Portfolio 12: Kitsch and the Avant-Garde

Prompt:  What is the avant-garde?  What are the politics of the avant-garde according to Clement Greenburg?  How does Greenberg describe the relationship of the avant-garde to bourgeois culture?  To mass society and culture?  How does Greenberg describe the relationship between the avant-garde and kitsch?  

In his essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" (1939), Greenberg describes the avant garde as an extremely self conscious, form-preoccupied style of art which came into being some time in the mid nineteenth century.  It was born, according to Greenberg, out of a certain cultural necessity, wherein the erosion of certainty and objective truth in the nineteenth century gave way to an "Alexandrianism" in culture, which is a stagnation of culture in which certain controversial issues are consciously avoided, and all new creative activity defers to the 'old masters.'  The avant-garde is brave where Alexandrianism is timid, active where Alexandrianism is static.  It moves culture forward precisely with its historically conscious outlook which seeks to imitate processes of art and its old masters, rather than reproduce and imitate the forms themselves.  Greenberg calls this highly self conscious sense of aesthetics "the imitation of imitating."  In painting, the avant garde is preoccupied with the "arrangement of spaces, surfaces, shapes, colors, etc. to the exclusion of whatever is not implicated in these factors" (9).  In poetry, the emphasis is on "the effort to create poetry the 'moments' themselves of poetic conversion, rather than on experience to be converted into poetry" (9).  

     Greenberg sees the avant garde as having a slightly confused relationship with politics.  Originally, the avant garde was so preoccupied with questions of form and the relative values of aesthetics, that it did not have a political program--its program was decidedly apolitical.  It soon found it necessary, however, to borrow from revolutionary politics the courage needed to defy social convention and to position itself critically against social (and artistic) establishment.  Yet, it is interesting to note that the birth of the avant garde in or around the 1860s in France also coincided with what has been called "the great divide" when high and low cultures began to diverge.  Thus, that which would rather divorce itself from class and the social/political world is in fact inextricably bound to the bourgeoisie by what Greenberg calls "an umbilical cord or gold" (11).  In the end, neither the revolutionary facet, nor the anti-social, apolitical facet of the avant garde is tenable.  Greenberg notes that academicism (which results in Alexandrianism) and commercialism (which results in kitsch) "are appearing in the strangest places" (11).

     This encroaching stagnation is particularly frightening for Greenburg because he sees the avant garde as really the only living culture we have.  We can see here an intersection with Benjamin, where the superstructure (culture, technology, etc.) begins to develop assymetrically with the base (the mode of production).  If the base does not socialize in time, then the avant garde will be assimilated into the very economic and power structures which produce kitsch.

     Because the avant garde is active, form-obsessed, historically conscious and (somewhat) revolutionary, it is the cultural opposite of kitsch.  Kitsch, however, develops roughly a half-century after the appearance of the avant garde, as a result of the industrial revolution ('the machine age').  Kitsch depends on the avant garde because the former defines itself against and alongside the latter.  It is not sensitive to history, but it is sensitive to the avant garde itself, and to public taste.  In an attempt to become as universally acceptable as possible, it constantly changes with public taste yet can never express what the avant garde cannot.  

      Greenberg thinks of kitsch as something of a disease or tumor on the side of the avant garde, imitating its effects on viewers, without developing the form.  Thus, it takes a shortcut; a viewer can experience similar effects looking at a kitsch painting, but a Picasso painting is intelligible only by those who have the resources and leisure to become educated.  As a result of this simplicity in expression and reception, kitsch has become the official culture of fascist governments, populist governments, and virtually all powers who rule by demagogy.  In democratic countries, however, kitsch is the universal culture as well, if not the official.  

       

Portfolio 11: The Aura in the Machine Age

Prompt: Summarize Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" (1939).  Can we reintroduce aura to an object that has been mechanically reproduced?  What are the possibilities for creating "aura" in the age of mechanical reproduction?

     Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" has two main theses:  The first, is that technological reproducibility withers the "aura" of the art object, reducing the authority of the art object to condition response on its own terms.  Secondly, this change in the way we view and understand art favors a mass to an individual response, which, as the masses become increasingly proletarized, results in the politicization of art.  Benjamin figures this politicization against the fascist attitude towards art which attempts to aestheticize the political.  This can only result in war.  

     The aura of an art work is its "here and nowness," which is related to the historical function of the art object as religious or cult object.  The art object creates a certain distance--not a literal distance, but the "unique apparition of a distance" (255)--between itself and a viewer.  This is what helps to establish the authority an art object has: by demanding distance, the art object asserts its uniqueness, its otherness--a process which ironically limits a viewer's experience of the object by denying a full identification with the object.  The objects "aura" is thus more important than any physical attribute it has.  For some object, Benjamin notes, it is "more important for these figures to be present than to be seen" (257).  

