This morning I found a great paper by Charles Altieri, UC Berkeley English Professor and renowned theorist. In it, he sets out a perfect narrative of philosophy and aesthetics, their courtship, marriage (thanks to Kant, who set them up in the first place), trials and tribulations, and current marital problems. They are not breaking up any time soon, but there are things that are not quite cutting it in the 21st C. Nevertheless, in the beginning there was...
Light. & what Altieri does is write clearly and lightly on a subject that often gets bogged down in search of illumination. Here is a truth that I have been deriving from Wordsworth for, like, the last six months, with which Altieri enlightens us in his third paragraph:
"...Aesthetic pleasure pushes against the limits of empirical subjectivity. Pleasure located in the object follows the model of the sublime, a domain where some version of excess challenges the understanding and opens the agent to imaginative speculation on what lies beyond the boundaries of common sense. Such pleasure elicits an intensity and a mobility of self at odds with the versions of duty and decorum imposed on us as part of the socializing process [*this is like Kristeva's "necessity of revolt" I think]...In aesthetic experience we let our pleasure depend on our efforts to cast our judgments so that they elicit agreement from other agents [*as Kant], and hence become exercises in our capacity to identify freely and fully with what we take to be communal attitudes. Pleasure then is not merely a reaction, but a projection of what is possible for a self that submits itself to the discipline of tracking forms and exploring how it might be bound to other agents. This pleasure becomes a symbolic display of what is possible for me as a moral agent capable of identifying with rationality" (67-68).
I know that's a mega long quote for a blog post but it's GENIUS. basically, experiencing art makes us feel at once an intensity and individuality that hold us apart from societal expectations; (& for Kristeva, this might even be a sense of the reactionary, rebellious, revolutionary, etc)... and at the same time, aesthetic experience makes us feel part of a community through our expectation that others would see the artwork similarly. This is Kant's basic precept that "the Beautiful" is that which we expect others will also find beautiful.
(They key, is of course, that Altieri does not agree that this "topoi," as he calls it, is necessarily correct. However, what he does do, for me at least, is encapsulate a lot of the theory I have been reading in a few choice sentences, that are (now) going to help me talk about some art...)
So, to return to my artist-friend in New Zealand, whose name is Keinyo White, I think it's really interesting that he is (still?) extremely invested in this kind of rhetoric:
From his website: "To understand the revelations at the core of Keinyo White’s vibrant and extraordinary work is to understand the powerful, shaping influence of isolation.
The personal isolation of experiencing life as an African-American man at a time when black culture is struggling to retain its historic strength and unity. The professional isolation of emerging as a black artist in a white-dominated modern art world while conquering the immensely difficult art forms of painting and collage. The emotional isolation of a young man who felt compelled to carry the torch of black anger through his twenties only to find that same anger had left him exhausted and creatively limited.
White has now evolved from being a young and angry black artist to a master painter with a profound vision of race, hope, triumph and beauty."But actually he produces quite a lot of this kind of work:
Which are quite extraordinarily beautiful watercolour portraits of women, but which are not in the least testaments to artistic isolation or the vestiges of black anger. ... but that might not even be the point. What Altieri tells us is that the Romantic/Kantian topoi presents us with, instead, a process of that looking does both things at once: it allows us to tap into that feeling of apartness from society ("a young man who felt compelled to carry the torch of black anger") and at the same time reach a consensus that says, these are beautiful, you must see that these are beautiful, Keinyo sees their beauty, makes it luminous, and we comply and agree with his vision. At once, we are part of a community of rational thinkers, steeped in beauty.
As Altieri makes clear, it is the principle of pleasure that arises here as the main mode for experiencing art. Keinyo's pieces are not conceptual in the way that, say, those at the National Gallery's Pop Life exhibit were conceptual; they are instead exquisitely crafted and personal. The pleasure, then, I think is the intimacy of acquainting oneself with another's face. Of being able to stare, in a way one cannot do on the subway (even though I want to! Always, through my dark sunglasses). This intensity breaks the social taboo that says, "don't stare at people and dissect their face" and at the same time creates a new social unity around the fact of the portrait's beauty-- & the pleasure of looking.
So I've wasted the entire morning. Success!! Better shutter down. Happy August Long Weekend, everyone!
