The Illusion of Aimless Art
In his book, Thinking With Images, philosopher John Carvalho argues against metaphorical readings of artworks, contending that such readings limit deeper thinking because, in his words:
Making metaphorical associations does not require much thinking. It is more like following the rules for substituting one thing for another. The thinking we have in mind does not take the form of a deciphering. 1
Carvalho makes this assessment in the context of a comprehensive study of Duchamp’s enigmatic installation Etant donnes to illustrate his thesis that we only really begin to think about an artwork when we don’t know what to think about it. If presumably Duchamp didn’t know what to think about his own work, at least as it was unfolding, this would apparently support Carvalho’s belief in an open-ended thinking process, one without an aim or goal, at least for the artist. But is this aimless thinking process ever absolute for either artist or audience? Can we assume that most viewers of a perplexing artwork initially don’t know what to think about it but in time most will form some conclusions about the work and what it might mean? Might we also assume that as the artwork develops the artist also begins to form an idea as to its meaning or significance? Duchamp insisted that his works not carry a single meaning, that what they might mean is left up to the viewer and moreover that he never intended them to be expressions of a personal or subjective nature. While this notion might free the viewer from any obvious designs the artist had for the work, thus perhaps more thoroughly engaging the imagination of the viewer, there is always the possibility of an “unconscious intention” on the part of the artist. In other words, it’s highly unlikely that any work of art, no matter how perplexing, can be entirely without a personal or subjective aspect. Apart from or in addition to the possibility of some intention, however obscure, what are we to make of our subjective responses to such an artwork in light of our social nature? In addition to being individuals with putative free will we are also social creatures. It stands to reason that our responses can’t be entirely subjective, nor can the artist’s be entirely without an element of subjectivity. There are certain cultural viewpoints based on numerous factors, upbringings, biases, and so forth, often unconsciously held, that as social beings humans both share and are at odds with. Carvalho might argue that our affinities and differences based on social standing, race, gender, and so forth have no bearing on how an individual ultimately comes to understand an artwork. There is truth and value in this position, however, taken to an extreme it verges on solipsism, the illusion that we are all on our own. Obviously, artworks also have a social function; they have the power to engage people in diverse ways and reveal their affinities and differences, a function that also implicates the artist that makes the work.
When it comes to perceiving an artwork (or any object), it is critical to distinguish between the perception of the work in all its sensible qualities, and ideas and/or beliefs about the work based on background knowledge, interpretations, theories, and so on. We obviously do not relate to artworks only through the ideas we form about them. We appreciate the richness of our sensible perceptions of such things, even when that richness has an austere quality, as in minimal art. A distinction thus needs to be drawn between fact perception and object perception, the former involves knowledge or beliefs about the objects of perception, whereas the latter, according to the Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy:
[D]oes not depend on, and is therefore not relative to, the observer’s linguistic, conceptual, cognitive, and scientific assets or shortcomings.2
The presentation of an artwork, its physical context, accompanying curatorial remarks, and so forth, will have bearing on how we think about the object, which might coincide with the sensible perception of the object or be at odds with it. While object perceptions are sometimes never purely sensible, in so far as in some circumstances they might also impart ideas and/or feelings through their perceptual “rawness.” It is also possible that the unvarnished perception of things might elicit some unconscious influence on consciousness due to, for example, buried memories or feelings that might give rise to thoughts and feelings. Nevertheless, generally speaking, the object perception of a thing or an artwork is not essentially a matter of thought, but rather, of cognition. This might seem like a contradiction, depending upon one’s understanding of cognition. This is a critical point because cognition according to Nelson Goodman, lies at the heart of aesthetic experience:
In contending that aesthetic experience is cognitive, I am emphatically not identifying it with the conceptual, the discursive, the linguistic. Under ‘cognitive’ I include all aspects of knowing and understanding, from perceptual discrimination through pattern recognition and emotive insight to logical inference.3
Much has been made of the “visual turn” in formalist approaches to understanding or appreciating the arts. But if we are to believe Goodman, it seems more accurate to speak of a “cognitivist turn” when it comes to furthering our understanding of aesthetic experience. Rather than limiting our understanding of cognition by regarding visual thinking or “visuality” in opposition to the cognitive or cognition, Goodman’s important insight has the potential to clear the air. Nelson Goodman was emphatic on this point: Cognition must not be conflated with the conceptual. Awareness of the artwork’s sensible qualities, for instance, its size or shape or the way it is made is in most art inseparable from any ideas that the art might give rise to. This understanding need not lead to embracing, in Duchamp’s telling, the “retinal,” his somewhat florid term for art that focuses on pleasuring the eye at the expense of thought, the presumption being that thought and (visual) perception are always at odds with each other. The point is that the retinal or visual perception of art, particularly work that is a matter of visual metaphor, is never “mindless,” it is a mode of experience. However, it is an experience independent of a conceptual or linguistic framework; the physical object of perception becomes or better, is the locus of thought. I hasten to add that it is critical to understand that reducing cognition to visuality or the visual sphere alone is a conceptual fallacy. Our fundamental encounter with visual metaphor is cognitive, which is essentially experiential. Visual thinking based on object perception or ontological reality is nothing new, Rudolph Arnheim, among many others, have made convincing cases over the years for this cognitive capacity. Those artists that seem to be making art to simply pleasure the eye are also thinking in their own way, but their focus on the aesthetic pleasures delivered by the formal qualities of their art often blind them to the cognitive richness that art can offer.
