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ANXIOUS OBJECT #1105/ 2005
(  Satoshi Kinoshita )
| Series: | Paintings: Landscape | | Medium: | oilstick on non-stretched canvas | | Size (inches): | 80 x 18 | | Size (mm): | 2032 x 457 | | Catalog #: | PA_093 | | Description: | Signed, titled, date, copyright in magic ink on the reverse.
Art is essentially communication (a sine qua non for a symposium on art and cognition). Ambiguity makes communication more complicated, but also more powerful. All the more so if it flows richly in both directions.
-David Cohen
"Ambiguity and intention" by David Cohen
As my paper more properly concerns aesthetic appreciation than the mechanics of perception I feel, within the context of this symposium, a need to assert that, in my opinion, cognition and evaluation are to all intents and purposes, inseparable. There is no “fresh”, innocent seeing free of judgement in relation to a work of art. One is from the outset engaged in valuation. The cognitive pyschologist will acknowledge, I think, that the act of seeing entails split-second operations of categorization and organization which are in themselves reflexive, unconscious judgements of sorts. But I am going so far as to argue that conscious, deliberate judgement cannot be turned off the moment one becomes aware of art.
If judgement is imagined as the hot faucet in a sink, then at the very least it will leak as soon as the cold is turned on (cold being the raw, primitive act of seeing). And, as the “institutional definition” would have it, it is the act of being looked at as art that makes art art. Actually, that very question, “Is it art?”, ubiquitous in the experience of much innovative art of the last century, places ambiguity center-stage in the appreciation of modern and contemporary art. The critic Harold Rosenberg coined the phrase “the anxious object” to describe this situation.
Ambiguity is equally the hallmark of very fine and very poor art, and knowing this in itself breeds ambivalence. What I am looking at could be very fine, it could be very poor. Anxiety, we could say, is the royal road to the Sublime and a back alley to disappointment. But then, ambiguity by its nature unsettles, which explains its appeal to romantics and to the avantgarde, For the latter in particular, disruption of norms, of patterns of seeing or experiencing the world, has been their self-allotted mission. Ambiguities abound in the strategies adopted by the avantgarde. Collage, montage, the found object, painting from photographs so as to arrest and creatively exploit discrepancies: each of these test received boundaries of cognition in ways that teach of the experience of modernity.
My paper, however, focuses on a different kind of ambiguity. My contention is that, more than any other characteristic of art, ambiguity brings into question the notion of intentional fallacy. This idea, which gathered pace in the twentieth century, is dear to formalist and structuralist alike, and frankly indeed to any kind of serious attention to art, however free of doctrinal allegiance. The sophisticated viewer has been educated to believe in the supremacy of the text or object under view over extraneous considerations. The moralizing cul-de-sac of Tolstoy’s theory has been cordoned off (which, for sure, is a service to criticism). The “death of the author” is an article of faith for the committed aesthete. But as soon as ambiguity and quality cross paths, issues of intention once again arise.
By intention I don’t mean that the artist consciously has this or that fully articulated objective in mind at the moment of creation and that the success of the work is somehow mortgaged to the extent to which it was followed through. That would indeed be banal and reductive, robbing art (and for that matter ambiguity) of its organic quality, its ability to live and thrive independently of its originators’ intentions. We can ask the question in a more "critically correct" fashion: does the ambiguity sustain itself in the experience of viewing? If it does, if it has "quality", then it was present as a living, worked-through entity in the creative process and is not just a fluke discovered (deconstructed) at the viewer’s end. It has purposiveness, even if it is not there "on purpose". It has the "weight of decision", whatever the extent to which it was consciously decided upon.