     The technological reproducibility Benjamin discusses is mostly on the order of photography and film.  Reproduction allows a destruction of cult value, a withering of aura and a negation of uniqueness.  With the probing, scientific eye of the camera, the photograph allows the masses to close the distance between the object and their selves.  It"extracts sameness even from what is unique" (256).  Benjamin likens this process to the intrusiveness of the surgeon.  As Roland Barthes would later do, Benjamin points to the increasing relevance of the press photograph.  The existence of the caption seems to symbolize the image's loss of cult value; the caption conditions--in fact instructs--our reception of the image as if to relieve us of the unsettling feeling of not knowing how to respond.  

     The political significance of all this lies in the growing relevance of the mass response.  Technological reproduction allows all art to be experience as a mass because it sees with a single eye, from a single perspective.  Unlike the theater, where the actor's expression appears different for each viewer depending on where he sits or what he cares to notice, the photograph displays the facts of an object's physical appearance in stark objectivity.  Because of this, and the erosion of the art object's aura, the mass can apprehend these images with a unity that is not only newly possible, but newly necessary.  The mass begins to take control over the mode of artistic perception.

     As to the question of reintroducing aura into a reproduced object, the task seems to me, in the light of Benjamin, a wholly regressive enterprise.  What is the benefit of reintroducing aura into the art object?  Benjamin says that the modes of expression are opening up, allowing the proletariat to express itself in ways previously allowed only to men of letters and education.  Thus, he says, "the distinction between author and public is about to lose its axiomatic character" (262).  Perhaps anxiety about the loss (death?) of the author or artist would encourage one to force aura into the reproducible.  Though I think such an act is more obviously egotistical the more and more the aura withers.

     To choose a pseudo-literary example, the increasing relevance of blogs and citizen reportage through the internet has destabilized the apparent authority of the journalist.  We could say even that the cult value of the journalist and his works has withered.  Making the news journalist give aura to his works when the very newspaper they appear in has lost its authority, it's monopoly on "the news" as a referent?  MSNBC and CNN have for some time featured a "blogosphere" section of their daily news shows where "experts" actually display a computer screen, which the studio camera focuses in on.  Thus old media filters the new media in an attempt to subsume a new news source under the category of "news" itself.  Though, to my eyes, they only point towards their actual demise, their actual lack of authority.  Watching a television screen of a computer screen can only remind the viewer just how much easier it is to bypass the television and access the blog itself.  

     On the other hand, it seems that we've come along way since Benjamin and that there are many arts which are intended to be reproducible, wherein reproducibility is part of the art.  Photography itself is a respected art, and photographic exhibitions are shown in the same museums as paintings and sculptures.  However, it is hard to say how exactly the aura of an art photograph differs from a painting, but I am certain that it does.  The photographs by Ansel Adams, for instance, command a certain authority as object, a certain uniqueness partially because of the detail and effort put into the actual printing of the object.  However, this effect is gained by denying the reproducibility of the photograph--a denial which itself withers with the advances in print technology which now allow for faithful reproductions.  

     It seems that the aura itself is somewhat dated, and people tend to go on making art anyway.  I am personally enamored with radio podcasts like This American Life, or the many independently produced podcasts available at the Public Radio Exchange where I have contributed content myself.  Many of these podcasts are less on the order of journalism and more geared towards a developed sense of the relationships between storytelling and aural experience--something that I think is, or is related to art.  Yet, in their podcast form, they deny any claim to "hereness" or "nowness."  They can be listened to in any place and at any time.  

     My examples are sparse and only partially illustrative of an argument, but I think I can conclude that it seems that these days, whatever "aura" art has is not as related to "here and nowness" as it once was.  Perhaps it is possible to reinscribe a refigured "cult value" onto an object without demanding a distance that is impossible.  Any art that does this I think first has to firmly establish its relationship with the masses, whether that relationship is an open or closed one.

Portfolio Ten: Sculpture in the Expanded Field

Prompt: Do Chinese rocks as defined by Zhan Wang "fit" into Krauss' argument about the modern and the postmodern?

In "Sculpture and the Expanded Field" Rosalind Krauss argues that 'modern' sculpture (that is, sculpture that is produced under the conditions of Western modernity) abstracted the sculptural form from its architectural or scenic environment.  What Krauss calls the 'monumental' aspect of sculpture was a pre-modernity ideal that figured the sculpture as supplementary to its environment, performing an ideological function that would modify or commemorate its site and it's (the site's) function.  Modern sculpture changed this by allowing the sculpture to function and signify on its own terms, by its own terms, and for its own terms.  As radical as this shift was, modernism still demanded a 'purity' of mediums and figured the artist as a specialist in a given medium.  

