ART 272 Spring 2009, Department of Art Theory & Practice, Northwestern University
Tuesday, May 5, 2009
Gadamer, Burger questions here:
14 comments:
Anonymous
said...
In discussion about Benjamin’s concept of allegory in the Burger article the distinction is made between organic work that is referred as classicists’ and that of the avant-gardiste. The classicist is said to treat the material as something living and respect its significance as something that has grown from concrete life situations. The avant-gardiste thinks the material is just material and tries to kill the life of the material. By tearing it out of its functional context is how meaning is ascribed. If the material itself is living according to the classicist then when a piece is finished couldn’t the work still be considered a writerly even though production has ceased which is what Barthes would call a readerly? The idea of meaning within the material brings back T.S. Elliot. Classicists would agree with T.S. in that meaning is found in the material while the avant -gardiste finds meaning/value in the artist. Furthermore the avant-gardiste joins fragments with the intent of positing meaning, so then would the meaning come from taking the material out of its functional context or from the artist positioning meaning or both because of the presence of the artist in both cases?
Is the allegorical related to the readerly and the symbolic related to the writerly in that they are both dependent on process?
In the Burger reading, Benjamin states that the allegory is an expression of melancholy because they cannot produce a meaning on their own and the meaning must then be found within the artist. Is there a way of distinguishing allegorical and non-allegorical art? Is it up to the artist to decide if the artist them self wants to be part of the meaning of the work?
Burger defines Benjamin's allegory as images isolated from their original, natural context and thus non-organic. Why is the symbol organic, while the allegory is non-organic? Is this related to what Gardner says about the "external" aspect of an allegory versus the metaphysical, essential affinity of the symbol to the symbolized? The concept of the allegory reminded me of our discussion of appropriation art and montage in 270. Both also involve fragmenting images from their supposedly natural, organic, original meaning. However, Benjamin seems to view allegory as inherently negative, full of melancholy due to focus on the singular, whereas appropriation artists viewed their work as a crucial questioning of the inherent biases and social constructs present within our culture as well as the crisis of originality and meaning in modernity. How could this be related to post-modernism?
It seems as if Burger equates avant-garde with abstract or montage art, as well as the Surrealist outlook on reading the hidden natural clues within our manmade world. Is it an oversimplification to state that the avant-garde isolates material from its context in order to posit meaning, as opposed to classicist who attempt to render a totality? After all, Burger states that "the withholding of meaning is a positing of it", and that "the negation of synthesis" can "become a compositional principle." In addition, don't classicists pick and choose elements to depict as much as Picasso did within his collages, the difference being that Picasso was more transparent in the construction-aspect of his work? Would that make them equally non-organic? Is any work truly organic? What about painted montages- are they a classical totality or avant-garde allegory?
Gadamer affirms that "the great ages in the history of art were those in which people without any aesthetic consciousness and without our concept of "art" surrounded themselves with creations whose function in religious or secular life could be understood by everyone and which gave no one solely aesthetic pleasure." Is Gadamer saying that the best art is that art which appeals to and can be understood by the most amount of people? Would Gadamer argue that the movie "Meet the Fockers" (critical flop, but box office success) which grossed $279 million is a better film than "A Beautiful Mind," best picture winner in 2001, but grossed only $170 million?
Burger highlights the connection between montage and movement in film and differentiates it from other mediums such as painting. However, although film montages do indeed incorporate movement both in their technology and content, doesn't the essence of the montage still lie within the juxtaposition of different images/ideas regardless of their mechanical properties? Isn't every artistic medium capable of this?
Referring to the quote that Danny brought up, did the "great ages of art" necessarily bring the best art? Isn't the Mona Lisa a great painting, but not necessarily a good painting? I feel that Gadamer would agree that Meet the Fockers is the greatest movie, simply because it is so accessible and enjoyable. Isn't that what matters in the long run? Do "great" things necessarily have to be the "best" things? For those who choose to prefer "A Beautiful Mind", are we essentially wrong in our decision?
Burger says that Cubism doesn't content itself with merely showing a reality fragment, but at the same time stops short of a total shaping of the pictorial space. Does this intermediate ground represent an overlap between allegory and symbolism? Is such an overlap even possible?
