of the unbiased ‘disinterested’.27 For Kant, art and aesthetic judgement involved a union of pleasure and universal truth. In the late eighteenth century, whilst Lessing had broken ground for the importance of process, he still felt that art was primarily for personal pleasure, as stated in his Laocoön: ‘Truth is necessary for the soul; and it becomes tyranny to exert any force upon it in respect to this vital need. The ultimate end of the arts, however, is pleasure; and pleasure is dispensable’.28 Kant, on the other hand, placed aesthetic judgement 130

13

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient and experience in a realm unto itself, and beyond personal pleasure, which offered profound implications for the significance of art. Published in his The Factor of Surprise (1975), Greenberg explained with erudite precision that the ‘Esthetic expectation is “unpractical”, disinterested, and it is so because it is created solely within esthetic experience by nothing outside it’.29 The reflexive idea of the ‘disinterested’ meshed perfectly with the reflexivity of the formalist aesthetic and in part resided in the context of universal beauty, which was thought to be an object that brought pleasure purely for its own sake. Yet, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant stated that ‘Taste is the faculty of judging an object or a mode of representation based on pleasure or aversion, yet without interest’.30 This contradiction between individual experience and unselfish universality plagued Greenberg as well. Whilst Kant resolved the contradiction with the complicated ‘subjective universality’, Greenberg rationalised the ‘disinterested’ aesthetic experience as being a key response to abstract art and the autonomy of process. And, in doing so, he situated the individual and experimental expression with the international advances of the avant-​garde. He posited an individualist and democratic, but also globally minded, American art that resisted the provincial trappings of regionalism and the supposed crudity of folk art.31 Fittingly, Greenberg’s American art movement embraced a universal detachment in the spirit of universal freedom. Art without literal subject matter was inherently unbiased, unsentimental, unselfish and above the individual’s ego. Of course, this tenet countered dramatically the love of process and conflict with imagery of our four artists, especially Dubuffet. Whereas de Kooning departed and then returned to the motif, despite the autonomy of process in what could be called a suspended painterly myopia, Dubuffet, as a radical form of myopia, sought to find his own reflexive and material process as life itself. This medium-​centrism, in turn, lent a greater intimacy, understanding and concentrated relationship to the represented object. In Minerva (1945), Dubuffet fashioned a crusty and tactile surface that pushed painting to the realm of sculpture and the body to caricature. The title, which refers to the Roman goddess of wisdom, plays against the associations of classical antiquity with a comical rendition of a female figure shown frontally spread across the surface. She is represented with bold outlines demarcating power points of head, face, arms, breasts and hands, whilst the surface exudes a layer upon layer of experimental 131

132

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics work. The motif is embedded in thick patties of pigment. Unlike Bacon, who likened the essence of paint to abstract decoration, Dubuffet saw that painting ‘operates through signs which are not abstract and incorporeal like words. The signs of painting are much closer to the objects themselves’.32 Dubuffet envisioned painting as a primitive and personal means to represent the world, and the process of painting as integral to understanding the world. Unabashedly intimate with his surroundings and the experience of the body, he used art to extend and connect with unashamed bias. His main inspirations were painter Paul Klee (1879–​1940), children’s art, untrained artists and graffiti. In his work, we see a recreation and connection between painter, paint and subject as a form of epistemology. Dubuffet’s statement of 1953 sheds light on his attitude, as ‘you see at one and the same time all the objects stripped of their flesh and refreshed again with a concentrate of matter’.33 The process and outcome of which Dubuffet spoke was inherently personal, in that basic experience was a physical process of subjective destruction and renewal. It followed a path towards self-​discovery. Greenberg’s ambivalence regarding Dubuffet bespeaks the merit of this chapter’s thesis, since on one hand Greenberg asserted that Dubuffet’s style was ‘little more than confectionary –​[it] reveals literary leanings … But the literature, I must admit, is of a superior order’.34 This superiority resulted from a conflict between process and representation. Greenberg later denounced Dubuffet, claiming that ‘his art still suffers under the limitation of being too essentially personal … Dubuffet still speaks for but a single mood inside a single period of that age’.35 The age to which Greenberg referred was the period of post​war Europe and the pessimistic philosophy of the French Existentialist Jean-​Paul Sartre (1905–​80).36 Dubuffet’s postwar expressions of anxiety and alienation remained a personal kind of existentialism and perhaps a means towards healing or adventure, but it was definitely not an intellectual pursuit for the ‘disinterested’. In my view, a better and often overlooked philosophy existed in George Santayana’s (1863–​1952) statement that ‘the claim of universality is such a natural inaccuracy’ and that there ‘is no great agreement upon aesthetic matters’.37 He countered Kant’s ‘disinterested’ position, arguing that beauty was ‘the greatest capacity both for enjoyment and creation’ and ‘is highly specialised and exclusive, and hence the greatest ages of art have often been strangely intolerant’.38 This 132

13

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient intolerance and exclusivity may be sensed in Greenberg’s criticism, which eventually inspired the postmodern deconstruction of the formalist aesthetic. The artists of flesh and process revealed the plurality of the world and the relation within it of the artist. When in front of a work of internal and formal conflict bearing the motif of flesh, viewers are faced with an intense, complicated and personal experience of the body. The work of art continues to destabilise the viewer’s concept of human representation, thereby thwarting the notions of universal truth and an unbiased aesthetic. If a combination of paint-​about-​paint and paint-​about-​flesh was to coexist, then traditional means of conveying space and perspective had to be altered, or altogether jettisoned. Lessing’s traditional (and academic) requirement that painting depict space, like Greenberg’s attack on illusionistic space, saw implied space and depth as purely visual. The four artists presented here created their own unique brand of formal space that incorporated the gesture of the hand, the texture of the medium and the determination and accidents obtained through a combination of well-​thought-​out movements and pure chance. In addition to the evidence of visual mimicry, forms were represented with the proof of haptic and tactile sensations. As each artist combined motif and process, he employed a personal means to mesh a visual symbol with an idiosyncratic method of space. The painterly rendition of flesh congealed the moments of action to the point that the tactility of paint became an essential aspect of the representation’s mass. In other words, the mass of paint converged with the mass of an object. In Head and Carcass of a Horse (formerly Side of Beef and Calf ’s Head) (c.1923), Soutine showed the physicality of flesh, meat, fat, tissue and bone from a proximate vantage point. The carnal display of meat is reflected in the materiality of paint; the forms and details of the carcass are present, whilst the intimacy is encountered as pictorial mass. This is not just a loose visual representation with bravura brushwork. It is a concrete haptic representation of solid space. Tactile stimulations gained by Soutine moving his arms and hands corresponded to the gestures and brushstrokes required to transcribe the object onto the canvas. He literally reshaped the subject matter onto the surface of the substrate, as a reenactment of the real experience of touching the subject. Unlike sight, which determines a shape almost instantly, touch requires a series of both premeditated 133

134

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics and accidental movements. Soutine’s representations, gathered from a sequence of many contacts, condensed the spatial properties of an object to equivalents in marks, brushstrokes and painterly applications. Cognitive psychology established that in relation to sight, touch expands the realisation of many properties due to its sequential nature. Hatwell elaborated on this, saying that The successive nature of touch has long struck observers and has been opposed to the simultaneous nature of vision. This opposition should however be qualified. Although it is true that the vast visual perceptual field allows a global and immediate apprehension of many aspects of the stimulus, exploratory movements are still necessary in vision to identify the invariants which specify the spatial properties of the environment.39

Soutine –​a painter of ‘haptic equivalents’ –​required a poignant recognition and memory of sequential stimuli.40 The hands, arms, shoulder and sometimes entire body moved to determine the object’s breadth from one end to the other. Based in kinaesthetic motion, the perception of touch determined location and size through the bodily exertion and duration of the time required to feel it. In his perceptive lectures on Soutine, Louis Finkelstein explains that Soutine’s plasticity originated from his use of the ‘Geodesic Principle’, which is a ‘mathematical term for the shortest line between points on a curved surface’. Finkelstein went on to say that ‘three-​ dimensional forms are drawn with lines that traverse the forms in varying directions to heighten the sense of tactility and solidity’. This kind of painting raised ‘a principle of description to a principle of feeling’.41 In the analysis of the Sleeping Figure (1959), Lawrence Gowing and Sam Hunter accounted for Bacon’s depiction of mass as a process of physical chance, describing the work by saying that the ‘paint spilled out, much as the body was sprawled out on the mattress –​dropped in amorphous, random pools’.42 The act of spilling and dragging the brush reaffirmed the planarity of the body and flatness of the surface. Similarly, Bacon’s brushstrokes often shot away or took off in random directions, breaking up the representation and disturbing the solidity of forms. Bacon’s faces appear to be ripped apart and bitten savagely, while, simultaneously, they are made from an elegant handling of paint. The process distorted the isolated body, 134

135

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient affecting the expression; the individuality of subject was intensified, and contrasted, in the specificity of material effects. Bacon’s surfaces reveal a visual or tactile duality with the painterly process, generating an image of the broken body. Unlike Bacon, who defended the process as an essential reality of the expression of angst and violence, de Kooning centred on the action of painting itself. Scholar Richard Shiff explains how de Kooning defended the liberties that he took with bodies in the following statement: To see from the end of an arm, intimately … Since you draw out a line or a passage of paint just as you draw out (extend, spread) your arms or legs, to follow a movement of paint from a distance with the eyes induce a feeling of movement in the limbs. So if a line stretches a drawn limb too far, the naïve viewer may well feel a sympathetic pain, a violation. Think of spreading your own body to its maximum extension; it will help to imagine yourself as much as possible against a resistant surface, such as a wall or a wooden panel.43

Both Bacon and de Kooning created a space based on touch and the kinaesthetic of painting. Whilst Bacon sought the expressiveness of violence and mutilation through the haptic experience, de Kooning, by contrast, did not direct expression to such a precise path. For the latter, the haptic experience, although initiated by the subject, broke away from this starting point in order to further antagonise the process. Greenberg’s assessment of de Kooning’s Women series placed the paintings in the Cubist tradition –​essentially an abstract and process-​oriented theory –​yet the critic mentioned that the series ‘attack[s]‌the female form with a fury greater than Picasso in the late ’30s and the ’40s’.44 The critic allowed de Kooning, whom he pronounced to be as ‘genius’ as Picasso, the benefit of represented imagery to serve the autonomy of process. Dubuffet stood apart from the other three in the sense that the work of art became an independent life of its own with respect to the perceived subject. The work’s sheer physicality encounters the viewer and prevents an ordinary visual experience. For instance, in Julie la sérieuse (Figure 5.3: 1950), a diminished body is attached to a disproportionately large head with a humorous smiley face, while a spiky head and dark 135

136

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Figure 5.3  Jean Dubuffet, Julie la sérieuse, 1950, 73 cm x 60 cm (28 3/​4 x 23 5/​8 in.), oil on composition board, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA. Photographic credit: Courtesy of the Dallas Museum of Art.

background mesh together to form a clumsy and childlike human figure. With an uncanny resemblance to earth sediment, clay and dried mud, the rough surface joins to the primitive body and creates an image of humanity that is awkward, disturbing and silly. As seen in his series called Texturologies, the crusty, rough and unpredictable textures were consequences from a battleground of surface disruption. Although the reality of the portrayed person remained, Dubuffet’s search for a primordial 136

137

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient process created a surface quality unto itself that was unique and tangible. More than the other artists, Dubuffet stressed the instinct of touch over sight as the most basic sense, thereby extolling the ‘primitive’ aspects of haptic sensory perception, just as he put the physicality of painting over writing and the abstract written word. In his Anticultural Positions (1951), Dubuffet stated the following: ‘I believe (and here I am in accord with the so called primitive civilizations) that painting is more concrete than the written word, and is a much more rich instrument for the expression and elaboration of thought’.45 In part, the innovation that results from process-​myopia stemmed from the restriction of composition by the four artists in their use of the portrait scheme. In the Chaïm Soutine Catalogue Raisonné, the authors noted that ‘the portrait was a perfect vehicle for Soutine in its single focus’, which ‘increasingly restricted compositional format’.46 In Portrait of Pastry Cook with Red Handkerchief (1922–​3), a young man dominates the picture plane and is placed frontally at the centre. The innovation is not in the compositional layout, but in the applications of paint, which are spread evenly and calmly, contrasting with clumpy and stringy marks. The background completely serves the body and acts as a niche or pedestal, which allowed Soutine to concentrate his energy on painting the face, hands, garments and body. Like no other artist, Soutine used a simple layout in order to combine the pigment of paint, effects of colour, and sculptural modeling of tonal gradations. Surfaces were not built up with large passages of impasto, but were rather interrogated to explore the possibilities of combining the psychological effects of colour, and the implication of mass through the use of lights and darks. De Kooning expressed a similar quest for simplicity in a quote regarding the ‘impasse’ that the Woman series created when trying to enter landscape abstraction. He bemoaned the excessive talk on abstract formalism, recalling that ‘maybe I was stuck to a certain extent; I couldn’t go on. And (the figure) did one thing for me: it eliminated composition, arrangement, relationships, light –​all this silly talk about line, color, and form, you know –​ because that was the thing I wanted to get hold of ’.47 For de Kooning, a figure, spread across the picture plane, filling the majority of the canvas, provided a realm of constants in which the variants were launched. Though de Kooning never spelled out the technical or emotional reasons 137

138

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics for pictorial limitation, it would seem that a blunt layout acted as visual and psychological blinders for an aesthetic obsessed with mark making. The variety of lines, gesture and applications, from smooth wet-​on-​wet to rough scumbling, testify to the impact of an uncomplicated arrangement. In de Kooning’s Women series, the flurry of busy marks and elisions of paint bury the figure and dissolve the initial organisation. Dubuffet’s strategy, by contrast, remained fixed to a simple body flattened to the surface. Shapes and representations are solid, tight and appear like ruins or characters in a secret alphabet. In Dhotel Hairy with Yellow Teeth (1947), Dubuffet reduced his composition to the bare minimum with a bulbous head and cartoon-​like body. The simplified head squirms out of a globular thorax, which embodies more geometrical shapes, skewed and altered by the labour of work. Yet, the surface is complicated, made from scratching, spreading, incising and dabbing. A graphic quality resulted from such a simple design, whilst the bluntness offered a palpable entrance into the process. But, the redundancy also created a resistance against the drive towards free indeterminacy. In Art as Experience, John Dewey described the phenomenon of expression in this way: it is ‘Mere opposition that completely thwarts, creates irritation and rage. But resistance that calls out thought generates curiosity and solicitous care, and, when it is overcome and utilised, eventuates in elation’.48 In short, the straightforward layout offered a balance for the contentious preexistent structure and the possibilities of bodily imagery and tactile process. For the four artists under consideration, a perpetual return to the same pictorial scheme offered a ready-​made strategy for productive experimentation, frustration and resolve. This process played a distinct autobiographic role for de Kooning and Bacon, who used the repetition of straightforward compositions to coordinate flesh and painterly performance as an accumulation of past performances. Shiff cites Thomas Hess’s account to note that this insistence on a single topic constituted a monomania, or a life-​long obsession with a particular theme, painterly gesture or passage. According to Hess, de Kooning ‘has gone back continuously to older shapes, recreating new ones from them, as if he were impelled to bring a whole life’s work into each section of each new picture’.49 The repetition of de Kooning’s Women series, and the transformation into the abstract landscape series, illustrate this issue. 138

139

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient Perhaps more than the others, Bacon returned to similar schemes, searching to reanimate the nervous system with both intense images and painterly innovation. The Second of Triptych 1944, completed in 1988, exhibits Bacon’s undying obsession with painterly haunting figures that are placed in an altar-​like context. The later triptych is larger, with the figure proportionally smaller to adjacent areas. The formal alterations in the flesh of the mutated bodies bear the mark of an artist dealing with process and the memory of an image, which was an image that members of the public associated with Bacon. The artist battled with not only the issue of recreating the theme, but with the response to this recreation from himself and his viewers. For the final issue of painterly myopia and the main ingredient of flesh, I will discuss an outcome of the dual emphasis on process and flesh in the habit of cannibalism, or the proclivity of the artists under consideration to destroy their own work. Truly, artists who destroy (or repeatedly paint over) their own works rarely discuss such acts. Such eradications remained undisclosed and their purpose largely secret. Yet, such artistic cannibalism speaks volumes about artistic intention, since lost or covered work indicates disappointment, intolerance and begs for a comparison with the works that survive consumption. The sheer physicality of the creative process resulted in a level of necessary excess, which made the creative process akin to the biological and neurological functions of eating. In this sense, the destroyed canvases were being eaten up as a means to creativity. This essay has addressed the tension between a myopic painterly process and the motif of flesh and considers the implication that such tension yielded powerful and original results. However, tension often meant dissatisfaction for the artists considered. Greenberg’s ‘paint is paint and surface is surface’ provides a kind of foolproof theoretical foundation in the painterly tradition. The four artists combated this formalist reduction of painting to surface and paint; they embraced conflict and contradiction. In theory, then, it seems apparent that an art of paradox brought trouble and the destruction of a fair amount of labour. The difficulties of integrating the sense of touch into the depiction of body, along with the need for surprise within a simple compositional format, also added to the struggle. Fittingly, the characteristics that most often described the four artists in critical literature indicate their rough temperaments: Soutine the ‘tormented’, Bacon’s ‘violence’, De 139

140

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics Kooning’s ‘anxiety’, and the ‘brutal’ or ‘savage’ Dubuffet.50 However, might the inclination towards auto-​vandalism have resulted from a dichotomous artistic theory that expected and championed the unexpected? Lessing’s call for a moral, universal beauty, Kant’s disinterested ‘subjective universality’, and Greenberg’s ‘unpractical’ and detached formalism solved the issue of taste in the logical realm of predetermined cultural mores that transcend the individual, selfish and destructive aspects of creation.51 On the contrary, each of the four artists sought his own theory and way of ­seeing: Soutine pursued heightened expressiveness, de Kooning his painterly experiments, Bacon his conquered pessimism and Dubuffet his primordial Art Brut.52 Vicissitudes, accidents, temporal happenstance and paradox were essential elements of the painterly process and aesthetic judgement. Hence, it is difficult to find universal beauty or aesthetic taste beyond personal desire and, as such, the demands for the subjective and indefinable end made any fixed standard or universal taste absolutely intolerable. For his part, Bacon wanted the process to evoke chance and accident. In one statement, he declared, ‘real painting is a mysterious and continuous struggle with chance –​mysterious because the very substance of the paint, when used this way, can make such a direct assault upon the nervous system’.53 Yet, paradoxically, Bacon clung to repetitive iconography, such as that of a disfigured person screaming hysterically. The return to the same basic motif and design heightened Bacon’s need to find an unexpected sensory experience. The struggle inevitably led to the destruction of work. Bacon’s process invited the erratic and capricious; it was entirely subjective and complex. But his ability to select and halt the process proved that the artist knew what he was after. Bacon established cultural images of anxiety, and a destruction of authority, facilitated by the appropriation of Old-​Master paintings and images of enthroned and deformed bishops. The consistent quality of his images reveals the value of auto-​vandalism as a routine of behaviour. Whereas Bacon’s work indicated moments of intense painterly passages aside coexisting with quiet and relatively untouched areas, pointing to flashes of inspiration next to cold inert sessions, de Kooning maintained a steady, daily and blue-​collar studio practise. de Kooning had a similar problem with repetition, but, contrary to Bacon’s use of grotesque figures, his conflict arose from the monotony of method and repeated applications. 140

14

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient David Sylvester equated de Kooning with Giacometti and Bacon, stating that de Kooning’s process ‘[W]‌as simply beginning again, as all three artists did with their paintings, sometimes after removing existing paint, sometimes obliterating paint with paint. The effective destruction was what happened to paintings by all of them as a result of repeating the processes too often’.54 Perhaps, for De Kooning, the mutability of the flesh motif served as a means to exorcise the memory or repetition of a past technique, or to expel the chance of predictability through the tension generated from a surface organ to a surface medium. Flesh is part meat, tissue and the skin that covers the body. To counter the overuse of his designs and themes, de Kooning might have felt that the looseness and fluidity of flesh offered the most capacity for pictorial change. The dissolution and mutability of flesh afforded de Kooning’s paint a perpetual freshness and openness that promoted spontaneous gestures and unplanned painterly effects. In the undying battle to tear down the wall of repetition, Dubuffet’s process differed from de Kooning, in that for de Kooning, the means was the end, whilst for Dubuffet, the means served to eliminate Western preconceptions of perspective, proportion and beauty, as well as offering a means to escape his own preconceived associations. For Dubuffet, the body acted as a kind of partner in this artistic self-discovery. Painting gained a life of its own and became totem-​like with the matter of process highly fetishised. This explains why Sylvester could claim that ‘there was an insistence [in Dubuffet’s work] that life must also be an equivalent for sensory experience of reality’.55 Again, like the opposition between process and motif, the need to generate painting as life required an intense commitment to an unstable vocation. Dubuffet wanted a holistic and original art, and was often unhappy. His vision required the ceaseless ambivalence and despair of work that hits only after it misses. In the case of Soutine, the tendency to cannibalise raises questions regarding his theory of art, since he basically wrote nothing about the disapproval of his own art and yet the cannibalistic tendency seemed inherently part of his aggressive method. Many critics have suggested that the more nonrepresentational and ‘unconscious’ works of Soutine’s ‘Céret’ period, which were executed in the early 1920s, constituted a detour before his supposedly greater works in the mid-​1920s, which explains Soutine’s legendary auto-​vandalism of the Céret paintings. For example, Dunow 141

142

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics claims that Soutine followed a ‘deliberate evolution’ and demonstrated an ‘impulse toward structural organization’, saying that the Céret paintings were overly Dionysian and chaotic.56 Others, such as Sylvester, argue that the ‘Céret’ works were superior, because they represented a prophetic existential experiment that preceded Abstract Expressionism.57 Whether simply a result of disapproval or need for change, Soutine’s auto-​vandalism was indicative of a fundamental problem of process-​expectation and the nature of his definition of a ‘finished’ work. In response to the major retrospective of Soutine’s work at the Museum of Modern Art in 1951, Greenberg outlined its internal conflicts in one of the most insightful essays ever written regarding the problems of Modern painting. Greenberg’s comments fit with this discussion on cannibalism, claiming that Soutine ‘aimed for a maximum of expressive intensity and he asked, perhaps, too much of painting. Certainly he paid too little heed to its inescapable requirement of a minimum of decorative organisation, without which even easel pictures must fail of unity’.58 Greenberg also explained that most of Soutine’s paintings represented futile attempts to combine two contradictory methods. That is, Soutine’s failures resulted from his twofold method to create volume and sculptural bodies from tonal shifts (like Rembrandt) and his use of colour as ‘unmodulated according to values and organised by the orchestration of flat, single hues’.59 For Greenberg, these two methods of pictorial structure were incompatible; he required an emphasis on ‘decorative’ or formal qualities; hence, Soutine produced works that were incomplete and disappointing. Previously, it was argued that Soutine searched for a tactile space, by pushing the physical aspects of the medium, rendered with the gestural movement of the hands and body. Thus, this new interpretation of Soutine’s haptic space counters Greenberg’s reading that the painter employed lights and darks like the Old Masters. In other words, Soutine’s lights and darks stemmed as much from the heavy tactility that he wished to express, as from the optical perception of gradations of light reflecting on a body. The application of saturated and dense pigment corroborated with the visual sensation of three-​dimensional form. This was a realistic quality, but unlike the Old Masters, Soutine allowed for the autonomy of the process and, therefore, did not rely on a standard painterly technique to render tangible space. But, Greenberg’s statement about the Modern artist who ‘asks too much 142

143

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient of painting’ raises an important issue regarding the inherent problem of Modern painting, which was its relative limits and, as a pertinent critique, belongs next to the other three artists of this study. Indubitably, the four artists of painterly myopia with a fixation on flesh asked a great deal of art and ultimately many failures demanded destruction in order for the process to continue. Above all the four artists, Soutine’s status as a bohemian Jew in Paris during the Nazi takeover, which in part caused Soutine’s death,60 makes him seem the most troubled and tormented, and though perhaps Greenberg’s assessment rested myopically within a formal critique, Greenberg understood that Modern art, like modern poetry, tempted the individual to embrace an expressivity of inexplicable freedom, experimentation and limitlessness. Even though Greenberg found much of Soutine’s work disappointing, the attention that Greenberg gave him proved that Greenberg was moved by Soutine’s difficult mission.61 Soutine’s cannibalism probably arose because of many different issues outside of the artist’s control. Yet, Greenberg’s theory that paint was paint, and was essentially ‘decorative’, sheds light on a possible explanation for Soutine’s cannibalism or that of the other three artists explored in this chapter. That is, the formal elements of painting, one way or the other, determined whether the work was or was not successful. The cases of auto-​vandalism demonstrated that each artist searched for permanent ideas that could be transcendental and detached. The pattern of cannibalism meant that some valuable criteria existed outside of the art, even if completely idiosyncratic and beyond formal aesthetics. In the context of Lessing’s attention to medium-​centrism, the issue of Soutine’s cannibalism marked a unique situation for an artist involved with process and representation. In the pursuit of what Dunow called ‘aesthetic distance’, Soutine demonstrated a division between artist and subject, as a means to focus on the creative process. Here we recall Kant’s ‘disinterestedness’, which links to the unbiased and impersonal reality of the medium and surface, as championed by Greenberg, or the search for the visceral, yet detached, reality of life associated in the haptic equivalents of Bacon and de Kooning. Interpreting Soutine, Dunow linked this ‘emotional’ or ‘aesthetic distance’ to T.S. Eliot’s (1888–​1965) statement that ‘the more perfect the artist, the more completely separable in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates’.62 For his part, Forge described Soutine’s 143

14

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics creative process in this way: ‘It is in terms of this totally engrossed, primitive relationship to the painting act, in which he seems to demand something of it rather than to make something with it’.63 In summary, the four artists considered in this chapter demonstrated the profit of a tailored and modified reading of Lessing and Greenberg’s medium-​centrism. The tension of flesh and paint was not a rubric to transcend the individual, but was a creative means to ignite a theory of instability, which was a personal process and individual reaction, riddled with impurity, being rife with unpredictable physicality and an efficacious fleshy body. In the context of Lessing and the dissection of artistic media, a painterly myopia that creates individual expressions of flesh extends the conversation by implanting the call to join the realm of historical ideas to the physical act of creativity. The mediation of Greenberg’s modern system of formalism continued the debate and gave a concise reading of art history and culture, to which Soutine, Bacon, Dubuffet and de Kooning answered. They projected themselves into the discourse, whilst, in effect, their visual and tactile paintings altered the intellectual discussion. The quest of these artists made flesh out of theory and ideas into paint. If Lessing were alive to examine their work, perhaps he would first pause at the sensation of such strange depictions of the human body. But, after realising the impact that these paintings have made on art, history and culture, in a medium of lesser importance in his age, it may be argued that he would look amazed at the power of his seminal theory and the inherent freedom out of which it was made, and that humans made of it.

Notes 1. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism Perceptions and Judgments 1939–​1944, volume 1, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 34. Greenberg is considered one of the most influential art critics in art history. His preeminence came simultaneously with the rise of American art on the international scene, after World War II. His main critical stances were first published in Art and Culture: Critical Essays (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961). Originally, his reviews were published in journals, such as Partisan Review and The Nation, and were not subject to in-​depth analysis. After Art and Culture, scholars, curators and artists were able to grasp Greenberg’s consistent theory of modern art.

144

145

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient 2. Greenberg, Perceptions and Judgments, pp. 25–​6. Greenberg gives Lessing credit for realising the problem of a dominant medium, such as literature, and that each medium is different and should be analysed with distinct advantages and disadvantages. Thus the title of his article, Towards a Newer Laocoön, points to a revision of Lessing’s notions that were presented in the seminal work, Laocoön or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). Greenberg continued to claim that Lessing was too sparse with few examples about the medium of painting versus the medium of poetry. 3. Greenberg, Perceptions and Judgments, p. 37. 4. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–​1956, vol. 3, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), p. 72. Greenberg’s critique, titled ‘Chaïm Soutine’, followed the Museum of Modern Art’s retrospective of Soutine’s work, which began in 1950. The exhibition of 75 works traveled through 1952 to eleven different places in the United States. 5. Francis Bacon, Francis Bacon, In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud (London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1993), p. 145. Bacon implied the necessity of a picture’s decorative qualities, whilst saying these qualities were not his main interest. 6. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, Arrogant Purpose, 1945–​1949, vol. 2, ed. John O’Brian (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986). This span of Greenberg’s criticism demonstrates the critic’s coverage of Dubuffet. 7. Valerie Da Costa and Fabrice Hergott, Jean Dubuffet; Works, Writings and Interviews (Barcelona, Spain:  Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006). This text covers a wide range of topics concerning Dubuffet. One quote from the artist reveals much about his attitude in general and about his feeling for a popular theory, such as Greenberg’s formalism. Dubuffet stated that ‘the important thing is to be against things’, p. 11. 8. Maurice Tuchman and Esti Dunow, The Impact of Chaïm Soutine (1893–​1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon, Galerie Gmurzynska, Exhibition 2 November–15 December 2001 (Cologne: Hatje Canz Publisheres and authors, 2002). 9. Maurice Tuchman, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls, Chaïm Soutine (1893–​1943) Catalogue raisonné (Koln, Germany: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1993). 10. Michael Leiris, Francis Bacon:  Full Face and in Profile (New  York:  Rizzoli, 1983). John Russell, Francis Bacon, revised and updated edn, World of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993). 11. Da Costa et al., Jean Dubuffet: Works, Writings and Interviews. Max Loreau, Catalogue integral des travaux de Jean Dubuffet, 34 vols (Paris: J.​J. Pauvert, 1964). 12. On de Kooning’s career see Harry F. Gaugh, Willem de Kooning (New York: Abbeville, 1983). Thomas B. Hess, Willem de Kooning (New York: MOMA, 1968).