And this brings us to the issue of reading visual art metaphorically. The metaphorical intention of an artwork is built upon a sensible perception of it; indeed, even the physical material of an artwork might be employed metaphorically. I question Carvalho’s dismissing the possibility of metaphorical interpretations of artworks on the grounds that such interpretations do not require much thinking or that it is simply a matter of deciphering. To begin with, metaphors, again according to The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy:
[A]re not cognitively dispensable decorations. They contribute to the cognitive meaning of our discourse; and they are indispensable, not only to religious discourse, but to ordinary, and even scientific, discourse, not to mention poetic. Nietzsche, indeed, went so far as to argue that all speech is metaphorical.4
In an explication of how language evolves, and words are extended to accommodate novel ideas and objects, the authors of A Companion To Aesthetics, writing under the entry on “Metaphor” offer a claim that seems to support Nietzsche’s view:
[T]hat language is metaphoric ab origine, its metaphoric character deriving from the very fact that, as we might put it, words are not the things they refer to, or that language is representative of but is not the same as our experience of the world.5
If we grant that language is metaphorical from the start, it seems only a short step to conclude that perceived images form the basis of language, but these images are always (or usually) “read” or interpreted. When it comes to images and/or objects with a metaphorical intention or bearing, again, this intention or bearing is not limited to visuality per se but is essentially a matter of cognition. This still doesn’t address Carvalho’s presumption about the so-called shallowness of metaphorical thinking. Is metaphorical thinking in either visual or verbal terms merely or only about following the rules of substituting one thing for another as Carvalho maintains? Might metaphorical thinking involve more than simply decoding images or text, thus making room for a certain amount of interpretative ambiguity? Even if decoding is involved, might there be different codes applicable to the same artwork, based on, for example, cultural differences, thus producing varying interpretations? Discussing metaphor, Ted Cohen offers some clues to these vexing questions when he writes:
Grasping a metaphor seems to require, as it were, an extra exertion, something beyond and in addition to what is required in grasping a literal meaning. Why suppose that there is a special kind of meaning that cannot be grasped in the customary way? Furthermore, even if the point of a metaphor is relatively specific and fixed, it is still true that metaphorical import often seems open-ended, and not able to be captured in a tidy paraphrase. In this respect, a metaphor seems less something with a determinate meaning than a stimulus to the imagination, an incitement to imaginative and fanciful thought.” 6
Cohen is suggesting that metaphors often have more than one meaning or interpretation; that individual experience and knowledge have bearing on how any given metaphor is understood. It seems that the point of visual metaphor in art, much like verbal metaphors, need not be to simply require the viewer to decipher an image but rather to think about or with it in an open-ended way, even if it seems “relatively specific and fixed.” This is particularly evident when an image or an object offers the possibility of an interplay between literal and metaphorical meanings; an interplay that suggests the complementarity of literal and metaphorical perception. A complementary relationship in this case involves two contrasting ways of perceiving an image or an object, depending upon the viewer’s focus, making how the thing is perceived in one sense relatively independent from a contrasting perception of it. Modern forms of advertising have made use of this interplay in a myriad of ways, but it can also be found in the arts, particularly where poetic forms predominate (see my essay, “Unobtrusive Visual Metaphor”).
Throughout Thinking With Images, Carvalho is not telling viewers what to think about specific artworks, which is entirely up to them, but he is nevertheless suggesting how to think about or approach artworks, particularly those that offer affordances of a cognitive nature in spite of or perhaps because of their strangeness. Over and over, he emphasizes the value of not knowing what to think about these works in other than instrumental terms, thus initiating, in his words, “real thinking.” Such thinking results from what Carvalho and others call an “ecological philosophy of mind.” A concern with perception seems central to Carvalho’s viewpoint, and he is right to argue:
Perception is active, not receptive, an achievement not a recognition. It is a skilled engagement with an environment full of things, affects, ideas and other active perceivers as well. 7
The active perception or skilled engagement with an artwork begins the process of understanding or making sense of the artwork. It seems unlikely that not knowing what to think about a confounding artwork can ever be truly perpetual because most viewers will eventually form some idea about the artwork. Carvalho’s point seems to be that the perplexing artwork will be perpetually open to any number of interpretations, and moreover, the greater the interpretations and duration of this openness, the greater the artwork. Suppose hypothetically that the artwork is so perplexing that nothing can ever be made of it. Various interpretations as to its meaning or significance proliferate over time and yet the mystery of the artwork seems impenetrable. If this is a possibility, what cognitive value does the work possess if it simply induces endless thought and imaginings about it? Such artwork might have a putative aesthetic value, perhaps in that maligned sense of the merely retinal, but does its apparent meaninglessness have any real or ultimate purpose? Another way to put it is: What, if anything, is the real meaning of an artwork that apparently cannot be resolved, and does this constitute a problem? This brings us to the notion proposed by Duchamp that there is no solution to an artwork because there is no problem. But this seems dubious if not disingenuous. All artworks, even the most abstruse, pose problems, either immediately or eventually in terms of understanding or appreciation. With Duchamp in mind, wasn’t the “retinal” deemed a problem by him and others because it seemed to eclipse thought when it came to understanding art as opposed to merely appreciating its aesthetic qualities? It might be that there is cognitive value in both perspectives: the determinant and indeterminant. One the one hand, it is often satisfying to make sense of something, and on the other, there is pleasure in the ongoing speculation about the meaning of something. In either case, it is a mistake to support a nihilist position and assume that not only is there no meaning in anything but moreover the very concept of meaning is meaningless.