Burger avant-garde work's refusal to provide meaning is experienced as shock by the recipient, but that ultimately this shock is non-specific and fleeting in effectiveness. How does this idea fit in with Walter Benjamin's discussion of shock as it relates to aesthetic experience?
Both the Gademer and Burger articles brought up the concept of allegory and this translated into my own thoughts concerning the Photoshop trend. Is Photoshopped photography a modern form of allegory? Burger does bring up the example of the photomontage artwork of John Heartfield. But photography today is doing some different and less apparent. Touched-up photographs seen in magazines aren't meant to be viewed as avant-garde, but they are still "essentially fragment and thus the opposite of the organic symbol."
However, Lukacs works as a counter-argument. He says that "organic work of art seeks to make unrecognizable the fact that it has been made. The opposite holds true for the avant-gardiste work: it proclaims itself an artificial construct, an artifact." All in all, I'm still left wondering if we can still view the glossy images of seemingly-perfect people as a form of allegory. Can an allegory be purposefully disguised? Can it portray itself as organic when it is obviously not?
1) Gadamer writes that "in every case the meaning of the symbolon depends on its physical presence and acquires a representational function only be being shown or spoken." To dispute, can't symbols also be mentally formed without the physical presence of, perhaps, "a badge," for example, as Gadamer supposes? If you imagine without physical provocation, a symbol, is it not still representative?
2) Burger's view on allegory is that it is "essentially [fragmented]," that "the allegorist joins the isolated reality fragments and thereby creates meaning," a meaning that he labels "posited." If true, then how is there still a connection between the allegorical reference used and the original source? What sort of relationship is created then? If a new meaning displaces the original, then what is the purpose? (I am confused as to what Burger is attempting to argue here).
In reference to the organic article, we watched an interesting video in Michael Rakowitz's class from the TED conference. See it here at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvrgD0mAFoU
Gadamer quotes Kant in that 'taste makes possible the transition from sensory attractiveness to habitual moral interest without, as it were, too violent a leap.' I'm particularly interested in the significance of comparing moral interest to aestheticism and whether the two can really be equated. What does that say about the ways in which aesthetic attraction determines an individual's perception of morality, and consequently ethics? Is that a fair equation to make?
Butler talks again about shock and the notion of expected shock. How does a sense of cultivated shock affect the interpretation of the world and the aesthetic? Suppose and individual constantly forces oneself to confront imagery that would cause shock; we know that the neurological predisposition causes the shock to lessen and become expected, but does that fundamentally alter the way in which the shock is interpreted? Can positive surprise have as significant an impact as shock, which I'm interpreting to have a negative connotation?
I was very surprised to learn of the dual meanings of "organic." I had never even considered the term outside the connotation of the earthly or natural. Seeing as one notion relates to nature, while one relates to industrialization, I began to wonder: did these two notions become intertwined as a means of easing the public's possible fears of industrialization? Did we begin to relate wholeness of society as an industrialized body to the terms of the earth as to re-connect us to a more "natural" understanding of ourselves It seems to me that the symbolic and the allegorical are directly related. If indeed the symbolic "points up a disproportion between form and essence," from where is this essence derived? Surely, there must be some sort of backstory to this essence, although it might not necessarily be biblical or mythological. Is symbol not allegory stripped down to its most fundamental state?
1. Early in his text, Gadamer ties symbols and allegory to religion. The symbol, he implies, is a way to attain knowledge of the divine through real-world elements: "it is possible to know the divine in no other way than by starting with the world of senses" (73). The symbol thus relies on the senses to create a connection to God. However, the sense of sight can be just as subversive to religion as it is helpful. As I've read and discussed in another class, sight allows people to fixate on icons, which can detract from divine connection. In their reliance on the fallible human senses, how else can symbols be subversive?
2. Burger distinguishes between photographic montage and montages made from fragments, such as newspaper clippings on a painting. He writes that photomontages are, like film, "obscured or at least made difficult to spot." He suggests that a photomontage is a more coherent whole. However, still photography has a tendency to strip things of context. One doesn't get an entire scene; one only gets a frame of it. As a result, the photomontage is rather deceptive. It presents as a whole what can only ever be fragmented moments of time. What are the implications of this? Is photomontage often used as a deceptive tool?