145

146

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 13. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, The Laocoön, and Other Prose Writings of Lessing, trans. and ed. W.B. Ronnfeldt (London: Walter Scott, Ltd), p. 57. 14. Penelope J.E. Davies, Walter B. Denny, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Joseph Jacobs, Ann M. Roberts, David Simon, Janson’s History of Art: Western Tradition, vol. 2, 7th edn. (New York: Pearson Education, 2007), p. 946. 15. Greenberg:  Perceptions and Judgments, p.  14. In ‘Avant-​Garde and Kitsch’, Greenberg criticises Soviet Russia’s use of ‘socialist realism’. A site that discusses the government’s use of Abstract Expressionism in the Cold War: http://​www. independent.co.uk/​news/​world/​modern-​art-​was-​cia-​weapon-​1578808.html. 16. H.H. Arnason, History of Modern Art, 5th edn, Peter Kalb, revising author (New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2004). 17. Norman Kleebaltt and Kenneth Silver, Soutine, An Experiment in Paris, The Paintings of Chaïm Soutine (New York: Prestel, 1998), p. 151. 18. Bacon: Francis Bacon, p. 145. 19. Ibid. 20. The most famous negative reaction to Bacon’s images came from Margaret Thatcher, who was called Bacon ‘that man who paints those dreadful pictures’. From Francis Bacon obituary, The New York Times (April 1992). It should be noted that for many influential art historians and critics, Bacon’s mutilated, unsentimental and detached uses of the body were considered admirable qualities of his work, as seen in Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New: The Hundred Year History of Modern Art –​Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), pp. 296–​9. 21. Whilst Soutine and Bacon painted from live models, Bacon also used photographs of heads or figures. Hence, regarding Bacon’s ‘realism’, I refer to the fact that the subjects of his paintings often came from a real person, not an imagined person. 22. Cited by Tuchman and Dunow: The Impact of Chaïm Soutine, p. 95. de Kooning mentioned flesh as a specific representation that is a basic motif for the beginning of paintings. That is, flesh was a point of departure for abstract painting, as well as a main theme for painters in the history of art. 23. Robert Hughes: The Shock of the New, p. 296. Hughes labelled de Kooning’s Women as ‘an amphibian living between the atavistic and trivial… one of the most memorable images of sexual insecurity in American culture’. 24. Herschel Chipp, Theories of Modern Art:  A  Source Book by Artists and Critics, contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C.  Taylor (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968), p. 557. 25. Clement Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, Observations on Art and Taste (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 31. See also Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 21–​41. Kant’s first seminal work concerning the

146

147

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient ‘disinterested’ was the Critique of Judgment (1790). Greenberg refers to Kant’s notion of the ‘disinterested’, which was a staple of the Western humanist tradition and any study of aesthetics in America or abroad. Kant, of course, famously defines beauty as something that can only be observed in a non-​ utilitarian object, making the viewer disinterested in its use. A scholar who discusses Greenberg and Kant is Ingrid Stadler in ‘The Idea of Art and of Its Criticism: A Rational Reconstruction of a Kantian Doctrine’, Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics, eds Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 26. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, p. 8. 27. Ibid. pp. 8, 31. 28. Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, p. 22. Quote from Lessing’s The Laocoön or on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). 29. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, p. 31. 30. Cited in Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition, p. 29. 31. Greenberg, Perceptions and Judgments, pp. 5–​22. The reference is to Greenberg’s original article, ‘Avant-​Garde and Kitsch’, (1939). 32. Cited by Tuchman and Dunow, The Impact of Chaïm Soutine, p. 101. 33. Jean Dubuffet, Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, A  Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings, eds Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996), pp. 192–​7. 34. Greenberg, Arrogant Purpose, p. 90. 35. Ibid., p. 124. 36. Ibid., pp.  91–​2. Greenberg counters the association of Dubuffet’s work with Jean-​Paul Sartre’s (1905–​80) French Existentialism by stating that the association is a ‘mood’, not a philosophy. He admits that Sartre’s philosophy is congruent with its times and that Dubuffet’s paintings express the times as well. For a concise summary of Sartre’s philosophy, see Walter Kaufman, Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre (New  York:  Penguin Books, 1956). Sartre made a famous comment about the sculpture of Alberto Giacometti (1901–​66) regarding emptiness and the void, being notions that were commonly associated with the pessimism of existentialism. Dubuffet’s deformation and de-​valorisation of humans are usually put in the same category as Giacometti amongst art critics and historians. See Arnason, History of Modern Art, p. 449. However, Giacometti denied that his works were existential, and nor did Sartre discuss painting in his major work, Being and Nothingness (1956). 37. George Santayana, The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955, first published by Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1896), p. 27. I have found no reference to prove that the artists of this chapter knew of Santayana’s work, which was considered an important American philosophy in the early twentieth century. I claim that the insistence

147

148

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics on motif or representation, whilst still emphasising process and medium, is a practical, albeit a difficult, theory. The issue of the dismissal of Santayana’s pragmatic view is an important one that should be mentioned, in that aesthetic experience and art were bound to the context, taste and conditions of each specific culture. Santayana wanted, like Greenberg, an art for everyman, although Greenberg resisted folk, ‘kitsch’ or regional art. Nevertheless, they both argued for an art about real experience and yet Santayana seems to be forgotten. 38. Santayana, The Sense of Beauty, p. 28. 39. Yvette Hatwell, Arlette Streri and Edouard Gentaz, Touching for Knowing, Cognitive Psychology of Haptic Manual Perception (Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2003), p. 2. 40. Robert Hughes, The Shock of the New, p. 417. 41. Louis Finkelstein, The Unpicturelikeness of Pollock, Soutine and Others: Selected Writings and Talks, ed. with a foreword by Mindy Aloff (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2008), p. 93. 42. Lawrence Gowing and Sam Hunter, Francis Bacon, foreword by James T. Demetrion (Washington, DC: Thames and Hudson in association with the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, 1989), p. 20. 43. David Sylvester, Richard Shiff and Marla Prather, Willem de Kooning, Paintings, National Gallery of Art, Washington (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 44. 44. Greenberg, Affirmations and Refusals, p. 222. 45. Dubuffet, Theories and Documents, p. 195. 46. Tuchman, Dunow and Perls, Chaïm Soutine Catalogue Raisonné, p. 513. 47. Cited by Sylvester et al., Willem de Kooning, p. 127. 48. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Published by The Berkley Publishing Group, 1934, Perigee Books printing, 1980), p. 60. 49. Cited by Sylvester et al., Willem de Kooning, p. 34. 50. That the four artists have been characterised as intemperate, angry, violent, etc. comes from a general summary of the literature, descriptions and critiques of the artists. For Bacon, see Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 593. For Soutine, see Robert Hughes: The Shock of the New, p. 292. See the text on de Kooning and Dubuffet in Davies et al., Janson’s History of Art. 51. Greenberg, Homemade Esthetics, p. 31. 52. Art Brut refers to art of the untrained or insane. Dubuffet collected art from artists associated with the concept, whom he felt exhibited an unbridled and uninhibited kind of art. Dubuffet thought this sort of primitive, naïve or raw art (being terms used at the time, however inappropriate today) could connect humans with primordial forces. 53. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 620.

148

149

Painterly Myopia and the Main Ingredient Sylvester et al., Willem de Kooning, p. 29. Ibid. Kleebaltt et al., Soutine, An Experiment in Paris, p. 137. David Sylvester, About Modern Art, 2nd edition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001). 58. Greenberg, Affirmations and Refusals, p. 72. 59. Ibid. 60. Due to the Nazi’s surveillance of the city, Soutine had difficulty getting to the doctor for an urgent abdominal surgery. The delay in medical attention allowed the ulcers in his stomach to rupture. 61. Greenberg, Affirmations and Refusals, p. 158. 62. Cited by Esti Dunow, Chaïm Soutine 1893–​1943 (New York: Dissertation in Department of Fine Arts for New York University, June, 1981), p. 103. 63. Andrew Forge, Soutine (London: Spring Books, 1965), p. 14. 54. 55. 56. 57.

149

150

6 Almost Greenberg and Lessing Thomas Morgan Evans

I am inclined to think we shall find a ready clue to this inquiry in this one circumstance, that all the representations of Art are necessarily restricted by its material limits to a single instant of time.1 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

Lessing’s (1729–​81) vision of the ‘single instant’ of time can be seen as a borderline. As a ‘material limit’ it points to those material things of which the artwork consists and the material conditions of viewing. Lessing’s words here also describe an approach –​a ‘materialism’ –​the philosophical position that considers materiality as the key source of investigation and enquiry. What lies beyond this limit is the territory of the mind: of ideals and the imagination and, thus, another approach, or an ‘idealism’ that is a competing, indeed, diametrically opposed position. So the instant of time, both that in which the viewer beholds the work of art and the moment of time that Lessing describes the Laocoön as representing, negotiates this borderline: between the material and the ideal, and between matter and mind. It is on this borderline that the several voices whose work I shall discuss in this chapter meet. But, if, for these voices, time, and especially different ideas about the ‘single instant’ of time contained within visual 150

15

Almost art work, marks a point of congruence, this notion of a single instant is itself by no means something homogenous about which there is any agreement: instantaneity curiously does not itself have a singular identity. The eventual focus of this essay will be Clement Greenberg (1909–​94), who was a writer and theorist of critical importance for the history of twentieth-​century art. Greenberg, like Lessing, claimed to found his ideas on the physical characteristics and limitations of the visual object.2 Whilst Lessing’s analysis bears on what he famously calls the arts of ‘succession’ and ‘simultaneity’, of which poetry and painting are the main examples respectively, Greenberg also separated literature from visual art. He was against illusion and what he saw as the influence of other art forms. In its place he advocated self-​reference to the qualities of paint and to the flatness of the canvas. In his 1940 essay titled ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, which, of course, makes reference to Lessing, Greenberg advocates an avant-​garde art free of the ‘ghosts and “stooges” of literature’.3 The aim of this purification is expressly one that makes use of the instant of time. This is manifest in the requirement that this work of art should be bound to the medium and, in doing so, produce a sensory experience contained within an instant of time: ‘to expand the expressive resources of the medium, not in order to express ideas and notions, but to express with greater immediacy sensations, the irreducible elements of experience’4 Greenberg is no doubt the most significant art critic of the twentieth century to have followed Lessing’s example in citing, as a founding principal on which to begin a qualitative assessment of the work of art, the material limits of artistic media and, importantly for this chapter, the instantaneous present time of one’s engagement with the aesthetic object. Michael Fried, a veritable disciple of Greenberg’s, gave this idea its strap line when in 1967, in defence of high-​Modernist painting as something distinct from ‘objecthood’, he wrote, ‘presentness is grace’.5 Such a position, combining sheer subjectivism and reductive materialism (a seeming contradiction for which the ‘instant’ seems to allow) has ceased to seem a sturdy enough location for critical approaches, though these are still often guiding principals under which art is made, taught, bought and sold. Greenberg was a figure who embodied in his thinking vacillations between idealism and materialism that are only possible at the material limit of the instantaneous apprehension of the art work. In the history of philosophy, many different notions of immediate present time (the time of the subject’s conscious awareness) have come 151

152

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics to carry weight for many of the most important philosophers of modern thought. But, different though the theoretical characterisations of the instant have been, and as different from one another the conclusions of these thinkers may be, there is nonetheless a consistent preoccupation with presentness in Western philosophy. For example, such an idea describes the realm of epistemological certainty for the philosophies of René Descartes (1596–​1650) and David Hume (1711–​76), figures through which we might bookend a large period of Enlightenment history, and one which partially overlaps with the life and work of Lessing. For both Hume and Descartes the present moment is crucial. For Descartes, in the Meditations (1641), the instant becomes the genus of all being. From a position of radical doubt, there is no existence outside of the present time of Descartes’ doubting, for it is only this time that Descartes believes he can verify. The cogito, or idea of doubting one’s own existence, but in so doing affirming it, which Descartes expressed in the commonly known phrase ‘I think therefore I am’, connects mental process with the certainty of existence. It does so through a present time that acts as a seal between subjective existence and epistemological certainty, through which doubt cannot seep, though it leaves the sensuous body behind, and so may not be strictly understood as an aesthetic theory. Whilst the immediacy of the present moment is, on the one hand, taken by Descartes as justification for an empirical basis for scientific enquiries, it also, as a kind of territory of thinking, expands upon an open plain of present time, without duration, that is diagrammatic, and almost a-​temporal. This is a time that is also a point of view, or a looking down on time, and is accessed through the present moment as if it were a key hole: the time of the cogito is all-​time and connects the subject with the existence of God.6 Hume, on the other hand, refuses these dual outward and upward expansions of knowledge through the single moment of time, as if they were a porthole into the realm of certainty. The single instant in which experience occurs for Hume, rather, distinctly limits the reach of epistemology: ‘other’ time, time before or time now, or time after these times, bring with them new contingency, as the rules may have changed with time’s changing.7 If the philosophies of both Hume and Descartes begin by postulating immediate sensory experience as an apparent source of certainty, 152

153

Almost for both, the idea becomes increasingly problematic as the investigations develop. There are casualties. In Descartes, in his famous example of the melting wax, sense experience is doubted (by virtue of its perceived subjectivity); meanwhile, in Hume, the possibility of any extension of absolute knowledge outside of experience falls by the wayside.8 However, rather than the immediate experience of sense, what can be said to survive, and which is common to both, is the importance of what one might call the sense of immediate experience. For both philosophers, the present, or presentness –​that ‘material limit’ of the instant that Lessing describes in the Laocoön –​holds what is most convincing in both Hume’s and Descartes’s argument. Instantaneity, or the condition of an immediate relation to present time, bears a heavy burden that recurs in philosophical discourse until Immanuel Kant (1724–​1804). The ‘material limit’ of presentness, in these particular terms taken from Lessing, and in the particular historical context of Enlightenment thought to which he belonged, might raise the problem of materialism per se. The problem of saying for certain anything more about the world from the conclusions of immediate sensory interaction with it is one that has largely been passed over to scientific inquiry since the Enlightenment, particularly as a result of the influence of Kant.9 But this does not mean that investigations into what is material in the world are not ever-​present in instances of philosophical thought whose inheritance is largely idealist or post-​Kantian. For example, this is what can be said of Marxist ‘materialism’, wherein Marx is considered by some to continue the Hegelian idealist legacy; it is also the case in many theories of art and literature, and in psychoanalysis; and, it is indeed what we see from the outset in Lessing’s Laocoön. For Lessing, art serves an idealist, transcendental purpose, yet he appeals to material conditions and the material conditioning of the seeing subject, in support of this purpose, and it is with the instant of time that these two forces of materialism and idealism meet. We might therefore say that Lessing’s segregation of the arts based supposedly upon the material and rational observation that poetry belonged to the realm of time and painting to the province of space, mirrors an Enlightenment pattern of philosophical thought that was well established by 1766. As is demonstrated by the opening quotation, it is uniquely the instant of time –​both that which is captured by the artwork and the single 153

154

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics instant of our apprehension of it –​through which materiality is invoked in Lessing’s text. Again, from this point we see a similar attempt to construct from the material instant something that opens out or leads onto a broader horizon of ideas. For Lessing’s subject, what is present and most convincing in a visual depiction can become dislocated from the observer as an embodied, physical subject. Both Descartes and Lessing argue for a sensibility that transcends sensation and one that is mental and apart, or distinct, from the physical location through which the temporal location is expressed.10 W.T.J. Mitchell’s twentieth-​century analysis of Lessing’s work, which he describes as ‘pulling Lessing down from his imperial position as the Newton of aesthetics’, can be seen precisely in terms of a critique of taking what is presented as material or natural (and therefore akin to scientific fact) to justify what is certainly an ideological argument.11 Mitchell writes that Lessing [G]‌rounds everything in what he admits is a ‘dry chain of conclusions’ (diese trockene Schlusskette), the abstract categories of space and time. He places himself with Newton and Kant above the realm of ideology and sexuality in a transcendental space where the laws of genre are dictated by the laws of physical nature and the human mind-​and there he has remained.12

In such a way, Mitchell’s essay constitutes a now very familiar post-​ Enlightenment critique of the way in which social and cultural norms are enforced, or at least constructed and perpetuated by myths of ‘naturalness’. Critiques such as these are of course important. Michel Foucault’s analysis of the means by which the category of the natural was used for legal and medical measures concerning sexuality might be considered a paradigmatic example.13 Outside of aesthetics ‘the natural’ became, in the Enlightenment, a scientific framework with which to justify the enforcement of social norms. Greenberg is today still viewed as prescriptive of cultural norms, which is very like the perception of Lessing. Greenberg is seen to have held up an ideal of formal ‘purity’ that also supported an ideology; this ideal was the triumphal humanism of boom-​time, postwar and early Cold-​War American society. Like Lessing, Greenberg roots his theory in the materiality of the 154

15

Almost art work, for which the instant of time, whether the moment selected by the artist to depict or the moment of viewing that depiction, is also a key site of negotiation. But it is an idea of the material (concerning a painting or sculpture as an autonomous object) that was itself deeply and inextricably embedded within the ideal. For Greenberg, a critic need not worry about questions regarding ‘[T]‌he extra aesthetic contexts of art: social, political, economic, philosophical, biographical etc., etc.? The historical moment? … [h]ow can aesthetic value be kept in sight in such contexts? It doesn’t have to be. For when such contexts are brought to the fore it’s no longer criticism that’s being practiced’.14 Greenberg’s reputation has paid for this kind of refusal to accommodate the material conditions in which art is both made and viewed, but what might also be extracted from Greenberg’s work is something that nevertheless does coherently invoke the material and is important, though is perhaps not what the author intended. The importance for Greenberg of the ‘instant of time’, with its relation to Lessing’s Laocoön text, along with his purported Kantianism and Marxism, are the points of contact with philosophy to which I will attend in my analysis of Greenberg’s aesthetic stance. Through an analysis of Greenberg in relation to Kant we might establish what is materialist in Greenberg’s thought in opposition to Kant’s radically idealist position. Through an analysis of Greenberg’s criticism, we can think through his Marxism. What I want to suggest of Greenberg’s relation to Marx will be controversial; I do so only speculatively by way of reaching a conclusion regarding the arguments in this chapter. I want to suggest that Greenberg’s aesthetics highlight a failure on the part of Marxist discourse to deal properly with precisely the instant of sense experience as the model of existence, to which the subject must return having overcome alienation. Thus, there is a broad spectrum of considerations that I intend to address and which constitutes a mélange that requires justification. I intend to critically highlight the ways in which the material and the ideal are allowed to shuffle together in Greenberg’s writing, so as to ultimately be able to claim that what is materialist in Greenberg’s writing, specifically his early writing, and with a focus on his relationship to Jackson Pollock’s work, might be worth reconsidering. Philosophy was important to Greenberg, and his writing invites consideration from a philosophical point of view.15 However, Greenberg was an inconsistent disciple of every 155

156

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics major influence that he professed to follow. It is tempting to accuse him of being an opportunist, who showed allegiance to only what suited him. But then, why should he not have? Greenberg worked according to an urgency that was at once personal and political after the end of World War II and proceeding the collapse of support for the communist party, at a key moment in his career and dictated by the emergence of the New York School of Abstract Expressionist artists in his immediate proximity. But the implication is not to accuse him of being a sloppy theorist; it was more that he incorporated theory into a balance with the social reality of the conditions in which he worked, the nature of having to almost literally think on one’s feet at this time. In the moment of the encounter with the work of art to which Greenberg attended, philosophy as a set of doctrinal discursive frameworks is subordinated to an idea of the critic’s mobilisation of philosophy as, instead, part of an exercise that is both evocation and invocation. And it is precisely because of the importance of the single instant, or the location of Greenberg’s aesthetic experience in the instantaneous, which determines this. This idea of the critic emerging out, and in furtherance, of the developments of the philosopher, returns us to Lessing’s text: The first person to compare painting with poetry was a man of fine feeling who observed that both arts produced a similar effect upon him … A second observer, in attempting to get at the nature of this pleasure, discovered that both proceed from the same source. Beauty … A  third, who examined the value and distribution of these general rules, observed that some of them are more predominant in painting, others in poetry … The first was the amateur, the second the philosopher, and the third the critic.16

Lessing, early on in the Laocoön, divides between two archetypes the philosopher and the critic. The difference is that the critic judges in terms of intensity and difference, and of categories transposed to the realm of sensation, whereas the philosopher makes categorical claims as an end in itself. The critic makes observations in the light of the philosopher’s categories, but re-​enfolds those categories within the moment of experience –​ the moment of, more specifically, affect. The critic senses the ideal and 156

157

Almost thus there is an empirical stance of possibility, of the suggested, and the almost as if. This is based on the critic’s intuition, meaning the total effect of multiple sensuous impressions in relation to the material object. It might extend to possibility, to tendencies of intention and of what these impressions infer might lie in the future, but it does not claim that those things yet still to be are material in the presentness of viewing, or somewhere out there in a transcendent space. An example of this is Lessing’s discussion of what happens next in the Laocoön narrative that he addresses, but it does not claim that those things yet still to be are material in the presentness of viewing, or are somewhere out there in a transcendental space. This is the materialism I want to push in this chapter: a materialism of ‘almost’. The ‘almost’ is a particularly temporal word; it evokes precisely the instantaneous moment of suggestion that Lessing sees as fixed in the face of Laocoön, by an artist who was mindful of the limitations of the formal restrictions of his art. As Lessing explains, If it be true that the artist can adopt from the face of ever varying nature only so much of her mutable effects as will belong to one single moment, and that the painter, in particular, can seize this single moment only under one solitary point of view; –​ if it be true also that his works are intended, not to be merely glanced at, but to be long and repeatedly examined; –​then it is clear that the great difficulty will be to select such a moment and such a point of view as shall be sufficiently pregnant with meaning. Nothing however can possess this important qualification but that which leaves free scope to the imagination.17

Materialism here then is not a strict philosophical discipline, but the evocation of a kind of materialisation in itself. The sense that something is out there, no matter if it can be verified or known for certain, is rather considered as a kind of materialism –​a colloquial materialism –​and one not established in philosophical discourse, but certainly used in everyday life. This is a materialism that is concomitant with the philosophy of the ‘instant’, as if it were extracted from all of its many specificities in Hume and Descartes and many more, and homogenised. These philosophies all acknowledge the instantaneous, meaning the sense of an immediate and proximate present time, as ground of experience, and this in turn as the 157

158

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics ground for their investigations into epistemological certainty. It is not necessarily that this grounding temporal framework of sensation holds a ‘material’ value, but it suggests something strongly enough to justify further investigation. So the ‘matter’ in this chapter is sense itself, located in the instant of time, acting as a ‘material’ ground for discourse, whatever conclusions such a discourse may produce. This idea is strongly reflected in Greenberg’s writing; for him, the work’s ‘almost’ status, of reaching towards a given ideal was the ‘substance of aesthetic experience’. ‘I don’t want to argue this assertion [he wrote]. I  point to it as a fact, the fact that identifies the presence, the reality in experience of the aesthetic’.18 But though in some ways, and perhaps in the most obvious reading, Greenberg’s comment comes across like an apology, or as a statement of self defence that acknowledges the position’s weakness; nonetheless, I would argue that in another way, if limited to a ‘facticity’ of the sense of the ‘almost’, it may be considered as something that grounds the apprehension of something material. What else could he have said? Sense, however, is often the very undoing of materiality in philosophy, and Kant is the most famous and important philosopher to have thought through this undoing and its implications.19 Yet nowhere is the influence of Kantianism more keenly felt and asserted in modern criticism than in the work of Greenberg. This is despite the fact that nowhere, either, is Greenberg’s theoretical position more plainly problematic than in his relation to Kant, as might be already apparent. Though Kant’s critical method certainly acted as an extremely important model of inspiration for Greenbergian formalism, as Caroline A. Jones has explained: For most following Kant … form could never be known independently of our cognition of it. Greenberg’s fetishisation of form was thus a fascinating detour from the Kantian relay. Form in Kant’s eighteenth-​century model could not be said to act on our passive sensibilities; rather, we have an a priori sense of it which we impose upon the material objects we perceive … Greenberg places this part of the Kantian relay into the unthought.20

Greenberg’s great strength as the interpolator of the New York School is his commitment to the experience of the immediately and instantaneously 158

159

Almost apparent. This heavy weighting on the importance of direct impressions of the visual object would seem to be in contradiction of Greenberg’s claimed Kantian distance. Greenberg’s entire career can be seen to be based on an empirical method, the premise of which stood in diametrical opposition to Kantian idealism. He wrote consistently and compellingly about what it was like to stand in front of a work and voice what he intuited from the experience of the matter of paint on canvas. I would argue that it is particularly the notion of the instant, as a kind of hyper-​empirical temporality of vision, which divides Greenberg from Kant: the idea that within the instantaneous moment of looking there exists the possibility of a super sensuous capacity. Yet of course, the conclusions that Greenberg draws from this quick critical reflex become aligned with Kant, and idealist and ideological principles more generally in Greenberg’s thought. Nevertheless, against Kant’s general idealist position, Greenberg was able to state the following: ‘yeah, I am an empiricist. And how! When it comes to art, I should say so’.21 Greenberg is today, in a critical landscape after conceptualism, accused of touting a general triumphal anthropomorphism and humanist idealism, but ironically, from his point of view, he distinguished himself from Kant for similar reasons. The issue is discussed by Thierry de Duve in Clement Greenberg: Between the Lines (1996), which includes a late transcription of a question-​and-​answer debate with Greenberg.22 De Duve’s book is important, as it offers a restoration of Greenbergian vision, whilst at the same time a critical discussion of the philosophical premises on which it was based in themselves, rather than in opposition to other equally historically contingent standpoints, such as that represented by Rosalind Krauss (b. 1940) and other pioneering Structuralist and Post-​Structuralist thinkers on art.23 In De Duve’s reading of the relationship between Kant and Greenberg, Greenberg is proven to have misread Kant in crucial places. In De Duve’s account the confusion comes when Greenberg refers to Kant on the idea of objective taste, thereby misreading Kantian transcendentalism to actually support an argument that aims to assert his own position as a connoisseur, meaning as a master empiricist of the arts.24 Greenberg’s susceptibility to critique, therefore, can be seen to stem quite simply from his arrogant assumption of the role of a spokesperson for modernity when it came to matters of 159

160

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics high taste; this can be easily detached from its misguided philosophical justification. But to return to models, it can nonetheless be maintained, as John O’Brian does in his introduction to Clement Greenberg:  The Collected Essays and Criticism, that ‘over time, Kant loomed progressively larger in Greenberg’s thinking’.25 In Greenberg’s Modernist Painting, which was published 15 years later than his famous earlier reviews of Pollock, Greenberg characterises Kant’s project as intrinsically bound to Modernism: I identify Modernism with the intensification, almost the exacerbation, of this self-​critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant. Because he was the first to criticize the means itself of criticism, I conceive of Kant as, the first real Modernist … The essence of Modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.26

Greenberg means for the reader to infer that his exposition of Modernist painting, as it deals with the components of the medium, is utterly akin to the methodology that Kant put to work in the Critiques. But this act of criticism, in Greenberg’s understanding unlike Kant’s, is everywhere practised through the materiality of a world that Kant cannot verify through the similar model of subjective self-​critique. This ‘entrenchment’ that Greenberg speaks of, is, further, an act of making more material, of emphasis, rather than distancing; it imagines there to be no subject-​object leap at all in the work of Pollock, and we are to see Pollock from this immanent position. Greenberg writes famously, in a review of April 1946, that Pollock is an artist whose ‘emotion starts out pictorially’, or in other words that Pollock’s relationship to the world is already embedded within the materials of his art.27 The review from which this quote is taken is of Pollock’s 1946 show in which the painting Troubled Queen, painted the preceding year, was the probable object of Greenberg’s attention. The notion of the instantaneous experience of a work is, I  argue, an important thing that can be extracted from both Greenberg’s conception of Pollock’s work, and Greenberg’s own act of critical vision, which highlights Greenberg’s conceptual divide with Kant. Instantaneity not only 160

16

Almost establishes a kind of materialism in Greenberg’s work as a critique, but can even intensify the viewer’s connection to the material world, making him or her immanent of it through the disembodied eye’s reposition within the picture. This notion of the eye-​within-​the-​picture, apart from the body, is part of the core of Greenberg’s interpretation of Pollock up to 1948; it emerged in discussion mostly of Pollock’s work in generality. The idea of the eye immanent of the surface of the canvas, is another means by which Greenberg could formulate an idea that expressed the sense of immediacy that he felt was a part of the message of Pollock’s work, and the modern way of looking that Greenberg began to formulate. This aesthetic is one inextricable from the idea of the instant of time, for it is in this timeframe that such connections between the subject and the object occur. Again this is an idea of sense experience in over-​drive, and of super-​materialism, yet it is one that serves the idealism of a distinction between the body and the eye. It is now necessary to review Greenberg’s writing to explore his understanding of immediacy, partly because Greenberg’s searching, suggestive and intense writing style distinctly echoes the effect of intensive immediacy and imminence that he wishes to communicate about the works in the New-​York-​School style. Greenberg considered such a means of looking as more generally appropriate to his age, writing this in a review of Painting and Painters: How to Look at a Picture: From Giotto to Chagall by Lionello Venturi in 1945: Doesn’t one find so many times that the ‘full meaning’ of a picture –​i.e., its aesthetic fact –​is, at any given visit to it, most fully revealed at the first fresh glance? And that this ‘meaning’ fades progressively as continued examination destroys the unity of impression? With many paintings and pieces of sculpture it is as if you had to catch them by surprise in order to grasp them as wholes –​their maximum being packed into the instantaneous shock of sight.28

Years later he notes the following: But ideally the whole of a picture should be taken in at a glance; its unity should be immediately evident, and the supreme quality of a picture, the highest measure of its power to move and control the visual imagination, should reside in its unity. And

161

162

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics this is something to be grasped only in an indivisible instant of time. No expectancy is involved in the true and pertinent experience of a painting; a picture, I repeat, does not ‘come out’ the way a story, or a poem, or a piece of music does. It’s all there at once, like a sudden revelation. This ‘at-​onceness’ an abstract picture usually drives home to us with greater singleness and clarity than a representational painting does. And to apprehend this ‘at-​onceness’ demands a freedom of mind and untrammeledness of eye that constitute ‘at-​onceness’ in their own right.29

The first passage is from early 1945, but the idea is still as vital to Greenberg’s thinking in the latter text of 1959. That, for Greenberg, ‘aesthetic judgments are given and contained in the immediate experience of art’, that they ‘coincide with it … not [being] arrived at afterwards through reflection or thought’, and lastly that, due to this immediacy, ‘they leave no room for the conscious application of standards, criteria, rules or precepts’, puts him at distinct odds with Kant, the philosopher, whose theory of aesthetic judgement was built upon the temporal remove (both historical and immediate) of reflection; this theory presupposes the temporal frame of that judgement to be a subjective a priori condition.30 Lessing’s influence is very present in all of Greenberg’s passages here. The logic of the Laocoön essay is seemingly amplified; however, this amplification of the importance of the instant (of Greenberg’s at-​onceness) is now retained within the experience of a subject, as if shifted in proximity towards the art object. Lessing’s instant of time in painting and sculpture can be characterised as a suspended instant of reflection. In a work of art, time is static and should be paused at an optimal moment before the narrative’s climax, which is inferred in sculpture, but which a poem can more fully represent. This time of suspended imminence, as it can be called, is a quality of almostness, one which, again, gives way to, in both the artwork’s material property and in the imagination of its viewer, not a time, but arguably a space, or spatiality. Suspended imminence is a conceptual space of the imagination in which the viewer imagines the horrors (or ecstasy) of the crescendo of a depicted scene and, in an artwork, it is the formal element, or the spatiality of stilled time that reflects sculpture as defined by space, or as a spatial art. One might, therefore, argue against 162

163

Almost Lessing that actually space is produced by the hesitation of time, rather than being revealed as latent and secondary, as well as constant, and underneath a narrative flow. Lessing’s moment of imminence not only speaks loudly to Greenberg’s formalist agenda (the work’s reduction to the specificities of its medium), but, it also speaks to his aesthetic theories and the rhetorical style with which these are conveyed. Moreover, Lessing offers us a point of mediation between Greenberg and Kant. Perhaps this is convoluted, but if it could be maintained that this time of reflection in Lessing is not a time at all, but is rather a space of reflection (even though this goes against Lessing somewhat, as time clearly possesses a hierarchical position above space in the text), then what we have, transposed to the materiality of the art object (which Greenberg upholds) is something of the Kantian formula for aesthetic judgement. It might further be suggested that Kant’s time might also constitute a plateau-​like space of possibility, such as the frozen instant of imminence that the Laocoön text describes, because time, for Kant, is merely a conditioning factor of representation (in the philosophical sense) and one to which the realm of thought is not subjected. At this stage, let us consider Greenberg’s writing as it relates to Pollock’s early reception of 1945, taking reviews in consecutive years from that point until 1949. If it is argued that the Pollock of these years –​Greenberg’s Pollock –​has, in relation to the ‘instant of time’ a sense of imminence, it might be because at this point Pollock, as the art-​historical figure we now know him to have been, was imminent, and waiting in the wings as it were; this is in a large part thanks to Greenberg’s writing. Even though he may have produced his very best work immediately following 1949, Pollock had by this point already ‘broken the ice’ in Willem de Kooning’s (1904–​97) words, and begun the conversation that was Abstract Expressionism at the dinner table of high culture and its patronage.31 But, at the same time what we are talking about is a view of Pollock’s work, and it is Greenberg bringing his vision to Pollock’s work that is important here, not Pollock’s work itself, which, in 1946, was not yet commercially successful, to say the least.32 This said, it is significant that Pollock was a particular kind of abstract artist; his early morphologies owed much to Surrealism, and he gave his works poetic titles, evoking a kind of relationship to nature, (including ‘human nature’, the supernatural and the 163