It is not possible in the space of this article to begin to chart degrees of intention, nor to map a typology of ambiguity for the visual arts, let alone to correlate these two in some kind of graph. I would say, however, in considering types of ambiguity, that an ambiguity that is so obviously intended by the maker that it is axiomatic to the work ceases by definition to be an ambiguity from the point of view of evaluation. The reason I mention this is because in doing so I stake the claim of ambiguity’s relationship with intention. Consider double entendre (specifically, in visual art, anamorphy). As an example, take Arcimboldo’s The Gardener (c.1590) where an assemblage of vegetables turned 180° ingeniously becomes the portrait of the gardner, the bowl his helmet. Here is ambiguity that converts upon cognitive impact into a convention. Arcimboldo neatly exposes the contradiction at the heart of mimesis. The Ekphrastic poet extols a painting of seeds that is so realistic that a poor bird is fooled into pecking at it. This case underlies the extent to which all our cherished conventions are borne out of resolved ambiguities.
For to represent three-dimensional experience onto a two-dimensional plane is by definition a dubious trade; clarity is the lie, whereas truthfulness to what one actually sees generates ambiguity. The anamorph is not alone: a host of sometime ambiguities have been absorbed into the fabric of artistic convention: compressed space, distorted limbs, unfinish, any knowing subversion of the rules of perspective. All these formal strategies look, on face value, ambiguous, but they are taken on trust by the knowing consumer, for they work as expressive devices. Wölfflin made this case in The Principles of Art History putting forward, for instance, the category of "unclearness"; when unclearnesses are means of making the drama more tangible, they need no longer induce ambivalence or anxiety. In fact, they can add to the clarity and beauty of our experience rather than threatening us with the sublime. Just as in perceptual cognition we fill in gaps to complete a picture, so in judging a work of art we bridge stylistic gaps to meet the artist’s intentions.
We have spoken about types of ambiguity within depiction, of shapes and forms that degenerate into less legible passages or motifs. But in abstract art, the opposite phenomenon is responsible for ambiguity: forms that obstinately assume an unanticipated legibility which conflicts with the artist’s stylistic intentions. Of course, there is an enormous range of purpose after a near-century of abstract art. Some abstractionists retain a modicum of depictive interest, requiring the presence of a motif to abstract from; others are more purely non-objective, but can adopt a robust attitude towards accidental intimations of the objective world. Some strive for compositional dynamics, others for open fields, others still for mechanical impersonality.
Even the most seasoned viewers of abstract art, however, are so conditioned to look for representation in an image that they will often have the experience of seeing strange faces and limb-like forms in passages where such “gremlins” are completely unintended, and quite likely unrecognized by the artist. (Incidentally, the same figures are often to be found grimacing in drapery and rock formations in Northern Renaissance painting.) The effect this has is to re-impose pictorial conventions on a work that is trying hard to be, not a picture but a painting. We could say this is just an occupational hazard for abstract painting. But maybe we could also say that, despite the best anti-pictorial intentions of the abstract artist, the mimetic origins of painting craft comes back in the shape of these gremlins to haunt the form. However “abstractly” the abstract painter loves the depictive art of the past, in seeking to emulate and join that tradition, the depictive urge undermines their abstracting intentions.
To return to representational painting, ambiguity that morphs into convention becomes essentially a mode of rhetoric. In contemporary painting, one cannot proceed far without encountering that all-pervasive mode of rhetoric, irony. I notice that more than one earlier participant in this symposium has felt the need to confront the phenomenon of kitsch. Contemporary art looks to kitsch (hackneyed, cloying images of low-brow appeal) as ubiquitously as painting and sculpture one century ago looked towards “primitive” art, and art of the nineteenth century looked to classical and renaissance models. From the point of view of our argument, we can say there is a shift from ambiguity in style to ambiguity about style. To draw upon kitsch is no more likely to make knowing contemporary artists kitsch themselves than, say, faithfully transcribing old masters would make them masters. Kitsch has simply revealed itself as a fertile source of inspiration. “Inspiration”, of course, is a word with romantic connotations, and truth be told the inspiration of kitsch lies in its potential to destabalize notions of quality or originality. It appeals to iconoclasts, or at least that is what it did once. It may be, with certain current artists, that the infatuation with Bad Painting has moved beyond its initial conceptualist strategy to “assassinate” painting from within, to become instead an autonomous tradition, in the way that mannerist or baroque shock tactics once settled into polite pictorial conventions.