Real thinking only begins when we don’t know what to think about an artwork is an appealing argument. If our inability to think anything about the artwork is sustained, or if our thinking about it is forever shifting, which is to say, our thinking about the work has no set purpose, does it have a meaning in any sense or is this eternal elusiveness a meaning in itself? The notion of “eternal elusiveness” suggests a positive role for the indeterminant position. Is this elusiveness perhaps a metaphor for the human condition, assuming an eternal inability to grasp the essence of life or existence? Or is it less a metaphysical issue and simply that thinking is pleasurable in itself regardless of a goal? This too might be essential to our humanness. And yet, such pleasure might only satisfy aimless minds, or those content to swim in circles, whereas many of us still seem compelled to make meaning of our lives and the world around us, perhaps especially where meaninglessness raises its thorny head. I unfailingly believe that most human beings are born with the desire and propensity to make meaning, even as ever-increasing efforts by society (and advanced technology) seem to undermine or overwhelm this precious human virtue. The irony is that this great human virtue is perhaps the main reason that we have been so successful as a species (in spite of all our faults and failings).
Before closing it is important to make some further distinctions: Not knowing what to think about something is distinct from not knowing how and why to think about something. The what is the subject of thought, the how is the method, and the why is the reason. However, regardless of these distinctions, not knowing either what, how, and why to think about something is nonetheless still a matter of thought. Therefore, thinking about “not knowing what to think” seems paradoxical. The fundamental rule is that not knowing what, how or why to think about something is thinking just the same. If not knowing is a matter of thought in some fundamental sense, then the question is: If this state of uncertainty is perpetual (and thus thinking is in a continuous stall) does it override an inherent need to make meaning? I do not believe so. Meaning is, of course, intimately related to understanding, and how we understand something is also related to belief. It seems that subjective experience and/or knowledge are the links between belief and understanding. Belief in something is not always the result of understanding, indeed, understanding might not be necessary or even possible for one to believe. Moreover, when there is little or no understanding of something there might still be a reason to believe if such belief is advantageous. One might also not understand why they believe something but accept it as true based upon a “gut instinct” or intuitive sense of its truth. In this regard, I believe that the need to find meaning in an artwork is always greater than any perplexing quality that might temporarily tickle one’s fancy while forestalling some understanding of it.
Can our fascination or pleasure with something we apparently cannot understand be enough to satisfy our curiosity about this thing? Isn’t this fascination or pleasure ultimately driven by a need to know? We might find pleasure in the thinking that arises when we don’t know what to think about something, but isn’t this fascination implicitly driven by a need to understand the thing? If so, such thinking cannot be endless, without particular aims guided by certain constraints or rules of thought, including logic, however poetic it may be. This is an important conclusion because it has a good deal of bearing on our moral and/or ethical situation. The nihilist essentially believes that everything is ultimately meaningless, everything except the nihilist viewpoint. So, Carvalho’s argument carries a significant risk. The vitality of thinking can be somewhat preserved through the experience of art, but meaninglessness and chaos can undermine that vitality in much the same way that it can undermine the social and political institutions that preserve the framework of society. But this risk might be mitigated by the realization that not knowing what to think about something (an artwork or anything else) is itself meaningless without a backdrop of understanding writ large. The perpetual uncertainty of understanding (and a sense of knowing) anything is a grand illusion because understanding is always implicit in the experience of that which seems unknowable, nonsensical.
Postscript
In addition to addressing Carvalho's dismissing of metaphorical readings of artworks and his thesis regarding "real thinking," "The Illusion of Aimless Art" is also a reflection on thinking about how we might think (about art), or an intuitive reflection about a particular thought process. Of course, one must first take Carvalho's thesis seriously as well as finding any sort of meta-thinking worthwhile.
1. John M. Carvalho, Thinking With Images, An Enactivist Aesthetics (Routledge, London and New York) 2020, 89.
2. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge University Press), 1995. “Perception,” 569.
3. Nelson Goodman, Of Mind and Other Matters, Harvard University Press, 1984, 84.
4. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. “Metaphor,” 488.
5. A Companion To Aesthetics, Blackwell, 1996. “Metaphor,” 285.
6. Ted Cohen, “Metaphor” in The Oxford Handbook of Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2003, 371.
7. John M. Carvalho, Thinking With Images, 108.