164

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics pastoral), whilst his abstract works suggested ‘standing in the place of ’ this nature and acting as a cipher for it, which relates to what Lessing says of classical art. The frozen moment of the Laocoön is a moment of comparative blankness on the face of the central figure; it is a blankness that Lessing says Johann Winckelmann (1717–​68) wrongly takes as stoical grace.33 For Lessing, realism concedes to beauty in this depiction and provides a site for imaginative reflection on the viewer’s part. In this early section of Lessing’s treatise, he establishes his position in opposition to Winckelmann, calling on a description of a painting by Timanthes (c. fourth century BCE) of the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father. Lessing makes the same argument regarding this work that he made for the Laocoön: the ‘hideous violence’ of the situation is subordinated to the order of aesthetic harmony and the ‘vehemence [is] mitigated’, by the painter throwing a ‘veil over the countenance of the father’.34 It is precisely the word veil that Pollock uses to describe an early move towards abstraction in his painting Mural (1943), wherein he takes a moment of violence (a ‘stampede’ of cattle) as a point of inspiration. Jones has claimed that Pollock might well have experienced this type of event firsthand during his own ‘violent’ boyhood growing up on ranches in America and working as a cowhand.35 Violence in Greenberg’s reviews of Pollock’s work is omnipresent. Pollock’s work is ‘suffocating’ and wrought with ‘intensity’ in 1945, being ‘genuinely violent and extravagant’ in 1946, containing an ‘astounding force’ and is ‘rough’ and ‘brutal’ in 1947, and in 1948 consists of ‘raw uncultivated emotion’.36 Nevertheless, it is the fact that Greenberg writes this last description as an imagined quote from the voices of those ‘not sincerely in touch with contemporary painting’ (in other words this is an ill-​advised account of Pollock’s work, regardless of the recognition of its violence) that is the real clue to how Greenberg sees Pollock: the metaphor of being ‘in touch with contemporary painting’ has a double meaning.37 It also refers to the metaphorics of proximity, on which Greenberg’s account of Pollock hinges. The violence, like that of the picture by Timanthes, is shrouded in Pollock’s work; it is always beyond the reach of touch, at least when the painting works properly. Indeed, for Greenberg, Pollock’s show of power, force and strength, brings a work to the point of being ‘overpowering’, and threatening to become ‘almost too dazzling to be looked at’.38 The key word is almost. 164

165

Almost Modernism’s project of medium-​specific reduction both sets the ideal towards which the work is ever approaching (and towards is also a key word to which Greenberg often returns) and yet, through its proximity to it, Pollock’s work teeters on a point of violent self-​negation, which is defined by precisely the sheer exposure of the painted medium and Pollock’s automatist stylisation of its logic. It hovers at the point of being ‘almost’, as a state in itself, so that Pollock’s gift is ‘free to function almost automatically’, according to Greenberg, and is ‘almost unlimited’.39 The materials keep the artist’s vision visible and measured, as it is orientated and appears in square inches and ounces: it is horizontal, vertical and described by Greenberg as ‘almost square’, in one case for example.40 And yet, all of these descriptions of the paintings are in this way somehow absurd, because they speak for an experience that the viewer has an underdeveloped capacity to describe; this is the sense of the ‘almost’ with which I began. Greenberg’s descriptions of the canvas as a material object cited above are all framed within a temporality that seems not to come from the same measurable world to which the canvases themselves are restrained. Greenberg sees Pollock’s work, and specifically its tension between excess and material restraint, within a timeframe that belongs to Greenberg’s own act of vision, which exists within Greenberg’s almost quality of the ‘instantaneous shock of sight’. The point with which I would like to conclude considers Greenberg’s Marxism and Marxism more generally. Kant overtakes Marx in the hierarchy of Greenberg’s thought after 1945. This shift in Greenberg’s influences (following Greenberg’s 1942 move from the Trotskyist Partisan Review to, after the Moscow show trials and the Nazi-​Soviet Pact, the ‘liberalism’ of The Nation) is indicative of his move away from partisanship towards a more muted leftism within the avant-​garde generally, which has been well documented in the histories of the New York School.41 However, Greenberg’s Marxist credentials are not the point of discussion here.42 Rather, I  want to suggest a way in which Greenberg’s aesthetic vision of the ‘instant’, as a shared territory not just with Lessing, but the foundations of Enlightenment philosophical enquiry, might provoke Marxism, as a ‘materialism’, to reconsider its own place within that history. Time is the matter of history. It is our relation to this matter with which this chapter has been concerned, as seen through the distorting prism of Greenberg’s contribution to debates about art from the late 1940s. Of 165

16

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics course what matters in history is the meaning that is extracted from this matter. However, this materialist position has been threatened by relativism, revisionism and Structuralism (the same enemies that speculative realist philosophy nominates) and is in need of defending. Yet even without this threat, we are on shaky ground. Marx’s model of history is susceptible to the critique that it is founded on idealist propositions when it fails to integrate an experiential notion of time into its wider system. Accounts of time in Marx’s early writing are dependent on the same thing as in Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s (1770–​1831) Phenomenology (1807), which Marx describes in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (EPM: 1944) as ‘the true birthplace and secret of Hegelian philosophy’.43 For both Marx and Hegel, time, and particularly historical time, is equivalent to the movement of the dialectic (which does not merely follow time, but actually constitutes it). In his analysis of the Phenomenology, J.N. Findlay paraphrases Hegel to say that ‘Everything we know must come before us in a living phase of experience (Erfahrung). The substantial, or in other words the solidly out there, must slowly be transmuted into the notional, and therefore the subjective. Time simply is the form of this self-​ realising process’.44 Criticising the Phenomenology, Marx points out the dematerialisation of objects into moments and, for a moment, it seems he is going to suggest a non-​dialectical alternative in which objects remain objects. In proposing that subjects become embodied moments of historical specificity in a socio-​economic dialectical framework, Marx does this to an extent, and yet historical time in this account remains uneven and not material in any scientific sense of the term. Neither Marx, nor Hegel, introduce time in their early constructions of the subject’s primary encounter with the world. This encounter, based on sense experience, for both Hegel and Marx exists implicitly on a kind of flat non-​time, but neither expands on any account of a sense of time. For both philosophers, however, the manifest and blatant matter of sense from which humankind has become alienated, has a redeeming property. Marx explains that [S]‌ense perception must be the basis of all science. Only when science starts out from sense perception in the dual form of sensuous consciousness and sensuous need –​i.e. only when

166

167

Almost science starts out from nature –​it is real science. The whole of history is a preparation, a development, for “man” to become the object of sensuous consciousness and the needs of “man as man” to become (sensuous) needs.45

Notably, the realised, un-​alienated person encounters him or herself with the same immediacy as sense experience. For both Marx and Hegel, the ‘to hand’ of sensory certainty is the spiritual level of the plane of truth. Therefore, this immediacy, which results from the condition, the sensory experience, of being present with time so that one is not forever chasing or driving time, or being subjected to a time that is dialectically other, is both the time that the subject leaves behind through alienation, as well as the time of the world, which both Marx and Hegel hope that dialectics can deliver back. There is no time-​with-​the-​world in Hegel or Marx, even though there is time-​as-​framework-​of-​the-​world. This treatment of time, of course, is that around which our daily routines are built and bureaucratised. In science and philosophy also time must be ‘seen’ and is spatialised, just as it is in the visual arts for Lessing. For Hegel and Marx, quite understandably, the object of sensory certainty is the object of a particular sense, or a thing, and time has no purchase as an object in this way. But this is the power and possibility of the kind of aesthetics that Greenberg represents, to re-​imagine materialism inclusive of, and drawn from, sensation and, more importantly, the sense of the instantaneous. It is from this point that we might think of continuing in order to reclaim history as a materialist practice.

Notes 1. G.E. Lessing, Laocoön or the Limits of Poetry and Drama, trans. William Ross (London: Ridgeway, 1836), p. 28. 2. Caroline A.  Jones, Eyesight Alone:  Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2005). Donald Kuspit, Clement Greenberg:  Art Critic (Madison:  University of Wisconsin, 1979). 3. Clement Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, Clement Greenberg Collected Essays and Criticism Vol. 1. ed. John O’Brian (London: 1988), p. 25 (see pp. 23–​ 42 for essay). 4. Greenberg, ‘Towards a Newer Laocoon’, p. 30.

167

168

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 5. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, Minimal Art:  A  Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, (London: University of California Press, 1968), p. 147. 6. The Meditations are Descartes’ most systematic account of his philosophy. The argument that the famous phrase ‘cogito ergo sum’ refers to is made here but the phrase itself is only alluded to. René Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. Donald A. Cress (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 1979). 7. David Hume writes in the Enquiry: ‘As to past Experience, it can be allowed to give direct and certain information of those precise objects only, and that precise period of time, which fell under its cognizance: but why this experience should be extended to future times, and to other objects, which for aught we know, may be only in appearance similar; this is the main question on which I would insist … The consequence seems nowise necessary … there is here a consequence drawn by the mind; that there is a certain step taken; a process of thought, and an inference, which wants to be explained’. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (London: Oxford World’s Classics, 2007), especially pp. 18–​30. 8. Again, Descartes’ Meditations. The wax argument occurs on pages 17–​23. 9. For an interesting new account of the impact of Kant’s work in relation to science see Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude (London: Continuum, 2008), pp. 1–​15. 10. Descartes’ Meditations. Lessing, Laocoön. The weight of importance given to the single moment, however, is not unique to Enlightenment thought. Take, for example, Herman Hausheer’s extrapolation of St Augustine’s conception of time: the nunc stans. Only the experienced instant is given. In every instant a whole world perishes, and in every instant a whole world emerges out of nothing. Infinite past and infinite future do not exist. Moreover, because the present condenses itself to an inextensive point, it seems to dissolve all existence into emptiness. The paradox of the evaporation of the moment and the annihilation of the present is a profound abstraction. How is one to resolve the paradox of the annihilation of the intervals of time, the non-​reality of the past and the future? Nothing is ever destroyed. Neither is nothing ever magically produced. The infinite moments of time, while perishable for man, coexist in God’s eternal present. They abide in the nunc stans of the scholastics. The souls of men pass through these perishing intervals of time until they come to rest in God. Herman Hausheer, ‘St. Augustine’s Conception of Time’, Philosophical Review, 46:5 (Sept. 1937), p. 510.

168

169

Almost 11. W.J.T. Mitchell, ‘The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoön’, Representations 6 (Spring 1984), p. 110. An extended study of the issues that Mitchell raises in relation to Lessing is Iconology. 12. Mitchell, Iconology, p.110. 13. Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1998), particularly pp. 36–​50. 14. Greenberg, ‘The State of Art Criticism’, in Twentieth–​Century Theories of Art, ed. James Thompson (Ottawa: Carlton University Press, 1990), pp. 102–​18. Another earlier example from Greenberg’s writing might be this: ‘there is a consensus of taste. The best taste is that of the people who, in each generation, spend the most time and trouble on art, and this best taste has always turned out to be unanimous’. Greenberg elects himself to this position, as a spokesman for hegemony. In Clement Greenberg Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4 (hereafter CGCEC), ed. John O’Brian (London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 118. 15. For a detailed account of Greenberg’s interest in philosophy, which was a profound influence from early in life, and mostly Kantian in flavour, apart from his Marxism, see Caroline A. Jones, Eyesight Alone: Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses (London: University of Chicago Press, 2005), especially the last section of Chapter Two and Chapter Three. 16. As quoted and abbreviated in Jones: Eyesight Alone, p. 56. 17. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 28. 18. Greenberg, ‘Art Criticism’. 19. Kant, arguing against sensation-​based epistemologies, writes that ‘our representation of things, as they are given to us, does not conform to these things as they are in themselves … these objects as appearances conform to our mode of representation’. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, in Kant’s Critiques (Radford, VA: Wilder Philosophy Publications, 2008), p. 15. 20. Jones, Eyesight Alone, p. 78. 21. Thierry de Duve, Clement Greenberg Between the Lines, trans. Brian Homes (London: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 150. De Duve also comments earlier on Greenberg’s notion of intuition saying that ‘Greenberg employs intuition much as Croce does: it is a perception, an unintellectualised synthesis of sensations which can emanate from the possible as well as from the real … anything and everything can become the object of an aesthetic intuition’, pp. 92–​3. 22. The debate with Greenberg that de Duve organised occurred at the University of Ottawa in 1988. De Duve’s interest is in rethinking contemporary divisions between Modernism and Post-​Modernism. 23. A debate between, and overview of the work of, some of the main Post-​ Structuralist protagonists in art history can be found in Art Since 1900 (London: Thames and Hudson, 2005).

169

170

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 24. Other commentators have addressed aspects of whether ‘Greenberg’s Kant’ is legitimate. Reviewing the debates, Suma Rajiva writes that ‘The main focus is Kant’s claim in the Critique of Judgement that the work of art, whilst being the product of genius, must also be “like” or “as” nature. According to Diarmuid Costello, it is a mistake to interpret such a claim as being about resemblance –​ the point is rather about the artwork being convincingly “unwilled”’. For myself, as for De Duve and Costello, there can be little debate over either what Kant meant here or whether Greenberg read Kant correctly on this point, which he surely did. Suma Rajiva, ‘Art, Aesthetics and “Greenberg’s Kant”’, Canadian Aesthetics Journal 14 (Fall 2008), p. 1. Also, Diarmuid Costello, ‘Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65:2 (Spring 2007). 25. Greenberg, CGCEC, vol. 3, p. xxii. 26. Greenberg, CGCEC, vol. 4, p. 85. 27. In a postscript Greenberg repudiates reducing aesthetic judgement to a judgement about it reaching a point of flatness. Indeed, as De Duve points out, it is only in relation to Pollock’s work that Greenberg even specifically uses the famous phrase ‘all-over’ to describe a painting. See the 1978 postscript to ‘Modernist Painting’ CGCEC, vol. 4. Also, De Duve: Clement Greenberg, p. 29. 28. Greenberg, CGCEC, vol. 2, p. 34. 29. Greenberg, CGCEC, vol. 4, pp. 80–​1, emphasis added. 30. Ibid., p. 265. 31. Cited in Jones, Eyesight Alone, p. 296. 32. Although he was on the way, Pollock’s first major commission might be considered the 1943 Mural, painted for Peggy Guggenheim, and the first work in which Pollock used an all-over style in large scale. 33. For a study of the context of the debate between Lessing and Johann Winckelmann and its relation to Kant, see Kai Hammermeister, The German Aesthetic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 73–​81. 34. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 20. 35. Jones, Eyesight Alone, pp. 229–​30. 36. All quotes Greenberg, CGCEC, vol. 2, pp. 17, 75, 125 and 201 respectively. 37. Greenberg, CGCEC, vol. 2, p. 201. 38. Ibid., p. 202. 39. Ibid., pp. 202 and 285. 40. Greenberg, p. 286. 41. See primarily Nancy Jachec, The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940–​1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Andrew Hemingway discusses the impact of the show trials and World War II

170

17

Almost on Western socialism. See Andrew Hemingway, ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’, Oxford Art Journal, 17:1 (1994) pp. 13–​29. 42. Though if they were, I think my sympathies would lie with T.J. Clark’s more charitable and less pedantic position in ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art’, Critical Inquiry, 9:1 ‘The Politics of Interpretation’ (September, 1982), pp. 139–​56. 43. Karl Marx, Early Writings (London: Penguin, 1992), p. 383. 44. This refers to section 802 of Hegel’s book; the analysis is contained within the Oxford edition of the Phenomenology. See A.N. Findlay, ‘Analysis of the Text’, in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 591. 45. Marx, Early Writings, p. 355.

171

172

7 In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time Feeling Your Way Through Richard Serra’s The Matter of Time Rob Marks

‘I start from the void and form the object from this emptiness’, Richard Serra (b. 1939) says of the large curvilinear works that make up the eight-​ ­sculpture Guggenheim Museum Bilbao installation titled The Matter of Time (Figure 7.1: 2005, hereafter TMOT).1 ‘In this way’, he adds, ‘the material becomes the skin of the void’.2 Serra’s void, instead of being an absence, as the word suggests, is in fact the particular presence with which he collaborates. The Serra sculpture is the surface of a void that has revealed itself to the artist; it is a form invisible to viewers until he has sheathed its presence with a skin of weathering steel. In a 1997 interview about the first of these pieces, a series of three Torqued Ellipses, Serra observed that ‘By starting with the material, you’re starting from the outside: you’re constructing a space’. He further noted that In most of the work that preceded the Torqued Ellipses, I was forming the space in between the material that I was manipulating … In these pieces, by contrast, I  was starting with the void, that is, starting with the space, starting from the inside out, not the outside in, in order to find the skin. I wasn’t particularly concerned with what the skin looked like.3

172

173

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time

Figure 7.1  Richard Serra, The Matter of Time, 2005, weatherproof steel, variable dimensions, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Spain. Photographic Credit: Saul Rosenfield. License Information: Courtesy of the Artist, Richard Serra.

Because Serra is successful in collaborating with, rather than re-​conceptualising, the void, his work is a recognition of space –​and, inevitably, time –​more than it is a fabrication of shape. So it is no surprise when, despite the fact that the artist is famous for his use of industrial media, such as steel, rubber and lead, Serra writes in 2004, ‘I consider space to be my medium … I am not interested in form as pure abstraction. I am interested in form as the conjunction between space and matter’.4 Nor is it a surprise when, in 2005, he characterises the experience of TMOT as one of both ‘spatial continuum’ and temporal ‘duration’.5 Serra’s works are, in fact, so prodigious in their capacity to stimulate movements in space and time that they become events. People can experience a Serra sculpture from the outside, as ‘viewers’ or ‘spectators’. But they also unavoidably engage as ‘participants’ after stepping into the artwork’s orbit. Then, as in any dance, visitors operate at the mercy of their partner’s movement, as much as they initiate their own. The Serra visitor, thus, emerges as the ideal post-​Minimalist subject:  the art object becomes the participant’s movement through sculptural space over the course of sculptural time. Such is the eventful 173

174

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics relationship of participant to sculpture in TMOT, being Serra’s largest indoor sculptural installation and, according to the Guggenheim, ‘the largest sculptural commission in history’.6 And it accounts for why New  York Museum of Modern Art director, Glenn Lowry, calls Serra ‘one of the preeminent artists of our era’.7 Serra’s sculptures represent contemporary manifestations of the very tension between the temporal and spatial that theorist and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–​81) limned in the eighteenth century and Lessing inheritors, such as Michael Fried (b. 1939), sustained in the twentieth century. But, unlike Serra, Lessing and Fried sought, like geologists tapping rock samples to determine patterns of breakage, to find natural cleavages between those artistic genres and media that derive their power by manipulating space and those that derive their power by manipulating time. Although such cleavage planes surely exist –​Lessing associates painting with the immediate apprehension of space and poetry with narrative apprehension of time –​Serra distinguishes himself by equipping his works to reveal not the cleavage, but the collaboration, of space and time. Serra has not been alone in this endeavor. Since the early 1960s, artists ranging from Donald Judd (1928–​94) and Robert Smithson (1938–​73) to Maya Lin (b. 1959), Olafur Elliasson (b. 1967) and many others today have activated viewers by manipulating space. Serra’s breakthrough is to create sculptures that seem inaccessible without movement in space-​time. Serra says that he has been uninfluenced by any particular theory,8 but three experiences that he recounts are particularly pertinent to his manipulations of space and time: visiting the Myoshin-​ ji garden in Kyoto, whose design manifests Japanese conceptions of melded space-​ time, reading Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty’s (1908–​ 61) Phenomenology of Perception (1945 in French; 1962 in English)9 and witnessing experimental dance performances of the 1970s, particularly in the work of Yvonne Rainer (b. 1934) and the collective improvisational dance group The Grand Union.10 Serra commentators have used similarly phenomenological lenses to interpret the spatial-​temporal activity of these sculptures –​ and their predecessors by Serra. Key amongst these commentators are the following: art historian Rosalind Krauss (b. 1941), who was the first to use phenomenology and the work of the philosopher Merleau-​Ponty 174

175

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time to explore Serra’s work; art historian and critic Hal Foster (b. 1955); art historian Yve Alain Bois (b. 1952); philosopher of religion and cultural critic Mark C. Taylor (b. 1945), who combined Japanese space-​time with Merleau-​Ponty’s work; and philosopher John Rajchman (b. 1946), who extends beyond Merleau-​Ponty to apply Gilles Deleuze’s (1925–​95) Logic of Sense.11 Yet these approaches stop short of fully exploring the world that unfolds in the TMOT installation. This chapter will add to this literature in three ways, by demonstrating how Serra’s work heals schisms of space and time, and body and mind. First, it will apply philosopher Immanuel Kant’s (1724–​1804) aesthetic theory, and in particular his account of the ‘sublime feeling’ from his Critique of the Power of Judgment (more commonly known as the Critique of Judgment in other translations). A Kantian analysis demonstrates the vitality of eighteenth-​century aesthetic categories to better engage the aesthetic experience that materialises within the walls of the spatial-​temporal-​ corporeal container that Serra so carefully prepares and phenomenology so ably describes.12 Second, this chapter will employ Deleuze and collaborator Félix Guattari’s (1930–​92) ‘haptic function’ and ‘smooth space’ to explain how the viewer’s body-​mind can negotiate both the Serra sculpture’s disorientating effects and its incomprehensibility, which is central to evoking the Kantian sublime.13 In the process, the haptic function also heals one final schism: the cleavage between the spatial-​temporal and the ‘pictorial’ that Serra himself hews. Further, this chapter will demonstrate how the ongoing weathering activity of the sculptural surfaces, which is an effect that is overlooked in Serra scholarship, manifests not only pictorially but also temporally. Third, the chapter will introduce the ‘contact improvisation (as it was called)’ dance relationship, not as a metaphor for or overlay upon the Serra experience, but as a more capable and visceral expression of what it means to be in the haptic space of Serra’s sculptures, and to experience them as events over which the viewer’s control seems radically diminished. Contact improvisation is a dance form, which coalesced in New York in the early 1970s out of the experiments of Grand Union co-​founder Steve Paxton (b. 1939). Contact improvisation dancers seek to manifest movement out of the process of one partner’s body ‘listening’ to the other partner’s body. 175

176

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics The result of such a dance is the spontaneous choreography of movement that is consistent with both bodies.14 Ultimately, this chapter will frame Serra’s work as an exemplar of the capacity of contemporary art to reintegrate the schisms of Lessing, Fried, and Serra himself. The curvilinear steel sculptures do not function only as spatial; rather, they transcend Lessing’s category of visual art, wielding, like Lessing’s ‘poetry’, the temporal force of narrative and transforming this notion of temporality by making it non-​narrative. Serra’s work grows out of Minimalism and land art, being approaches to conceptual art that broke the hold of the strictest Modernism, and he is considered one of the first post-​Minimalist and process artists. Art historian and longtime Serra commentator Foster characterises ‘the stake of minimalism [as] a partial shift in focus from object to subject, from ontological questions (of the essence of the medium) to phenomenological conditions (of a particular body in a particular space as the ground of art)’.15 This shift, Foster says, ‘was fundamental for Serra too; indeed, he has pushed it further than anyone else within sculpture … Serra wanted to defeat pictoriality completely’. Serra’s inclination expressed itself in several ways. For example, Serra’s process art pieces memorialise actions using industrial materials in sculpture, such as splashing lead (Gutter Corner Splash; 1969/​1995) and lifting rubber (To Lift; 1967), and in film, for example, Hand Catching Lead (1968) and Hands Scraping (1968). His Prop pieces of the late 1960s explore balance, weight and space through apparently precarious constructions of lead plates and poles.16 His paint-​stick drawings, dating from the early 1970s through the present, whilst hung on walls, ‘establish and structure disjunctive, contradictory spaces’,17 according to Serra, within the sites that they occupy. And his enormous landscape works, which are scattered across the country and the world, force the viewer’s body into a conscious relationship with the space of the land. They put the viewer’s body in relation to ‘the shifting horizon of the landscape space [which] immediately calls into question basic spatial coordinates’ and, as they lead the viewer, ‘the placement of sculptural elements … draws the viewer’s attention to the topography of the landscape as the landscape is walked’.18 Foster identifies three principles that guide Serra’s work: ‘constructivist’, emphasising making; ‘the expressive development of structures out of 176

17

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time the effective treatment of materials;’ ‘phenomenological’, emphasising the body’s activation; and ‘situational’, ‘engag[ing] the particularity of place, [and] not the abstraction of space’.19 Framed differently, Serra prioritises process,20 seeks to create forms that have not existed before,21 interacts with space as medium and site as context22 and seeks to implicate the participant in an unavoidably spatial-​temporal and embodied activity.23 He states that ‘The meaning of this installation does not exist independently from the viewer’s experience’.24 Although Serra cares about how his sculptures visually interact within their situations, and in the case of the TMOT installation, with each other, he cares less about their visual appearance. Serra is the most deliberate –​meaning both intentional and methodical –​ of artists. He begins his process by constructing lead models. He depends on computer-​aided design and other software applications, including one used by his fabricator to create a ‘virtual model;’ he asserts that ‘inventing forms is not dependent on software’.25 During production planning, fabrication, and installation of the enormous works themselves, Serra remains closely involved, facilitating his ‘reevaluation and adjustment’ of the works. A pioneer in site specificity, Serra’s site-​specific works, most famously Tilted Arc (1981), heeded the Minimalist call for sculpture to step off its pedestal into public space. A flashpoint in the ‘culture wars’ that dominated the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, Tilted Arc inspired a vocal opposition that framed Serra’s art, especially its industrial and monumental aspect, as an incursion into public space.26 Tilted Arc was neither the first nor last Serra sculpture to attract opposition in its community, but, extending more than 200 feet in lower Manhattan’s Federal Plaza, it was the most prominently sited and the only one whose controversy led to its destruction. (The passage of time, however, has nurtured an embrace of some of Serra’s public sculptures by their communities.) In this sense, the evolution of Serra’s large curvilinear pieces parallels a volatile and contentious time when public art, as well as that in museums, forced questions of both place and space into consciousness, challenging the ways in which people engaged with artworks. Serra’s more recent sculpture –​including both his curvilinear works and his drawings –​have garnered a positive reception for their ability 177

178

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics to engage and activate visitors. In a 2005 review of TMOT, critic Robert Hughes (1938–​2012) asserted, ‘On the basis of his [Matter of Time] installation … we can call Richard Serra not only the best sculptor alive, but the only great one at work anywhere in the early 21st century’.27 The TMOT sculptures reflect not only the mature Serra, but also his deepening exploration of the forms he began with the 1996–​7 torqued ellipse series. As the TMOT floor plan suggests, the eight sculptures, occupying a gallery that is 350 x 75 ft. cohere as one undertaking for both artist and museum visitor.28 As a visitor approaches the seventh TMOT sculpture, Between the Torus and the Sphere (2003–​5), the first of its eight steel plates rises up fourteen feet and extends fifty feet across and arcs towards him or her. The panel –​ a concave section of a sphere –​torques not only the material of the space contained in its hollow, but also to the material of the visitor’s body, forcing it to conform to the steel contours. This is the corporeal and disorienting nature of the TMOT sculptures. Indeed, it is the nature of all of Serra’s large curvilinear sculpture of the past twenty years. During the procession down each of the seven passageways formed by Torus’s eight steel sections, time and space invite the visitor into a relationship with the piece, then into an activity, even a dance, that confers motion upon the human body. The Serra sculpture wrests agency from the participant, just as the contact improvisation dance wrests agency from the dancers. A typical contact improvisation dance begins in stillness and unfolds in response to proximity, gravity, friction and both unintentional and intentional bodily movements. According to dancer and theoretician Cynthia Novack (1947–​96), ‘Contact improvisation defines the self as the responsive body and also the responsive body listening to another responsive body, the two spontaneously creating a third force that directs the dance. The boundaries of the individual are crossed by “seeing through the body” and “listening through the skin”, allowing the dance to unfold’,29 until, as in the mirror exercise that is common in drama classes, the dancers’ movements are simultaneous and neither dancer is able to discern which is leading and which is following. The experience is, in fact, of no leader; or, it is as if the movement, itself was leading. Or perhaps most precisely, it is of two bodies leading together, followed by two consciousnesses, disoriented by the apparent loss of their agency, yet flushed with excitement, running behind, riding the movement 178

179

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time that they thought that they were controlling, but have discovered is not their own. Agency becomes confused and conflated, residing now in the place between the dance partners, manifesting as Novack’s ‘third force’ or what Paxton calls the ‘it’.30 Imagine that the visitor re-​approaches the first plate of Torus, but now, a moment of pause interrupts the passage of time and the expanse of space. Instead of dancing with the sculpture, the visitor experiences what a play of light reveals. Here, in steel rather than pigment, the sculptural surface takes on the visual subtlety and depth of an Impressionist painting: the layering of shadow and light; the profusion of colour –​orange, rust, olive, black, grey, silver; and the varieties of brushstroke –​streaking, striating, etching, cross-​hatching and smudging. Serra is troubled by this experience of seeing, which risks transforming the visitor from participant to viewer and his or her experience from the immediacy of embodiment to the distance of sight.31 As Foster notes, ‘Like his peers [Serra] wanted to defeat pictoriality, especially as it underwrote Gestalt readings of art, which he saw as idealist totalisations that serve to conceal the work’s construction and to suppress the body of the viewer. But [unlike his peers,] Serra wanted to defeat pictoriality completely’.32 However, although the primary experience of TMOT remains inaccessible and absent movement within three-​dimensional space and over time, it inevitably evokes its others situated at the opposite end of the spatial-​temporal continuum: the flat, immobile and interrupted.33 So Serra’s fear of pictoriality is overstated in terms of its capacity to undermine the spatial-​ temporal experience. People who pause in stillness to observe the surface effects of a panel will soon feel compelled to move, indeed, will soon be overtaken by the experience of movement. But the surface effects do not interest Serra –​or many of his commentators –​because they are ephemeral, which, in 2007, Serra explained to television interviewer Charlie Rose: In about eight years, [the surface will] reach a dark amber. And then that color will hold, and it will cease to oxidize and that’ll be the color it is forever … When it goes through the colorization, a lot of people say, ‘Oh rusty waste’, and a lot of [other] people will then get involved with the colorization and say ‘I like it for its painting quality’. I know that it’s going to be one

179

180

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics flat dark color after eight or ten years, so I don’t get involved in being attached to however it is at a given moment.34

Serra chooses his steel for its structural and weathering capacities; the surface effects are artifacts of this choice and temporary ones at that. But, they are not as temporary as he suggests.35 His sculptures continue to oxidise for a much longer time and, unlike the temporal process of walking through a Serra sculpture, this temporality is out of the participant’s control. Although the ephemeral –​a surface’s ‘given moment’ –​relieves Serra of his interest, it is, in fact, a spatial-​temporal process, a marker of change, that whilst out of the participant’s control, may be (and perhaps, ought to be) in the participant’s consciousness. It is, like the movement of the participant’s body, a matter of time. In a sense, a participant revisiting TMOT after an extended absence would experience both an external marker of time, as reflected in changes to the sculptural surfaces, and an internal marker of time, through the echo in the sculptures. The ephemeral, so easily dismissed by the artist and his commentators, whose long view of the sculptural lifespan counts twenty-​ five or fifty years to be a moment in time, is in the present a matter not of such magisterial time, but of the time of memory. Weathering becomes a measure of time itself because we, as humans, have the capacity to experience change. These twin experiences of Torus –​movement and pause –​demonstrate not only the capacity of all TMOT sculptures to engage spatiality and temporality, and to keep these states in constant relationship with one another, but also to complicate the relationship by playing at two ends of the spatial-​temporal spectrum, encompassing the following tensions: movement and stillness, three-​dimensional torque and curve and two-​dimensional inscription and texture. This is the case for all of Serra’s curvilinear, weathered steel forms. This rhythm repeats in all eight pieces, which range in complexity and form from single and double-​torqued ellipses, to various torqued spirals, to a sine curve and finally beyond Torus, the almond-​shaped spiral, titled Blind Spot Reversed. Although Serra works with a vocabulary of geometric shape, it is the space that determines the form that fills it, not the shape that determines the space that it contains. These forms share key characteristics, including the following: material 180

