Part-Objects as Art-Objects: Modernism and its Lack

The following is the first half of a dissertation I submitted for a Master of Arts degree. 

It was awarded a distinction.

Abstract

Although the terms ‘modernism’ and ‘post modernism’ in art history are contested concepts, according to Harrison and Wood (In. Harrison et al, 1993) there was a point at which a radical shift occurred between the two. As they argue, post-modern approaches to art address themselves to discussions of a broadly cultural and critical nature, and effectively negate the authority over aesthetic value seen in modernism. However this does not mean that ‘problems of valuation are either solved or rendered irrelevant’ (p.255). Indeed they argue a ‘third’ approach is required in order to be able to discuss the ‘critical awareness’ that, they argue, must logically exist in the ‘aesthetic experience’ as ‘processes of evaluation in the genesis of pictorial meaning’ (p.253). I argue here for the emergence of a third ‘process of aesthetic evaluation’; one that sees the use of conceptual metaphors appropriated from a variety of re-readings of the Freudian Oedipal event.

Chapter 1: Introduction

'We would propose that inquiry into the artistic (as opposed to the more broadly cultural) character of the postmodern could usefully commence at that point in the later 1960’s when the virtue and authority of Modernism itself came under sustained examination from within the actual practice of modern art’ (Harrison and Wood, In. Harrison et al, 1993, p 255-256).

There was a point at which a radical shift occurred in art historical discourse between what is now thought of as ‘high modernism’ and the turn towards, what Harrison and Wood discern as, a more ‘broadly cultural’ post-modernism (In. Harrison et al, 1993, p.253). This shift is centred on what Harrison and Wood suggested are ‘processes of evaluation in the genesis of pictorial meaning’ (Ibid, p.253). Whilst Harrison and Wood suggest that post-modern approaches to art address themselves to discussions of a broadly cultural nature ‘high modernism’ they characterise as being an ‘authority over aesthetic value’. However, this does not mean, Harrison and Wood argue, that ‘problems of valuation are either solved or rendered irrelevant’ (Ibid, p.255). Indeed, they argue, a ‘third’ approach is required in order to be able to discuss the ‘critical awareness’ that must ‘logically exist’ within the ‘aesthetic experience’ (Ibid, p.253). Harrison and Wood suggest that such an inquiry ‘may require the assertion of a ‘third term’ (In. Harrison et al, 1993, p250). A third term that is distinct in that whilst ‘may establish grounds for critical action; it does not however, make it its’ business to prescribe it’ (Ibid, 1993, p.250). What is particularly important here is that whilst any ‘third term’ of analysis needs to allow the spectator critical action it must not prescribe it. Contemporary readings of art, I will argue, discuss a series of modes through which the spectator is proposed to critically engage with formal qualities in abstract art, without prescribing more ‘broadly cultural’ critical action. Thus a third term is characterised that exists as several modes of evaluating form yet refrains from the more prescriptive ‘broadly cultural’ post-modernist approaches that Harrison and Wood discern. I argue here for the emergence of an approach to engaging with formal qualities in art. One that sees the use of conceptual metaphors appropriated from different readings of the Freudian Oedipal event that allows critical action yet is situated before any ‘broadly cultural’ prescription.

Art objects as ‘part-objects’    

The authoritative ‘Modernism’ (here described as ‘high modernism) that Harrison and Wood discuss is premised on the interpretation of material forms produced by the artist. Thus, forms such as fine lines, textured surfaces or blocks of colour may be interpreted according to the connections and rhythms they evoke. In 1967, at an ostensible peak of ‘high modernist’ formalism, Michael Fried (1998) had judged abstract art objects according to the extent to formal parts cohered to form a visual unity. Such a coherence of part elements, for Fried, produced a visual rightness of relations so profound that the beholder was absorbed into its synthesis. The absorption was such, so his argument goes, that the spectator experienced a ‘transcendence’ of bodily bound subjectivity, and moment of ‘grace’ as they became as ‘one’ with the artwork. The ‘Modernist’ approach as a unity of relations on a painterly surface (or parts of a sculpture) became the dominant discourse.