     Some time in the 1960s, according to Krauss, the 'field' of sculpture expanded drastically.  Sculpture was but one term in a complex of relations between sculpture, architecture, and landscape.  All these things have specific relationship to one another because the way our culture sees and defines sculpture in terms of what it is not.  Thus 'not-landscape' and 'not architecture' can signify 'sculpture' just as 'sculpture' can signify 'not landscape' and 'not architecture.'  Because "sculpture" is only intelligible in terms of these binaries, our historical period how "allows" for sculptures to be produced which situate themselves in complex relationship with categories like 'landscape,' 'architecture' as well as what Krauss calls, 'site construction,' 'marked sites' and 'axiomatic structures.'  Krauss calls this historical period (1968 onward) 'postmodern.'  However, I sense a timidity here in Kruass' writing.  She seems to wish there were another, less controversial term she could use other than 'postmodern.'  Perhaps she feels a pull between history and theory that is largely passed over in her essay.  Or maybe she isn't entirely sure herself whether the postmodernism of sculpture is so easily relatable to other kinds of postmodernism as the shared term implies.  She points to a modernist bias in contemporary art historical praxis that might resist her account of sculpture's history, so it may be that the timidity lies more in a sense of conflict between herself and her peers, rather than a conflict  between ideas internal to the text.  Though I sense that there is something more going on here.

     I do think that there is a 'fit' for Zhan Wang's sculptures and Krauss' notion of the postmodern.  Though I think that Wang's art pushes Krauss' framework to its limits and that ultimately, the stress calls for a new, or expanded framework.  The problem is that Kruass' argument is explicitly bound to western culture and history.  She does note, in passing, that non western cultures have an very different and interesting relationship to sculpture in that 'landscape' and 'architecture' are conceived of very differently.  Thus, the binary which defines sculpture as the point at which 'not-architecture' and 'not-landscape' meet does not work in, say, a Chinese context.     

         The Chinese scholar's rock, according to Zhan, "satisfied people's desire to return to Nature by offering them stone fragments from Nature" (qtd. in Wu Hung, 133).  Thus, Chinese 'rockery' is related to landscape.  However, as John Hay's article shows, chinese rocks have a close relationship with sculpture in that they were considered in one way or another art objects.  The word 'painterly' comes up several times in the historical texts, and they were sometimes c

arved and modified to achieve certain effects.  As the translation of jia  shan shi, "fake mountain rocks," shows, the rocks had a certain monumental quality, in that they were intended to directly reference mountains for the purpose of bringing a piece of actual nature to a landscaped garden.  Chinese rocks can thus be thought of as somewhere between landscape and modern sculpture.

     The above comparisons work out rather awkwardly because of the inherently western terms applied to a Chinese context.  As Krauss says, the 'field' of Chinese sculpture is simply a different field than our own.  Yet, I think Krauss' argument works out better as we think of Zhan's work in a postmodern context.  Beijing's rapid growth of urban infrastructure has brought western aesthetics into a Chinese environment.  Zhan sees the relationship between Chinese and Western aesthetics as an uneasy one for which an effective solution has yet to be found.  His metallic rocks, based on the forms of actual chinese rocks, takes the Chinese scholar's rock, a found object, and turns it into a postmodern sculpture.  The form of the chinese rock represents an authentic, old, Chinese culture.  The metal represents the new, amalgam culture of urban Beijing.  Thus, the chinese rocks shift from sculpture to architecture.  However, they hold on to the modern, monumental aspect of the chinese rock because rather than self referential, they function directly with the urban landscape of Beijing.  They are intended to, in a way, anneal the rift between an authentic Chinese culture and a borrowed Western one, still in the uncertainties of construction.

     Using Kruass' 'complex,' Zhan's rocks might be said to be between the categories of architecture and landscape, because of the landscape function the original Chinese rocks performed.  The rocks create a space as well as modify one.  The garden environment of the Chinese rock (representing authentic Chinese culture) is laid over the present environment of urban Beijing (representing a culture unsure of how to represent itself).  

Portfolio Nine [Under Construction]

O Portfolio Nine, like so much else in this uncertain world, your presentness is an impossibility....