18

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time (weathered steel), form (labyrinthine, curving, tilting), height (all are twelve-​to fourteen-​feet tall), thickness of the plates (all are two inches thick), width of pathway, variation of passage width from floor to the top edge and the interplay of surface qualities, such as shadow, weathering, texture and colour. In an interview on the first of the torqued ellipses, Serra explains some of these decisions. He rejected using concrete as the material for almost all of his work, saying that ‘I wanted to keep them within the definition of sculpture’, in order to sustain the ‘tension of the torqued steel’ and to avoid comparisons to the ‘contained spaces of architecture’.36 Serra explains that height is crucial to this work: ‘[N]‌ine-​foot pieces aren’t going to have the same capacity to cohere, hold, or envelop the space … [T]he higher the elevation, the greater the potential for torquing to have an effect’.37 He says that although the steel plates must be two inches thick to ensure ‘stability of form’,38 they do not sacrifice the work’s ‘weightlessness’, which is an achievement that he attributes to the feeling of surface movement.39 The ‘continuously inclined’ surface, he suggests, makes it difficult to ‘sense the distance to any single part’ of the torqued, curving forms. This institutes dynamism to the material of immobile sculpture. The result, as Serra puts it, is that, ‘from the outside, you have no sense of what the form is on the inside; and when you’re inside, it is very difficult to understand how the form leans on the outside. They challenge your memory. They are unlike any space you know’.40 All of these sculptures engage not only the confusion of disorientation, but also the veiling of space, and the theft of the certainty of the participant’s bodily relationship to the space that he or she inhabits. Experiencing a new perspective, the old one is lost. Even retracing steps fails to recover the space that was. Ultimately, TMOT poses questions about form in general. In fact, in Serra’s work, the idea of form is constantly under construction. This is the result of three factors: the forms are extraordinary, that is, outside of usual experience; the sculptures re-​form and gather in relation to each other; and the experience of their presence shifts frequently as the participant moves amongst them. Yet, Serra explains that the individual sculptures in TMOT translate into a language deciphered by the body: ‘Without knowing anything about sculpture you understand that the single and double ellipse, 181

182

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics the spirals, and the piece made up of torus and sphere sections share a language and a syntax’, which your ‘bodily movement’ deciphers.41 Mark Taylor, in his analysis of Serra’s first Torqued Ellipses, defines the Japanese conception of space-​time as embodied in the Japanese term ma. Unlike the Western conception of space and time, the space and time of ma ‘are inseparable from bodily movement. Space-​time, in other words, is a corporeal event, which is never fixed but always in transition’.42 Arata Isozaki, on whom Taylor relies, evokes not only the inextricability of time and space, but also the central role of the void in the conception of ma: ‘Space was believed to be fundamentally void. Even solid objects were thought to contain voids … [S]‌pace was perceived as identical with the events or phenomena occurring in it; that is, space was recognized only in its relation to time-​flow’.43 So, bodily movement reveals not only, as Serra notes, the ‘language and syntax’ of the forms, but also the fundamental relationship between space and time flow. And this experience unfolds not only for each individual sculpture, but in ever more complex ways for the whole installation. TMOT is, then, not simply the sum of eight discrete spatial-​temporal experiences. The installation induces its own spatial-​temporal experience from a multiplicity of visual, auditory and corporeal experiences and effects, such as occlusion, foreshortening, echo, fusion and illusion, which result from these interrelationships. Each sculpture’s outer walls engage those of its neighbouring sculptures and the walls of the gallery. The entrance to each sculpture engages the entrances of neighbouring sculptures. Moreover, what might be overlooked as circulatory space produces, like negative space in a painting, its own vortex of forces, impelling or impeding movement, creating or disturbing a vantage point. The installation, thus, comprises a continuous spatial-​temporal experience that, according to Serra, engenders a continual making of meaning. ‘The sculptures’, Serra observes, ‘are not objects separated in space … They impart form to the entire space; they shape the space through axes, trajectories, and passages between their solids and voids’. Likewise, the installation shapes time, as Serra continues: ‘The meaning of the installation will be activated and animated by the rhythm of the viewer’s movement. Meaning occurs only through continuous movement, through anticipation, observation and recollection’.44 182

183

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time That the interactions of space, time, and body are essential to Serra’s work is not surprising, given their origins in the ferment of the 1960s conflict between Modernism and Minimalism, and in particular, as articulated by Fried’s 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’. In a seminal work on one of Serra’s earliest arced steel sculptures, Clara-​Clara (1983), Bois suggests that ‘In a certain way, all of Serra’s œuvre is an implicit reply to Fried’s text’.45 In ‘Art and Objecthood’, Fried traces a spatial-​temporal cleavage between the work of Minimalist artists, such as Donald Judd (1928–​94) and Robert Morris (b. 1931) and Modernist artists, such as Anthony Caro (1924–​2013) and the Abstract Expressionist Jules Olitski (1922–​2007). This logic places Fried firmly in the lineage of Lessing and art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg (1909–​94). Fried posits that, spatially, the Modernist art object finds ‘it imperative to defeat or suspend its own objecthood’. He explains that ‘What is at stake is whether … the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or objects’.46 Minimalist, or what Fried calls ‘literalist’, works such as Untitled (1966), being one of Judd’s series of galvanised steel boxes, cannot transcend their objecthood to become art; rather, they remain boxes. More importantly, Fried frames not only a spatial distinction between Modernist and literalist art, but a temporal distinction. He contends that the viewer (or what he calls the ‘beholder’) experiences a Minimalist-​ literalist work as having ‘endless, or infinite, duration’ and a Modernist work as being ‘instantaneous’. Fried adds that ‘Morris’s claim that [the beholder is] ‘establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context’ invokes as almost necessary the ‘endlessness and inexhaustibility’ of the viewer’s experience, since the artwork is conceived as extending into its environment.47 The Modernist experience, Fried suggests, is entirely different, because it ‘has no duration –​not because one in fact experiences [the artwork] in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest … as though if only [a person] were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it’.48 Fried concludes, almost elegiacally, as if to mourn the passing of the spatial-​temporal transcendence of Modernism. When he says, ‘We are all literalists most of our lives. Presentness is grace’,49 he grieves the loss of 183

184

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics the sacred Modernist art space of not only suspended objecthood, but also suspended time. Fried’s distinction between an object that transcends its objecthood, and one that affirms it, summons a distinction that Kant makes in his seminal The Critique of Pure Reason, completed a decade before his foundational work on aesthetic philosophy. In his lengthy analysis of Kant’s conception of space and time, Deleuze focuses at one point on Kant’s description of the process of perception. According to Deleuze, Kant distinguishes between those phenomena whose parts the perceiver can apprehend subjectively –​ that is, in any order –​without compromising the individual’s capacity to apprehend the whole and those phenomena whose parts the perceiver can apprehend only objectively, that is, in one particular chronological order. Subjective apprehension results in what Kant calls ‘things’; objective apprehension, however, results in what Kant calls ‘events’, since an insistent time gives the perceiver no choice about the order or direction of his or her perception.50 For Fried, then, a Modernist artwork is a Kantian ‘thing’ –​ an object –​that suspends its objecthood and a Minimalist artwork is a Kantian ‘event’ that asserts its objecthood; this eventful objecthood is a violation by time of that rare, timeless, Modernist space. Serra’s curvilinear sculptures as events, then, perpetrate this violation, although not willfully and not because the participant’s experience of them is inexhaustible, but because they make palpable and conscious the experience of time and space as always and everywhere incurring upon each other. If, for Fried, presentness is grace, because he longs for space outside of time, for Serra presentness is grace, because he discloses space and time inside of each other. Serra’s curvilinear sculptures, even if uncomfortable within the constraints of Fried’s categorisations, trace the form of a third genre. They are Kantian objects that act like events; they are objects that wrest control of space and time from the individual.51 Within this third genre, however, is a third element, which is not just event and object, but also the perceiving body.52 Putting aside the problems with Fried’s assumption about Modernist instantaneity, it is true that Serra, even more than the Minimalists whom Fried laments, takes as his medium not just space, but also the human body as it is influenced by the space of the sculpture; this is an influence that unfolds not in an instant, but over a period of time. Foster quotes Serra as seeking, unlike the ‘graphic idea of 184

185

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time landscape’ of his ‘earthwork peers’, a ‘penetration into the land that would open the field and bring you into it bodily, and not just draw you into it visually’. Serra asks rhetorically, ‘How do you make walking and looking into the content [of the artwork]?’53 To paraphrase Fried, it is ‘as though if only one were infinitely more patient, infinitely immersive experience would not be long enough to wholly contain the experience of Serra’s sculpture in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it’.54 And, yet, and this is where Serra’s undertaking so resolutely achieves what Bois suggests, which is that in a single infinitely brief instant, the embodied participant is ‘forever convinced’ by Serra’s work. Crucial to Fried’s formulation is the cleavage between two corporeal activities that imply two different kinds of relationships with Serra’s object-​ events: seeing, which implies distance, both physical and intellectual, and a presumption of separation between viewer and object; and moving, which implies proximity, and a presumption of permeability between the object-​ event and the participant. In an interview with the artist, Cooke remarks about the Torqued Ellipses that ‘Your body responds to things your eyes are not yet even seeing’. So, when Serra replies, ‘As soon as you start reducing it to how you see it, it takes away from the fact that your body and your haptic senses don’t register in that way. Nor can such experiences be distilled into words’,55 he means not simply that language is a poor substitute for experience, and that the optic and the haptic are in conflict, but also that the optic will not serve as a tool to discover the experience of these works. Foster makes a similar point regarding the works in a 2001 exhibition called ‘Torqued Spirals, Toruses and Spheres’. Unlike a typical building, Foster says, the experience of Serra seen in an ‘elevation’ view, that is, at eye level, cannot be predicted by having seen the work in a ‘plan’ view, that is, from above –​or vice versa. This quality, according to Foster, ‘blinds us optically –​we cannot project the work beforehand –​in a way that allows us to “see” the work haptically –​in the flesh, as it were’.56 In a Sculpture interview about the exhibition, Serra adds that ‘On a basic level [haptic] means touch. But, for me, it means … psychologically extending the feeling of touch through the space, so that the space of the void becomes palpable as a form. Negative space becomes psychologically loaded, so that you could actually put your hand out and feel its presence. [I]‌t affects your body: you’re being implicated in it, the space becomes a substance’.57 185

186

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics This is close to what Deleuze and Guattari mean when they, like Serra, oppose the haptic function to an ‘optical’ one. But unlike Serra, they do not oppose it to the activity of the eye. Deleuze and Guattari propose that ‘“Haptic” is a better word than “tactile” since it does not establish an opposition between two sense organs [the skin and the eye] but rather invites the assumption that the eye itself may fulfill this non-​optical function’.58 They equate haptic space with ‘close-​range vision’ (versus ‘long-​distance vision’), that is, a ‘touching … with one’s mind, but without the mind becoming a finger … Where there is close vision, space is not visual, or rather the eye itself has a haptic, non-​optical function’.59 During the close-​range vision of the haptic function, the eye engages not with the pinpointing, directing, goal-​oriented precision of a finger, but with the exploratory, receptive speculation of a hand or, even, a body in contact with another body. It is as the eye sees when it is not looking. It is no surprise then to find operating in the Novack’s descriptions of contact improvisation dance language that is similar to that of Deleuze and Guattari: ‘“seeing through the body” and “listening through the skin”’,60 and a ‘peripheral vision so that the eyes have a wide and general, rather than direct and specific, focus’.61 According to Nobel prize-winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel, this is the peripheral vision that operates ­during night vision62 and also, as it turns out, during the perception of art. Kandel reports on ‘an alternative explanation for the [Mona Lisa’s] shifting expression: ‘Researcher Margaret Livingstone suggests that if viewers look directly at the Mona Lisa’s mouth, they will fail to detect the smile. But, according to her, peripheral vision, ‘which cannot perceive details well, employs a holistic analysis that enables [viewers] to see the softening effects of [Leonardo’s] sfumato technique on her lips in the corners of her mouth’.63 Taken together, Novack, Kandel and Deleuze and Guattari collectively suggest a haptic function that is not only tactile, but also visual. It is not only the sort of ‘feeling one’s way’ associated with night vision, but is also the capacity to detect subtle distinctions including the deep or shallow and dark or light that reveal to the Mona Lisa viewer a sfumato smile at the corners of the lips. As Deleuze and Guattari put it, the haptic capacity functions in a landscape where ‘no line separates earth from sky, which are of the same substance’.64 When they quote anthropologist Edmund 186

187

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time Carpenter’s description of the Inuit landscape as a ‘land without bottom or edge’ or ‘a labyrinth’,65 –​a place where perspective and outline fail to deliver the visual clarity –​they could just as well have been describing the land encountered in the passages of other TMOT sculptures, for example, Double Torqued Ellipse, Torqued Spiral (2003–​4) (Right Left), or Blind Spot Reversed (2003–​5). The experience of these sculptures requires, as does the contact improvisation dance, having one’s eyes wide open. But to engage as a participant in a Serra sculpture, the viewer must relinquish the kind of long-​distance seeing that as mere glance will deliver to the brain all of the information necessary to negotiate a landscape. This wide-​open eye of close haptic vision sees what it does not look at and thereby navigates what is unnavigable, such as structures whose visual features do not disclose their structure. In Torus or Spiral, the shifting, sliding and torqued walls, moving in and out, left and right, and up and down, defy anticipation and disrupt the participant’s navigation of the space. Instead, without necessarily being conscious of it, the participant relies upon peripheral vision and its sensitivity to the subtlety of the space, rather than central vision and its focus on the fine detail of the sculpture’s appearance. This disorientation is possibly what Cooke means when she observes that ‘You have a bodily based reading which is not primarily a visual reading, and simultaneously a visual reading’.66 Perhaps it is what Serra means when he describes the visual experience of Kyoto, saying that ‘The act of seeing, and the concentration of seeing, takes an effort. The gardens impose that effort on you if you want to see them. It’s another way of ordering your vision, and it slows down your vision’.67 Perhaps despite his assertions, Serra, although anti-​Gestalt, is not so much anti-​optical as differently optical, instigating a close-​range, rather than distant, visual experience, which elaborates rather than summarises, revealing itself as intermediate instead of immediate, and constitutes time over time as opposed to seeking to negate time with instantaneity. The temporality of these moments in Serra’s work reflects not just the process of orienting and situating in ‘real’ time, but also the palpable duration of the effort first to perceive and then to come to terms with experience as part of a chronology that an experience comprises.68 The visual resolution of this process both defeats a literal pictorialism and establishes 187

18

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics a visceral and temporal one. That is, the result is not only a feeling in the body, but also a picture, since for sighted people who walk through a Serra, it is unlikely that the optical eye will cede all authority to the haptic one. But it is a double image, which is both a moving picture felt in the mind-​body and a still one felt in the place behind the eyes. In this way, the image of the experience is both temporal, as Lessing’s temporal ‘poetry’ is narrative, and a-​temporal, as Fried’s Modernist art is instantaneous. These ‘images’ and their bodily reverberations are the artifacts of haptic functioning. Serra calls the experience of time in TMOT ‘nonnarrative, discontinuous, fragmented’.69 A participant feels disoriented within the sculpture (as well as the contact improvisation dance), because the mind has trouble relinquishing enough control –​its verbalised narrative of experience –​to share in the storytelling process with another part of the consciousness. The mind feels disoriented –​but the thinking body, aided by the haptic eye, does not. The thinking body, like the contact improvising one, is the self that comprehends the feeling of disorientation as a function in which both mind and body operate; disorientation defines itself both as a phase through which the mind goes until it has adjusted to the current configuration of space and as the body’s recognition of the transitory nature of its relationship to the space that it inhabits. The thinking body becomes the primary subject who experiences sculptures, which Serra hopes will ‘be a catalyst for thought, [and] change how people think’.70 Indeed, as Rajchman puts it in his 2007 essay, Serra’s works comprise a ‘reinvention of thinking itself ’.71 Although Rajchman applies a different Deleuze text –​ The Logic of Sense –​to explicate this revelation, Kant’s ‘Analytic on the Sublime’ offers an alternative approach for explaining the activity of the mind (which reconstitutes itself here as the mind-​body, the thinking body) as it confronts spatial-​temporal challenges like the ones posed by Serra’s sculptures.72 A visitor enters Torus as one might enter a cave: warily. How could it be that the steel plates of its passage are centred enough to stand? If this is the first inkling of Serra’s capacity to manipulate the spatial-​temporal fabric, it is also the first sense of Kant’s version of the sublime feeling,73 which is not, as it is sometimes characterised, a more intense instance of beauty. Kant’s sublime feeling is the aesthetic pleasure, but first displeasure, that arises in the presence of something that appears ‘infinite’ in size and power (Kant 188

189

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time relies on examples such as the immense mountain and the mighty ocean). Such objects, Kant says, stump the individual’s ability to comprehend his or her limits. What Serra’s sculptural object-​event requires, then, is not only a new way of seeing, which is haptic, but also a new way of thinking or knowing. To describe his radical ideas, Kant created a new language; his terms are Imagination, Understanding and Reason (being divergent from twenty-​ first century usage). Kant says that Imagination is the capacity that all people have to represent sensory perceptions in the mind and, in this way, give mental form to these sensations. The displeasure of the sublime feeling arises when the Imagination attempts to formulate in the mind the sensation of an object’s oversized magnitude or power, but fails to grasp this particular object’s formlessness. Neither infinitely large nor powerful, Torus nonetheless appears boundless in both. As the visitor walks down a passage in Torus or Spiral, the sculpture masks the endpoint of its magnitude in the unpredictability of its path, obscuring the endpoint of its might in the paradoxical, impossible, unstable stability of its plates. In response, what Kant calls Understanding, or the capacity to apply a concept to a representation that Imagination has formulated, has no form to work with. It cannot help the mind name, and thus comprehend, this boundless experience. Neither infinitely large nor powerful, Torus, like all the TMOT sculptures, nonetheless appears boundless in both.74 During a 2010 visit, a ten-​year-​old girl emerged from one piece saying, ‘You never know what’s coming next!’ Not knowing, a property of all the TMOT sculptures, also evokes the infinite. To know something is to not only limit it to a finite definition of what it is, but also to eliminate the infinite definitions of what it is not. Just as Serra’s sculptures obscure the endpoint of their magnitude and their might, they also obscure the endpoint of the visitor’s capacity to know. So, displeasure in TMOT arises as a towering passage that not only wrestles the visitor’s agency from him or her, but also hides its origin and the logic of its mass and trajectory and thereby stumps the mind’s capacity to represent the sculpture as a unified object. Yet, the girl does not conclude, ‘Ugh’, but rather, ‘Cool!’ Where is her pleasure in such a disturbing moment? Kant asserts that the viewer must be safe, in order to experience the danger that is fundamental to the sublime feeling’s displeasure. If the visitor perceived real danger, he or she would 189

190

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics flee or become paralysed with terror, or in any case, would not be able to sustain the ‘disinterested’ distance that for Kant is necessary for an experience to be aesthetic.75 There is something ungraspable about this un-​dangerous danger. It is not the caged tiger, for, unless I distrust the cage, I do not feel endangered by the big cat. Danger here is far less contained and comprehensible. Safety arises not out of the comprehension of this boundless object, but out of the comprehension of the self –​out of the visitor’s capacity to reason. Kant’s Reason is thinking’s capacity to conceive Ideas. Kant’s Ideas are thoughts, independent of the experience that the world gives the mind; they are deductions from within the mind. It is this narrowly defined Reason that leads both to a sense of safety –​and to pleasure. If the sublime’s displeasure arises from the Imagination’s incapacity in the mind to represent TMOT’s various infinities, the sublime’s pleasure arises from Reason’s capacity to conceive of the idea of ‘infinity’.76 In this way, the visitor finds a boundary to contain TMOT within the self. Kant locates the sublime dynamic in the mind: Kant’s Imagination, Understanding and Reason are mental faculties. Just as the lens of the Kantian sublime feeling reveals something about TMOT that the Serra literature has not fully plumbed, the Serra literature broadens the Kantian conception of the sublime by finding in TMOT a thinking that unfolds in the body, matching the seeing that the haptic function re-​conceives as feeling.77 In this way, the sublime experience in TMOT leads the participant to re-​cognise the body and the self –​an event that is consistent with both Taylor’s formulation when he describes Serra’s sculptures as ‘thought in experience, which transforms the experience of thought’,78 and Rajchman’s when he calls them ‘gigantic steel exercises in thinking’, adding, ‘Thus Serra introduces into sculpture a kind of thinking that deliberately severs the link between intuition and understanding, the experience of space and the analysis of it. He obliges us to discover a new sort of visceral intelligence’.79 As Serra concludes, ‘[P]‌laces engender thoughts … distinct from abstract concepts. You have to make connections while evaluating experience: thinking on your feet, so to speak’.80 Motion sickness results from the mind’s confusion, when the body’s movement does not coincide with what optical perception suggests is happening. It would seem, then, that the thinking-​on-​your-​feet body that Serra 190

19

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time activates learns to know something more true than its sensory apparatus alone can deliver. So when Rajchman says, ‘one exits strangely refreshed, one’s sensibilities heightened or quickened, as if new, unforeseen connections and possibilities had been introduced into one’s brain’,81 the description, whilst apt, seems a bit timid and imprecise. What Serra achieves, and what Kant’s sublime manifests, in the participant’s experience of TMOT, is not only a visceral revelation of the implicit bond between space and time, but also a healing of the wound –​‘I think therefore I am’ –​that has seemed to sever mind from body since René Descartes (1596–​1650).82 In Serra’s world of temporal-​spatial-​corporeal contingency and Kant’s experience of the sublime feeling, neither mind nor body could accomplish the journey on its own. Serra’s work is the subject of several critiques related to their size, their fabrication using industrial processes, their imposition on space, particularly in contexts outside the museum. When talking about site-​specific urban and landscape pieces, Serra acknowledges that ‘the work can be disruptive’, but that ‘retreat[ing] to the sanctity of museums’ sacrifices the ‘public dialogue’ that he considers essential.83 Is the sublime feeling or the ‘reinvention of thinking’ crucial enough to justify the expense, resources and size of the TMOT installation and newer sculptures such as Junction (2011) and Cycle (2010), which are amongst the largest and most complex of Serra’s indoor works.84 The sublime feeling is accessible through the works of artists who work in flat media85 and characteristics of temporality and spatiality are also apparent even at reduced scale.86 But in both of these cases, the viewer is required to make an effort unnecessary in Serra’s sculptures to create in him or herself the context in which the experience might unfold. For example, to experience the sublime feeling in David Maisel’s (b. 1961) Lake Project (2001–​4) photographs, the viewer must know something about the depleted landscape that he depicts, and to experience the temporally compelling effects of Sharon Lockhart’s (b.  1964) slow-​action film Lunch Break (2008), the viewer must be patient enough to sit through its ninety-​minute crawl. Serra’s work requires no such context: it is immediate in its capacity to create its own context, tendering an almost unrefusable invitation to enter into its disorienting effects.87 191

192

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics

Notes 1. Acknowledgements from the author are as follows: Rob Marks wishes to thank Lynne Cooke, Susan Gevirtz, Peter Milne and Joseph Tanke for helping to develop the ideas that evolved into this essay; Sarah J. Lippert for her editorial guidance; and the Studio of Richard Serra and Ana López de Munain of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. He also thanks Kate Angelo, Michelle Carlson, Julian Carter, Jacqueline Francis, Tirza True Latimer, Maria McVarish, Maria Porges, Jordana Moore Saggese, Tina Takemoto and Ignacio Valero, all at the College of Art annual conference in Los Angeles. Finally, he also thanks those whose teaching and collaboration were crucial to his evolution as a writer and artist, including the following: Ben Bagdikian, Michael Markowitz, Nancy Marks, Frank McCourt, Saul Rosenfield, Danielle Sommer, Nancy Stark Smith and the Way Group. 2. Cited in Mark C. Taylor, ‘Learning Curves’, in Dia Center for the Arts, Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997), p. 55. 3. Cited in Lynne Cooke and Michael Govan, ‘Interview with Richard Serra’, in Dia: Torqued, p. 13. Serra installed these sculptures at the Dia Center for the Arts in New York City in 1997, where Cooke was an art historian who was the Dia’s curator, and Govan was the Dia’s Director. The sculptures are now located at the Dia Art Foundation’s Beacon, New York museum. This was not Cooke’s first interview with Serra, and nor would it be the last, as she has become both a leading art-​historical source about his work, and an astute interviewer of the artist. 4. Richard Serra, ‘Questions, Contradictions, Solutions:  Early Work’, in Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Richard Serra:  The Matter of Time (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2005), p. 54. Published in conjunction with the installation of The Matter of Time at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. 5. Richard Serra, ‘Notes on The Matter of Time’, in Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Richard Serra: The Matter of Time (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2005), p. 141. 6. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: http://​www.guggenheim.org/​guggenheim-​foundation/​architecture/​bilbao [accessed 18 October,  2013]. Matter includes one work, Snake (1994–​7), purchased and installed in the Guggenheim in 1997, and seven works produced 2003–​5. Although the Guggenheim paid roughly $20 million for the installation (http://​www.nysun.com/​arts/​serra-​gamble-​cost-​ guggenheim-​62m/​83919/​ [accessed 18 October, 2013, it is notable that Serra regularly seeks public venues and partners for his work, thereby transcending the traditional boundary between two segments of the populace:  an art-​ ­educated class of collectors and museum-​goers and a less than engaged arts public. In fact, in many cities, Serra’s large weathering steel sculptures, although not many of the more recent, are still outdoors.

192

193

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time 7. Glenn Lowry, ‘Foreword’, in Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke, Richard Serra: Forty Years, exh cat. (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 7. 8. Cooke and Govan, ‘Interview’, p. 27. 9. Taylor, ‘Learning Curves’, p. 45. 10. Yvonne Rainer was a pioneering experimental dancer in the 1960s and 1970s, out of whose piece Continuous Project-​Altered Daily (1969) evolved the experimental dance group, The Grand Union. Rainer and other Grand Union founders, including contact improvisation founder Steve Paxton, were part of the dance composition class held by Robert Ellis Dunn, a musical collaborator of pioneering modern dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, at Judson Church in New York. This class was the meeting place of many of the members of the 1961–​4 performance collective, the Judson Church Dance Theatre. ‘[Steve] Paxton was one of the dancers with whom Rainer made “Continuous Project Altered Daily”, an evolving piece which incorporated the rehearsal process as part of the performance. “The whole world of spontaneous behaviour on stage was opening up to us ... we were interested in unforeseen happenings, effort, spontaneous response’’, Rainer recalled. That interest spurred the dancers in “Continuous Project” to begin to perform as a collective improvisational group, the Grand Union, which existed from 1970–​6’. Cynthia J. Novack, Sharing the Dance: Contact Improvisation in American Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990), pp. 43–​63 (quotation, p. 58). 11. A good survey of these works can be found in Richard Serra, eds Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), which includes Rosalind Krauss’s seminal essay ‘Richard Serra: Sculpture’, pp. 99–​145, and other essays by Hal Foster, Yve-​Alain Bois and Douglas Crimp. 12. Immanuel Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, ed. Paul Guyer, trans. Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews (New  York:  Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 89–​159. Kant’s most substantial contributions as the progenitor of modern Euro-​American aesthetic theory is not, as he is sometimes accused, of imposing Eurocentric assumptions on the process of aesthetic perception, but in seeking to understand the conditions that underpin the human inclination to make the statements ‘this is beautiful’ and ‘this is sublime’, his twin aesthetic judgements, and to presume from the stance of an individual that everyone else ‘ought’ to agree with my judgement. That is, Kant found in these judgements a paradox: a statement that understood itself to be subjective, but which aspired, even claimed, against all evidence, to be universal. In this way, he uncovered the secret key to all judgement. Serra’s work is not infrequently referred to as sublime, but rarely does a commentator apply a careful analysis to discover the layers of the work that the sublime reveals, in particular, in terms of the sculptures’ spatial-​temporal revelations. Two other Serra commentators do apply a more careful analysis, but even then, they refer to Kant’s aesthetic philosophy only in passing. Yve-​Alain

193

194

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics Bois prefers applying Uvedale Price’s 1794 conception of the sublime –​the ‘sublime picturesque’ –​since, quoting Price, ‘the picturesque appeared halfway between the beautiful and the sublime’. Bois, ‘A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-​Clara’, in Richard Serra, eds Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), p. 87. Art historian Stephen Melville uses Kant to get to Hegel, taking as a starting point Serra’s use of the word ‘absolute’ to describe his work. In ‘Richard Serra: Taking Measure of the Impossible’, RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 185–​201. 13. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘1440:  The Smooth and the Striated’, A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), pp. 474–​500. 14. Novack, Sharing, p. 8. [C]‌ontact improvisers use momentum to move in concert with a partner’s weight, rolling, suspending, lurching together. They often yield rather than resist, using their arms to assist and support but seldom to manipulate. Interest lies in the ongoing flow of energy rather than on producing still pictures, as in ballet; consequently, dancers doing contact improvisation would just as soon fall as balance. Although many contact improvisers demonstrate gymnastic ability, their movement, unlike that of most gymnastic routines, does not emphasize the body’s line or shape. Even more important, they improvise their movement, inventing or choosing it at the moment of performance. 15. Hal Foster, ‘Un/​making Sculpture’, in Richard Serra, eds Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 176–​7. 16. I am using the word ‘apparently’ here not as a hedge, but to communicate that these works feel precarious but are engineered to be stable. 17. Serra: ‘Notes on Drawing’ p. 56. Published in conjunction with the installation of Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Menil Collection. 18. Cited in Lynne Cooke, ‘Thinking on Your Feet: Richard Serra’s Sculpture in Landscape’ in Richard Serra:  Forty Years, ed. Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 100. In the conclusion to this comprehensive and sensitive survey of Serra’s body of landscape work, Cooke contrasts these two perspectives, which Serra expresses in two interviews held sixteen years apart. But, although Cooke wisely observes that the first quotation, from 1996, reflects Serra’s topologic concerns, and the second, from 1980, his topographic ones, together, the quotations reflect Serra’s ongoing and complex relationship with the space as medium and the viewer as embodied.