However, by the late 1960’s a radical shift had occurred, and the focus was placed on the split between the viewing body and the art object. ‘Minimalism’ was at the crux of this shift, and has been argued by Alex Potts (2000) to be premised on a ‘phenomenological turn’. Such a turn saw the art object foregrounding subjectivity rather than transcending it. The argument was that, as art’s phenomenological or affective qualities were experienced within the body, the entrapment of subjectivity within that body was thrown into sharp relief. A body set in sharp relief was experienced in contradistinction to Fried’s argument of a body being absorbed into the art. Consequently, alternative theoretical strategies that became of interest at that time focused on the nature of binary relations, and the split between the body and art object. And thus multiple strategies of difference (rather than unity) between art object and viewing subject came to the fore.

However, the singular approach to modernism was soon set in stark opposition to social realism. As Harrison and Wood state; ‘the intellectual culture of the cold war had been characterized by a structure of oppositions and contrasts’ (2003, p.1013) and this structure, they argue, ‘was constantly available to be mobilized in argument’. Thus the interest in strategies of difference quickly moved away from evaluations of difference within the purely formal qualities of art, to mapping difference more broadly. Political, colonial and gendered differences often took centre stage. Such a sharp turn, Harrison and Wood propose, has left unanswered questions regarding the evaluation of pictorial effects in art. In the final paragraph of Modernism in Dispute: Art since the Forties Harrison and Wood (In. Harrison et al, 1993) suggest that the somewhat sudden move from modernism towards a more ‘broadly cultural’ postmodern, although returned critical faculties to the spectator, did not mean that ‘problems of valuation are either solved or rendered irrelevant’ (Ibid, p.255-256).

Harrison and Wood’s use of the phrase ‘the actual practice of modern art’ is particularly pertinent to recent philosophical ideas regarding the ability of art objects to ‘think’. As the art historian Hanneke Grootenboer (2007) suggests ‘in recent years, the notion of thinking images has enjoyed increasing attention’. She means to suggest that as we engage with the material properties in art we are compelled to think about ‘how we think’ and therefore encouraged to notice that we ‘think’ in different ways. Grootenboer cites James Elkins paper entitled Can pictures think? (2006) as she marks a historical trajectory of philosophical thought on this subject that runs from Denis Diderot, through Hubert Damisch, and ends with Gilles Deleuze. Thus, Grootenboer argues, the idea of the capacity of images to ‘think’ is not a novel notion. However, she argues:

 ‘what has not yet been realized are substantive explorations of these images as a series or type; moreover, we lack new designs for particular interpretative approaches that such images may solicit’ (Grootenboer, 2007).

My principle interest here is to look at what might be said about an artwork from the 1960’s, at the point of high modernism’s demise, in order to discover ‘new designs’ for the ‘particular interpretative approaches’ that it can be said to ‘solicit’. To this end, I look at the work Grand Nucleus (1960-66) by the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica. Thus this dissertation aims to characterise the proposed gap between a single authoritarian approach to form in high modernism, and the ‘more broadly cultural postmodern’ that Harrison and Wood suggest leaves unanswered ‘processes of evaluation in the genesis of pictorial meaning’ (In. Harrison et al, 1993, p.253).

Art from the 1960’s has, since Harrison and Woods writing, been re-examined. Canonical high modernist works from the 1960’s and early 1970’s have been reconsidered by contemporary art historians. One approach has been to interpret art through complex metaphors appropriated from re-readings of Freud’s original Oedipal event. This has seen art historians applying theoretical tropes that move beyond binary splitting between subject and object, to include heterogeneous relations of difference. However, the heterogeneous relations of difference most frequently drawn on involve the ‘pre-Oedipal’ realm. This dissertation argues for the emergence of the ‘an-oedipal’ condition that is set it in opposition to the pre-Oedipal. Whilst it can be shown that art historian’s appropriations of heterogeneous strategies of marking difference break the domination of the singular approach to form proposed by high modernism, it falls short of being culturally prescriptive. Therefore, I want to propose, these appropriations of psychoanalytic developmental theory fill the theoretical gap in aesthetic evaluation that is suggested by Harrison and Wood to exist between high modernism and post-modernism. To this end, I map psychoanalytic approaches to re-readings of Freud’s Oedipal scenario, and discuss the ways in which they are being used to discuss ‘form’ in 1960’s non-figurative art today. Thus I seek to understand the challenges to ‘high modernist’ formalism that can be said to be presented by art objects in the 1960’s at the point of high modernism’s demise.