Portfolion 8: The pleasure of the gaze

     Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema" critiques representations of gender in the cinema with a pointed use of psychoanalysis. Her main argument is that the cinema offers scopophilic pleasure which is ultimately narcissistic. On the one hand the spectator gains a (sexual) pleasure from the images seen, on the other hand he identifies with certain images. These two modes of looking is divided along gender lines. The (male) protagonist structures film. What the camera shows or does not show us is always in significant relation to that which the protagonist sees or does not see. He has a life of his own, so to speak, and the spectator is invited to identify with him. The gaze of the spectator is therefore gendered male because of this

 identification. The woman is figured as an object of the gaze and does not direct the spectator's perception in the authoritative way in which the male protagonist does. As an object she gives scopophilic pleasure, but as an autonomous person, her very presence in the image causes a castration anxiety in the spectator due to her lack of penis. This is the case because the cinematic experience closely simulates the Lacanian psychosexual stage of the Imaginary win which the subjectivity of the spectator's ego is developed and regulated by the play of scopophilic pleasure and identification with the figures represented on the screen. Thus, in order to counter the castration threat the woman poses, cinema employs a range of techniques to deny the woman a gaze and subvert her autonomy and identity as a character in the story.

     In his book, The Double Screen, Wu Hung describes the "Twelve Beauties" screens owned by Prince Yongzheng in the 18th century with a perspective very much like Mulvey's.  As in the image to the right, the women are situate in their own, private

 spaces, and "the illusory space behind each woman entices the viewer to peep through layers of gates and windows into her private domain" (Wu, 219).  In the painting at the right, the hand seems to gesture upwards, toward the face, inviting the viewer to deny any subjective power the woman's gaze might suggest, and instead consider her an object intended to give scopophilic pleasure.  The calligraphy in the background, written by Yangzheng himself, positions the prince in the role of primary viewer (the paintings were commissioned by the prince, for the prince) as well as a co creator of the image.  The calligraphy acts as a stand in for the prince and his presence in the woman's private quarters conveys a sense of his ownership over the space and the figure as well.   

     Wu does not use the words "castration anxiety" in any of its forms, and does not even say that the women represented had the capacity for threatening the viewer in any significant sense.  Yet, his arguments are all centered towards the ways in which the autonomy of female's image was denied, how the figures were carefully crafted to have a certain seductive power, and yet remain wholly objectified.  Part of the difference in approach between Mulvey and Wu may just be the difference between western cinema and Chinese painting.  The former has a sense of verisimilitude written into its very practice, while in the latter, realist representation was sideline to other concerns.  What these paintings show, for Wu, is the way in which Yangzheng displayed his mastery over the other which, for the Manchu rulers, constituted the entirety of subjects over which they ruled.  Such mastery "fulfilled not only a private fantasy [for Yangzheng] but also a desire to exercise power over a defeated culture and nation" (Wu, 221).  

Portfolion Seven: Narrative in Text and in Image

     Just as it is problematic to discuss an essentially literary term (narrative) in the context of images and painting, to discuss the devices used among similar works in text and image will come up against the same problems of analogy.  However, it seems that this difficulty, the difficulty of analogy, is exactly the one that we're confronting this week.

      Zhang Zeduan's Spring Festival on the River scroll gives a certain sense of narrative mostly as a result of what Julia Murray would term, its 'format.'  The format of the scroll is such that only a limited section can be viewed at any given time.  Thus, it feels appropriate to view the scroll linearly, moving from one section to another over time.  In this way, time (real time) is controlled.  Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope seems relevant here.  The chronotope, as Bakhtin defines the term, refers to the way(s) in which a literary work fuses time and space into a unity, manipulating both in different ways, at different points, towards a unified effect.  This notion applies more easily, of course, to works of text.  

     In Meng Yuanlao's Recollections of the Northern Song Capital a sense of space is controlled very exactly with the used of absolute spacial indicators.  The text is rife with words like east, west, above, below and so on.  At many points, exact distances between objects are given.  This, combined with the virtual lack of characters, gives a sense of timelessness to the capital.  Given such exact spacial dimensions, we are supplied with context but no action.  It is as if the capital always was and always will be.

     Yet, at other points, Yuanloa's descriptions manipulate the chronotope.  When we learn of the different festivals that occur and how they work, suddenly there is action, and people.  The process of the festival is described in close, chronological detail such that we know what happens in the morning, the afternoon and the evening.  The increase in action actually narrows the spacial dimension of the work as we focus closely onto the festival area and spend time watching its happenings.  Yet, in the end, this too has a timeless feel to it as well.  These sections (along with most of the work) are written in a generalized present tense.  We do not learn of a specific festival with specific people on a specific date, but rather a formula for a festival that we are told had been more or less repeated during Yuanloa's experience of the city.  Or, to use the structuralist terminology which Murray cites, the discursive time is generalized to the point of being static, while the story time (the time referred to) repeats itself ad infinitum in a lost, indeterminate past.  I think this, perhaps, is what we generally mean when we say that something is 'timeless': it suggests an action that is static as we experience it, but refers to something endlessly repeating, but not repeatable.   