Definitions of the organic and nonorganic artist in the Burger article seem to orbit around the same ideas that we discussed last section on Barthe's ideas of the "writerly" and "readerly". How are these concepts similar or different? (I am thinking of the description of treating material as "something living" or "just material"...) can a readerly work treat material as a living thing, or is that a contradiction in terms? From the Gadamer article: he talks about the distinction and the relationship between symbol and allegory, especially historically. Then I read the short piece on the use of the word "organic". can we say something about the relationship between these two histories?
Overall, the two pieces seem to blend in perfectly with our reading from Tuesday, relating the "organic" and the "symbol" / "symbolic" with being "writerly," as opposed to the "non-organic" ("avant-gardists") and the "allegorical" to more "readerly" works. I'm just confused about a few points.
1. Could we maybe go over in class the Surrealist concept of "ennui"? I've heard about it before but it was never really fully explained, and I'm curious.
2. In the Gadamer reading, at one point he mentions on p. 77: "Similarly we find Solger saying that all art is symbolic." Doesn't it seem obvious that all art is symbolic on some level? While one can argue that certain pieces or processes are more readerly or writerly than others, in the end in some shape or form, isn't all art at least somewhat writerly/symbolic/organic? And if it isn't, doesn't that just mean it has failed as a piece of art?
Burger's article touched on the difference between the classicist and the avant-gardiste. The classicist is seen as organic, while the avant-gardiste as inorganic. The Avant-gardiste "tears [the material] out of the life of totality, isolates it, and turns it into a fragment." It basically removes the material from its history and original meaning, which is his problem with allegory. However, isn't the organic something you cannot trace? Something of which its origins cannot be defined completely? So doesn't this make allegory, and avant-gardism more organic because it is about the material at its most basic and neutral state?
Finally, in relation to the Gadamer article, would Burger find Symbolism to be more organic than Allegory again? Both agree that allegory is sort of "deathlike," but Gadamer insists that allegory "rests on firm traditions and always has a fixed, statable meaning which does not resist rational comprehension...or with the Christian interpretation of Scripture." How then can allegory be the stripping away and isolating of ideas? Won't it always have a basis in history somewhere?
14 comments:
In discussion about Benjamin’s concept of allegory in the Burger article the distinction is made between organic work that is referred as classicists’ and that of the avant-gardiste. The classicist is said to treat the material as something living and respect its significance as something that has grown from concrete life situations. The avant-gardiste thinks the material is just material and tries to kill the life of the material. By tearing it out of its functional context is how meaning is ascribed. If the material itself is living according to the classicist then when a piece is finished couldn’t the work still be considered a writerly even though production has ceased which is what Barthes would call a readerly? The idea of meaning within the material brings back T.S. Elliot. Classicists would agree with T.S. in that meaning is found in the material while the avant -gardiste finds meaning/value in the artist. Furthermore the avant-gardiste joins fragments with the intent of positing meaning, so then would the meaning come from taking the material out of its functional context or from the artist positioning meaning or both because of the presence of the artist in both cases?
Is the allegorical related to the readerly and the symbolic related to the writerly in that they are both dependent on process?
In the Burger reading, Benjamin states that the allegory is an expression of melancholy because they cannot produce a meaning on their own and the meaning must then be found within the artist. Is there a way of distinguishing allegorical and non-allegorical art? Is it up to the artist to decide if the artist them self wants to be part of the meaning of the work?
Burger defines Benjamin's allegory as images isolated from their original, natural context and thus non-organic. Why is the symbol organic, while the allegory is non-organic? Is this related to what Gardner says about the "external" aspect of an allegory versus the metaphysical, essential affinity of the symbol to the symbolized?
The concept of the allegory reminded me of our discussion of appropriation art and montage in 270. Both also involve fragmenting images from their supposedly natural, organic, original meaning. However, Benjamin seems to view allegory as inherently negative, full of melancholy due to focus on the singular, whereas appropriation artists viewed their work as a crucial questioning of the inherent biases and social constructs present within our culture as well as the crisis of originality and meaning in modernity. How could this be related to post-modernism?