I want to argue for the existence of distinctly different approaches to the evaluation of ‘partial-objects’. These modes of evaluation correspond to the psychoanalytical operations proposed by key proponents of the ‘pre-Oedipal’, ‘Oedipal’ and ‘anoedipal’ as articulated by Julia Kristeva (reading Melanie Klein) and Jacques Lacan and Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari respectively. The aim is not to ultimately consolidate each of these psychoanalysts ideas, or to ‘prove’ that they are distinct from each other, but to use their ideas productively, as art historian’s have already done, and importantly, to clarify the different kinds of formal modes of evaluation being proposed by art historians today.

Initially I outline the development over the twentieth century of ‘high modernist’ formalism and the ways in which this is premised on the ultimate unification of partial-objects. Then I discuss some of the ways in which high-modernist formalism was challenged by post- modernist theories, before focusing on one particular challenge; the appropriation of psychoanalytic theories to read partial-objects in art. I look in more detail at contemporary art historical appropriations of the difference between the pre-Oedipal, the Oedipal and the anoedipal and explain some of the ways in which binary and heterogeneous approaches to partial-objects have been used as conceptual metaphors to read material elements in late 1960’s and early 1970’s art. Finally, I discuss my own engagement with the work Grand Nucleus (1960-66), by the Brazilian artist Helio Oiticica, through the various psychoanalytic logics that I have sought to clarify.

Chapter 2: Literature Review: 

High modernist formalism; a singular approach to evaluating part-objects   ‘Formalism’ at its simplest level involves making meaning for the material part-elements an artwork contains; such as colour, line, or mark. One approach is to discuss the spatial relationships between part-elements. That is to say, this approach to formalism excludes discussion of known objects that, being ‘re’ presentations of already valorised concepts, more readily lead to discussions of socio-historical content or narrative. Neither does formalism traditionally include the kinds of purely haptic tactile sensations - such as ‘disgust’ for example - that might be argued to arise in the viewer on seeing objects that partially represent something already known; such as smears of brown sludge, or liquids that are reminiscent of congealed blood etc. However, as I will later explain, this is not to say that the unknown in these qualities are not read formally. Regarding perception the difference between the unknown and the known is a point of much debate. The first question that arises is whether we perceive form as tainted by language, and what we already ‘know’, or whether it is possible to perceive form in a realm beyond language. As the prominent neuropsychologist Zenon W. Pylyshyn (1999) informs us, cognitive science has made ‘dramatic progress’ in the study of visual ‘perception’. Yet, he states:

'There have been, and continue to be, major disagreements as to how closely perception is linked to cognition – disagreements that go back to the nineteenth century’ (Pylyshyn, 1999, p.341).

This particular ‘major disagreement’ on perception can be found in art historical discussion between Michael Fried and T. J. Clark. Accepting the progression of the pictorial flattening of form in painting (often cited as beginning with Manet and ending with Pollock) as an accepted starting point, their arguments for the rational for such formal changes then divide. Cognitive science is also interested in this debate about perception and the evaluation of hard evidence helps us to understand the Clark/Fried divide. As Pylyshyn (1999) tells us:

 ‘the question of why we see things the way we do in large measure still eludes us: Is it only because of the particular stimulation we receive at our eyes, together with our hard-wired visual system? Or is it also because those are the things we expect to see or are prepared to assimilate in our mind?' (Pylyshyn, 1999, p.341)