     A similar sense of timelessness is achieved in  Zeduan's scroll.  Like Yuanloa's Recollections, the scroll is filled with people, but lacking in characters.  Much is happening in this snapshot of a moment, but it is a generalized moment, a moment rooted in place and time, yet somehow lacking these things as well.  All this is to simply say, it has no story, and I think Murray would agree with this point.  A story requires a transformative action or event happening to or through a character.  In the impressive, realistic detail of this immense scroll, I think we are given an excellent setting for such a story, but no story proper.  

     The way in which the format of the scroll limits and segments our viewing is analogous to the segmentation of Yuanloa's text.  We see episodes of events, but no specific chronology.  Such episodic viewing gives a real sense of chronology, of time passing, but I think it is only a reaction to the form; such a sense is not borne out by the content.  

     To the question, "can either of these works be called narratives?" it is probably clear that I would conclude "no" in both cases, but there is one thing which seems to contradict a lot of what I have been saying.  In the Yuanloa text, there are points at which he slips into a past tense and refers to "the old days."  Usually these sections describe the author's own experience in the city, but in other places it does not.  On page 413, to choose just one of many instances, the author describes several floating pavilions on "where people were allowed in to enjoy the spring" (413; emphasis mine).  This subtle reference to a present time significantly different from the time of which he writes may in fact refer to a story, rather than tell it.  This story would be the story of the fall of the Song empire and the sudden exodus south.  In this way, the entire work could be seen in terms not unlike the way we talk about chinese "episodic" art which reference specific stories with specific characters with specific trajectories and transformations but don't seem to give all the information upfront.  Perhaps the city itself is just such a character, and perhaps the timeless sense that Yuanloa's descriptions give is meant to access a collective mourning for a city and a life taken from an entire people.      

Porfolio Six: Iconology and Iconography

Erwin Panofsky tries to classify the different modes of art historical research and analysis in a system that is loosely based on the way in which we perceive art, and successive stages we take in thinking about it.  The goal is to define, as concretely as possible, the point at which formal analysis ends and intellectual analysis begins.  “Let us, then,” Panofsky begins, “try to define the distinction between subject matter or meaning on the one hand, and form on the other” (26). 

The basic unit of art historical analysis is the icon.  Panofsky does not explicitly define the icon here, but he seems to use it in the wide sense of a visual sign of any kind.  His analysis is not confined only to renaissance painting and sculpture, but also to the realm of gestures (as in the example of a man lifting his hat) and other forms of visual expression.

Panofsky divides the way we receive visual information into three categories.  First, there is the realm of primary or natural meanings, which is limited to 1) factual content: that which we understand by matching certain “visible forms” with real world objects we know from our own memories and experience and 2) expressional content: that which we understand using our empathic faculties (27).  Panofsky refers to the secondary category of meaning as just that, secondary or conventional meaning.  He defines it as that which we understand through our cultural understanding.  Unlike the information we glean from our experience (primary meanings) secondary meaning is concerned with the intent of the signer insofar as the sign enacts some cultural practice or ritual.  Finally, there is the realm of instrinsic meaning, which is that which we understand by intellectualizing the sign and interpreting it through the lenses of “period, nationality, class, intellectual traditions and so forth.” (28).  This information, requiring as it does a synthesizing analysis, subsumes the intent of the signer, unlike the first two categories which are in one way or another dependent on intent.

  Thus, iconography is divided from iconology by which categories of visual response it deals with.  Iconography is concerned with primary and secondary meanings, but not intrinsic.  Its mission is a cataloguing mission; it is interested in development of artistic motifs over periods of history.  Iconology is an analytic process.  It takes everything in its purview (history, culture, philosophy and iconography itself) in order to describe signs and artistic motifs as symptoms of something else.

Iconographically speaking, we can catalogue many artistic motifs that are present in various representations of the bodhisattva Guanyin.  Guanyin is represented as male at times, and at other times as female.  Often, the figure is shown with female hair and clothing, as in the many images of Guanyin wearing a veil.  The chest, it seems, never appear particularly feminized.  Thus, the sense of gender is consistently androgynized.  Often the bodhisattva is shown in a typical, meditative pose with one foot on one knee.  Also, the motif of a water vase consistently appears.

In the article, “Fire Down Below and Watering, That’s Life: A Buddhist Reader’s Response to Marcel Duchamp,” Tosi Lee makes many iconological arguments.  Still, most of it is indeed an iconographical analysis.  It is an iconographical move to argue, as Lee does, that many of the motifs in Duchamp’s work (androgyny being the main one) are similar to the motifs in various depictions of Guanyin.  From this, Lee can iconographically argue that the figure of Rrose Sélavy represents Guanyin.  But to argue that Duchamp and the group he was associated with, the Dadaists, had an artistic philosophy which enacted Buddhist concepts is using (in an inverted manner) an iconological argument to bolster an iconographical analysis.   

