10/6/2005 (WBUR web site)
Arthur Danto: 9/11: Heroic Sublime
"Recall that after Schubert's death, his brother cut some of
Schubert's scores into small pieces, and gave each piece, consisting of a few
bars, to his favorite pupils. And this act, as a sign of piety, is just as
understandable as the different one of keeping the scores untouched, accessible
to no one. And if Schubert's brother had burned the scores, that too would be
understandable as an act of piety." Ludwig
Wittgenstein, as quoted by Arthur Danto in his curator's statement for
"The Art of 9/11."
On September 12, I visited Arthur Danto in his apartment on
Manhattan's Upper West Side to talk about "The Art of 9/11," the
exhibit he had curated at the Apex Gallery.
HB: Where were you on September 11, 2001?
AD: Here.
Oddly, Barbara [his wife, the artist Barbara Westman] and I
were getting ready to go up to Wellesley to have a conversation with an artist
about a show called "Obituary," based on obits in The NY Times.
As we were getting ready, I looked, as I always do, on
Yahoo. It said two planes crash into World Trade Center in an apparent
terrorist attack. I ran to [cable outlet] Channel 1, and was locked into
television for the rest of the day.
I got one call from a guy writing for The NY Times. He
asked: What's the art world going to do about this?
AD: Same day. I couldn't imagine.
Since, then, I've come across a number of artists who
actually did document it. I didn't want documents in the show, though. I was
interested in the idea of ritual thinking that I got out of Wittgenstein. I was
interested in ritual thinking in the artistic response, which pertained to
feelings of grief and community.
Anger was a legitimate response; plenty of people were
pissed, rightly so. But I thought New York's response was heroic sublime.
Rather than anger, there was grief, mourning, and helping.
And it lasted for a while. I was overwhelmed by the appearance of shrines
everywhere in the city. There was more hugging and crying than I've ever seen.
Everyone seemed concerned for everybody else, everyone volunteering to help. I
was interested in whether any of that got into the art.
HB: In Brooklyn, I saw a handball court spray painted with
the names of neighborhood people killed in the attack. People were banned from
playing on it, and for a while, most didn't.
AD: On 9/11, Barbara had to go to Broadway. She laughed when
she told me about a taxi suddenly coming up the street, and the big American
flag it was trailing, the kind you pledge allegiance to in high school. She
said it was so funny, and so courageous, like: Fuck You!
Later, I felt every differently about flags being
everywhere. But there weren't many flags in New York right away.
HB: My impression is that you have a group of artists you've
been talking to for a while, and that the show is, in effect, a survey of their
work in relation to 9/11.
AD: No. The response was communicated to me by artists
themselves.
I've written about some, including Robert Rahway Zakanitch,
who did the lace.
He's a wonderful artist, who did a exhibition in the 90s
called "Big Bungalow Suite", gigantic paintings of his central
European parlor, all the fabrics and tschokes, etc.. I guessed he would have
done something unusual. So I called and asked if he did anything in response to
9/11, and he said, yeah, he had started painting lace, and it was an act of
defiance.
People were really moved by the show. I've gotten so much
response. I think there was a capsule of feeling in a lot of people, and scar
tissue that formed around it. The show broke through the scar tissue. The
feelings began to flood again in peoples psyche.
HB: The artists statements were more important than they
usually are.
AD: I thought they were essential. I wasn't going to say,
let the work speak for itself.
HB: In your curator's statement you discuss Ludwig
Wittgenstein [quoted above], and talk about the oblqueness you were looking for
from artists. That reminded me of the Hebrew prayer for the dead, The Kaddish.
The prayer itself says nothing at all about death or grief
or loss. It goes off in another direction altogether, praising the maker of the
universe.
AD: That's a beautiful example, The Kaddish. I heard my
father, who didn't know Hebrew, either, recite it for his father. I remember
sitting with him in this cold basement in a shul in Detroit. He'd bring some
rye whisky to the old Jews down there in their prayer shawls, and they'd carry
him through the whole thing.
It's a haunting, haunting thing. It's that rhythm.