Whilst Fried looked at particular stimulations received by the eyes, T.J. Clark had discussed what we ‘are prepared to assimilate’ and proposed a ‘Marxist’ influenced development of abstract art. Clark’s theory on abstract art has been argued by Harrison et al (1993) to have broadly run from Meyer Schapiro’s ideas in ‘The Nature of Abstract Art’ (1937) to T.J. Clark (1973, 1982 & 1985). Clark’s approach is important and not entirely irrelevant to this discussion because the rational is to map the ways in which we ascribe value to formal properties in art. However, his arguments are centred on wider socio-political discourse and I limit my discussion to arguments for ostensible ‘cognitive connections’ rather than go on to discuss the social consequences of doing so. In addition, this particular debate exists within a complex constellation of historical ideas and arguments, far too complex to properly outline here. Further clarification of the debate can be found in the discussion between Clark and Fried in the papers: ‘Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art’ (T.J. Clark, 1982) and Michael Fried’s response in: ‘How high modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark’ (Fried, 1982). In addition, much fuller arguments for and against ‘Modernism’ in its various guises is particularly well discussed in books by Charles Harrison (1993, 1997). Nonetheless, it is important to be clear about the assumptions of form upon which this research rests. Therefore I place my starting point on the perception of form from Jerry Fordor (1983). According to Pylyshyn (1999) Fordor, a prominent neuropsychologist, found plenty of evidence to suggest that the perception of form precedes cognition. This, according to Pylyshyn (1999), led Fitch (1978) to use the term ‘sub-doxastic states’ (Fitch, cited in Pylyshyn, 1999). Fitch is suggesting that the perception of form, or looking at formal qualities in an artwork, involves states of mind that precede acquired clusters of linguistic knowledges, structures or ‘doxas’. This is important, because as with the Fried and Clark debate, the counter argument is that the perception of form is preceded by linguistic discourse and thus only a socio-political analysis of the formal qualities of art will do. Therefore throughout my argument I am assuming that the perception of form is ‘sub-doxastic’ (or following Deleuze & Guattari 1994 an ‘Urdoxa’). However, I point to the ways in which it starts to become doxa, without providing a full analysis of any cultural system of beliefs in particular. Within art history the autonomy of what I describe as a ‘sub-doxastic’ theory of form is commonly associated with ‘high modernism’ and it is this trajectory that I shall outline here.

High modernism has been set within a trajectory that has been argued by Charles Harrison to have emerged in France; developed in England, and moved on to become paradigmatic in America. As Harrison states:

 ‘A high modernist critical tradition emerged in France in the later nineteenth century, to be first codified in the writings of Maurice Denis, was developed in England in the first three decades of the twentieth century, principally by Clive Bell, Roger Fry and R.H. Wilenski, and was brought to its paradigmatic form in America between the end of the 1930’s and the end of the 1960’s, notably in the work of Clement Greenberg and subsequently Michael Fried’ (In Nelson & Shiff, 2003 p.193).

Maurice Denis was a French ‘Post-Impressionist’ painter and writer working at the end of the nineteenth century and part of the Nabis group that included Pierre Bonnard and Eduard Vuillard. According to Charles Harrison; ‘the opening sentence of his 1890 paper ‘Definition of Neo-Traditionism’ ‘has been much cited as establishing a link between the symbolist theories of the late nineteenth century and the abstract art of the early twentieth’ (Harrison et al, 2005, p.863):

'We should remember that a picture - before it is a picture of a battle horse, a nude woman, or telling some other story - is essentially a flat surface covered with colours arranged in a certain order’ (Denis, In. Harrison et al 2005, p.863).

In this extract we see the beginnings of an interest in the arrangement and ordering of painterly elements. Denis also conveys a sense of the fundamental value that should, he feels, rightly be attributed to the formal aspects of art. Formal elements that reside on a flat surface would become the defining aspect of what was to be thought of, by the latter half of the twentieth century, as quintessentially ‘high modernist’ painting.

Building on this notion in the early twentieth century, as Harrison & Wood inform us, Clive Bell and Roger Fry ‘were to be closely associated with the propagandizing of Modern art in England for the next two decades’ (2003, p.107). Bell was involved with Fry in the second ‘post-impressionist exhibition of 1912. In a text taken from ‘Art’: ‘The Aesthetic Hypothesis’ published in 1914, Clive Bell described the ways in which the ‘relations and combinations of lines and colours’ could contribute to the creation of ‘aesthetically moving forms’(In. Harrison & Wood, 2003, p.108). For Bell the success of an artwork was closely related to the extent to which the elements it contained could resonate with each other in such a way as to create an emotionally moving quality he referred to as ‘significant form’. Bell also argued that ‘people who cannot feel pure aesthetic emotions remember pictures by there subjects’, whereas those that can feel are ‘concerned only with lines and of colours, their relations and quantities and qualities’ and can be informed ‘by a single line whether or no a man is a good artist’ (Ibid, p.110). Bell is quite clear that there is such a thing as ‘good’ art and that only certain people can see it. Therefore notions of the value of art, for Bell, are inextricability bound to his particular notions of ‘formalism’.