Portfolio Five: Bourdieu and "Style Art History"

     It seems that the practice of "style art history" may be back in vogue partly because Bourdieu's notion of social "distinction" figures style as the essential condition that divides that which is art and that which is not.  In this sense, style is essential to art; it is what defines a sphere of art over and against a sphere of a more generalized culture.  Without style, there is no art.  Furthermore, Bourdieu believes that a study of sociology must ultimately transgress this "sacred space" that art makes for itself, and conceive of artistic "taste" in terms not unlike the sense of the word that applies to food.   

     The more traditional notion of style, as typified by writers like Wolfflin uses style as an explanatory tool that is best applied from hindsight.  This "holistic" concept of style, to use Gombrich's characterization, is a rather harmless use of the notion; it explains why a specific period's or place's art looks a certain way without questioning the social reasons behind a style's production.  For Bourdieu, every style of art (that is, a "high" art which is distinguished from the more generalized mass of cultural products) distinguishes itself against previous styles.  This in itself is not so groundbreaking or controversial, but he goes on to argue that the art work makes its meaning largely incomprehensible to those who do not have the education, or have not acquired enough experience in viewing art to understand the stylistic distinction, which is largely historical.  One must be in the club.  In this way, art is a marker of class and always "fulfil[s] a social function of legitimating class differences" (Bourdieu, 7).

     As to whether Bourdieu's work on "distinction" legitimizes Zhu Qi's claim that Westerners do not understand Chinese avant garde art is questionable.  Bourdieu's conclusion that art marks and legitimizes class differences is certainly at work in Zhu's argument, but the claim that Westerners do not "understand" Chinese art seems to reinforce much of what Bourdieu seeks to break or transgress.  Zhu says that Westerners only gain a "superficial" understanding of Chinese art, which implies that there is a more essential meaning barred to them.  In this way, Zhu characterizes Westerners similarly to the way Bourdieu characterizes "the people," as an uneducated mass who cannot understand the way art situates itself in a history of art, and therefore cannot understand the bulk of an art work's meaning.  Westerners can only understand Chinese art in its (perhaps nonexistent) political, national and historical dimensions.  

     However, in claiming that Western critics and collectors only superficially understand Chinese art, Zhu is also arguing that this lack of engagement causes Westerners to value artists and art works that are so bad that not only are their meanings misunderstood, but the "true" meanings are themselves nonexistent or unoriginal in both eastern and western contexts.  This argument also strikes me as a little weak.  If so many artists are producing works specifically for a Western audience as Zhu says, then when a Westerner sees that work as engaging in dialogue with western styles, then isn't everything simply going to plan?       

     

Portfolio Four: Style and "fugu"

     The chinese notion of fugu, "to return to the past," and the closely related idea of ku-i, "the sense of antiquity," are both concerned with how a contemporary art work situates itself in relation to the works before it.  The stance an artist takes, or attempts to take in a work, has a wide effect that ranges from the way an audience receives a work, to the specific type of audience a work will attract.  As Ernst Gombrich notes, during certain periods in history, the particular style a work (or performance) aligns itself with could even have moral and political repercussions, effectively declaring the artist's allegiance with a certain group not necessarily related to art, and also positioning the artist against other groups (161).

     Zhao Mengfu's conception of ku-i held that an artist should study the traditional forms of the ancient masters and sift out the most essential, simple and pure forms which had this "sense of antiquity."  In these two paintings, one by the Ming dynasty artist, Wang Lu (right) and another

by the later, Qing dynasty artist, Gao Qi Pei (lower left), there is a clear sense that the artists are drawing on past tradition in the manner of fugu.  In Wang Lu's landscape painting, the composition and use of floating perspective is reminiscent of Gao Xi's canonical Early Spring. The composition, of course, is much simpler and direct.  Its lines are thicker and outline sharper shapes.  But the bold rock formations, with what Cahill might call their 'exaggerated and swollen rotundity,' recalls Gao Xi's aesthetic.  Perhaps this painter, working roughly 250 years after Gao Xi's time, intended to imitate, and indeed abbreviate the forms of the old master in pursuit of a ku-i, that a rough aesthetic which is yet "beautiful in it antique simplicity" (Bush, 122).  