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, recently mounted a survey of young contemporary artists, “Drawing Now: Eight Propositions”. In one room, which looked at artists who exploit illustration techniques, two artists were pitted against one another who, to my taste, represent the zenith and nadir of Bad Painting: Elizabeth Peyton and John Currin. Bad Painting may be inherently bad to some people, but it is nonetheless an established genre, and as such (confounding though this will sound to the uninitiated) it has good and bad adherents. On the surface Peyton and Currin have much in common, and it was perfectly responsible of the curators to hang them together. Where they crucially differ, I will argue, is in the quality of the ambiguities that they arouse, and how these make manifest contrastive sets of intentions between the two artists.
The late Louis Finkelstein (painter and teacher) coined a phrase, “split intentionality”, although it is one he proferred as an educational rather than a critical tool: it helped him explain to painters where he felt they were going awry. Finkelstein, despite flirting rampantly with many styles in his own painting, was a modernist: reconcilliation and wholeness were his goals. It seems perfectly reasonable to me that current artists should want to orchestrate more complex projections of self and intention than a classic modernist might allow. I find Finkelstein’s term attractive, and in putting it forward I need to argue for a distinction between conflicting ambitions and a conflicted intention. The difference is akin to that between the dubious and the ambiguous. Currin is the example of conflicting ambitions, Peyton of split intentionality.
John Currin is an example of an artist who would have his cake and eat it. He deploys rendering skills which have largely evaporated from commercial illustration although they were the norm in that trade but half a century ago, and he does so with a dexterity that recalls Norman Rockwell. Where Rockwell fulfilled the traditional criteria of kitsch by satisfying the million with received pictorial devices and homespun sentimentality, Currin’s target audience is (slightly) more sophisticated and select - the artworld. His vulgarity is all-knowing rather than incidental. There seems, however, on the basis of the current vogue for Currin, to be such a diminution in the sensibility for old master techniques in a contemporary art scene where for several generations an anti-formalist, neo-dadaist, iconoclastic discourse held sway, that Currin’s tongue in cheek riffs on the old masters genuinely flatter the taste of new collectors for the very qualities he seeks to deconstruct. It is clear from the works themselves, however, that, enervated by their own disingenousness, they do not have the capacity to be moving beyond their shock value.
Elizabeth Peyton comes out of a totally different experience of kitsch. Where Currin is attempting a bravura double act – seeking to excel in the very tradition he must simultaneously denigrate – Peyton’s is an art of poignancy, of tender confusion, in which she is emotionally invested in the slightness of her chosen genre. Her subjects blur the boundaries of public and personal, making intimates out of elusive stars, and rendering as overnight celebrities her actual personal circle. By working the ephemeral, ditsey, inconsequential conventions of the fashion plate of yesteryear “as if” they were the most malleable of fine art techniques, Peyton finds a common ground between her spiritual and expressive fragilities. Ambiguity pervades her relationships with medium and motif alike. This ambiguity is kept alive in her images, and transfers intact to the sensibility of the viewer, an exquisite sensation.
I can anticipate, but must resist the charge that I am moralizing my response to Currin on the basis of speculation about his intentions. I fully accept that the road to paint heaven is paved with bad intentions. My problems with Currin are entirely qualitative. I can feel the negative and conflictual energies at play in his attitudes towards form and iconography alike. In metaphysical terms, Currin has an I-It relationship with artistic means, Peyton an I-Thou relationship. Each can be as resolved or unresolved in their ambiguities as they like; resolve is not the issue. The quality of their results has to do with the quality of certain organizing energies in their artistic personalities - thus the interest in intention. Art is essentially communication (a sine qua non for a symposium on art and cognition). Ambiguity makes communication more complicated, but also more powerful. All the more so if it flows richly in both directions.
© 2005 interdisciplines.
-www.interdisciplines.org/artcog/papers/11
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