The most frequently cited name associated with high modernism in art is that of the art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg championed the abstract painting of artists such as Jackson Pollock. By the early 1960’s it was his definition of high modernism that was most influential in the development of the canon of abstract expressionism. Greenberg’s was a reductionist argument that proposed the development of a refinement in artistic practice. He argued that what was particular to painting was the flat surface of the canvas and that over the twentieth century artists had sought a flattened effect. In 1964 Michael Fried, much influenced by Greenberg, also agrees with Bell’s notion that it is ‘lines and colours’ and ‘their relations and quantities and qualities’ that are of the most value in art. He also argues that the ability of an artwork to signify in a valuable way evolves around the syntactical relationships suggested by formal elements:

‘The mutual inflection of one element by another, rather than the identity of each, is what is crucial...the individual elements bestow significance on one another precisely by virtue of their juxtaposition’ (Fried, 1967 In. Harrison & Wood 2003, p.842).

Indeed, for both Fried and Bell, a failure for the artist’s marks to produce ‘significant form’ (Bell, 1914) reduced a works status as ‘Art’. In Eugene Lunn (1982) reflects on what defined high modernism:

‘In much high modernist art, narrative or temporal structure is weakened, or even disappears, in favour of an aesthetic ordering based on synchronicity, the logic of metaphor or even what is sometimes referred to as ‘spatial form’’ (In. Gaiger & Wood, 2003, p.32).

Grand  Nucleus Helio Oiticica 1960-66

It is the possibility of a unity of relations between partial elements - ‘an aesthetic ordering based on synchronicity’ - that is of particular interest here. I think one way in which Grand Nucleus (1960-66) above, could be seen is indeed as a whole within which its various parts – colours and shapes - cohere in the eye and synchronise although I will argue that this is not the only way to read this work.

High modernist art came to be defined by advocates such as Michael Fried as that which produced a sensation of ‘atemporality’ that was argued to be autonomous from socio-political forces, and universal rather than unique to the individual. A defining moment in the history of high modernist art was given theoretical definition in 1967 by Michael Fried in the essay ‘Art and Objecthood’. As Harrison and Wood tell us:

 ‘In Fried’s view it is a symptom of the decadence of literalist art that it theatricalises the relation between the object and beholder, whereas the experience of authentic high modernist art involves the suspension of both objecthood and the sense of duration’ (Harrison and Wood , 2003, p.835).

In 1967, Fried discussed the ways in which syntactical relations between formal elements in a high modernist art work could create a sensation of timelessness; ‘at every moment the work is wholly manifest’(Ibid, 2003, p.845). That is to say that ‘syntactical relations’ were argued to produce an affective experience in the viewer which felt as though time had been suspended. In ‘Art and Objecthood’ (1967) Fried discussed the experience of high modernist formalism as a sensation of ‘presentness’ that involved a sense of ‘instantaneousness’. The important point was, he argued, that this resulted in an ‘a-temporal’ experience which produced a sensation of ‘transcendence’ of everyday ‘literal’ reality. ‘Transcendence’ he equated with ‘grace’. It was these qualities, he argued, that allowed high modernist art to defeat the ‘literalism’ of everyday reality, or in his words; to ‘defeat theatre’:

‘I want to claim that it is by virtue of their presentness and instantaneousness that high modernist painting and sculpture defeat theatre’ (Fried, 1967, In Harrison & Wood, 2003, p.845)

‘Theatricality’, for Fried, was the result of ‘literalist’ art that failed to create a sensation of the suspension of time. With time suspended art object and viewing subject became one. For Fried, art that he dismissed as ‘literal’ or ‘theatrical’ created a split between object and subject. Thus the ‘objectness’ of the art, threw an ostensibly bodily-bound subjectivity into focus which was a move away from ‘grace’. With such a separation between art object and subject, contingent, and thus ‘theatrical’ sensations were produced. This quality he discussed as the art’s ‘objecthood’. Somewhat perversely, such a careful analysis of what was not of value in art was to be widely acknowledged by art historians to have laid the territory for a sizable ‘shift’ of interest. A shift in value away from high modernism towards ‘literalism’ - interpreted as the inter-relations produced between the beholder and the art object. ‘Literalism’ effectively became a major focus in the 1970’s. Gaiger and Wood suggest the late 1960’s shift has been discussed as:

 ‘a shift from the conditions of an ideal encounter with the high modernist work of art - a disinterested spectator instantaneously apprehending the resolved formal configuration - to the conditions of the anticipated encounter with the literalist object: an embodied viewer moving around a physical object that is present in the same physical space’ (Gaiger & Wood, 2003, p.174).