     One dynasty later, Gao Qi Pei produces a painting even more similar in composition to 

Early Spring.  Again we see the use of floating perspective, the similar rock formations with only sparse shrubbery clinging to the top.  Again, there are distinct differences.  Gao Qi Pei's lines are thick like Wang Lu's, but lack the latter's sharpness and boldness in outline and detail.  These lines are blurry and indeterminate, lacking much of the intricacy and detail that can be seen in Gao Xi and Wang Lu as well.  Yet, the sense of antiquity in this piece is strong, recalling aspects of Yuan dynasty painting which Wang Lu may have missed.  Gao Xi obtains a dreamlike effect with his precise yet wavering lines and the use of whitespace which mists over and obscures much of the landscape. Gao Qi Pei obtains similar effects by abbreviating the form, reducing Gao Xi's techniques into a hazy, unelaborate line which blends details together and at times nearly fades into the paper. 

     Zhao Mengfu's conception of ku-i differs very much from Ernst Gombrich's thoughts on artistic style.  Much of the difference may simply come from perspective.  As a creator of art, Zhao Mengfu is naturally more concerned with form than context.  By contrast, Gombrich attempts to explain style in terms of its physical context--be it spacial, historical, social, technological or political.  Although he is wary of the unitary, holistic approach that Hegelian art historians like Heinrich Wolfflin, Gombrich admits that such perspectives are 'seductive.'  All this goes to show that Gombrich is much more concerned with explaining style than with classifying them.  Therefore, he might be inclined to take Zhao's claims about antiquity and form at face value, but would strive to go further into the socio-historical situation of the Yuan dynasty artist.  While Bush is perfectly clear when she says that "For the Chinese scholar, age had precedence over beauty," Gombrich would ask just why age had such precedence, how long it had this privileged status, whether certain groups valued things other than age, and so on and so forth.  Only an investigation that asked such questions, in Gombrich's view, could ever hope to explain that thing we call "style."  

Portfolio Three: Guo Xi's "Early Spring"

In his book, Chinese Painting, James Cahill gives a non-ekphrastic description of Guo Xi's Early Spring.  It seems that he does not offer an image of the painting, choosing instead to include an image of Guo Xi's Autumn in the River Valley, to which his survey quickly turns.  Thus, in some way, Cahill's description is intended to stand in for the image in our minds.  Yet he does not offer an objective description of the painting which would approximate its appearance in our minds, but rather uses a combination of what Michael Baxandall would call cause words, comparison words and effect words.

Cahill starts by describing the "earth forms" which are "swollen to an exaggerated rotundity."  These same earth forms, Cahill claims, are "deeply undercut" and even "altered."  All this refers to the making of the painting, which does not so much as actually describe the artist's process but rather describes what the art historian observes (and speculates) about the process by virtue of the works' effect on him.  Comparison words are used as well, often in simple impressionistic phrases like "the spidery bare trees" and in some adverbial phrases, like "the shadows flicker mysteriously."  Elsewhere, Cahill describes the lines in the painting as "nervous" and "wavering" which simultaneously personifies the lines as having an erratic personality (comparison words) and speculates about the lines' creation, suggesting that the way the lines were painting was in a nervous or wavering fashion.  

Rather than objectively describe the picture, language like this requires the reader to map aspects of the vehicle (spider, for instance) onto its tenor (in this case, the tree).  The meaning that the reader gets out of the figure (that is, the specific combination of features which the reader maps from spider to tree) is ultimately indeterminate, but the author's intention is not to create in the reader's mind an image of the tree which would correspond to the tree as it appears in the painting, but rather to give a combined sense of the image's appearance and its effect on a viewer.  With non-ekphrastic, metaphoric language, Cahill can build an argument towards an overall effect.  He says that the painting as a whole is is grandiose but "unsettling" and suggests "a turbulent vision of the world in flux."  

Portfolio Two: Ritual Objects

Prompt: "Can it be argued that there is something in the abstract--some aspect of form--that defines an art object as a ritual object?"

Considering my own limited experience, I believe it could be argued that something in the abstract defines an art object as ritual, but I am reluctant to make such an argument myself.  My readings in Freedburg and in Clunas have given me a diverse but rather sparse set of examples to draw upon.  While Freedburg would likely (and perhaps does so later in his book) claim that there is some formal element which connects the ritual elements of the Italian Renaissance and ancient China, I don't see the connection in form so clearly myself.  Secondly, I find it very difficult to make generalized claims about form when Clunas is good enough to remind his readers that among the ancient Chinese artifacts we have, it is quite likely that most of them are ritual objects.  How can we make generalizations about form without something to compare to?  How can we tell that it is something formal that makes something what it is when it is the only example of its type?  To choose an example, if we know that a decorative wine vessel is a ritual object because of the context in which it was found (beside other ritual objects, for instance, or in an actual burial site) then it seems to be more speculation than reason that leads one to find the object's "ritualness" abstractly, in its form.