It seems as if Burger equates avant-garde with abstract or montage art, as well as the Surrealist outlook on reading the hidden natural clues within our manmade world. Is it an oversimplification to state that the avant-garde isolates material from its context in order to posit meaning, as opposed to classicist who attempt to render a totality? After all, Burger states that "the withholding of meaning is a positing of it", and that "the negation of synthesis" can "become a compositional principle." In addition, don't classicists pick and choose elements to depict as much as Picasso did within his collages, the difference being that Picasso was more transparent in the construction-aspect of his work? Would that make them equally non-organic? Is any work truly organic? What about painted montages- are they a classical totality or avant-garde allegory?
Gadamer affirms that "the great ages in the history of art were those in which people without any aesthetic consciousness and without our concept of "art" surrounded themselves with creations whose function in religious or secular life could be understood by everyone and which gave no one solely aesthetic pleasure." Is Gadamer saying that the best art is that art which appeals to and can be understood by the most amount of people? Would Gadamer argue that the movie "Meet the Fockers" (critical flop, but box office success) which grossed $279 million is a better film than "A Beautiful Mind," best picture winner in 2001, but grossed only $170 million?
Burger highlights the connection between montage and movement in film and differentiates it from other mediums such as painting. However, although film montages do indeed incorporate movement both in their technology and content, doesn't the essence of the montage still lie within the juxtaposition of different images/ideas regardless of their mechanical properties? Isn't every artistic medium capable of this?
Referring to the quote that Danny brought up, did the "great ages of art" necessarily bring the best art? Isn't the Mona Lisa a great painting, but not necessarily a good painting? I feel that Gadamer would agree that Meet the Fockers is the greatest movie, simply because it is so accessible and enjoyable. Isn't that what matters in the long run? Do "great" things necessarily have to be the "best" things? For those who choose to prefer "A Beautiful Mind", are we essentially wrong in our decision?
Burger says that Cubism doesn't content itself with merely showing a reality fragment, but at the same time stops short of a total shaping of the pictorial space. Does this intermediate ground represent an overlap between allegory and symbolism? Is such an overlap even possible?
Burger avant-garde work's refusal to provide meaning is experienced as shock by the recipient, but that ultimately this shock is non-specific and fleeting in effectiveness. How does this idea fit in with Walter Benjamin's discussion of shock as it relates to aesthetic experience?
Both the Gademer and Burger articles brought up the concept of allegory and this translated into my own thoughts concerning the Photoshop trend. Is Photoshopped photography a modern form of allegory? Burger does bring up the example of the photomontage artwork of John Heartfield. But photography today is doing some different and less apparent. Touched-up photographs seen in magazines aren't meant to be viewed as avant-garde, but they are still "essentially fragment and thus the opposite of the organic symbol."
However, Lukacs works as a counter-argument. He says that "organic work of art seeks to make unrecognizable the fact that it has been made. The opposite holds true for the avant-gardiste work: it proclaims itself an artificial construct, an artifact." All in all, I'm still left wondering if we can still view the glossy images of seemingly-perfect people as a form of allegory. Can an allegory be purposefully disguised? Can it portray itself as organic when it is obviously not?
1)
Gadamer writes that "in every case the meaning of the symbolon depends on its physical presence and acquires a representational function only be being shown or spoken." To dispute, can't symbols also be mentally formed without the physical presence of, perhaps, "a badge," for example, as Gadamer supposes? If you imagine without physical provocation, a symbol, is it not still representative?
2)
Burger's view on allegory is that it is "essentially [fragmented]," that "the allegorist joins the isolated reality fragments and thereby creates meaning," a meaning that he labels "posited." If true, then how is there still a connection between the allegorical reference used and the original source? What sort of relationship is created then? If a new meaning displaces the original, then what is the purpose? (I am confused as to what Burger is attempting to argue here).
In reference to the organic article, we watched an interesting video in Michael Rakowitz's class from the TED conference. See it here at:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvrgD0mAFoU
Gadamer quotes Kant in that 'taste makes possible the transition from sensory attractiveness to habitual moral interest without, as it were, too violent a leap.' I'm particularly interested in the significance of comparing moral interest to aestheticism and whether the two can really be equated. What does that say about the ways in which aesthetic attraction determines an individual's perception of morality, and consequently ethics? Is that a fair equation to make?