Whilst one move away from ‘high modernism’ was towards the body, another was to revisit, or some would argue carry on with, ‘avant-garde’ ideas about the development of abstraction as a challenge to (rather than a mere reflection of) socio-political conditions. According to Harrison and Wood, Modernists championed the ‘apolitical virtue’ of Modernist art over what they saw as a ‘cultural form of political dogmatism’, whilst artworks that clearly represented a ‘relevant’ social realism, found that ‘Modernist abstraction seemed redolent of bourgeois idealism and mystification’.

Indeed, in addition to the overtly ‘social’ scenes found in depictions of human labour in large mural paintings, the 1970’s saw the development of a Marxist influenced social history of art that looked at many of the same twentieth century formal developments as the Modernists had done. After revisiting the ideas of Schapiro who had argued at the beginning of the twentieth century that changes in mark making might be the result of changed conditions in society, T.J. Clark (1973, 1982 & 1985) argued for the ways in which the formal changes in art (including abstract art) had been inextricably linked to, and determined by, socio-political forces. Clark argued that the idea that formal developments from the late nineteenth century onwards (that eventually resulted in the production of abstract art) were somehow free and autonomous from socio-political discourse was (wilfully) misleading. Conversations ensued between T.J. Clark in his paper ‘Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art’ (1982) and Michael Fried’s response with ‘How Modernism Works: A Response to T.J. Clark’ (1982) regarding the development of formalism. For example, Fried and Clark (2004) in discussion analyse Jackson Pollock’s abstract paintings and discuss the different points of view between modernism and social realism regarding the conditions that Pollock’s dripped and splattered tactile surfaces suggest.

However, as Harrison (2003) asserts, the most prominent view was Fried’s: ‘In view of hindsight, Fried has generally been seen as a somewhat Canute-like figure’. This is because his 1967 essay provoked a radical turn in art. As evidence, Harrison quotes the artist Martha Rosler, who was working at that time:

'I read Michael Fried’s essay...which was a sort of terribly starch defence of high modernism, and he spoke of the problem of art that did not follow these precepts as being ‘theatre’. And I said, ‘bingo, that’s it, that’s right. The art that’s important now is a form of ‘theatre’, and one thing that means is that it has to be in the same place as the viewer...’ (Rosler, In Harrison 2003, p.75).

Indeed, ‘temporality’ became a feature because the human body, redolent with sensations, related in different ways over time to another body in the room – the artwork. The split was initially set around ‘Minimalism’, which includes work from artists such as Donald Judd (below), Robert Morris and Frank Stella, but quickly came to inform many other kinds of art: Judd’s Untitled (1974) clearly reflecting the spectator through its’ mirrored surfaces.

Donald Judd Untitled (1974)
[Six boxes]

In between the overtly cultural Marxist readings of art, and the ostensibly autonomous high modernism, is, following Harrison and Wood, I propose, a point at which abstract art requires us to question how we begin to ascribe value to its formal parts. Yet, unlike more broadly cultural work, this art refrains from prescribing exactly how we do so. It is this point, I want to argue, that has been best described by contemporary art historians regarding late 1960’s early 1970’s non-figurative art in conjunction with various re-readings of Freud’s Oedipal scenario. Freud’s Oedipal event is principally about the child’s first experience of evaluation as they move away from their symbiotic unity with the mother, toward an evaluation of gendered binary difference. Sexual binary difference is perceived visually by the child, and consequently this theoretical trope has been useful to art historians in discussion of strategies of difference in art. However what is of interest to me here is that although at times art historians interpret art culturally at other times the formal ‘part-objects’ of art are read as metaphors for the ways in which we might map our thoughts, or make connections between forms. It is the metaphorical approach to form that I seek to extract from such writings and make distinct as I ask how we might discuss relational qualities in form today.