194

195

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time 19. Foster, ‘Un/​making’, pp. 178–​9. 20. Serra’s Verb List Compilation:  Actions to Relate to Oneself, which includes 54 terms, mostly verbs –​‘to roll; to crease; to fold … to bundle; to heap; to gather’ –​is a document that the artist’s commentators see as a Rosetta stone for understanding the language of Serra’s art. Serra says the Verb List ‘allowed me to experiment … [un]burdened by any prescripted definition of material, process, or end product’, Kynaston McShine, ‘A Conversation about Work with Richard Serra’, in Forty Years, p. 27. For an infrequently told history of the Verb List, see also Cooke: Thinking, pp. 77–​8: Cooke says that the document began life as a handwritten list –​an artwork –​and it was when it was reprinted as a typeset list that it became identified as Serra’s credo. 21. Cooke and Govan, Interview, p. 13. 22. As noted earlier, refer to Serra: ‘Notes on Matter’, p. 141, Taylor’s quotation of Serra in ‘Learning Curves’, p. 55, and Cooke and Govan: ‘Interview’, p. 13, for Serra’s reference to the void. 23. In Serra’s recent statements, temporality, especially, and spatiality are dominant themes; see, particularly, Serra, ‘Notes on Matter’, p. 141; and Cooke and Govan, ‘Interview’, pp. 18–​22, 26, 28–​31, as well as less recent commentary, including Foster, ‘Un/​making’, p. 178. 24. Serra, ‘Notes on Matter’, p. 141. 25. Richard Serra, ‘Richard Serra’, Artforum International, 51:1 (September 2012), p. 491. 26. See Douglas Crimp, ‘Redefining Site Specificity’, in Richard Serra, eds Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), pp. 147–​73, for a reflection on how Serra’s achievements have sometimes been obscured by such controversies. See Clara Weyergraf-​Serra and Martha Buskirk, The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991) for a comprehensive record of the Tilted Arc controversy as recounted through primary documents encompassing General Service Administration correspondence, public hearing transcripts and court briefs and decisions. See also Miwon Kwon, ‘Sitings of Public Art: Integration versus Intervention’, in One Place after Another: Site Specificity and Locational Identity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 56–​99 and Harriet F. Senie, The Tilted Arc Controversy: Dangerous Precedent? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001) for analyses of the Tilted Arc controversy. 27. Robert Hughes, ‘Man of Steel’, The Guardian, 22 June 2005: http://​www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2005/​jun/​22/​art [accessed 18 October 2013]. 28. For the floor plan see the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao website: https://​www. guggenheim.org/​about-​us. 29. Novack, Sharing, p. 189. 30. Ibid., pp.  182–​ 3. In an interesting overlap, Taylor cites Merleau-​ Ponty to show  that he identified the perceiving body (versus the objective

195

196

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics body) as the ‘third term’ between the objective world and the subjective self. Like the ‘it’ and the ‘third force’, it is a something that seems outside of the self, and of the conscious mind that thinks it has agency (Taylor, Learning Curves, p. 47). 31. There is a tendency amongst Serra commentators like myself to find ourselves so engaged in the spatial-​temporal experience of the works –​the contortion of space, the passage of time –​as to overlook the temporal-​spatial revelation within the two-​dimensional space of the sculptures’ panels. Not one of Serra’s sculptures reduces itself to a single ‘side’ to be seen at a distance; as Merleau-​ Ponty would say, we cannot perceive the other side of a Serra piece in the same manner that we regularly perceive as ‘real’ the other sides of objects that we perceive, such as everything from lamps to people (Maurice Merleau-​ Ponty, ‘The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences’, in Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor, eds, The Merleau-​Ponty Reader (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), pp. 90–​2). Yet, a single side (or surface) reveals something, and, in any case, no amount of attention will reveal everything. 32. Foster, ‘Un/​making’, p. 177. Serra also says that unlike the Minimalists, ‘who were more interested in the specificity of the object in its relation to space … I became very interested in the distribution of the elements in the open field, in the space in between’. Cooke and Govan: ‘Interview’, p. 28. 33. Although the comparison between an Impressionist painting and a sculpture by Serra can claim no art-​historical foundation, it is notable that the pictorial should emerge within Serra’s non-​pictorial frame, and as an evanescence that recalls, for example, a work by Claude Monet. This implication of the pictorial –​ in a work that towers over me, torques my body, compels me forward –​is, itself, an event. 34. Rose, ‘Richard Serra, Part 2’, June 6, 2007, http://​www.charlierose.com/​view/​ interview/​8536 [accessed 23 July, 2011]: 24:34–​25:12. Oxidation rates depend on a variety of atmospheric variables, including weather conditions, salinity, acidity, and exposure. 35. For example, Snake, completed in 1995, was vibrantly striated and coloured in 2010, when I visited the Guggenheim Bilbao, as was Intersection II (1992) when I visited it at the New York MOMA retrospective of Serra’s work in 2007. But I have also seen photographs of much older works (from as early as 1987 and taken as recently as 2013) whose pattern and colouration are not consistent, so it remains unclear if they have stabilised at a point different from what Serra imagined as ‘one flat dark color’, or if they continue to weather and will one day reach this state. 36. Cited in Cooke and Govan: ‘Interview’, p. 17. And, he makes similar comments in McShine: ‘Conversation’, p. 34: ‘Steel can feel weightless on the ground, but

196

197

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time it doesn’t become ponderous; it doesn’t look like it has been cast or formed. It’s under its own torqued compression’. 37. Cited in Cooke and Govan: ‘Interview’, p. 17. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., pp. 16–​17. 40. Ibid., pp. 18–​19. 41. Cited in McShine, ‘Conversation’, p. 37. Serra is speaking about Matter at this point in the interview. 42. Taylor, ‘Learning Curves’, p. 35. 43. Isozaki, ‘Space-​Time in Japan’, p. 12. There is no indication, despite the influence of the Kyoto gardens, that when Serra refers to the ‘void’ he has any knowledge of the ma-​related void. But that the void is essential to both ma and to Serra’s work highlights the prominence of emptiness as the fundamental condition that allows for a conceptual blending of what Western thought has separated: space and time. Isozaki notes that ‘While in the West the space-​time concept has given rise to absolutely fixed images of a homogeneous and infinite continuum, as presented in Descartes, in Japan space and time were never fully separated but were conceived as correlative and omnipresent’. Serra, in harnessing the void, in a way that is consistent with ma, demonstrates the problems with this Cartesian separation. 44. Serra, ‘Notes on Matter’, p. 141. 45. Bois, ‘A Picturesque Walk’, p. 82. 46. Michael Fried, ‘Art and Objecthood’, ed. Gregory Battcock, Minimal Art: A  Critical Anthology (Berkeley, CA:  University of California Press, 1995), p. 120. 47. Fried, ‘Objecthood’, p. 144. 48. Ibid., pp. 145–​6. All emphases are Fried’s. Fried writes at a time when Serra, who is usually classified first as a process artist and later as a post-​minimalist, has only just begun to show his work, and Fried does not mention Serra at all. 49. Ibid. p. 147. 50. Gilles Deleuze, ‘Sommaire sur Kant: Cours Vincennes: Synthesis and Time –​ 28/​03/​1978’, Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze, ed. Richard Pinhas, http://​www. webdeleuze.com/​php/​sommaire.html, [last update to site 2/​5/​2013; accessed 24 August, 2013]. 51. Mark Taylor arrives at a similar conclusion: ‘The torquing space has the strange effect of transforming objects into events’, (Taylor, ‘Learning Curves’, p.  55), but he departs from a different place that is not Immanuel Kant, but Japanese space-​time. 52. I am borrowing ‘third genre’ from Merleau-​Ponty via Taylor. Taylor explains that, according to Merleau-​ Ponty, ‘Never a self-​ contained entity … the body is the mean between extremes –​the mi-​lieu –​in which opposites, like

197

198

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics interiority and exterior are the as well as subjectivity and objectivity, intersect. Underscoring the liminal status of the body, Merleau-​Ponty writes:  ‘At the same time as the body withdraws from the objective world, and forms the pure subject and the object a third genre or gender of being’’ … the elusive “third term.”’ For Merleau-​Ponty, this body, distinct from the ‘momentary body which is the instrument of my personal choices and which fastens upon this or that world’, is the the link between the conscious, subjective self and the objective world. (Taylor, ‘Learning Curves’, pp. 46–​7). 53. Cited in Foster, ‘Richard Serra in Bilbao’, Parkett 74 (2005), pp. 28–​33. Indeed, Serra is famous for the phrase ‘thinking on your feet’, which Cooke contrasts with ‘the kind of “seeing on your feet” that originated with eighteenth-​century travelers in search of the picturesque, who attempted to reformulate natural topography as pictures’, Cooke, ‘Thinking’, p. 100. 54. Fried, ‘Objecthood’, pp. 145–​6. 55. Cooke and Govan, ‘Interview’, pp. 30–​1. 56. Hal Foster, ‘Torques and Toruses’, Richard Serra: Torqued Spirals, Toruses and Spheres (New York: Gagosian Gallery), p. 13. 57. Jonathan Peyser, ‘Declaring, Defining, Dividing Space:  A  Conversation with Richard Serra’, Sculpture 21:8 (Oct. 2002), http://​www.sculpture. org/​documents/​scmag02/​oct02/​serra/​serra.shtml [accessed 16 October, 2013]. 58. Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Smooth’, p. 493. 59. Ibid., p. 494. This may also be the type of vision to which Merleau-​Ponty refers when he says that vision ‘is a thinking that strictly deciphers the signs given within the body’. Merleau-​Ponty, ‘Eye and Mind’, p. 361. 60. Novack, ‘Sharing’, p. 189. 61. Ibid., p. 154. 62. Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 244. 63. Kandel, Insight, pp. 245–​6. The whole of Kandel’s ‘Chapter 15: Deconstruction of the Visual Image:  The Building Blocks of Form Perception’, pp.  239–​55, offers an excellent description of these processes. He goes into detail about the different functions of the basic cells of the retina: the rods, which cannot detect colour but are more sensitive than cones to light, and which are most concentrated on the peripheral retina; the widely spaced cones that share the peripheral retina with the rods and which perceive ‘coarser, large-​scale components of an image;’ and the foveal cones, densely packed in the central retina, discern fine detail. The light sensitivity of the rods make them ‘entirely responsible for night vision’, which you can understand whilst looking at a star: ‘You may have difficulty seeing [a dim] star if you look straight on … [b]‌ut if you turn your head slightly and look at the star out of the corner of your eye, you will recruit the rods in the periphery of the retina, which will enable you to see the star clearly’.

198

19

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time 64. Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Smooth’, p. 494. 65. Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Smooth’, cited by Carpenter in note 28 p. 494 (the quotation itself is p. 574). 66. Cooke and Govan, ‘Interview’, pp. 30–​1. 67. Cited in ibid., p. 29. 68. This echoes Merleau-​Ponty, who says that phenomenology, itself, ‘will therefore do itself over indefinitely; it will be … a dialogue or an infinite meditation. Merleau-​Ponty: ‘What Is Phenomenology’, p. 68. 69. Serra, ‘Notes on Matter’, p. 141. But, the Serra participant, whilst feeling time as what Serra also calls ‘decentering, [and] disorienting’ feels at the same time the whip of the Kantian event, which forces the non-​narrative experience, finally when all is said and done if not in the moment of experience, into the coherent narrative of memory. 70. Cited in Rose, ‘Conversation’, pp. 31, 46–​58. 71. John Rajchman, ‘Serra’s Abstract Thinking’, in Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke, Richard Serra: Forty Years (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007), p. 72. 72. See Jean-​François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime:  Kant’s Critique of Judgment, trans. Elizabeth Rottenberg (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1994)  and Heidegger and the ‘Jews’, trans. Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Henry E.  Allison, Kant’s Theory of Taste (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 2001); Rudolf A.  Makkreel, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant:  The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990); Christian Helmut Wenzel, ‘Kant’s Aesthetics: Overview of Recent Literature’, Philosophy Compass, 4/​3 (2009), pp.  380–​406; Thierry de Duve, Kant after Duchamp (Cambridge, Mass.:  The MIT Press, 1996); and (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003). See also for a survey of the sublime in the contemporary literature on the arts:  Bill Beckley, ed. Sticky Sublime (New York: Allworth Press and School of Visual Arts, 2001) and Simon Morley, ed., The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art) (Cambridge, MA:  MIT Press, 2010). 73. Contemporary art critics seem to be drawn more often to more straightforward account of the sublime of Kant’s contemporary, the British philosopher Edmund Burke (1729–​97). 74. It is notable that most of Kant’s examples of objects that evoke the sublime feeling, such as the raging ocean, the hurricane, or the towering mountain, whilst larger or more formless than Serra’s sculptures, are not often actually infinite. They only appear to be; the crux of Kant is to be infinitely large or powerful. As Kant says, ‘the sublime … is to be found in a formless object insofar as limitlessness is represented in it’ (Kant, Judgment, p. 128).

199

20

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 75. Kant elaborates on disinterestedness during an aesthetic experience by saying, ‘one does not want to know whether there is anything that is or could be at stake … in the existence of the thing [beyond] its mere contemplation’ (Kant, Judgment, p. 90). By ‘disinterested’, Kant did not mean ‘uninterested’ or unengaged or apolitical, or any of the other interpretive misconstructions of the word. He means that the aesthetic judgement must be independent of the capacity of the object to gratify the senses or achieve some practical end. Further, he spoke only of the moment of contemplation and not any action or transformation that might follow from the contemplation. For more on disinterestedness, see Allison, ‘Kant’s Theory’, pp. 85–​97. Allison concludes, ‘according to the conception of interest with which Kant operates, what makes a liking (or pleasure) interested is its connection with an aim or desire distinct from the liking itself ’ (p. 97). 76. Kant, Judgment, p. 138. 77. No longer is the aesthetic judgement a movement purely of the mind. It is, nonetheless, still Kantian; it is still, in this instance, of the sublime. That the body participates in the mind’s capacity to attain an Idea of Reason does not contradict the dynamic to which Kant ascribes the sublime. Instead, the thinking body suggests only that the dynamic’s players –​Imagination, Understanding, and Reason –​play upon a field that expands beyond what Kant conceived. Having made this adjustment, it is easy enough to view the progression from a disorientation of thinking to its successful reorientation, or Rajchman’s ‘reinvention of thinking itself ’ (Rajchman, ‘Abstract’, p. 72), as a movement not away from but towards Kant. 78. Taylor, ‘Learning Curves’, p. 41. 79. Rajchman, ‘Abstract’, p. 64. Rajchman does not mention Kant by name but his implicit critique of Kantian aesthetics appears in several places in his essay. Here, however, it is useful to note only that Rajchman’s reference to ‘intuition’ and ‘understanding’, but not to the Kantian sublime, seems confusing. In fact, the sublime feeling precisely explains what goes on when an aesthetic experience severs the link between Intuition (Kant’s term for sensory perception) and Understanding’s capacity to conceive of and analyse, in this case, space. Reason, parallel to Imagination’s stuttering attempt to formulate this spatial experience, deduces an ‘analysis of it’. This ‘Reasoning’, incidentally, does not close the subject off to what Rajchman sees as Serra’s ‘sculptural way of giving us instead a brain tied up in the indeterminacies of the milieux in which we move’ (Rajchman: ‘Abstract’, p. 72). It is not that a Kantian analysis undermines a Rajchmanian analysis; it is that it underlies it. The Rajchmanian subject in the Serra sculpture would flee the experience without the capacity of Reason that Kant describes, a capacity not to pin down the indeterminacy but to engage, to endure, it.

200

201

In the Body’s Space, the Body’s Time 80. Serra, ‘Questions’, p. 54. 81. Rajchman, ‘Abstract’, p. 64. 82. Lex Newman, ‘Descartes’ Epistemology’, in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition):  http://​plato.stanford.edu/​ archives/​fall2010/​entries/​descartes-​epistemology/​. This is a good description of Descartes’s philosophy and its identification with the mind-​body dualism that followed in the wake of his Meditations. It also offers insights into the theory that the dualism that has since gripped Euro-​American culture is based on an over-​interpretation of what Descartes meant. 83. Serra, ‘Questions’, p. 54. 84. Karen Rosenberg, ‘Shockingly Orange, Invitingly Meandering, Immensely Imposing’, New  York Times, p.  5 October 2011:  http://​www.nytimes.com/​ 2011/​10/​06/​arts/​design/​richard-​serras-​sculpture-​at-​gagosian-​gallery-​review. html?_​r=1&. Other artists who work on a scale approaching or exceeding that of Serra include land artists Walter de Maria (1935–​2013), Michael Heizer (b. 1944), Beverly Pepper (b. 1922), Andy Goldsworthy (b. 1956), Maya Lin, Robert Smithson, and James Turrell (b. 1943), as well as artists like Anish Kapoor (b. 1954) and Olafur Elliasson. 85. For example, The Lake Project or mining images of photographer David Maisel, the ‘manufactured landscapes’ of Edward Burtynsky (b.1955), and the gold-​mine images of Sebastião Salgado (b. 1944). 86. The films of artist Sharon Lockhart, in particular Lunch Break (2008), are especially effective, as is Christian Marclay’s (b. 1955) The Clock (2010). Sigmar Polke’s (1941–​2010) The Spirits that Lend Strength are Invisible III (Nickel/​ Neusilber) (1988), whose inclusion of nickel and silver in resin, ensure that the colours of the painting will evolve, evoking the temporality of Serra’s weathering steel. 87. It is important to note that Kant endows nature –​the raging ocean, the cliff edge, the mountain –​over art with the capacity to evoke a sublime feeling. Eighteenth-​century art, however, did not have access to the tools of space and time that Serra wields. A Serra sculpture is, in this sense, not art at all, nor is it a depiction of sublime-​inducing natural events. It is, instead, a manifestation of nature itself. From where else could come Serra’s void?

201

20

8 The Art of Becoming The Symbiosis of Time, Space and Film in Pull My Daisy Timothy W. Hiles

The Origins and Intent of Pull My Daisy ‘Early morning in the universe’ is a fitting non-​temporal beginning to Jack Kerouac’s (1922–​69) remarkable narration of Pull My Daisy (1959), which is the first film to truly capture the Beat aesthetic with all of its spontaneity, specificity and ambiguity. Although by the late 1950s mainstream films had begun to address the rebellious aspects of Beat culture, they did so largely through stereotyped characters, popularly termed beatniks, who parodied the free-​form, unstructured lifestyle and unconventional language of the movement. Parodic films within this genre include The Beat Generation (1959) directed by Charles Haas and A Bucket of Blood (1959) by Robert Corman, both being crime films where coffeehouses and eccentric Beat characters figure prominently. These films contained a critique of this subgroup of American culture and sometimes addressed, however lightly, prominent aspects of the movement, such as male chauvinism and a rejection of conventional and authoritative structure, but their filmic form remained within the narrative confines of Hollywood studio storytelling and spectacle, which included a logical progression of 202

203

The Art of Becoming time necessary to develop characters, present a plot and a final resolution of a particular conflict.1 As we will see, more serious attempts related to the Beat milieu to address the deconstruction of conventional filmic time were created by avant-​gardists Christopher Maclaine (1923–​75), with his astonishingly innovative The End (1953), and Stan Brakhage (1933–​2003) with Desistfilm (1954); however, these filmmakers’ emphasis on pushing the medium beyond its illusionary capabilities to emphasise its formal qualities differentiates their work from Pull My Daisy, which was the first serious attempt through the entirety of its form and content to capture a literary and visual aesthetic spontaneity tied directly to the work of significant figures within the Beat movement as well as feature their appearance in the film. These figures include Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg (1926–​97), Gregory Corso (1930–​2001) and Peter Orlovsky (1933–​2010). The narration of Kerouac, who had become a spokesperson for the movement, provided the film with an authenticity that echoed the seemingly unedited and extemporaneous prose in his innovative novel On the Road published two years earlier.2 Merging cinematic, real and poetic time, through both structure and content, Pull My Daisy signifies the most consistent aspect of the work of Kerouac, Robert Frank (b. 1924), Alfred Leslie (b. 1927) and others associated with the New York avant-​garde in the late 1950s; it embodies the art of continually becoming, experiencing the ever-​changing moment without preconceptions of the past or future expectations, and challenging the commodification of time and space that had emerged in a postwar America increasingly dominated by capitalism and corporate liberalism.3 Traditionally interpreted as a marker in the pantheon of those films defined by filmmaker and critic Jonas Mekas (b. 1922) as ‘spontaneous cinema’, considered part of the New-​American Cinema, Pull My Daisy has more recently been commended for its captured moment mediated to a present audience by the poetic narrative of Kerouac.4 Whilst Kerouac’s voice indeed serves as a bridge from the past to the present viewing experience, it also plays a central role in signifying spontaneous occurrence, which is a time-​based construction of actions that along with the stunning visuals by Frank and careful editing of Leslie emphasises the conversational and ever-​changing aspects of being in the moment. The successful merging of poetica and pictura in this film can be construed as an example of the limited value in the modern era of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s call for the 203

204

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics separation and minimal interaction of the two in his essay Laocoön:  An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766). When Lessing wrote his treatise, the invention of cinema lay more than one hundred years in the future and he presumably would not have foreseen the implications of this time-​based medium for his theory. On the other hand, a consideration of Lessing’s vivid description of Homeric verse as a series of time-​based constructive actions reveals his theory’s continued significance by contributing to our understanding of the conveyance in Pull My Daisy of the ever-​ changing nature of the improvisational moment. Pull My Daisy was directed by Robert Frank and Alfred Leslie and is based loosely on the third act of Beat Generation, which was an un-​ produced play by Kerouac. It was originally to carry the same title as the play, but the name had to be changed when MGM released Haas’s film with that title, The Beat Generation, in July of 1959. Shooting began on 2 January of that year in the central location of Leslie’s studio loft at Fourth Avenue and 12th Street in Manhattan. The only departure from this setting is one exterior scene in front of an East River warehouse in Brooklyn. Pull My Daisy premiered 11 November 1959 at a popular venue for independent film: Cinema 16 in New York City. Running time is twenty-​eight minutes and it was shot on 16mm, black and white film.5 Inspired by author and film critic James Agee’s (1909–​55) call for a film that is ‘pure fiction’ but plays ‘against and into, and in collaboration with unrehearsed and uninvented reality’ and Kerouac’s desire to avoid meaning and preconceived notions of situation, to ‘let people rave on as they do in real life’, Pull My Daisy was created in a pseudo-​documentary style that demonstrates the continually shifting moment, by fusing Kerouac’s poetic and sometimes spontaneous voice-​over narration, Frank’s personal and non-​theatrical imagery, David Amram’s (b. 1930) improvisational jazz musical score and the ‘goofing’ of a cast of characters that included poets Ginsberg Corso and Orlovsky, jazz musician Amram, improvisational dancer Sally Gross (b. 1933), and painters Alice Neel (1900–​84) and Larry Rivers (1923–​2002).6 Unfolding over the course of one evening, the film centres around the relatively uneventful visit of a bishop to a gathering of poets and musicians in a New York loft on the Lower East Side. Although it opens with Kerouac’s romantic statement of undefined time, merging the specificity of morning and the inconceivable temporality of the universe, Pull My Daisy initially 204

205

The Art of Becoming settles into a conventional neorealist representation of time in both narration and image. As the film develops, however, it becomes progressively and unpredictably abstract in both editing and narration, signifying the unraveling of the temporal as well as a deconstruction of the language that we use to define what had become paradigmatically iconic and ‘holy’ in American post​war society, and shifting towards an ambiguous moment of becoming devoid of predetermined meaning and intention. Pull My Daisy had its origins in a desire in 1956 by Leslie to return to filmmaking after, in the misguided interest of building his career, he temporarily avoided film (this was one of several activities that he abandoned, including photographing and writing) to concentrate on one medium:  painting. His previous experience in cinema was minimal but significant, creating four films in the 1940s: Walking (1944), The Eagle and the Foetus (1944), Magic Thinking (1949) and Directions: A Walk after the War Games (1944–​9), the latter of which was shown in 1949 at the Museum of Modern Art.7 When he approached Frank, his friend and neighbour, about collaboration, he had in mind a series of short art films that could fill the void left by the break-​up of the Hollywood studio system and the growing interest in television that had led to decreased attendance at theatres.8 A photographer at that time, Frank was in the midst of a Guggenheim Fellowship project to photograph a cross-​section of America as a Swiss immigrant. Both Frank and Leslie had been inspired by Italian neorealist films, the emerging French cinema and by the spontaneous prose of Kerouac, whom they knew through friends and acquaintances and through associations at the Cedar Bar and the Five Spot.9 With the rising success of On the Road (1957), they seriously considered Kerouac’s novel as the setting for a film, but rejected the idea due to the complexity of filming in many different locations. Kerouac, in response to Leslie’s interest, sent him a copy of his three-​act play, The Bishop of the New Amaraean Church: The Beat Generation.10 As a whole, the play did not appeal to Leslie. A  similar sentiment was expressed by several producers; in fact, the play was never produced. But Leslie was drawn to the third act, which, like On the Road, has a certain unstructured rhythm and spontaneity in dialogue and action, and is a representation of a moment as it unfolds, but with broader consequences towards our understanding, perception and experience of 205

206

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics time. Unlike On the Road, it had the advantage for a filmmaker of being a controlled event –​one evening in the house of Neal and Carolyn Cassady in Los Gatos, California.11 The question of how one perceives time in the play centres around Milo (Neal Cassady), who holds a conventional job with the railroad and by necessity of supporting a family has settled into a structured, temporal existence. His Beat-​poet friends, who have no such responsibilities, fear that Milo has become a ‘quitter’.12 ‘Ah no more poetry for me’ Milo exclaims upon returning from a day of labour and finding his inebriated poet-​friends waiting for him in his home. The conflict between conventional time and that of the free-​wheeling poets is taken to a level of spiritual discussion when a bishop and his two aunts visit that evening, provoking the young poets to discuss the meaning of existence and its consequences for time as experienced: ‘do you think that there’s a personal God and we all go back to Heaven to perfection and bliss, that when God shows his Face all our personalities’ll vanish?’ asks the poet Buck. As the natural time of the evening progresses, the conversation degenerates as the poets continue to push the bishop for answers, and to question why we should not live our lives in the moment to ‘be ourselves sometime … soon as we can’. The bishop pushes back, emphasising a progression of time, both through the stages explained in Buddhism and through an awareness of the dangers of becoming attached to the personal self: the mundane. ‘The mundane’s all we got … The surface, X, is all we got’, responds the poet Irwin. Increasingly though, temporal structure, represented through the bishop’s words and thoughts, is replaced by a deconstruction of language and an emphasis on immediate experience. The bishop is bombarded with a flurry of queries focusing on the real and concerning what is ‘holy’ –​‘alligators?’ ‘Hair?’ ‘Streets?’ ‘Racetrack?’ Frustrated and somewhat discombobulated, the bishop takes his leave. The poets return to the mundane: ‘I guess it doesn’t matter’ says Irwin, finally questioning’ … the world is what form is, and that’s all you can say about it, huh?’13 Although he questioned its theatrical appeal, Leslie was excited about the possibilities of creating a film based on the third act of Kerouac’s play, not only because it captured and encapsulated the increasingly recognised and popular questioning of the Beats, but also because it presented in a minimal way an ambiguous moment in time that gave audience members little predetermined meaning and allowed them to interpret:  ‘it was just 206

207

The Art of Becoming one place and was about nothing’, remembered Leslie.14 Still, he was doubtful that a play bound by the conventions of a theatrical presentation of real time, as it unfolds within a single space, could adequately address the spontaneity, improvisation and questioning of commodified time that Kerouac sought. Then, on a trip with Frank to visit Kerouac on Long Island, the author gave him a recorded reading of the play.15 For Leslie and Frank this opened up entirely new possibilities for a film that would capture the spontaneous prose of Kerouac both visually and aurally whilst expanding the temporality of the scene to a more poetic sense of the spontaneous evolution of time. This was something that Leslie had previously recognised in the play but could not perceive with actors. ‘All the characters are aspects of Jack’ he recalled thinking. Kerouac’s narration would allow that sincerity to come through.16 It was then that he realised that the film could be viewed as a cinematic poem, or the individual perception of Kerouac’s narration as poetica –​a work that unfolds and builds upon a succession of moments as Kerouac recites it.17 Despite the use of the third act of The Beat Generation as the framework for the film, the visual part was created without much input from Kerouac. The very thing that they admired in Kerouac’s writing, they saw as disruptive in a working environment. As Frank recalled: ‘One of my regrets is that I said I don’t want him on the set when filming, I was afraid of the destructiveness that he could bring about, and it is one of my great regrets, I was afraid of him that way. He was just … he was … he really was a model of spontaneity, he knew what it was: it was life! That is what he talked about’.18 In fact, Pull My Daisy was shot as a silent film with Kerouac’s narration added after the final edit. The setting was changed from a suburban house in Los Gatos to a loft in Manhattan. The three poets –​Ginsberg, Corso and Orlovsky –​were played by themselves and all but two of the actors were friends or acquaintances of Leslie and Frank from within the New York avant garde. Milo was played by the painter Rivers. The Bishop was portrayed by the art dealer Richard Bellamy (who at his request was listed as Mooney Peebles, who was a former disc jockey character that he played), the bishop’s mother by painter Neel, and his sister by improvisational dancer Gross. The saxophone-​yielding Pat Mezz McGillicuddy was played by Amram. The only professional actors were Denise Parker, who played the girl in the bed, and Delphine Seyrig (Beltiane) who portrayed 207

208

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics Caroline, Milo’s wife. Shooting the nearly half-​hour film took three weeks of intense prodding and re-​shooting by Frank and Leslie, as attempts to follow Kerouac’s play often ended in random confusion when Ginsberg and Corso resisted Frank and Leslie’s serious direction. Amram recalled feeling sorry for Seyrig, who took her craft seriously and was rewarded with an admonishment by Corso, who proclaimed that ‘This is supposed to be real and poetic, beautiful and soulful. Not that show business bull-​shit. This is life and truth and God touching us all with his divine finger of reality. Later with all that acting. This is rea-​al-​ity’.19

Spontaneity and the Art of Becoming Leslie’s reputation as an artist within the New York avant garde community had been built upon his growing respect as an Abstract-​Expressionist painter. Recognised as a significant figure by the influential writers and theorists, Clement Greenberg (1909–​94) and Meyer Schapiro (1904–​96), Leslie had been included in their New Talent show at the Sam Kootz Gallery in 1949, and two years later with Jackson Pollock (1912–​56), Franz Kline (1910–​62), Willem de Kooning (1904–​97), Helen Frankenthaler (1928–​2011), and many others at the infamous Ninth Street Show in 1951.20 Organised by Leo Castelli (1907–​99), the latter was a bellwether exhibition for a generation of postwar painters who replaced representational and narrative art with a myriad of forms known variously as gesture, action and colour-​field, but collectively as Abstract Expressionism. Although the movement took many forms and its contributions to twentieth-​century art are innumerable and outside the purview of this chapter, chief amongst its innovations was a passionate emphasis on the merging of time and space to represent individuality, spontaneity and being, and a new way of considering the temporal and spatial that called into question Lessing’s contention that they should remain separate with only limited infringement upon each other. A painting became, as art critic Harold Rosenberg (1906–​78) proclaimed in 1952, a ‘moment’ indubitably tied to the artist’s existence.21 Even more significant for the present study is Schapiro’s contention in 1957 that the gesture captured a moment of becoming, rather than a completed form. Free and independent of predetermined structure and expectations, the gesture was a spontaneous movement that led to another, thus 208

209

The Art of Becoming confusing the traditional roles assigned to the temporal and spatial in a representational work that utilised pictorial space to create a predetermined idea.22 Leslie would continue to embrace this approach through the mid-​1950s and at the time of Pull My Daisy was using broad, surface-​conscious brushstrokes in works such as Composition in Black and Red (1957) and Quartet #1 (in 4 parts) (1958), which reveal his temperament at the moment of creation, whilst rejecting spatial depth with nonrepresentational colour and form. The value of becoming, and the gesture as a signifier of a moment that can lead to and inspire spontaneously another, can be recognised in several aspects of creativity in the 1950s, when a flourish of activity that has been aptly termed by Daniel Belgrad a culture of spontaneity occurred.23 Poet Charles Olson (1910–​70), in his projective verse, called for a process where ‘one perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception’ –​‘Get on with it, keep moving’ he directed the poet.24 Dancer Merce Cunningham (1919–​2009) stressed improvisation where one movement led to another in an evolutionary process that was not anymore prearranged than a conversation with a friend.25 And, as musician Miles Davis (1926–​91) explained, bebop jazz focused on individual musician’s ability to improvise in conversation with other musicians; the music was always changing, becoming: ‘Trane [John Coltrane] would play some weird, great shit, and Cannonball [Adderly] would take it in the other direction, and I would put my sound right down the middle or float over it, or whatever’.26 For Kerouac, that evolutionary moment was represented in ‘spontaneous prose’, where time was not quantified as in a preconceived plot-​driven narrative, but experienced in the Heideggerian sense of authenticity and acute awareness of the moment, where one recorded one’s thoughts in a direct flow that would then spontaneously lead to another by association.27 Considering the importance of being aware and in the moment, it is no surprise that live poetry readings became popular as poets strove for an immediate experience of creative impulse and audiences became interested in actively participating in that moment.28 The success of Ginsberg’s reading of ‘Howl’ at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955, with Kerouac in attendance gathering spare change for wine, is just one example of the emotional performance that was engendered by Beat poetry readings. For Ginsberg it was not just about that particular moment, which one could 209

210

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics not change, but about moving on –​all one could do is go on to the next moment he would explain. In New York, Ginsberg and Corso performed at the Village Gaslight and Kerouac improvised his poetry and prose to Amram’s music at parties. Sometimes at The Five Spot, Amram would accompany poetry readings late into the night whilst Kerouac sat at a table listening intently.29 Kerouac compared his writing process to an improvised jazz solo.30 Indeed, when Kerouac recorded his play, he did so with jazz music playing in the background from Symphony Sid’s (Torin) radio show, reflecting the spontaneous atmosphere of collaboration in these late nights. Kerouac’s interest in jazz music is also apparent in On the Road, where nightclubs blasting music often form the background for living in the moment and improvisation reinforces his emphasis on the endless variation of being.31 An ardent fan of musician Charlie Parker (1920–​55), Kerouac was inspired by bebop’s spontaneity and improvisational quality, explaining in his essay ‘Essentials of Spontaneous Prose’ that a sentence can be equated to a solo jazz performance on a saxophone, both making a statement when they run out of breath.32 Readings also allowed for change and a fluid and extemporaneous alteration of words, as happens in real space and time, which is impossible in the written word. With readings, the poem was in a constant state of becoming, with people raving on as they do in real life, as Kerouac would say, without abandoning the individual perspective that was so important to the Beat aesthetic.33 In his play, Kerouac strove to avoid meaning and a conventional theatrical presentation, to emphasise the improvisational aspects of life. Ultimately, he was unsuccessful because the dialogue remained within a theatrical construct, as did the visual space, which is a separation defined so well by Lessing where the poetica took precedent over the confined theatrical space, pictura. Unlike the liberated space represented so remarkably by flowing movement in On the Road, the tableau of theatre created boundaries, and a framework that was both spatially and temporally rooted. As Leslie discovered, however, Kerouac’s poetic reading of the play provided the opportunity to question meaning and established notions of situation and time by focusing attention on the fluid conversation of improvisation. 210