Ranting aside, I do understand that there are formal elements that contribute to how we understand an object as a "ritual" object.  By combining elements of the spiritual and the quotidian, the form gives the sense that the object straddles two worlds, the material and the spiritual, the living and the dead, the real and the fantastic.  The image to the right is entitled "Mythical Beast" and is from the Portland Art Museum's permanent collection.  The beast it represents is clearly mythical, but it is probably better and more specific to say that such a beast with all of these features does not exist and never has.  Yet certain features of the sculpture resemble different animals that do happen to exist, combining to figure a creature definitely related to this world, and yet not of it.  Its feet and legs are like the limbs of a dog.  The torso has the proportions of a bull, and the way the head bends down supports this analogy.  The position of the horn on the head does not correspond to any animal I can think of, but its shape and size are not unusual.  The wings are only suggested at, more a part of the torso than a separate form.  The tail, however, is completely otherworldly, resembling more a blade like a sickle or an axe than any animal part.  Finally, the beast's posture is balanced and resembles a position a dog or bull might take.  It is not entirely clear to me whether the beast is supposed to be preparing for attack, or kneeling in submission, but that either of these actions seem appropriate and plausible only heightens the sense of familiarity combined with otherworldliness.  

  This next image, also from the Portland Art Museum, the mixture of elements that refer to a real world with those that refer to a spiritual one is even more acute.  The Museum calls this piece "Two Headed Earth Spirit."  The quotations that the museum offers suggests that it is not in any real sense the object's given name, but more a descriptive title.  It is easy to see how the object would acquire such a name.  The protrusions that rise up out of the base on either end resemble deer or elk antlers so well that it might be that they actually are antlers of this type.  They connect to wooden relief carvings which resemble a face more by virtue of being connected to the antlers than anything else.  The faces are decidedly fantastic, spiritual, or otherworldly.  The combination of familiar and unfamiliar forms that are yet comprehensible as representation help us to understand this work as a ritual piece.

The idea and study of ritual helps us to understand "that thing we call 'art'" by pointing towards the roots of artistic expression, its role in societies and how it was originally conceived of against non-ritual objects and other forms of representation, like language.  Although we live in a secularized society, and the study of art is largely secularized as well, that representative objects were originally harnessed because of their connection to other worlds suggests a field of meaning to which only the art object can refer.  

Portfolio One: Curating

     The exhibit of chinese porcelain and glass at reed college seeks to recontextualize the small collection in its historical dimension as "loot" gained in in the Opium Wars of the 19th century.  Rather than using a background of white or similarly neutral color, a black cloth lines the back of the display case.  Black and white pictures of chinese palaces are attached to the cloth background above and behind the pieces.  These pictures, combined with the rather somber cloth makes the viewer aware of how removed these objects are from their original setting and highlights their "stolen" nature.  A paper handout is in a stack next to the pieces and it explains what the opium wars were and how they relate to the Chinese porcelain that entered western art markets shortly afterwards.

     A survey of the ceramic collections at the National Palace Museum in Taiwan shows that curators there seek to divorce the Chinese objects from their contexts as court art.  In the text that accompanies each object, no mention is made of the Opium Wars or of Western influence at all.  Each piece is shown in high resolution photographs against a two-toned background of neutral grays, whites and blues.  The text (in english) focuses purely on the object and points out relevant details about the object's construction, decoration and sometimes its use.      

     While the Taiwanese exhibit lacks a good deal of context for these pieces, I personally find the Reed College exhibit uncomfortably didactic.  The area of the library where the pieces are displayed is notoriously cold and badly lit.  What's more, the display is simply too high to be accessible.  Half of the exhibit shows the pieces well above the viewer's head, such that only a bottom view is available.  While the display case itself is very tall, the shelves are adjustable and could easily have been lowered.  Clearly, the curators are trying to make a moral point about the objects' very existence in this corner of the world, and want to condemn the military events which started the "long and tumultuous" journey that originally removed the objects from China.  The awkward positioning and location of the pieces within the library help to make this idea more physical.  However, the handout is historically reductive:  one sentence reads "These photographs were taken in 1906, following the destruction of Chinese culture...".  While the point is interestingly made, the curators have been overly forceful, even abusive of their curatorial powers and the end result is that the viewer feels bullied into a position, rather than engaged in a dialogue.  I don't think it is unreasonable to suggest that the curators feel guilty about their school's ownership of these pieces.  Perhaps such a guilt is rooted in a sense of unwilling complicity in the power structures that made such acquisitions (by both the American military, and Reed College) possible.