HB: But The Kaddish is also a declaration of a religious
faith. Wittgenstein is not talking about specific religious consolation.
AD: What I was thinking about in Wittgenstein's passage is
his use of "understandable" -- the idea of understandablilty. It's
like Aristotle's idea of moral education, where you give the child some
examples and after that the child is on its own. You can't give all the
examples necessary. To be a moral person is to know what to do. It's as if the
child generates a theory of moral behavior.
HB: Like deep grammar?
AD: Right, like deep grammar. I allude to that in my text
when I write: "We understand the meaning of gestures we have never seen
performed before, as we understand sentences that have never before been
uttered."
I thought Wittgenstein was speaking about a cultural
grammar. Maybe a person would have to explain or illustrate it a little bit,
but then, you go: Aha, I see what you're getting at.
Not merely do we get it, but we can generate a defense of
what we do. There's a form of reasoning going on, moral reasoning.
"Undestandability" was the key word, and I've been carrying it my
head for a long time.
HB: Where is it from?
AD: From Wittgenstein's "On Fraser's Golden
Bough," published posthumously. [Danto cackles] I think it's one of the
most interesting things Wittgenstein ever wrote.
HB: I see you have a big Brillo Box here, under the table.
Is it Warhol's?
AD: No. it's by Mike Bidlow, the appropriation artist. This
is an appropriation of one of the boxes. Barbara and I had a marriage
anniversary party a while back. Mike said, I left something with the doorman
for you.
That's it.
HB: Can I touch it?
AD: You can do anything to it! That's part of its story.
About five years ago a friend of mine in Germany -- at the
time the president of the Nuremberg Art School -- said we should have a Brillo
Box conference.
I said, great, let's have a Brillo Box conference. There
were art historians and artists, including Gerard Melanga, who was in Warhol's
Factory, and Mike Bidlow. Gerard talked about actually making the Brillo Boxes
in Warhol's Factory.
Mike said, I'm not a good talker, can I give a performance?
I said, sure.
So everybody clears out of the room. When we come back,
there are two tables, each with a cloth over it. Mike pulls the cloth off one,
and there's the Brillo Box -- *that* Brillo Box.
He pulls the cloth off the other table -- and there's a
bucket of water, and a pile of Brillo. He dips a Brillo pad in the water and
starts to erase the Brillo Box. But he couldn't. The paint was too set.
He said to the audience, C'mon and help me. All those
students rush up to what they think of as an art historical event. They
couldn't erase it, either.
So obviously, you can touch it.
HB: At the end of your curator's statement you write:
"I am not a curator, but I felt that such a show would itself be
understood not as an ordinary art exhibition, but as what Wittgenstein calls an
act of piety, and serve as an aspect of the question of what art is after all
for, and how it, just as Hegel had said, serves, together with religion and
philosophy, as a moment in what he called Absolute Spirit."
You call yourself an analytic philosopher, so it makes sense
for you to allude to Wittgenstein. But you've got to be the only analytic
philosopher who simultaneously admires Hegel. Isn't it taboo for an analytic
philosopher to praise Hegel as often as you do in your work?
AD: I don't know. I do call myself an analytic philosopher.
Partly it's a style -- you look for the logical joints, and try to get at
things where they crack. It's a way of addressing questions. I'm still a
foundationalist, looking for basic unities, basic concepts.
I think analytic philosophy by people who are just analytic
philosophers has become so sclerotic. People have to liberate themselves from
it. There was a wonderful moment when we were going to tear down the whole
structure. But then, what do you? Abandon philosophy and adopt the language of
science, as the positivists tried to do?
I got involved in Hegel when I read his
"Aesthetics". I thought this is so unbelievably deep and rich. I
couldn't get over, just couldn't get over, that book. He is the guy, absolutely
the guy, who looked at paintings, wrote criticism -- his pages on Dutch
painting are unparalleled. He listened to opera, he really was taking it in.
HB: I remember taking a course you taught at Columbia years
back. I was prejudiced against analytic philosophy, interested in the
continental tradition -- Aristotle, Hegel, Sartre, Marx.
But I couldn't figure you out.
AD: (cackling) I couldn't figure myself out!
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