21

The Art of Becoming

Robert Frank: No Beginning and No End During the initial stages of the filming of Pull My Daisy, the aesthetic for which Frank would become infamous was little known outside of his circle of friends and colleagues. It was two years before the controversial publication Les Américains appeared in France and three before its American incarnation; The Americans would garner much negative criticism whilst catapulting Frank into artistic prominence.34 Chief amongst the criticism leveled at his images was that through choice of subject matter, and an unflattering composition, he showed Americans in a particularly bad light; one critic put it this way: As a photographer, Frank uses the same approach that distinguishes Kerouac and his kind in their writing efforts. You will find the same studious inattention to the skills of the craft, the same desire to shock and provide cheap thrills. It seems as if he merely points the camera in the direction he wishes to shoot and doesn’t worry about exposure, composition, and lesser considerations. If you dig out-​of-​focus pictures, intense and unnecessary grain, converging verticals, a total absence of normal composition, and a relaxed, snapshot quality, then Robert Frank is for you. If you don’t, you may find The Americans one of the most irritating photo books to make the scene.35

Frank’s controversy stemmed from his significant restructuring of traditional theatrical compositions and a corresponding emphasis on individual perception. In his attempt to present his unique photographer-​centred perception of the country, outside of traditional constructs, Frank rejected a pictorial narrative and implied progression of time –​what he considered a Life magazine approach with a beginning and an end –​and instead presented the momentary randomness of life, with its unstructured sense of time and its lack of theatricality.36 In these photographs a dynamic shift occurred where the viewer’s personal reference to time, death and other associations, or what semiotician Roland Barthes (1915–​80) called the punctum, is replaced with the self-​referential perception of the photographer, so that rather than present a stage set ready for the viewer to bring the subjectivity of familiarity, remembrance and awareness to it, a banal, unromantic view lacking in reference points is presented.37 In other words, 211

21

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics his images intentionally lack the sentimental, and romantic, pathos that Americans had come to associate with the photographic medium. Without a traditional structure to spark valuation in the viewer, Frank’s photographs remained non-​referential, outside of time and space, and ambiguous images whereby experience trumps meaning. Frank’s approach to the photographs of The Americans, although largely unknown to Leslie at the time, would become essential in the filming of Pull My Daisy, which would also thwart conventional narrative readings of synchronous space and time with a disjunctive presentation of random activities in a natural way. By the filming of Pull My Daisy, Frank’s aesthetic had evolved into a style that eschewed traditional compositions and viewpoints in photography. His personal representation of an America that he saw as more random and disjointed than what had been presented in Life, and Look magazine and other positive, monolithic venues, brought the appearance of informality by removing the punctum that was so treasured by Barthes and replacing it with personal perception. The enduring aspect of Frank’s photographs is that they are carefully studied images that appear happenstance, as though a snapshot, and this coincided with Leslie’s vision of informality for Pull My Daisy. As Leslie explained, ‘there has to be a way in which the camera has to be positioned on a tripod, everything under control, no random shooting, everything rehearsed, yet at the same time it has to look more informal’.38 Kerouac contributed the introduction to The Americans and in 1958 accompanied Frank on a photographic trip to Florida, after which he wrote that ‘A lesson for any writer … to follow a photographer and look at what he shoots … I mean a great photographer, an artist … and how he does it. The result: Whatever it is, it’s America. It’s the American Road and it awakens the eye every time’.39

Film and the Culture of Spontaneity Leslie’s concern with individual perception and the moment extended to his early filmmaking, which can be seen in Directions: A Walk After the War Games, which, although narrative, was noteworthy for its juxtaposition of one day in two different locations (Europe and America) and from variable perspectives.40 Destroyed in a studio fire in 1966, little remains of this film, except fragments and Leslie’s description of it, but from these we 212

213

The Art of Becoming are able to discern his keen interest in the relativity of time and space.41 By 1956 he had become interested in the Italian neorealist films of Roberto Rossellini (1906–​77), which reflected the grittiness of postwar life in Italy through a realistic portrayal of the temporal and the spatial as they are perceived in everyday experience.42 In neorealism, modernism and its abstract emphasis on medium, is discarded in favour of a representational approach, utilising on-​location, long shots and moving cameras that allowed a particular scene to occur naturally with limited intervention of the medium, frequently with non-​professional actors unfettered by dialogue, which was often postsynchronised.43 This style approached a reality that was reminiscent of the earliest films by the Lumière Brothers, sans sound of course, though not just through on-​location shooting, but, as André Bazin (1918–​58), who was neorealism’s most ardent champion, pointed out, by adding duration and dimension to the still photographic image, giving the audience more opportunity for interpretation, which was previously directed by the editor of sequences in montage.44 Key to the neorealist style is the implication of objectivity, which somewhat ironically preserves the ambiguity of subjective interpretation; this is a point that Carruthers has correctly reiterated despite the recent tendency to find signification and reaffirming certainty in cinema.45 Everything presented realistically, even gaps in time, allows the viewer to experience and interpret, as in life, without preconceptions of what it all means. As Bazin observed in Rossellini’s Paisà (1946), ‘The unit of cinematic narrative … is not the “shot”, or an abstract view of reality which is being analyzed, but the “fact.” A fragment of concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity, whose meaning emerges only after the fact, thanks to other imposed facts between which the mind establishes certain relationships’.46 That is to say that although the audience is presented with facts, the most significant nature of cinema is duration and ultimately the meaning that the viewer discerns from a conversation with the film, whereby one photographic image influences his/​her reaction to the next, and so on. The role of the editor is essential, because it is the editor who collects the facts, leaves the gaps, and allows viewers to create images in their minds. A conversation happens between each successive image shown and the audience. True reality is marked then not so much by what is portrayed as by how it is unveiled in a moment of becoming and how that engages 213

214

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics the audience. Quigley’s recent conclusion that Bazin’s reality is a censored one can be applied to the reality presented in Pull My Daisy.47 Siegfried Kracauer (1889–​1966), one of cinema’s most astute theorists, who saw in film a photographic reality, came to a similar conclusion, recognising that the ‘flow of random events’ is dependent upon a dialogue with the audience that ultimately creates meaning.48 The neorealist preferred approach to filmmaking as an ultimate signification of reality became a point of departure for avant-​garde American filmmakers who emerged in the 1950s, because it stressed both the moment and individual perception. These filmmakers, however, emphasised the potentialities of the medium itself to represent through formal characteristics a spontaneity related to the random occurrence of human experience. San Francisco Beat poet-​ turned-​ filmmaker Christopher Maclaine, in his innovative The End (1953), combined a series of disjunctive images –​black and white, colour, near and far –​in seemingly random fashion reminding viewers that they are indeed watching a film and that the auteur is in control. The narration, written and read by Maclaine, is comparable to Kerouac’s Pull My Daisy narration as it seems arbitrary, inconsistent and references characters in the film who are known to him, but Maclaine’s overall message of impending doom in the nuclear age and the accompanying madness is more directed and intentional than Kerouac’s focus on improvisation and unpredictable progression of the moment.49 Stan Brakhage, in Desistfilm (1956), used a singular viewpoint (that of the cameraman but surreptitiously our own) that moves as though an eye darting around a room, reinforcing our awareness of the camera and the cameraman, whilst a grating unnatural and uninterrupted sound keeps us from being seduced by illusionistic temporal continuity. John Cassavetes (b. 1929), in Shadows, also from 1959, made use of the long shot and handheld cameras that allowed characters to exit and enter scenes, deceiving the viewer into reading and interpreting an event as it happens in real time.50 The seemingly impromptu dialogue spoken by the characters is related to that in Pull My Daisy with its real-​time effect, but it lacks the poetic narrative and authority established by Kerouac’s single voice. Although Pull My Daisy has been grouped with these spontaneous cinema films, it is unique within this genre, because whilst it on the 214

215

The Art of Becoming whole presents one evening in real time, presumably open to one’s own interpretation, it continually thwarts one’s reading of it as such with the improvisational narrative of Kerouac’s voice-​over and Leslie’s precise editing. It is, like Schapiro’s Abstract-​Expressionist painting, continually in a moment of becoming. This unusual merging of the poetic and the pictorial calls into question Lessing’s separation and prioritisation of poesis and pictura.51 Poesis, rather than presented as an art inherently of time, or a succession of verbal concepts revealed to us one after the other, becomes dependent here upon the spatial characteristics of Frank’s imagery; similarly, pictura is not presented in its entirety as an art of one space immediately perceived as in painting or sculpture, but is dependent upon the time implied by Kerouac’s narration. Regardless, Lessing’s theoretical stance on poetic time contributes much to our understanding of Pull My Daisy and its innovative approach to the temporal and spatial. As the preeminent Russian filmmaker and theorist Sergei Eisenstein (1898–​1948) demonstrated, it is Lessing’s thoughts on time and space that provide the viewer with a basis for perceiving the transformative process of cinema and its intriguing connection to his/​her aesthetic sensibilities. Instrumental in Eisenstein’s interpretation is Lessing’s description of the Homeric technique of presenting an idea temporally through a poetic succession of movements, rather than through a single static description. In this process, being one of occurrence really, a collection of time-​based fragments is drawn together to form an image in the mind of the reader.52 For Eisenstein, this Homeric technique is paralleled in film through the process of montage, which is a series of images that together works as a catalyst towards the formation of an idea. In literary terms, montage presents not a noun that is fait accompli, as a painter must, but a verb, or a continual and time-​based ‘coming into being’ that is accomplished not with words but through images.53 Eisenstein’s montage would become one of the most influential techniques in all of cinema, because it freed filmmakers from a conventional representation of time and space and allowed them to create cinema time in the service of an idea.54 The most famous and influential example of this in Eisenstein’s work can be seen in the ‘Odessa Steps’ sequence from Battleship Potemkin (1925) where over one hundred and fifty individual shots are edited together to effectively present the idea of oppression. What viewers see here in these individual 215

216

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics frames are innocent people dying as a result of soldiers marching upon and shooting at an unarmed crowd, but no one shot tells the complete story. Together, however, the cruelty of an oppressive regime is formed in the mind.55 Technically, Eisenstein’s montage technique introduces us to specific instances of oppression a little at a time –​one closely cropped image, then another more expansive, until finally a long-​shot presents the entire scene of bloody bodies. The images, as well as the presented technique, take us there, forming the entirety of the idea in the viewers’ minds. Within this sequence, the most effective segment is the infamous baby carriage scene that suspends any real sense of time with a series of inter-​cut shots of a mother falling and an uncontrolled carriage rolling down the steps. Eisenstein saw cinema as a transformative and evolutionary medium that through an abstract montage of time and space provoked the viewer’s aesthetic sensibility in new and exciting ways. Rejecting a ‘natural’ unfolding of time and space in film (a reproduction of reality), he argued for an abstract presentation of images (and eventually sound), or a symbiosis of the temporal and spatial in a series of ‘attractions’ that worked non-​temporally as signifiers towards an idea, the overarching content of which was determined by the director, but which was associated and thus imagined in the viewer’s mind. Eisenstein’s abstract presentation of time and space through montage can be seen as part of a broader concern with the conflation of these two aspects of pictura and poesis, forming an esprit de l’époque (spirit of the age) in the first third of the twentieth century that also brought about Cubism, representing a simultaneity of time pictorially without relying on continuous narrative; Albert Einstein’s (1879–​1955) and Henri Bergson’s (1859–​ 1941) questioning of absolutes in time and space perception; Hermann Minkowski’s (1864–​1909) mathematical interdependence of the temporal and the spatial, and the non-​linear structure of works by such writers as Gertrude Stein (1874–​1946) and William Faulkner (1897–​1962). But it was cinema, with its very nature as a time-​based medium, that thoroughly joined the two as intertwined aspects of a broader Gesamtkunstwerk, and aligned them with the temporal aspects of poetry, securing for it Lessing’s loftiest goal for both pictura and poesis art forms –​the attainment of a pleasurable experience through an aesthetic awakening of the imagination.56 216

217

The Art of Becoming

The Poetry of a Home Movie Despite its description by Amram as a home movie, Pull My Daisy is not without romantic aspects that seem antithetical to cinéma vérité.57 The film opens with nearly a minute of a slow pan, as one of only two long pans in the film, accompanied by Anita Ellis (b. 1920)  singing the title song. Ultimately, we are brought to a long shot of Caroline opening the tall shutters of the dark loft, letting the morning light filter in to establish the setting. Kerouac begins: Early morning in the universe. The wife is getting up, opening up the windows, in this loft that’s in the bowery in the lower east side, New York. She’s a painter and her husband’s a railroad brakeman and he’s coming home in a couple hours, about five hours, from the local. ‘Course the room’s a mess. There’s her husband’s coat on a chair –​been there for three days –​neckties and his tortured socks.58

The viewer is here lulled into a comfortable progression of natural time, not unlike that experienced in Hollywood movies of the period. But the opening pan and the establishing shot with Caroline are the longest ones the viewer will experience for quite some time, as the following shots are short bursts ranging on average between ten and four seconds. The natural unfolding of time in this sense becomes increasingly unstable as the emphasis shifts from a predetermined meaning told through a story line to visual and verbal signifiers that rely increasingly on the audience to determine meaning. Through editing, the real-​time event, initially played out before the viewer and described by Kerouac, begins to disintegrate as the shots become shorter and the narrative departs from its descriptive elements to brief moments of enigmatic self-​contemplation-​unanswered reflections on what it all means, or does not mean. Kerouac’s story-​telling technique of third-​person omniscient slips into multiple or varied viewpoints, which is a literary method of inter-​subjectivity that he employed in On the Road, but which here takes on new meaning. One’s sense of improvisation and uncertain progression is reinforced by Kerouac’s lines. ‘All these poets, struggling to be poets’, he says at one point in an ambiguous statement that conveys both being and becoming.59 217

218

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics We can only take Kerouac’s word as reality, as he surmises what the dialogue might be, what the characters are thinking and how the situation affects them and him, which is a technique that he would also use in his contemporary novel The Subterraneans, which would be published in 1958.60 And as the characters become more unpredictable and spontaneous in their thoughts and actions as the night progresses, so does Kerouac’s voice, opening up the viewer’s possibilities of interpretation, as the improvisational quality continues through wordplay and contrivance. As Kouvaros has pointed out, the effect is that of a home movie with comments from the presenter.61 But it is a highly edited home movie, and something seems lacking in the long, real-​time 8mm home movies that I remember watching as a child for what seemed to be endless hours. Process here becomes essential. Leslie was able to condense three weeks of filming down to twenty-​eight minutes through creative cutting. The result is a flurry of images that together mimic the technique of montage, but lack the presentation of a predetermined idea. Rather, the technique itself is the idea. As each successive image becomes associated with the next, a spontaneous conversation is created between the images and the audience, made coherent through Kerouac’s poetic random thoughts presented in the narrative. But even these become a part of the process as the seemingly improvisational narration was spliced together from three different takes that Kerouac made, whilst watching different versions of the silent film.62 Leslie directed the sound man, Jerry Newman, to leave the microphone on in between takes so that narrative spontaneity in some cases was both real and contrived. The repeated phrase ‘Up you go, little smoke’, for example, was the product of Kerouac’s rumination as he watched smoke swirl up from a cigarette. Leslie then matched the phrase to the scene where Milo lifts his son up to carry him to bed for the night. As in the play, the setting is the home of a railroad brakeman and the action revolves around a bishop’s visit. After some polite conversation, a chaotic evening ensues, due largely to the spontaneous actions of the brakeman’s poet friends, who appear uninvited and randomly throughout the evening. A  confrontation of sorts is initiated when one of the poets questions the bishop about Buddhism and life: ‘Do you think the world is holy? Do you think the alligator is holy? And the hair is holy? Is holy, holy? Is the racetrack holy? Hooray for holy!’63 218

219

The Art of Becoming In the play, the result of this degenerated discussion is ultimately the amicable departure of the bishop in real time. Nothing is resolved and the poets return to the mundane. Film, however, provided the opportunity for a cinematic breakdown of real time and structure, visually and aurally presenting the widening gap between the Beat poets and the establishment represented by the bishop. The most significant aspect of this deconstruction occurs just after Orlovsky asks the bishop, ‘Is baseball holy?’ and there is a dissolve to a scene from an earlier time. It is the only occasion in the film where the viewer gets to leave the apartment, as well as have a break in the natural unfolding of time. In a flashback, the bishop is shown outside preaching to a crowd on the street; the tempo slows as the music now ambles, whilst the sound of a lone oboe floats above the scene. This moment, which Frank would later refer to as a dream or memory, equates to a technique that Kerouac would call ‘sketching’ that he employed in On the Road and is a process that allowed him to contribute more information to the moment whilst maintaining the flow of the narrative, which is something that he had also accomplished in a tape-​recorded monologue for Doctor Sax in 1952.64 Yet, this is not a moment for Kerouac, but for Frank, for the aside is purely visual. Kerouac remains silent. The setting is a cold, windy afternoon and the bishop stands outside of an old warehouse preaching. No voice can be heard, but as he appears to speak, an American flag held by the bishop’s sister flies in his face, interrupting his sermon. The imagery is remarkably similar to the very first photograph in The Americans, where a flag partially obscures the viewers of a parade, perhaps as a comment on blind patriotism. In the film, the connection between church and state is clear. Kerouac is silent until viewers are back in the loft and asked to dispel belief in the natural unfolding of time, both visually and aurally: ‘[Y]‌es. It’s early, late or middle Friday evening in the universe. Oh, the sounds of time are pouring through the window and the key’. The camera pans slowly, giving the viewer the entirety of the moment; as Ginsberg recalled, the entire universe of that moment is shown to the viewer, ‘all that space compressed’.65 Kerouac’s narration becomes dotted with sounds separated from connotation as the evolving moment increasingly becomes divorced from preconceived ideas:  ‘All ideardian windows and bedarvled bedarvled mad bedraggled robes that rolled in the cave of Amontillado and all the sherried heroes lost and caved up, 219

20

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics and Transylvanian heroes mixing themselves up with glazer vup and the hydrogen bomb of hope’.66 In another surprising break from reality, the voice of a child can be heard reciting the nursery rhyme ‘Humpty Dumpty’. This is the only voice heard in the entire film, other than Kerouac’s, and it has a surreal effect, taking the viewer out of the temporal. The tempo of the music slows even more and the viewer now shifts to the thoughts of Milo’s wife, who decries the way that the evening has degenerated. Kerouac picks up the pace of his narration, the music quickens and the visual cuts move rapidly. Previous questions, keeping pace with the images, come again: ‘Is American flag holy? What is holy?’ –​faster, faster, until chaos ensues. The disintegration is amplified by Leslie splicing together three ‘holy’ tracks spoken by Kerouac so that the final cut amplifies the ‘holies’, further disintegrating the temporal.67 ‘Up you go, little smoke’ says Kerouac in the final dissolution of time. The young boy is put to bed, the bishop leaves and the poets are ready for their next experience, off to the bowery perhaps and out of the film.68 Jazz music plays an essential role in the improvisational effect of the film, from the opening tone set by Ellis’s melodic voice to Amram’s accompaniment to Kerouac’s narration, Frank’s stark imagery and the rhythms of Leslie’s cuts. Amram was brought in to play piano when Kerouac recorded his narration, so it was his music that provided a tempo for the poetry that was Kerouac’s soundtrack, replacing the random radio jazz sounds of Symphony Sid (Sid Torin, 1909–​84) that appeared on Kerouac’s original recording of the play.69 The score of the film was created in three days of intense writing by Amram, who improvised music that fit some of the character’s actions.70 Kerouac, who considered himself a ‘jazz poet’, used syncopated phrases in the narration, which can be equated with those in a bebop solo, eliminating words and using intersubjectivity to shift to seemingly unrelated minor points: ‘Ah you make me –​I could tell you poems that would make you weep with long hair, goodbye, goodbye’ intones Kerouac as the voice of Corso at one point.71 Correspondingly, the visual takes syncopate as well, going from long shots to a short montage of interspersed cuts, and the musical passages shorten to bursts of noise that are fragmented with the sound of bongo drums. In addition, Kerouac’s phrases become increasingly shorter, held together by improvisational repetition of words and sounds: ‘Dishes, toothbrushes, cockroaches, cockroaches, 220

21

The Art of Becoming coffee cockroaches, stove cockroaches, city cockroaches, spot cockroaches, melted cheese cockroaches, flour cockroaches, Chaplin cockroaches, peanut butter cockroaches –​cockroach cockroach –​cockroach of the eyes –​ cockroach, mirror, boom, bang –​Jung, Freud, Jung, Reich’.72 In other parts of Pull My Daisy’s narrative, Kerouac depends upon ‘sound poetry’, where the sound of the word, like the notes of a jazz piece, communicates without direct symbolism.73 And as the character Pat Mezz McGillicuddy plays music after all has been disrupted at the end of the evening, Kerouac recites in scat-​like fashion: ‘Jamambi, jabambi, jamac, jamac. And elder twine old tweezies fighted the prize, Jamambi, jabambi, jamambi, jamac’.74 This pairing of Kerouac’s prose and Amram’s music has an air of comfortableness that was fostered during their days improvising at parties and at Circle in the Square in Greenwich Village.75 Pull My Daisy is noteworthy for its successful deconstruction of the traditional boundaries assigned by Lessing to the temporal and the spatial, whilst emphasising the role of becoming based upon the viewer’s moment of experience that was so important to Lessing’s understanding of Homeric poetry. Recognising the role of a traditionally structured representation of time and space in stifling imaginative creativity, Leslie and Frank disrupted what is largely a real-​time event unfolding in one evening, by emphasising the continually shifting and improvisational moment through careful editing of Frank’s non-​punctum imagery and Kerouac’s spontaneous prose. The effect is that of an improvisational moment that echoes Bazin’s realism that ‘burgeons and grows with the verisimilitude of life’,76 whilst incorporating Eisenstein’s technique of montage as a reflection of the moment of becoming. As Mortenson has recently pointed out, for the Beats, representation that captured the moment was not enough.77 A process that reflected the fluidity of time itself, beyond the temporally bound subject, was necessary to create a conversation with the audience.

Notes 1. For a critical review of the Beat genre in film see David Sterritt, Mad to be Saved: The Beats, the ‘50s and Film (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998). See also Jack Sargent, The Naked Lens:  An Illustrated History of Beat Cinema (London: Creation Books, 1997).

221

2

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 2. Often referred to as the father of the Beat Movement, which was a title that he dismissed, Jack Kerouac was a novelist and poet whose prose style is considered amongst the most innovative and genuine writing techniques of the twentieth century. His most well-​known novel, On the Road (New  York:  Penguin Books, 1999; 1957), is a rambling account of the heightened experiences of young Americans as they travel across the country embracing a free life style that values the momentary and eschews the constraints of an industrious life of timetables and alarm clocks. Gerard Nicosia’s lengthy biography Memory Babe: A Critical Biography of Jack Kerouac (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994; 1983) is a thorough account of Kerouac’s life and work. See also Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1994; 1973) and Ann Charters, Brother-​Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation (Jackson:  University Press of Mississippi, 2010). For contextualisation of Kerouac’s spontaneous writing style see Michael Hrebeniak, Action Writing:  Jack Kerouac’s Wild Form (Carbondale:  Southern Illinois University Press, 2008). 3. Jonas Mekas, ‘Towards a Spontaneous Cinema’, Sight and Sound 28/​3–​4 (Summer/​Autumn, 1959), p. 120, considered Pull My Daisy to be the first ‘truly “beat” film’, due largely to its rejection of the mechanisation of middle-​class life. Herbert Feinstein, ‘Passion on the San Francisco Screen’, American Quarterly 12:2, part I (Summer, 1960), pp. 207–​8, emphasised how the film ‘went out of its way to flout as many conventions as possible’. See also Bosley Crowther, ‘Our Own “‘New Wave”’, New York Times 2:1 (10 April 1960); Arthur Knight, ‘The Far Out Films’, Playboy (April 1960), pp. 42–​85 (various pages), considered it the first ‘beatnik’ film to be produced in this country and equated it with the Beat attitude, where bourgeois morality is ‘loathsome’ and everything is ‘challenged, dismissed or suspect;’ Harris Dienstfrey considered the characters ‘natural adversaries of middle-​class life’. (‘The New American Cinema’, Commentary 33 (June 1962), p. 497.) 4. George Kouvaros, ‘“Time and How to Note It Down:” The Lessons of Pull My Daisy’, Screen 53:1 (Spring 2012), pp. 1–​17. 5. Jack Kerouac, Pull My Daisy, intro. Jerry Tallmer (New York, Grove Press, 1961), pp. 1–​19. See also Sargent: The Naked Lens, p. 14. 6. James Agee quotation referred to in Mekas: ‘Towards a Spontaneous Cinema’, p. 120. Kerouac quotation from Jack Kerouac, The Lost Work: Beat Generation, An Original Play by Jack Kerouac, intro. A.M. Homes (New  York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005), pp. vi–​vii. A portion of the letter is reproduced here. The term ‘goofing’ was used by Kerouac in the film to mean ‘playing around with words’; see the narration of the film published in Kerouac: Pull My Daisy, p. 27. 7. Allen Blaine, ‘The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’, Film History, 2/​3 (September–October 1988), p. 189. 8. See the interview with Leslie in Sargent: The Naked Lens, p. 29.

222

23

The Art of Becoming 9. For Leslie’s association with Kerouac, see Leslie interview in Sargent: The Naked Lens, pp. 24–​6. For Frank’s association with Kerouac see Luc Sante, ‘Robert Frank and Jack Kerouac’, in Sarah Greenough et. al., Looking In: Robert Frank’s The Americans (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009), pp. 202–8. 10. This play was published posthumously in Kerouac, The Lost Work:  Beat Generation, An Original Play by Jack Kerouac. 11. Blaine, ‘The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’, p. 189. The evening is recounted by Carolyn Cassady, Neal Cassady’s wife, in Carolyn Cassady, Off the Road: My Years with Cassady, Kerouac, and Ginsberg (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1990), pp. 264–​7. 12. All play quotations are from Kerouac, The Lost Work. 13. See Kerouac, The Lost Work. 14. See interview by Leslie in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 31. 15. According to Leslie, Kerouac left a tape for Frank and Leslie to listen to; see Leslie’s interview in Sargent, The Naked Lens, pp. 31–​2. Frank recalls a more spontaneous moment when Kerouac proposed having narration with Sid Symphony playing in the background, while being read an unspecified piece; see Frank’s interview in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 45. 16. Interview with Leslie in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 32. 17. Blaine, ‘The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’, p. 191. 18. See Frank’s interview in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 41. Leslie recalls trying to keep Kerouac off the set as much as possible; he was known to bring in drunks off the street. See Leslie’s interview in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 34. 19. Philip Brookman, ‘In the Margins of Fiction: From Photographs to Film’, in New  York to Nova Scotia (Houston:  Museum of Fine Arts, 1986), pp.  85–​6. The awkwardness of having a professional actress within the spontaneity of Orlovsky, Corso and Ginsberg is also recounted in David Amram, Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2002), pp. 48–​63. Amram offers much information about artistic intent during the filming of Pull My Daisy; however, his recollections are often apocryphal and reflect the popular mythology associated with the beat aesthetic. 20. Sargent, The Naked Lens, pp. 27–​9. 21. Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’, Art News 51 (December 1952), pp. 22–​3, 48–​50. This quotation was taken from the reprinted version in Reading Abstract Expressionism, ed. Ellen G. Landau (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), pp. 189–​98. 22. Meyer Schapiro, ‘The Liberating Quality of Avant-​ Garde Art’, Art News (Summer 1957), pp. 36–​42. This was reproduced in Ann Landi, ‘Top Ten ARTnews Stories: A Modernist Manifesto’, http://​www.artnews.com/​2007/​11/​ 01/​top-​ten-​artnews-​stories-​a-​modernist-​manifesto/​ (posted 11 January 2007, accessed 31 July 2013).

223

24

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 23. Daniel Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity:  Improvisation and the Arts in Postwar America (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1998), p. 3. 24. Charles Olson, ‘Projective Verse’, in Collected Prose, eds Donald Allen and Benjamin Friedlander (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), pp. 239–​49. ‘Projective Verse’ was first published as a pamphlet in 1950. 25. Belgrad: The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 161 26. This is a Miles Davis quotation from Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 188. 27. Erik R. Mortenson, ‘Configurations of Temporality in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road’, College Literature, 28:3 (Fall 2001), p. 57. Kerouac’s authenticity included an acute awareness of one’s mortality and correspondingly embraced the moment. As Mortenson has pointed out, Kerouac’s focus on an individual perception of the ‘moment’ can sometimes be construed as escapism and, thus, in Heidegerrian terms, ‘inauthentic’. 28. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 218. 29. Amram, Offbeat: Collaborating with Kerouac, pp. 4–​6. 30. Belgrad. The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 205. 31. Mortenson, ‘Configurations of Temporality’, pp. 63–​4. 32. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 205. 33. The Lost Work: Beat Generation, An Original Play by Jack Kerouac, pp. vi–​vii. A portion of the letter is reproduced in this publication. 34. For a thorough discussion of The Americans and an extensive bibliography of Robert Frank see Sarah Greenough et  al., Looking In:  Robert Frank’s The Americans (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009). See also Jonathan Day, Robert Frank’s The Americans:  The Art of Documentary Photography (Chicago:  Intellect, 2011)  and George Cotkin, ‘Robert Frank’s Existential Vision’, in Existential America (Baltimore:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), pp.  210–​21, originally published as ‘The Photographer in the Beat-​ Hipster Idiom: Robert Frank’s The Americans’, American Studies 26:1 (Spring 1985), pp. 19–​33. 35. James M. Zanutto’s review was published in ‘An Off-​Beat View of the USA: The Americans, Popular Photography’s editors comment on a controversial new book’, in Popular Photography 46/​5 (May 1960), pp. 104–​6. 36. James Guimond, American Photograph and the American Dream (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), pp. 207–​44. 37. See Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010); originally published 1980. 38. This if from the interview with Leslie in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 34. 39. Jack Kerouac, ‘On the Road to Florida’, Evergreen Review 74 (January 1970), pp. 42–​7, with photographs by Robert Frank (originally written after the trip in 1958).