Butler talks again about shock and the notion of expected shock. How does a sense of cultivated shock affect the interpretation of the world and the aesthetic? Suppose and individual constantly forces oneself to confront imagery that would cause shock; we know that the neurological predisposition causes the shock to lessen and become expected, but does that fundamentally alter the way in which the shock is interpreted? Can positive surprise have as significant an impact as shock, which I'm interpreting to have a negative connotation?
I was very surprised to learn of the dual meanings of "organic." I had never even considered the term outside the connotation of the earthly or natural. Seeing as one notion relates to nature, while one relates to industrialization, I began to wonder: did these two notions become intertwined as a means of easing the public's possible fears of industrialization? Did we begin to relate wholeness of society as an industrialized body to the terms of the earth as to re-connect us to a more "natural" understanding of ourselves
It seems to me that the symbolic and the allegorical are directly related. If indeed the symbolic "points up a disproportion between form and essence," from where is this essence derived? Surely, there must be some sort of backstory to this essence, although it might not necessarily be biblical or mythological. Is symbol not allegory stripped down to its most fundamental state?
1. Early in his text, Gadamer ties symbols and allegory to religion. The symbol, he implies, is a way to attain knowledge of the divine through real-world elements: "it is possible to know the divine in no other way than by starting with the world of senses" (73). The symbol thus relies on the senses to create a connection to God. However, the sense of sight can be just as subversive to religion as it is helpful. As I've read and discussed in another class, sight allows people to fixate on icons, which can detract from divine connection. In their reliance on the fallible human senses, how else can symbols be subversive?
2. Burger distinguishes between photographic montage and montages made from fragments, such as newspaper clippings on a painting. He writes that photomontages are, like film, "obscured or at least made difficult to spot." He suggests that a photomontage is a more coherent whole. However, still photography has a tendency to strip things of context. One doesn't get an entire scene; one only gets a frame of it. As a result, the photomontage is rather deceptive. It presents as a whole what can only ever be fragmented moments of time. What are the implications of this? Is photomontage often used as a deceptive tool?
Definitions of the organic and nonorganic artist in the Burger article seem to orbit around the same ideas that we discussed last section on Barthe's ideas of the "writerly" and "readerly". How are these concepts similar or different? (I am thinking of the description of treating material as "something living" or "just material"...) can a readerly work treat material as a living thing, or is that a contradiction in terms?
From the Gadamer article: he talks about the distinction and the relationship between symbol and allegory, especially historically. Then I read the short piece on the use of the word "organic". can we say something about the relationship between these two histories?
Overall, the two pieces seem to blend in perfectly with our reading from Tuesday, relating the "organic" and the "symbol" / "symbolic" with being "writerly," as opposed to the "non-organic" ("avant-gardists") and the "allegorical" to more "readerly" works. I'm just confused about a few points.
1. Could we maybe go over in class the Surrealist concept of "ennui"? I've heard about it before but it was never really fully explained, and I'm curious.
2. In the Gadamer reading, at one point he mentions on p. 77: "Similarly we find Solger saying that all art is symbolic." Doesn't it seem obvious that all art is symbolic on some level? While one can argue that certain pieces or processes are more readerly or writerly than others, in the end in some shape or form, isn't all art at least somewhat writerly/symbolic/organic? And if it isn't, doesn't that just mean it has failed as a piece of art?
Burger's article touched on the difference between the classicist and the avant-gardiste. The classicist is seen as organic, while the avant-gardiste as inorganic. The Avant-gardiste "tears [the material] out of the life of totality, isolates it, and turns it into a fragment." It basically removes the material from its history and original meaning, which is his problem with allegory. However, isn't the organic something you cannot trace? Something of which its origins cannot be defined completely? So doesn't this make allegory, and avant-gardism more organic because it is about the material at its most basic and neutral state?
Finally, in relation to the Gadamer article, would Burger find Symbolism to be more organic than Allegory again? Both agree that allegory is sort of "deathlike," but Gadamer insists that allegory "rests on firm traditions and always has a fixed, statable meaning which does not resist rational comprehension...or with the Christian interpretation of Scripture." How then can allegory be the stripping away and isolating of ideas? Won't it always have a basis in history somewhere?
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