224

25

The Art of Becoming 40. Interview with Leslie in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 34. 41. Judith E. Stein, ‘Interview: Alfred Leslie’, Art in America (1 January 2009), unpaginated. This interview was conducted on 1 May, 14 June, 2 Aug. and 25 Dec., 2007. 42. Blaine, ‘The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’, p. 189. 43. Postsynchronisation is the technique of adding synchronised sound to a film shot or sequence during postproduction to make it appear as though the sound was captured simultaneously with the images. 44. See especially André Bazin, ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema’ and ‘The Virtues and Limitations of Montage’ in André Bazin, What is Cinema? I (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 23–​40; 41–​52. 45. Lee Curruthers, ‘M. Bazin et le temps, reclaiming the timeliness of cinematic time’, Screen 52/​1 (Spring 2011), p. 15 (complete pages are pp. 13–​29). 46. Bazin, What is Cinema, p. 37. 47. Paula Quigley, ‘Realism and Eroticism: Re-​Reading Bazin’, Paragraph: The Journal of the Modern Critical Theory Group, 36/​1 (March 2013), p. 37 (complete pages 31–​49). 48. Kouvaros, ‘Lessons of Pull My Daisy’, p. 8. 49. J.J. Murphy, ‘Christopher Maclaine –​Approaching the End’, Film Culture, 70–​1 (1983), p. 92. 50. This term was coined by Mekas, Spontaneous Cinema, pp. 118–​21. 51. See Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön:  An Essay on the limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (New  York:  The Bobbs-​Merrel Company, 1962), pp. 91–​5. 52. Lessing, Laocoön, p. 80. 53. S.M. Eisenstein, ‘Laocoön’, in S.M. Eisenstein: Selected Works: Towards a Theory of Montage, vol. 2, eds Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, trans. Michael Glenny (London: BFI Publishing, 1991), p. 159. 54. Eisenstein: ‘Laocoön’, pp. 128–​9. Eisenstein introduced his theory of montage in (1923), but applied that theory to film in ‘The Montage of Film Attractions’, which was written in 1924 but published in its original form posthumously in 1988. Both of these essays can be found in The Eisenstein Reader, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. Richard Taylor and William Powell (London:  British Film Institute, 1998): pp. 29–​34 and pp. 35–​52. The most complete collection and translation of Eisenstein’s writings can be found in the four volumes:  Sergei Eisenstein: Selected Works, vol. 1, Writings, 1922–​1934, ed. and trans. Richard Taylor (London: British Film Institute, 1988); Towards a Theory of Montage, eds Michael Glenny and Richard Taylor, vol. 2 (London: British Film Institute, 1994); Writings, 1934–​47, vol. 3, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London:  British Film Institute, 1996); Beyond the Stars, vol. 4, ed. Richard Taylor, trans. William Powell (London: British Film Institute, 1994).

225

26

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics 55. Eisenstein, ‘Laocoön’, p. 130. 56. For an insightful discussion of the overall significance that Lessing placed on the ability of art to provoke the imagination, and thereby elevate the viewer to a level of understanding beyond mere sensation, see David E. Wellbery, Lessing’s Laocoön: Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 104–​9. 57. Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 21 refers to the romanticism of the film, which is ‘personal in a manner which is antithetical to vérité’. 58. Kerouac, Pull My Daisy, p. 21. 59. Ibid., p. 23. 60. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 210. 61. Kouvaros, ‘Lessons of Pull My Daisy’, pp.  12–​14. Of filming, Amram recollected that ‘it might be fun to get together and ‘have kind of a home movie’, which reflects of the notion that the filmmaking was spontaneous and improvisational. Although this may be the intent on the part of some of the participants, Leslie’s recollection reflects a much more studied and serious approach to the process. 62. Interview with Leslie in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 36. 63. The term ‘holy’ appears most directly in Allen Ginsberg’s poem ‘Footnote to Howl’, where it conveys the notion of the transcendent nature of experience, 1955. See ‘Footnote to Howl’ in Allen Ginsberg, Collected Poems 1947–​1997 (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 142. 64. Interview with Robert Frank in The Naked Lens: An Illustrated History of the Beats, p. 42. For memory and Kerouac’s ‘sketching’ see Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p. 205. 65. Ginsberg citing Brookman, ‘In the Margins of Fiction’, p. 86. 66. Kerouac, Pull My Daisy, p. 31. 67. Leslie’s interview in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p.  37. This is where Leslie explains how the sound was cut. In an interview in The Naked Lens, p.  41, Frank recalls a more free-​form inclusion of Kerouac’s narration: ‘I remember having big fights with Alfred about that, he wanted to edit the voice, he took out a couple of sentences but that was all. It was unnecessary to edit it’ 68. Blaine: ‘The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’, p. 196. In one planned version of the ending, the characters were to have their own voices as they move down the street, symbolising their freedom from the combined space of the loft and within the confines of Kerouac’s narrative, but the decision was made not to follow this path. 69. See Leslie’s interview in Sargent, The Naked Lens, p. 32 and Frank’s interview p. 43. 70. Blaine, ‘The Making (and Unmaking) of Pull My Daisy’, p. 198.

226

27

The Art of Becoming 71. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p.  214. Kerouac references himself as a ‘jazz poet’ in the beginning of Mexico City Blues. Belgrad uses the example of Kerouac’s ‘October in the Railroad Earth’ where moods are created by lengthening and shortening the phrase, p. 215. 72. Kerouac, Pull My Daisy, p. 32. 73. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p.  216 refers to ‘sound poetry’ and Kerouac’s usage of it in his essay ‘The Beginning of Bop’. 74. Kerouac, Pull My Daisy, p.  35. Pat Mezz McGillicuddy was the name that Kerouac gave to Amram even before The Beat Generation and Pull My Daisy; see Amram, Offbeat, pp. 48–​9. 75. Belgrad, The Culture of Spontaneity, p.  217 refers to Amram’s autobiography: ‘Perhaps scat singing is the closest one can come to an authentically collaborative jazz-​poetry’. 76. Bazin, ‘What is Cinema’, p. 31. 77. Erik Mortenson, Capturing the Beat Moment: Cultural Politics and the Poetics of Presence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2011), pp. 138–​9.

227

28

Conclusion Limit-Imposing Systems Sarah J. Lippert

Perhaps even more so than in his own time, the boundaries of time and space in contemporary media are more fluid and evolving than ever. Lessing himself could not have anticipated the ways in which new media, such as interactive design, would redefine the role of art in society. Today, contemporary artists who practise site-​ specific processes transform the time and space legacy into one of future possibilities, designing, for instance, works that map mobile devices to urban narratives, such as in the projects by contemporary artist Joseph Reinsel. In his work Flint Voices of 2012, Reinsel worked with linguistics scholar Erica Britt to tell stories across time and space. The stories of Flint residents were pre-​recorded, and then played back as ‘viewers’ traveled from one mobile tag to the next in downtown Flint. Textual experience was provided in the urban accounts, whilst spatiality was incorporated into the viewer’s need to move from one spot in the urban environment to another. It is works such as this that also support Mitchell’s theory that tensions between the arts, including boundaries between time and space, will continue to be flouted and are doomed to endless embittered confrontation with one another. However, the dispensation of rules and limits has led to increasingly fertile ways of viewing the boundaries of the arts. Within academia, the arts have conformed to such dispensations through the 228

29

Conclusion minimisation of medium-​specific training in curriculum design. Especially at the Master’s level of study, it has become increasingly common for programmes to choose not to specialise, but rather to allow the students to operate without limits in either theory or practise. On the other hand, other aspects of academic structure continue to encourage that limits be imposed on the arts. Because universities are not just teaching institutions, but are also the sites of new creative practise and knowledge, they have become hotbeds of limit-​imposing practises. Budget models that require departments to compete for credit hours, along with other reductions to resources associated with supporting a given programme, engender the imposition of limits on disciplinary and administrative practises, which impact the practise of fields of inquiry. Examples of such divisions include siphoning off areas such as creative writing, performance in music or on stage and visual arts exhibitions, which have become hotbeds of interdisciplinary crossover. On the one hand, many different types of academic units include graduate students and contingent faculty. Creative faculty (those who produce through creative processes rather than a typical research and publication method), are scattered throughout the university. But, presently, all are practising artists with deep connections to the communities in which they were raised and, as such, a nationalistic rivalry often emerges from this history, which further engenders separation rather than unification of the sister arts. Departments also promote limits and Lessing-​like divisions of the arts, as they learn to craft their academic identities, whilst conforming to expectations of their disciplines. Dangers regarding curriculum duplication and competition for post requests and other resources also tend to drive cross-​disciplinary action. For example, if a department obtains funding in a manner that is based upon credit hours, then other departments must fully define themselves as different in order to justify both its members’ resources and future requests. Only by filling a need that is unmet by any other department can a programme remain viable; therefore, it is by establishing disciplinary limits that structural lines in the university’s economic organisation percolate into those of its teaching practises. Since academics are borne out of these systems, it is no wonder that they tend to follow the same path. Strong incentives exist to keep scholars and 229

230

Space and Time in Artistic Practice and Aesthetics contemporary artists separated from each other’s areas of inquiry. From the departments, museums and governmental systems in which they are employed, to the academic associations and lines of funding that are based upon demonstration of expertise in a finite and specific area. These limit-​ imposing systems operate in both a temporal and spatial manner. Physical separation exists both geographically and on a university campus. Temporal limitations are present in that each such institution often runs temporally parallel to another, without awareness of the other’s existence. Nonetheless, there are indeed important reasons for such limits. They reflect the fact that the human mind is not without its own limits. One cannot be an expert in everything and, as academics tacitly reinforce by participating in limit-​ imposing systems, trying to be an expert in too many areas perhaps does make for not being able to become a true expert in anything. And, the global nature of information systems, as well as the size of the world-​wide population, means that we do in fact need structures, organisation, and other such contrivances to work and share ideas effectively and efficiently. The tension between free intellectual or creative human inquiry, and the features needed to share them, are, possibly, co-​dependent. It is perhaps the same with time and space. Although these comments will not be outlined as eloquently as they could by an aesthetic theorist or philosopher, it is nevertheless a question to ponder as to whether temporality can be appreciated without space and vice versa. If not, then perhaps Lessing’s limits were always meant to be trespassed.

230

231

Bibliography Ackerman, Gerald. ‘Gérôme’s Sculpture:  The Problems of Realist Sculpture’. Arts Magazine 60/​6 (1986): pp. 82–​9. Adler, Hans. Die Prägnanz des Dunklen. Gnoseologie –​Ästhetik –​Geschichtsphilosophie bei Johann Gottfried Herder. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1990. Alegret, Célia, Guillaume Faroult and Michèle-​Caroline Heck. Jean Raoux: un peintre sur la Régence. Exh cat. Montpellier: Musée Fabre, 2010. Allison, Henry. Kant’s Theory of Taste. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ———. American Art since 1900:  A  Critical Survey. Edited by Barbara Rose. New York: Praeger, 1968. Arens, Katherine. ‘History as Knowledge: Herder, Kant, and the Human Sciences,’ in Johann Gottfried Herder: Academic Disciplines and the Pursuit of Knowledge. Edited by Wulf Koepke, pp. 106–​19. Columbia, South Carolina: Camden House, 1996. Aristotle. Poetics. Edited and translated by Stephen Halliwell. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London: William Heinemann, 1995. Arnason, H.H. History of Modern Art. 5th edn. Peter Kalb, revising author. New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2004. Artangel. ‘About Juan Muñoz’. Accessed 14 July 2012. http://​www.artangel.org.uk//​ projects/​1992/​untitled/​about_​the_​artist/​juan_​munoz. ———. Art in Theory 1648–​1815. Edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Ltd., 2000. ———. Assembleur des rêves:  Écrits complèts de Gustave Moreau. Preface by Jean Paladilhe. Edited by Pierre-​Louis Mathieu. Paris: Fontfroide, 1984. ———. Aubin Louis Millin et l’Allemagne. Edited by Geneviève Espagne and Bénédicte Savoye. Hildesheim: George Olms, 2005. Bacon, Francis. Francis Bacon: In Conversation with Michel Archimbaud. London: Phaidon Press Ltd, 1993. Barck, Karlheinz, Jörg Heininger and Dieter Kliche. ‘Aesthetik/​ ästhetisch’, in Aesthetische Grundbegriffe. Historisches Wörterbuch in Sieben Bänden. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2000–​5/​1 (2000): pp. 308–​400. Barnes, Albert C. The Art in Painting. 3rd edn. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928. Bätschmann, Oskar. ‘Pygmalion als Betrachter. Die Rezeption von Plastik und Malerey in der zweite Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, in Der Betrachter ist im Bild. Kunstwissenschaft und Rezeptionsästhetik, edited by Martin Kemp, pp. 237–​67. Berlin: Dietrich Reimar Verlag, 1992.

231

23

Bibliography Baudelaire, Charles. L’Art romantique. Paris: Michel Lèvy Fréres, 1879. Beard, Mary. ‘The Sexual Status of Vestal Virgins.’ The Journal of Roman Studies 70 (1980): pp. 12–​27. Beckley, Bill, ed. Sticky Sublime. New  York:  Allworth Press and School of Visual Arts, 2001. Benezra, Neal. ‘Sculpture and Paradox’. Juan Muñoz. Exh. cat. Edited by Neal Benezra and Olga Viso, pp. 23–​54. Washington and Chicago: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution and Art Institute of Chicago, 2001. Berenguier, Nadine. Conduct Books for Girls in Enlightenment France. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. Blum, André. L’œuvre grave d’Abraham Bosse. Paris: A. Morancé, 1924. Bois, Yve-​Alain. ‘A Picturesque Stroll around Clara-​Clara’, in Richard Serra, edited by Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes, pp. 59–​96. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. Bonnel, Roland and Catherine Rubinger. Femmes Savantes et Femmes d’Esprit: Women Intellectuals of the French Eighteenth Century. New York: P. Lang, 1994. Bosshard, Walter. Winckelmann –​Aesthetik der Mitte. Zurich: Artemis Verlag, 1960. Bottari, G.G. Del Museo Capitolino, vol. 4, I Bassirilievi. Rome:  Calcografia Camerale, 1782. Böttiger, Carl August. Die Aldobrandinische Hochzeit:  Eine archäologische Ausdeutung. Nebst eine Abhandlung über dies Gemälde von Seiten der Kunst betrachtet von H. Meyer. Dresden: Walther, 1810. ———. Ideen zur Archäologie der Malerei. Nach Maasgabe der Wintervorlesungen im Jahre 1811. Dresden: Walther, 1811. ———. ‘Skizzen zu Millin’s Schilderung,’ in Aubin Louis Millin geschildert von Kraft und Böttiger, pp. 69–​108. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1819. Brea, Jose-​Luis. ‘Juan Muñoz: The System of Objects’. Flash Art, 138 (January–​ February 1988): pp. 88–​9. Brenson Michael. ‘Sound, Sight, Statuary’. Juan Muñoz. Exh. cat. Edited by Neal Benezra and Olga Viso, pp. 153–​66. Washington and Chicago: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution and Art Institute of Chicago, 2001. Brettell, Richard. Modern Art 1851–​1929: Capitalism and Representation. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Bruyère, Jean de la. Les caractères de Théophraste, traduits du grec, avec Les caractères ou mœurs de ce siècle. Paris: E. Belin, 1888. Bryson, Norman. Vision and Painting:  The Logic of the Gaze. New Haven:  Yale University Press, 1983. Buonarroti, Filippo. Osservazioni sopra alcuni frammenti di vasi antichi di vetro ornati di figure trovati ne’ cimiteri di Roma. Florence: Jacoppo Guiducci, 1716. Burke, Edmund. ESB = A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Edited by Adam Philips. Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 1998.

232

23

Bibliography Burke, Peter. The Fabrication of Louis XIV. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Busch, Ernst. ‘Das Erlebnis des Schönen im Antikebild der Deutschen Klassik’. Deutsche Viertelsjahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistegeschichte XVIII (1940): pp. 26–​60. Çakmak, Gülru. ‘The Salon of 1859 and Caesar:  The Limits of Painting’. Reconsidering Gérôme. eds Scott Allan and Mary Morton, Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. pp. 65–​80. Carchia, Gianni. Immagine e verità: Studi sulla tradizione classica. Edited by Monica Ferrando. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2003. Carlin, Claire L. Le Mariage sous l’ancien régime. Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada: Dalhousie University, 2010. Caylus, Anne-​Claude-​Philippe de Tubières, Comte de. ‘Sur le tableau de Cébès, sur l’antre de Coryce, et sur les tableaux de Philostrate’. Histoire de l’académie royale des inscriptions et belles-​lettres 29 (1764): pp. 149–​60. ———. Tableaux tires de l’Iliade, de l’Odysseé d’Homère, et l’Enéide de Virgile, avec des observations generals sur le costume. Paris: 1757–​8. Chadwick, Whitney. Women, Art, and Society. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. Chion, Michel. Audio-​Vision: Sound on Screen. New York and Chichester: Columbia University Press, 1990. Chipp, Herschel. Theories of Modern Art:  A  Source Book by Artists and Critics. Contributions by Peter Selz and Joshua C. Taylor. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1968. Christie, James. A Disquisition upon Etruscan Vases. London: T. Becket, 1806. Clarke, T.J. ‘Clement Greenberg’s Theory of Art.’ Critical Inquiry 9/​1 (September 1982): pp. 139–​56. Cometa, Michele. ‘Postfazione’, in Lettera sulla scultura, by Frans Hemsterhuis. Translated by Elio Matassi, pp. 69–​92. Palermo: Aesthetica, 1994. Connor, Steven. Dumbstruck: A Cultural History of Ventriloquism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Cooke, Lynne. ‘Thinking on Your Feet: Richard Serra’s Sculpture in Landscape’, in Richard Serra: Forty Years. Edited by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke, pp. 77–​104. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. Cooke, Lynne and Michael Govan. ‘Interview with Richard Serra’, in Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses, New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997. pp. 11–​31. Cooke, Peter. ‘History Painting as Apocalypse and Poetry: Gustave Moreau’s Les Prétendants, 1852–​1897, with unpublished documents.’ Gazette des beaux-​arts 127/​1524 (January 1996): pp. 27–​48. Costello, Diarmuid. ‘Greenberg’s Kant and the Fate of Aesthetics in Contemporary Art Theory.’ The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65/​2 (Spring 2007): pp. 217–​28. Cox, Kenyon. ‘What Is Painting? I: Painting as an Art of Imitation, Reviewed Work.’ The Art World 1/​1 (October 1916).

233

234

Bibliography Crimp, Douglas. ‘Redefining Site Specificity’, in Richard Serra. Edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. pp. 147–​73. Crousaz, Jean-​Pierre. Traité du beau. Amsterdam: François L’Honoré, 1715. Da Costa, Valerie and Fabrice Hergott. Jean Dubuffet:  Works, Writings and Interviews. Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2006. ———. Das Studium des schönen Altertums. Christian Gottlob Heyne und der Klassischen Archäologie. Edited by Daniel Graepler and Joachim Migl, Göttingen: Niedersächsische Staats-​und Universitätsbibliothek, 2007. Davies, Penelope J.E., Walter B. Denny, Frima Fox Hofrichter, Joseph Jacobs, Ann M. Roberts and David Simon. Janson’s History of Art: Western Tradition, vol. 2, 7th edn. New York: Pearson Education, 2007. De Contenson, Marie-​Laure. ‘The Middle Ages as Reinvented by Gustave Moreau’. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream. Exh. cat., pp. 22–​32. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1999. Découltot, Élisabeth. ‘Le Laocoon de Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. De l’imagination comme fondement d’une nouvelle méthode critique.’ Les Études Philosophiques (P.U.F.) 2/​65 (2003): pp. 197–​212. De Duve, Thierry. Clement Greenberg:  Between the Lines. Translated by Brian Homes. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996. ———. Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996. Deleuze, Gilles. Kant’s Critical Philosophy: The Doctrine of the Faculties. Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ———. ‘Sommaire sur Kant:  Cours Vincennes –​Synthesis and Time (1978)’. Les Cours de Gilles Deleuze. Compiled by Richard Pinhas. http://​www.webdeleuze. com/​php/​sommaire.html. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus:  Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis:  University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Delon, Michel. ‘Mythology de la vestale.’ Dix-​huitième siècle 27 (1995): unpaginated. De Quincy, Antoine Chrysostrome Quatremère. An Essay on Imitation in the Fine Arts. Translated by J.C. Kent. London:  Smith, Elder and Co., Cornhill, Booksellers to their Majesties, 1837. ———. De L’Idéal dans les arts du dessin. Paris:  Librairie d’Adrien Le Clère et Cie, 1837. ———. Le Jupiter Olympien. Paris: Firmin Didot, Imprimeur de l’Institut, 1814. ———. Des Herrn Grafen von Caylus Abhandlungen zur Geschichte und zur Kunst. 2  vols. Introduction by Christian Adolf Klotz. Altenburg:  Richterische Buchhandlung, 1768–​9/​2 (1769): unpaginated. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. 1934. Reprint, New  York:  Perigee Books printing, 1980.

234

235

Bibliography Diderot, Denis. ‘Letter on the Deaf and Dumb’ in Diderot’s Early Philosophical Works. Translated by Margaret Jourdain. Chicago and London: Open Court, 1916. Dolar, Mladen. A Voice and Nothing More. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, 2006. ———. Dresde ou le rêve des princes. Paris:  Éditions de la réunion des musées nationaux, 2001. Dubois-​Fontanelle, J.G. Essai sure le feu sacré et sur les vestals. Amsterdam: Le Jay, 1768. Dubos, Abbé Jean-​Baptiste. Reflexions sur la poésie et sur la peinture. Paris: PierreJean Mariette, 1719. ———. Réflexions critiques sur la pöesie et sur la peinture. Paris: Pissot, 1755. ———. Sur la poësie et sur la peinture. Paris: Pissot, 1770. Dubu, Jean. Les Demoiselles de Saint-​Cyr:  Maison royale d’éducation 1686–​1793. Paris: Somogy, 1999. Dubuffet, Jean. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art:  A  Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996. Ducrey, Guy. ‘Tanagra ou les anamorphoses d’une figurine béotienne à la fin du XIXe siècle,’ in Anamorphoses décadentes: l’art de la défiguration 1880–​1914: études offertes à Jean de Palacio. Edited by Isabelle Krzywkowski and Sylvie Thorel-​ Cailleteau. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-​Sorbonne, 2002. pp. 207–​24. Dunow, Esti. ‘Chaïm Soutine 1893–​ 1943’. Ph.D. Diss. New  York:  New  York University, 1981. Faroult, Guillaume. ‘Les Fortunes de la Vertu: Origines et evolution de l’iconographie des vestals jusqu’au XIIIe siècle’. Revue de L’art 152 (2006): pp. 9–​30. Faure, Elie. Soutine. Paris: Editions Crés, 1929. Feinberg, Larry J. ‘Gustave Moreau and the Italian Renaissance’. Gustave Moreau: Between Epic and Dream. Exh. cat. Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1999. pp. 5–​14. Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe-. De l’éducation des filles, edition contenant des extraits pedagogiques et comentaires par Gabriel Compayré. Paris: Ancienne Librarie Pickard-​Berheim Cie, 1888. Finkelstein, Louis. The Unpicturelikeness of Pollock, Soutine and Others:  Selected Writings and Talks. Edited and foreword by Mindy Aloff. New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2008. Foster, Hal. ‘Richard Serra in Bilbao’. Parkett 74 (2005): pp. 28–​33. ———. ‘Richard Serra in Conversation with Hal Foster,’ in Richard Serra: The Matter of Time. Translated by Alfred Mac Adam, Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2005. pp. 177–​87. ———. ‘Torques and Toruses.’ in Richard Serra: Torqued Spirals, Toruses and Spheres. New York: Gagosian Gallery, 2001. pp. 7–​21. ———. ‘Un/​making Sculpture.’ in Richard Serra. Edited by Hal Foster and Gordon Hughes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. pp. 175–​200.

235

236

Bibliography Forge, Andrew. Soutine. London: Spring Books, 1965. Foster, Stephen C. The Critics of Abstract Expressionism. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press, 1980. Franzke, Andreas. Dubuffet. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1981. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII. London: The Hogarth Press, 1953. Fried, Michael. ‘Art and Objecthood’. In Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology. Edited by Gregory Battcock. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995. pp. 116–​47. Fumaroli, March. La Querelle des anciens et des modernes. Paris: Gallimard, 2001. ———. Le Sablier renversé: Des Modernes aux anciens. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. Funder, Albert. Die Ästhetik des Frans Hemsterhuis und ihre historischen Beziehungen. Bonn: Peter Henstein Verlag, 1913. Fusconi, Giulia. La Fortuna delle ‘Nozze Aldobrandini’. Dall’Esquilino al Vaticano. Vatican City: Bibliotheca Apostolica Vaticana, 1994. Garberson, Eric. ‘Art History in the University: Toelken –​Hotho –​Kugler’. Journal of Art Historiography 5 (December 2011):  pp. 1–​89. http://​arthistoriography. files.wordpress.com/​2011/​12/​garberson-​toelken-​kugler1.pdf Gaugh, Harry F. Willem de Kooning. New York: Abbeville, 1983. Gautier, Théophile. Les Beaux-​arts en Europe. Paris: Michel Lèvy Frères, 1855. ———. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. 3 vols. Edited by H.G. Hotho. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1835–​8. Giuseppe, Pucci. ‘L’antichitá greca e romana,’ in Estetica della Scultura. Edited by Luigi Russo. Palermo: Aesthetica, 2003. pp. 9–​46. Goldblatt, David. Art and Ventriloquism. Commentary by Gary Hagberg. London: Routledge, 2006. Gordon, Rae Beth. ‘Aboli Bibelot? The Influence of the Decorative Arts on Stéphane Mallarmé and Gustave Moreau’. Art Journal 45/​2 (Summer 1985): pp. 105–​112. Gotlieb, Marc. ‘The Painter’s Secret: Invention and Rivalry from Vasari to Balzac’. The Art Bulletin 84/​3 (September 2002): pp. 469–​90. Gowing, Lawrence and Sam Hunter. Francis Bacon. Foreword by James T. Demetrion. New York & London: Thames and Hudson, Inc., 1989. Greenberg, Clement. ‘After Abstract Expressionism (1962)’. In Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4. Edited by John O’Brien. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———. Art and Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1961. ———. Homemade Esthetics:  Observations on Art and Taste. New  York:  Oxford University Press, 2000. ———. ‘Louis and Noland (1960a),’ Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4. Edited by John O’Brien. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———. ‘Modernist Painting (1960b)’. Clement Greenberg, The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4. Edited by John O’Brien. Chicago and London: University of

236

237

Bibliography Chicago Press, 1986. Reprinted with slight revisions in Art in Theory:  1900–​ 1990. Edited by Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (London: Blackwell, 1998). pp. 754–​760. ———. The Collected Essays and Criticism:  Affirmations and Refusals, 1950–​1956, vol. 3. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. The Collected Essays and Criticism:  Arrogant Purpose, 1945–​1949, vol. 2. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———. The Collected Essays and Criticism:  Modernism with a Vengeance, vol. 4. Edited by John O’Brian. London: The University of Chicago Press, 1995. ———. The Collected Essays and Criticism: Perceptions and Judgments, 1939–​1944, vol. 1. Edited by John O’Brian. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Accessed 18 October 2010. http://​www.guggenheim. org/​guggenheim-​foundation/​architecture/​bilbao. Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. Richard Serra:  The Matter of Time. Translated by Alfred Mac Adam. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2005. ———. ‘Gustave Moreau et le Japon’. Revue de l’art 85 (1989): pp. 64–​75. ———. Gustave Moreau par ses contemporains. Edited by Bernard Noël and Frédéric Chaleil. Paris: Les éditions de Paris, 1998. Hagedorn, Christian Ludwig von. Betrachtungen über die Malerey, vol. 2. Leipzig: Johann Wendlern, 1762. Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Hausheer, Herman. ‘St. Augustine’s Conception of Time’. Philosophical Review 46/​5 (September 1937): pp. 503–​12. Hebdige, Dick. ‘TransMissions’. Trans/​Mission:  Konst i interkulturell limbo/​Art in Intercultural Limbo. Exh. cat. Maimö: Rooseum Center for Contemporary Art, 1991: pp. 130–​41. Heidenreich, Marianne. Christian Gottlob Heyne und die Alte Geschichte. Munich-​ Leipzig: K.G. Saur, 2006. Hemingway, Andrew. ‘Meyer Schapiro and Marxism in the 1930s’. Oxford Art Journal 17/​1 (1994): pp. 13–​29. Hemsterhuis, Frans. ‘Lettre sur les désirs’. In Œuvres philosophiques de M.F. Hemsterhuis. Paris: Imprimerie Jansen, 1790. ———. ‘Lettre sur la sculpture’. In Œuvres philosophiques. Paris:  Imprimerie Jansen, 1790. ———. Œuvres Philosophiques. Edited by M.S.P. Meyboom, vol. 3. Ljouwert: W. Eekhoff, 1946. Herder, Johann Gottfried. Briefe zur Beförderung der Humanität. Riga: Hartknoch, 1793–​7. ———. ‘First Grove,’ in Selected Writings on Aesthetics, by Johann Gottfried Herder. Translated by Gregory Moore, pp. 51–​176. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.

237

238

Bibliography ———. ‘Fourth Grove’. In Selected Writings on Aesthetics, by Johann Gottfried Herder, edited by Gregory Moore, pp. 177–​ 290. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ———. Sculpture:  Some Observations on Sculpture’s Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream. Translated by Jason Geiger. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002. ———. Sammelte Werke, vol. 15. ———. Wälder Kritische: Oder Betrachtungen über die Wissenschaft und Kunst des Schönen. Erstes Wäldchen. Sämmtliche Werke zur schönen Literatur und Kunst. 16 vols. Tübingen: Cotta: 1805–​17/​4 (1806). Hess, Thomas B. Willem de Kooning. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968. Heyne, Christian Gottlob. Akademische Vorlesungen über die Archäologie der Kunst des Alterthums. Braunschweig: Friedrich Vieweg, 1822. ———. ‘Prüfung einiger Nachrichten und Behauptungen vom Laocoon im Belvedere’. In Sammlung Antiquarische Aufsätze. 2 vols. Leipzig: Weidemanns Erben und Reich, 1778–​9. 2 (1779): pp. 1–​52. ———. ‘Philostrati Imaginni illustratio,’ in Opuscula Academica Collecta, 6 vols. Göttingen: Dieterich, 1785–​1812. 5 (1802): pp. 1–​195. German summary Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen 1796/​41: pp. 409–​12; 1796/​162: 1609–​10; 1797/​151: pp. 1497–​9. ———. ‘Review of Herder.’ Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menscheit. Göttingische gelehrte Anzeigen 1807/​60: pp. 593–​9. Hirt, Aloys. ‘Ueber die Mahlerey bey den Alten’. In Sammlung der deutschen Abhandlungen welche in der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften (und schönen Künste) zu Berlin vorgelesen worden in den Jahren 1799–​1800 (1803): pp. 209–​30; in den Jahren 1801–​2 (1805): pp. 137–​54, 155–​70, 171–​86; in den Jahren 1803 (1806): pp. 193–​215. Hobbs, R.C. and Gail Levin. Abstract Expressionism: The Formative Years. New York: Whitney Museum, 1978. Hogarth, William. The Analysis of Beauty. London: W. Strahan, 1772. Hogsett, Charlotte. Jean Baptiste DuBos on Art as Illusion. Paris: Institut et musée Voltaire, 1970. Horace. Satires, Epistles and Ars Poetica. Translated by H.  Rushton Fairclough. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA:  Harvard UP; London:  William Heinemann, 1926. Hotchkiss Walsh, Philip. The Atelier of Gustave Moreau at the École des beaux-​arts (France). Ph.D. Diss. Boston: Harvard University, 1995. Hughes, Robert. ‘Man of Steel’. The Guardian. 22 June 2005. Accessed 18 October 2013. http://​www.theguardian.com/​artanddesign/​2005/​jun/​22/​art. ———. The Shock of the New: The Hundred Year History of Modern Art: Its Rise, Its Dazzling Achievement, Its Fall. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998. Isozaki, Arata. ‘Space-​ Time in Japan –​MA’. In MA:  Space-​ Time in Japan. New York: Cooper-​Hewitt Museum, undated.

238

239

Bibliography Jachec, Nancy. The Philosophy and Politics of Abstract Expressionism 1940–​1960. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Jacobs, Friedrich and Theophilus Welcker. Philostratorum imagines et Callistrati statuae. Leipzig: Libraria Dyckiana, 1825. Jacquemin, Hélène. Livres et Filles à St. Cyr:  1686–​ 1793. Angers:  Presse de l’université d’Angers, 2007. Jones, Caroline A. Eyesight Alone:  Clement Greenberg’s Modernism and the Bureaucratization of the Senses. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Junius, Franciscus. De pictura veterum. Edited by Keith Aldrich, Philipp Fehl and Raina Fehl. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Justi, Carl. Winckelmann und seine Zeitgehossen. F.C.W. Vogel, 1923. Kaiser, Thomas. ‘The Monarchy, Public Opinion, and the Subversions of Antoine Watteau’. In Antoine Watteau: Perspectives on the Artist and the Culture of his Time. Edited by Mary Sheriff. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2006. pp. 64–​75. Kandel, Eric R. The Age of Insight. New York, Random House, 2012. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Edited by Paul Guyer. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. ———. The Critique of Judgment. Translated by J.H. Bernard. New York: Prometheus Books, 2000. Kantorowicz, Ernst. ‘Oriens Augusti. Lever du Roi’, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers 17 (1963): pp. 119–​77. Kaplan, Julius. ‘Gustave Moreau’s Jupiter and Semele’, in Art Quarterly 33/​4 (1970): pp. 393–​414. ———. The Art of Gustave Moreau: Theory, Style, and Content. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982. Kaufman, Walter. Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre. New  York:  Penguin Books, 1956. Kleeblatt, Norman and Kenneth Silver. Chaïm Soutine: An Expressionist in Paris. New York: Prestel, 1998. Kosinski, Dorothy M. Orpheus in Nineteenth-​Century Symbolism. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1989. ———. ‘Orpheus in the Context of Religious Syncretism, Universal Histories, and Occultism’, in Art Journal 46 (Spring 1987): pp. 9–​14. Krauss, Rosalind. ‘A Voyage on the North Sea’. Art in the Age of the Post-​Medium Condition. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. ———. Passages in Modern Sculpture. Cambridge MA, London: MIT Press, 1981. ———. ‘Richard Serra: Sculpture’, in Richard Serra. Edited by Hal Foster with Gordon Hughes. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000. pp. 99–​145. ———. The Optical Unconscious. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 1994. ———. Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit. (1784–5) 3rd edn. Leipzig: Hartknoch, 1828.

239

240

Bibliography ———. ‘Shakespeare’. Sämmtliche Werke zur schönen Literatur und Kunst, vol. 13 (1815): pp. 240–​67. Kwon, Miwon. ‘Sitings of Public Art: Integration versus Intervention’, in One Place After Another: Site Specificity and Locational Identity. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. pp. 56–​99 Lacan, Jacques. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-​Analysis. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Karnak, 2004. ———. Le Dictionnaire de l’académie françoise, dedie au Roy. Paris:  Vve de J.B. Coignard, 1694. Lee, Rensselaer W. Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting. New York: Norton, 1967. ———. ‘Ut Pictura Poesis: The Humanistic Theory of Painting’, in The Art Bulletin 22 (December 1940): pp. 197–​269. ———. Le pitture antiche d’Ercolano. 5 vols. Naples: Regia stamperia, 1757–​79. Leiris, Michael. Francis Bacon: Full Face and in Profile. New York: Rizzoli, 1983. ———. Leonardo da Vinci’s Note-​Books. Arranged and rendered into English with Introductions by Edward McCurdy. London and New York: Duckworth & Co., and Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1906. Leppman, Wolfgang. Winckelmann. New York: Alfred Knopf, 1970. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoon:  An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962. ———. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore and London:  The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. ———. Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Ellen Frothingham. New York: The Noonday Press, 1957. ———. Laocoön or the Limits of Poetry and Drama. Translated by William Ross. London: Ridgeway and Sons, 1836. ———. The Laocoön, and Other Prose Writings of Lessing. Translated and edited by W.B. Ronnfeldt. London: Walter Scott, Ltd. Levesque, Pierre Charles. ‘Mémoire sur les progrès successifs de la peinture chez les Grecs’, in Mémoires de l’institut national des science et des arts, litterature et beaux-​arts 1 (1798): pp. 374–​470. Lichtenstein, Jacqueline. The Blind Spot: An Essay on the Relations between Painting and Sculpture in the Modern Age. Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008. ———. The Eloquence of Color:  Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age. Translated by Emily Varish. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. Lingwood, James. Interview by the author, April 2009. Lippert, Sarah J. Gustave Moreau and the Paragone: The Legacy of the Ut Pictura Poesis Tradition in the Work of a Nineteenth-​Century Painter. M.A. Diss. London: The University of Western Ontario, 2002.

240

241

Bibliography ———. ‘Gustave Moreau’s Dying Poets: A Message to the Art Critic’. Images and Imagery: Frames, Borders, Limits –​Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Edited by Corrado Federico, Leslie Boldt-​Irons and Ernesto Virgulti. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., 2005. pp. 45–​78. ———. ‘Theory, Practice, and Competition in the Visual Arts:  The Fortunes of the Paragone in French and British Nineteenth-​ Century Art’. PhD Diss., Pennsylvania State University, 2009. Lowry, Glenn. ‘Foreword,’ in Richard Serra:  Forty Years. Edited by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke. New  York:  The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. pp. 7–​8. Lyotard, Jean-​ François. ‘Answering the Question: What is Post-​ Modernism?’ in The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated by Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984. pp. 71–​84. ———. Heidegger and the ‘Jews’. Translated by Andreas Michel and Mark Roberts. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990. ———. Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime:  Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Translated by Elizabeth Rottenberg. Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1994. Maintenon, Françoise d’Aubigne de. Lettres et entretiens sur l’éducation des filles. Recueillis et publiés pour la première fois par Théophile Lavallée. Paris: Charpentier, 1861. ———. Conseils et instructions aux desmoiselles pour leur conduit dans le monde. 2 vols. Introduction and notes by Théophile Lavallée. Paris: Charpentier, 1857. Makkreel, Rudolf A. Imagination and Interpretation in Kant:  The Hermeneutical Import of the Critique of Judgment. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990. Marin, Louis. On Representation. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Marx, Karl. Early Writings. London: Penguin, 1992. Matassi, Elio. Hemsterhuis:  istanza critica e filosofia della storia. Napoli:  Guida Editori, 1983. Mathieu, Pierre-​Louis. ‘La Bibliothèque de Gustave Moreau’, in Beaux-​arts (April 1978): pp. 155–​62. McShine, Kynaston. ‘A Conversation about Work with Richard Serra’. In Richard Serra: Forty Years. Edited by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. pp. 15–​40. Meillassoux, Quentin. After Finitude. Translated by Ray Brassier. London: Continuum, 2010. Melville, Stephen. ‘Richard Serra: Taking Measure of the Impossible’, in RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 46 (Autumn 2004): pp. 185–​201. Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception. Translated by Colin Smith. London, New York: Routledge, 2001.

241

24

Bibliography ———. The Visible and Invisible. Evanston:  Northwestern University Press, 1968. ———. ‘What Is Phenomenology; The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences; and Eye and Mind’, in The Merleau-​Ponty Reader. Edited by Ted Toadvine and Leonard Lawlor. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007. pp. 55–​68, 89–​118, 351–​78. Migliorini, Ermanno. Studi sul pensiero estetico del settecento:  Crousaz, Dubos, André, Batteux, Diderot. Firenze: Il Fiorino, 1966. Millin, Aubin Louis. Galerie mythologique. 2 vols. Paris: Soyer, 1811. Mitchell, W.J.T. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986. ———.‘The Politics of Genre: Space and Time in Lessing’s Laocoön’, in Representations 6 (Spring 1984): pp. 98–​115. Molesworth, Charles. ‘Richard Serra at MoMA: Placing the Surfaces’, in Salmagundi 57 (Winter 2008): pp. 33–​44. Montfaucon, Bernard de. L’Antiquité expliquée et représentée en figures. Paris: F. Delaulne, 1719. Morrison, Jeffrey. Winckelmann and the Notion of Aesthetic Education. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Motschmann, Uta. Schule des Geistes, des Geschmacks und der Geselligkeit. Die Gesellschaft der Freunde der Humanität (1797–​1861). Introduction by Conrad Wiedemann. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2009. Mülder-​B ach, Inka. Im Zeichen Pygmalions. Das Modell der Statue und die Entdeckung der ‘Darstellung’ im 18. Jahrhundert. München:  Fink Verlag, 1998. Muñoz, Juan. ‘Illusionism, Perception, Plan/​Ilusionismo, percepción, proyecto’, in Juan Muñoz Writings/​Escritos. Edited by Adrian Searle. Madrid: La Central, 2009. pp. 70–​5. First published as ‘Ilusionismo, percepción, proyecto’, in Sur Expres 1 (15 April–​15 May 1987), p. 35. ———. Interview by James Lingwood. ‘A Conversation, May 2001’, in Juan Muñoz, A Retrospective. Exh. cat. Edited by Sheena Wagstaff. London: Tate, 2008. pp. 141–​7. ———. Interview by James Lingwood. ‘A Conversation, New York, 22 January 1995’. Parkett 43 (January 1995): pp. 42–​7. ———. Interview by Jean-​Marc Poinsot. ‘Un dialogue entre Juan Muñoz et Jean-​ Marc Poinsot/​A Conversation between Juan Muñoz and Jean-​Marc Poinsot’, in Juan Muñoz: Sculptures de 1985 d 1987. Exh. cat., pp. 43–​4. Bordeaux: Capc Musée d’Art Contemporain, 1987. ———. ‘Interview by Juan Vicente Aliaga and José Miguel G. Cortes’, in La creación artística coma cuestionamiento/​Artistic Creation at Stake. Edited by José Miguel  G. Cortes. Valencia: Instituto Valenciano de la Juventud, 1990. pp. 201–​5.

242

243

Bibliography ———. ‘Interview by Paul Schimmel. 18 September 2000’. In Benezra, Neal and Viso, Olga, Juan Munoz. Exh. cat. Washington and Chicago: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution and Art Institute of Chicago, 2001. pp. 145–​50. ———. ‘Notes on Three/​Notas afines a tres’, in Juan Muñoz Writings/​Escritos. Edited by Adrian Searle. Madrid: La Central, 2009. pp. 42–​3. Nadal, Abbé Augustin. Histoire des vestales, avec un traité du luxe des dames romaines. Paris: Vve Ribou, 1725. Najberg, Tina. ‘From Art to Archaeology: Recontextualizing the Images from the Porticus of Herculaneum’, in Antiquity Recovered: The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum. Edited by Victoria C. Gardner Coates and Jon L. Seydl. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. pp. 59–​72. Newman, Lex. ‘Descartes’ Epistemology’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited by Edward N. Zalta. (Fall 2010). Accessed 28 October 2013. http://​plato. stanford.edu/​archives/​fall2010/​entries/​descartes-​epistemology/​. Nicholson, Kathleen. ‘The Ideology of Feminine “Vertue”: The Vestal Virgin in French Eighteenth-​Century Allegorical Portraiture’, in Portraiture: Facing the Subject. Edited by Joanna Woodall. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997. pp. 52–​72. Nisbet, Hugh Barr H. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing:  His Life, Works, and Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. ———. ‘Laocoön in Germany: The Reception of the Group since Winckelmann’, in Oxford German Studies 10 (1979): pp. 22–​63. Norton, Robert. Herder’s Aesthetics and the European Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991. Novack, Cynthia J. Sharing the Dance:  Contact Improvisation and the American Culture. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Ovid, Fasti. Trans. by James G. Frazer. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1931. Parker, Holt N. ‘Why were the Vestals Virgins? Or the Chastity of Women and the Safety of the Roman State’, in The American Journal of Philology 125/​4 (Winter 2004): pp. 563–​601. Passeri, Giovanni Battista. Picturae Etruscorum in vasculis. 3 vols. Rome: Johannes Zempel, 1767–​75. Peyser, Jonathan. ‘Declaring, Defining, Dividing Space: A Conversation with Richard Serra’, in Sculpture 21/​8 (October 2002). Accessed 16 October 2013. http://​www.sculpture.org/​documents/​scmag02/​oct02/​serra/​serra.shtml. Philostratus. Imagines and Callistratus, Descriptions. Translated by Arthur Fairbanks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London: William Heinemann, 1931. Pillow, Kirk. Sublime Understanding:  Aesthetic Reflection in Kant and Hegel. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003. Plutarch. De Gloria Atheniensium. Critical edition and commentary by J.  Cl. Thiolier. Paris: Presses de l’Université de Paris-​Sorbonne, 1985.

243

24

Bibliography Potts, Alex. Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. ———. The Sculptural Imagination. New Haven and London:  Yale University Press, 2000. Rajchman, John. ‘Serra’s Abstract Thinking’, in Richard Serra: Forty Years. Edited by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. pp. 61–​74. Rajiva, Suma. ‘Art, Aesthetics and ‘‘Greenberg’s Kant’’’, in Canadian Aesthetics Journal 14 (Fall 2008). Accessed 13 May 2013. http://​www.uqtr.uquebec.ca/​AE/​ Vol_​14/​modernism/​Rajiva.htm. Rée, Jonathan. I See a Voice. New York: Metropolitan Books, 1999. Review of Toelken. Ueber das verschiedene Verhältniß der antiken und modernen Malerei zur Poesie, ein Nachtrag zu Lessings Laokoon. Allgemeine Literatur-​ Zeitung 3 (1822): pp. 865–​72. Reynolds, Joshua. Discourses on Art: Sir Joshua Reynolds. Edited by Robert R. Wark. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997. ———. Richard Serra Drawing:  A  Retrospective. Exh cat. Edited by Bernice Rose, Michelle White, and Gary Garrels. Houston: Menil Foundation, Inc., 2011. ———. Richard Serra: Forty Years. Exh. cat. Edited by Kynaston McShine and Lynne Cooke. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2007. Rose, Bernice. ‘Richard Serra’. Artforum International 51/​1 (September 2012), p. 491. Rose, Charlie. ‘A Conversation with Richard Serra, Part 2’. June 6, 2007. http://​www. charlierose.com/​view/​interview/​8536. Rose, Gillian. Dialectic of Nihilism. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984. Rosenberg, Harold. The De-​Definition of Art:  Action Art to Pop to Earthworks. New York: Horizon Press, 1972. Rosenberg, Karen. ‘Shockingly Orange, Invitingly Meandering, Immensely Imposing’, in New York Times, 5 October 2011. Accessed 28 October 2013. http://​www.nytimes.com/​2011/​10/​06/​arts/​design/​richard-​serras-​sculpture-​at-​ gagosian-​gallery-​review.html?_​r=1&. Rudowsky, Victor. ‘Lessing Contra Winckelmann’, in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 44/​3 (1986): pp. 235–​43. Russell, John. Francis Bacon. Revised and updated edition. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1993. Sandler, Irving. The Triumph of American Painting:  A  History of Abstract Expressionism. New York: Praeger, 1970. Santayana, George. The Sense of Beauty: Being the Outline of Aesthetic Theory. New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1955. Sartre, Jean Paul. L’Imagination. Paris: F. Alcan, 1936. ———. The Imaginary. A Phenomenological Psychology of the Imagination. Translated by Jonathan Webber. New York: Routledge, 2004.

244

245

Bibliography Schlegel, August. Über Dramatische Kunst und Literatur –​Vorlesungen: Erster Teil. Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1809. Schmidt, Stefan. ‘‘‘Ein Schatz von Zeichnungen’’. Die Erforschung antiker Vasen im 18. Jahrhundert’, in 1768: Europa á la grecque. Vasen machen Mode. Edited by Martin Flashar. Munich: Biering und Brinkmann, 1999. pp. 29–​47. Schönberger, Otto. ‘Introduction’, in Philostratos: Die Bilder. Griechisch-​Deutsch. Edited, translated, and explicated by Otto Schönberger. Munich: Ernst Heimeran, 1968. pp. 7–​83. Sébastiani-​Picard, Odile. ‘L’Influence de Michel-​Ange sur Gustave Moreau’, in La Revue du Louvre et des musées de France 27/​3 (1977): pp. 140–​52. Selz, Peter. The Work of Jean Dubuffet. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1962. Senie, Harriet F. The Tilted Arc Controversy:  Dangerous Precedent? Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Serra, Richard. ‘Richard Serra in Conversation with Hal Foster; Questions, Contradictions, Solutions: Early Work; Notes on The Matter of Time’, in Richard Serra: The Matter of Time. Translated by Alfred Mac Adam. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl Verlag, 2005. pp. f23–​41, 46–​55, 141. ———. Writings/​Interviews. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. ———. ‘Notes on Drawing’, in Richard Serra Drawing: A Retrospective. Edited by Bernice Rose, Michelle White, and Gary Garrels. Houston: Menil Foundation, Inc., 2011, pp. 56–​7. Schapiro, Meyer. Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers. New York: Braziller, 1978. Squire, Michael. ‘Review of Mario Baumann, Bilder Schreiben: Virtuose Ekphrasis in Philostratus “Eikones”’, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2012.12.32. (http://​ bmcr.brynmawr.edu/​2012/​2012-​12-​32.html). Stadler, Ingrid. ‘The Idea of Art and of Its Criticism: A Rational Reconstruction of a Kantian Doctrine’, in Essays in Kant’s Aesthetics. Edited by Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Staples, Ariadne. From Good Goddess to Vestal Virgins: Sex and Category in Roman Religion. London: Routledge, 1998. Steland, Ann-​Charlotte. ‘Vestalinnen –​Ein zettypisches Thema des Malers Jean Raoux um 1730, angeregt durch ein Werk wissenschaftlicher Lituratur und ein Opera-​ballet’, in Artibus et Historiae 29 (1994): pp. 135–​52. Sternke, René. Böttiger und der archäologische Diskurs. Berlin: Akademie, 2008. Settis, Salvatore. Futuro del classico. New edition. Torino: Einaudi, 2004. Stiles, Kristine and Peter Selz. Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A  Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Berkeley and Los Angeles:  University of California Press, 1996. Sylvester, David, Richard Shiff and Marla Prather. Willem de Kooning: Paintings. Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art and Yale University Press, 1994.

245

246

Bibliography Taylor, Mark C. ‘Learning Curves’, in Richard Serra: Torqued Ellipses. New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 1997. pp. 33–​59. ———. The Herculaneum Women:  History, Context, Identities. Edited by Jens Daehner. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2007. ———. The Speculative Turn. Edited by Levi Bryant, Nick Scrnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: re: press, 2011. ———. The Sublime (Documents of Contemporary Art). Edited by Simon Morley. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. Tischbein, Wilhelm. Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases, Mostly of Pure Greek Workmanship. 2 vols. Naples: W. Tischbein, 1791–​4. Toelken, E.H. A.L. Millin’s Mythologische Gallerie. Berlin: Nicolai, 1820; 1848. ———. Ueber das Basrelief und den Unterschied der plastischen und malerischen Composition. Berlin: Realschulbuchhandlung, 1815. ———. Ueber das verschiedene Verhältniß der antiken und modernen Malerei zur Poesie, ein Nachtrag zu Lessings Laokoon. Berlin: Nicolai, 1822. Torrelodones. Juan Muñoz archive, MS Juan Muñoz. ‘On Public Sculpture/​Sobre escultura pública’ (1981–​ 1982)’, in Juan Muñoz. Edited by Adrian Searle (Madrid: La Central, 2009): pp. 36–​7. ———. Juan Muñoz archive, MS Richard Serra, interviewed by Juan Muñoz (1981), (unpublished). ———. Juan Muñoz archive, MS Juan Muñoz, ‘De la Escultura Publica: Entrevista con Richard Serra’. Serra interviewed by Muñoz (1981). Translated by Juan Muñoz. Unpublished. ———. Touching for Knowing: Cognitive Psychology of Haptic Manual Perception. Edited by Yvette Hatwell, Arlette Streri and Edouard Gentaz. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Co., 2003. Tuchman, Maurice and Esti Dunow, The Impact of Chaïm Soutine (1893–​1943): de Kooning, Pollock, Dubuffet, Bacon. Exh. cat. Cologne: Galerie Gmurzynska, 2001. Tuchman, Maurice, Esti Dunow and Klaus Perls. Chaïm Soutine (1893–​1943): Catalogue Raisonné. Koln, Germany: Benedikt Taschen Verlag, 1993. Tuttle, Leslie. Conceiving the Old Regime: Pronatalism and the Politics of Reproduction in Early Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Vidler, Anthony. Warped Space. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 2001. Visconti, E.Q. Il Museo Pio-​Clementino. 7 vols. Rome: Mirri, 1782–​1807. ———. Le pitture di un antico vaso sittile. Rome: Paliarigni, 1794. Viso, Olga. ‘Suspicions of the Gaze’. In Juan Muñoz. Exh. cat. Edited by Benezra, Neal and Olga Viso. Washington and Chicago:  Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, and Art Institute of Chicago, 2001. pp. 167–​82. Vv.Aa. In CAR = Conférences de l’academie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Paris: A. Quantin, 1883.

246

247

Bibliography Vv.Aa. Jean-​Bapstiste DuBos e l’estetica dello Spettatore. Edited by Luigi Russo. Palermo: Aesthetica, 2003. Waldman, Diane. Willem de Kooning. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1988. Walker, Lesley H. A Mother’s Love:  Crafting Feminine Virtue in Enlightenment France. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2008. Wellbery, David. Lessing’s ‘Laocoön’. Semiotics and Aesthetics in the Age of Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Wenzel, Christian Helmut. ‘Kant’s Aesthetics: Overview and Recent Literature’, in Philosophy Compass. Salmagundi, 4/​3 (2009): pp. 380–​406. Werner, Alfred. Chaïm Soutine. New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1977. Weyergraf-​ Serra, Clara and Martha Buskirk. The Destruction of Tilted Arc: Documents. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1991. Wheeler, Monroe. Soutine. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, in Collaboration with the Cleveland Museum of Art, 2nd Preprint, Arno Press, 1950. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. ‘Description of the Torso of Hercules of Belvedere’. Journal of Speculative Philosophy 2/​3 (1868): pp. 187–​9. ———. HAA = The History of Ancient Art. Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave. Los Angeles: Getty Institute, 2006. ———. Letter and Report on the Discoveries at Herculaneum. Introduction, translation, and commentary by Carol Mattusch. Los Angeles:  The J.  Paul Getty Museum, 2011. ———.Winckelmann: Writings on Art. Edited by David Irwin. London: Phaidon, 1972. Wine, Humphrey. Tradition & Revolution in French Art, 1700–​1880: Paintings and Drawings from Lille. London: National Galleries Publications, 1993. Wölfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art. Translated by M.D. Hottinger. New York: Dover Publications, 1950. Žižek, Slavoj. Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA, London: MIT Press, 1991.

247

248

Index Abstract Expressionism, 41, 121–​3, 142, 146n.15, 163, 208 aesthetic distance, 143 Aldobrandini Wedding, 84 Aristotle, 52, 81, 93n.22 art brut, 140, 148n.52 auto-​vandalism, 140 Barthes, Roland, 211, 212, 224n.37 Battle of Marathon, 88 beau idéal, 45, 106 Bellamy, Richard, 207 Beltiane, 207 see also Seyrig, Delphine Bergson, Henri, 125, 216 Berlin, 74–​6, 83 Bilbao, 172, 192 Bois, Yve-​Alain, 175, 183, 185 Bosse, Abraham, 15–​7 Brakhage, Stan, 203, 214 Desistfilm, 203, 214 Bruyère, Jean de la, 19, 32n.35 Buddhism, 206, 218 Buonarroti, Michelangelo, 2, 36, 103 cannibalism, 122, 139, 142–​3 Caro, Anthony, 183 Carpenter, Edmund, 187 Cassady, Carolyn, 206, 223n.11 Cassady, Neal, 206, 223n.11 Cassavetes, John, 214 Castelli, Leo, 208

Caylus, Anne-​Claude-​Philippe de Tubières, comte de, 15, 31n.21, 85 Cedar Bar, 205 Church, Judson, 193n.10 Cinema 16, 204 Circle in the Square, 221 close-​range vision, 186 Coltrane, John, 209 concetto, 2, 103 contact improvisation dance, 175, 178, 186–​8 corporeality, 58, 61 Corso, Gregory, 203, 204, 207–​8, 210, 220 Coypel, Charles Antoine, 9, 22 Cubism, 216 Cunningham, Merce, 193n.10, 209 Davis, Miles, 209, 224n.26 deconstruction, 133 de Kooning, Willem, 5, 105, 120–​5, 128, 130–​1, 135, 137–​8, 140–​1, 143–​5, 146n.23, 148n.50, 163, 208 Deleuze, Gilles, 175, 184, 186, 188, 194n.13, 197n.50 De Maria, Walter, 201n.84 Descartes, René, 152–​4, 157, 168n.6, 168n.8, 168n.10, 197n.43, 201n.82 dialectic, 53, 166–​7 Dionysian, 48, 104, 117n.22, 129, 142

248

249

Index Dubos, Abbé Jean-​Baptiste, 1, 9, 14, 38, 43–​5, 47, 49, 67n.19, 67n.24, 98, 115n.2 Dunn, Robert Ellis, 193n.10 Einstein, Albert, 216 Eisenstein, Sergei, 215–​6, 221, 225n.54 Battleship Potemkin, 215 Ekphrases or Ekphrasis, 3–​4, 6, 41, 44, 68n.37, 95n.38, 100 Elliasson, Olafur, 174, 201n.84 embodiment, 179 existentialism, 132, 147n.36 Faulkner, William, 216 Fénelon, François de Salignac de la Mothe-​, 17 Five Spot, 205, 210 Frank, Robert, 211, 224n.34, 224n.39 Frankenthaler, Helen, 208 Gautier, Théophile, 104, 110, 114 Gérôme, Jean-​Léon, 97–​119 Artist and his Model, The, 111 End of the Séance, The, 111 Painting Breathing Life into Sculpture, 113 The Studio of Tanagra, 113 Gesellschaft der Freunde der Humanität (Humanitätsgesellschaft), 76, 80, 83, 91, 92n.7 Gestalt, 43, 56, 60, 179, 187 Ginsberg, Allen, 203–​10, 219, 223n.19, 226n.63 Goldsworthy, Andy, 201n.84 Grand Union, The, 174–​5, 193n.10

Greenberg, Clement, 5, 120–​6, 130–​3, 135, 140, 142–​4, 145n.2, 145n.4, 145n.6, 145n.7, 146n.15, 147n.25, 147n.31, 147n.36, 148n.37, 151, 153–​67, 169n.14, 169n.21, 169n.22, 170n.24, 170n.27, 183, 208 Greenwich Village, 221 Gross, Sally, 204, 207 Guattari, Félix, 175, 186 Hagedorn, Christian Ludwig von , 84, 95 n.42 Haptic function/Haptic, 122, 128, 133–​5, 137, 142–​3, 175, 185 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 52, 63, 76, 153, 166–​7 Heizer, Michael, 201n.84 Herculaneum, 28, 34n.57, 42, 83–​4, 87, 94 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 37–​38, 52–​62, 65, 70n.48, 71n.51, 72n.62, 72n.64, 77–​8, 80, 83, 93n.17, 93n.18, 93n.19 Heyne, Christian Gottlob, 78, 80, 84–​5, 92n.11, 93n.18, 93n.19, 95n.43 Hirt, Aloys, 83–​4, 94n.34 Homer, 85, 204, 215, 221 Horace, 1, 76, 81 Inuit, 187 Judd, Donald, 174, 183 Junius, Franiscus, 81 Kant, Immanuel, 93n.18, 130–​2, 140, 143, 146, 147n.25, 153–​5, 158–​63, 165, 168n.9, 169n.15, 169n.19, 170n.24, 170n.33, 175, 184, 188–​91, 193n.12, 199n.69,

249

250

Index Kant, Immanuel (cont.) 199n.73, 199n.74, 200n.75, 200n.77, 200n.79, 201n.87 Critique of Pure Reason, 184 Critique of the Power of Judgment, 175 Kapoor, Anish, 201n.84 Kerouac, Jack, 202–​27 The Bishop of the New Amaraean Church: The Beat Generation, 205 Doctor Sax, 219 On the Road, 203, 205–​6, 210, 217, 219, 222n.2, 224n.27, 224n.39 Pull My Daisy, 202–​27 The Subterraneans, 218 Kline, Franz, 208 Klotz, Christian Adolf, 85, 95n.42 Kracauer, Siegfried, 214 Kyoto, 174, 187, 197n.43 The Lake Project, 191, 201n.85 l’arabesque, 105 l’art pur, 105 Le Brun, Charles, 89 Leonardo da Vinci, 103–​4, 186 Mona Lisa, 186 Leslie, Alfred, 6, 203–​27 Composition in Black and Red, 209 The Eagle and the Foetus, 205 Quartet #1 (in 4 parts), 209 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 1–​6, 8–​9, 13–​5, 23–​7, 29n.4, 30n.18, 31n.21, 33n.47, 35, 37–​9, 44–​9, 52, 54–​6, 63, 63n.1, 63–​4n.2, 64n.5, 68n.26, 68n.37, 72n.60, 73n.74, 74–​96, 98, 108, 115n.1, 116n.12, 120, 122, 124–​5, 130, 133, 140, 143–​4, 145n.2, 150–​71, 174, 176, 183,

188, 203–​4, 208, 210, 215–​16, 221, 226n.56, 228–​30 Levesque, Pierre-​Charles, 66, 84 Life magazine, 211–​12 Lin, Maya, 174, 201n.84 ‘Literalist’ Art, 183 Lockhart, Sharon, 191, 201n.86 Lunch Break, 191, 201n.86 long-​distance vision, 186 Look magazine, 212 Louis XIV, 17–​9, 21–​2, 24, 89 Maintenon, Madame de, 18–​9, 21 Maisel, David, 191 Marclay, Christian, 201n.86 Marx, Marxism, 153, 155, 165–​7, 169n.15 Merleau-​Ponty, Maurice , 174–​5, 195, 196n.31, 197–​8n.52, 198n.59, 199n.68 Phenomenology of Perception, 174 Millin, Aubin-​Louis, 87, 95n.45 Minimalism, 176, 183 Minkowski, Hermann, 216 Monomania, 138 Moreau, Gustave, 5, 97–​119 Apparition, 108 Jupiter and Semele, 106–​7 Salomé Dancing before Herod, 108 Salomé Tattooed, 108–​9 Morris, Robert, 183 myopia, 120–​49 Nadal, Abbé Augustin, 21–​2, 29n.7, 30n.10 Neel, Alice, 204, 207 neorealism, 213 New American Cinema, 203

250

251

Index New York Museum of Modern Art, 142, 145n.4, 174, 205 New York School, The, 105, 125, 156, 158, 161, 165 Newman, Jerry, 218 night vision, 186, 198n.63 Ninth Street Show, 208

Rainer, Yvonne, 174, 193n.10 Raoux, Jean, 8–​34 Rivers, Larry, 204 Rome, 9, 11, 19, 28, 33n.47, 75, 112 Capitoline Museum, 87–​8 Museo Pio-​Clementino, 87 Rose, Charlie, 179 Rosenberg, Harold, 208 Rossellini, Roberto, 213

objecthood, 151, 183–​4 objective apprehension, 184 Olitski, Jules, 183 Orléans, Duc d’, 22 Orlovsky, Peter, 203–​4, 207–​8, 219, 223n.19 Palladium, 11, 23 Paragone, 99 Parker, Charlie, 210 Parker, Denise, 207 Pausanias, 87 Paxton, Steve, 175, 179, 193n.10 Peebles, Mooney see Bellamy, Richard Pepper, Beverly, 201n.84 peripheral vision, 186–​7 Philostratus the Elder, 84 pictoriality, 176, 179 plasticity, 128, 134 Pliny the Elder, 87 Plutarch, 81, 93n.21 Polke, Sigmar, 201n.86 Pollock, Jackson, 122–​3, 155, 160–​1, 163–​5, 170n.32, 208 postmodern, 133 process art, 176, 197n.48 de Quincy, Antoine Chrysostrome Quatremère, 98, 116n.12, 116n.16, 117n.18, 188n.25

Schapiro, Meyer, 208, 215 Sénozan, Comte de, 23 sense perception, 166 Serra, Richard, 172–​201 Between the Torus and the Sphere, 178 Blind Spot Reversed, 180, 187 Cycle, 191 Double Torqued Ellipse, 180, 187 Junction, 191 The Matter of Time, 172–​201 Snake, 192 Tilted Arc, 177, 195n.26 Seyrig, Delphine, 207–​8 sfumato, 72n.64, 186 Simonides, 81, 93n.21, 95n.35 Smithson, Robert, 174, 201n.84 smooth space, 175 subjective apprehension, 184 sublime, 3, 53, 57–​8, 70n.47, 175, 188–​94, 199n.72, 199n.73, 199n.74, 200n.77, 200n.79, 201n.87 Symphony Sid see Torin, Sid third force, 178–​9, 196 Toelken, E. H., 74–​96 Torin, Sid, 220 Turrell, James, 201n.84

251

25

Index Vesta, 8–​34 Village Gaslight, 210 visceral intelligence, 190

weathering steel, 172, 192, 201n.86 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim, 3–​4, 13, 27–​8, 34n.57, 35–​73, 79

252