Arthur Danto died on Friday, October 25, age 89, after
having, over his long career as a writer, critic and educator, worked out a
distinctive take on contemporary art and aesthetics, one he often termed
Duchampian. By that he meant there was more to visual art than what immediately
hit the eye, more than what resulted, as Duchamp put it, in "retinal
flutter." Art was unavoidably involved with concepts, meanings, questions.
None were more intriguing for Danto over the long haul than the question, as
Duchamp posed it in his readymades, of what distinguished pieces of art from
like pieces, a bicycle wheel or upside-down urinal, for example, as deployed by
Duchamp, from the ordinary item.
For Danto, this was a philosophical question par excellence,
which meant that to read him as he explored it was to encounter a heady blend
of philosophy, art history, and close attention to the art works at hand. You
might, for example, find Heidegger rubbing up against Warhol in a piece by
Danto, or run into Wittgenstein as implicated by an appreciation of
Mapplethorpe. You will often find Danto flummoxed by how much he is inspired by
Hegel, who, given Danto's background and bona fides in analytic philosophy,
should have been the thinker most non grata. That Danto cites Hegel's writing
about art again and again — the last sentence of his last book is yet another
nod to how much he "learned from Hegel" — is an inviting paradox in his
work.
None of this should give the impression that Danto's writing
was labored or pedantic. "Quite early on," he once said, "I
decided to be a literary writer, which meant that I wanted my pieces to be a
pleasure to read." And so they were. Danto might argue that visual art had
left aesthetics behind, in the sense that beauty in any traditional sense was
no longer a defining criterion or even necessary ingredient of an art work, but
he took pains to make that argument in excellent prose. This is no more evident
than throughout Danto's last volume, What Art Is. This slim, elegant book hangs
on two close readings of visual works. I'll return to them shortly but given
his recent demise, I can't but think back on my contacts with him, dating to my
undergraduate days at Columbia College, where he taught philosophy.
My first memories of Professor Danto, circa 1966-67, are of
someone who defied my rage to pigeonhole profs. Danto called himself an
analytic philosopher and never disowned the label though he hardly looked or,
as became more evident over time, thought the part. Analytic philosophy, to
summarize it ruefully if brutally, was the attempt to expunge from the field
anything that smacked of metaphysics, anything that might be guilty of intellectual
overreach, or of passing off linguistic dead ends as deep thought.
The urge to purge is a traditional and intrinsic impulse of
philosophy — how it has always critiqued and reoriented itself — but was never
practiced with quite the zeal the analytics brought to it. (The famous line
with which Ludwig Wittgenstein poetically ended his Tractatus
Logico-Philosophicus — "What we cannot speak about we must pass over in
silence" — cast a sort of spell on those who followed him, sealing many a
philosophical lip). Danto himself, in mid-career, delivered a scathing
assessment of the stop and frisk approach to ideas employed by the analytic
police.
He described papers that came out of Vienna Circle, an early
twentieth-century source of the school, as, "specimens of disciplined
aggressivity. The 'final solution to the problems of metaphysics' [as it was
termed] sounds an uncomfortable echo to other final solutions being noised
about in the German-speaking world in the thirties and early forties."
***
Analytic thinkers tended to wear suits and ties, the dress
code of the managerial class, befitting those who were whipping the wild and
woolly field of philosophy into manageable shape. Danto did not adopt that
uniform. He lectured in a shaggy wool sweater — green, as I recall — often
dashing across the hall with an arm quickly outstretched as if to snare a
thought before it sailed out of reach.
The course I took with Danto was concerned with what he
dubbed the analytic theory of action: simple acts without precursors or
antecedents, acts unto themselves, basic, irreducible human motions. He later mused
that since, "those were revolutionary times in universities", he had
been naive not to expect that a course on action would inevitably attract students
who thought the focus would be political action. "I never saw so many
bored, disillusioned people in my life," he reflected, "as when I
explained that I was interested in such simple performances as raising eyebrows
or raising body temperatures."
I was among those for whom no theory of eyebrows could possibly
matter as much as increasing opposition to the draft and the War in Vietnam,
but I was never bored by Danto, never dozed through his lectures, as I did
through talks by other luminaries at Columbia. Danto threw himself into
thinking, was almost whiplashed by it, chasing notions as if they were line
drives. Thinking was the basic act for him.
My next encounters with Danto came years later, after he had
undergone his intellectual metamorphosis and emerged from it writing about art.
Danto became art critic for The Nation in 1984, and it was through his pieces
there that I picked up his trail. As he said in an interview I conducted with
him http://www.harveyblume.com/2013/06/arthur-danto-interview.html,
"there [was] an energy which came into my writing in The Nation for which
I have no explanation at all." Elsewhere he observed that writing about
art brought him into the midst of the life and culture of his day.
***
These days I never fail to think of Danto when I drive past
the gas station where I get my car inspected. Its sign boasts a red background,
the lettering mostly white, except for the word "Gas", in blue, italicized
and jazzy. Red, white and blue: America gassed up and ready to go. I would
never have given a second thought to this sign, were it not for Danto's close
reading of the Brillo Box — the original, supermarket, non-Warhol version — in
What Art Is.
About that original Brillo Box he wrote:
The 1964 box is decorated with two wavy zones of red
separated by one of white, which flows between them and around the box like a
river. The world "Brillo" is printed in proclamatory letters: the
consonants in blue, the vowels — i and o — in red, on the river of white. Red,
white, and blue are the colors of patriotism. . . The white river
metaphorically implies grease washed away, leaving only purity in its wake. The
word "Brillo" conveys an excitement which is carried out in various
other words — the idioms of advertising — that are distributed on the surfaces
of the box, the way the idioms of revolution or protest are boldly blazoned on
banners and placards carried by demonstrators. The pads are GIANT. The product
is NEW. The carton conveys ecstasy, and is in its own way a masterpiece of
visual rhetoric.
Some have criticized Danto for insufficient retinal flutter,
for big thoughts at the expense of seeing. There are scores of examples in his
work that refute that charge. His reading of the Brillo Box is one of them,
even if his goal in that case was to show that despite being a triumph of
"visual rhetoric," the Brillo Box was, in its pure state, the
opposite of art.
Danto credits the design of the Brillo Box to James Harvey,
an Abstract Expressionist painter who "made his living as a freelance
package designer." Harvey's Brillo Box was absent the very things he and
painters of his ilk strove for on the canvas — spontaneity, originality,
emotion. Then comes Warhol, who looks at that Brillo Box and sees it not as the
antithesis of art, but, just maybe, though nobody has said so yet, the very thing.
In short, Warhol likes it! (Liking things made Warhol Warhol well before it
made Facebook Facebook.)
It should be said, for those who don't know Danto's
writings, that the Brillo Box was his soapbox, his platform for puzzling over what
art is, the issue that vexed and preoccupied him ever since he attended the
show at the Stable Gallery, in 1964, where Warhol unveiled his own, art world,
Brillo Box.
What made the Warhol version different from the supermarket
box? What if the boxes were made of the same stuff, were chemically identical?
What if, to push the point, you could find in the Warhol box those very bristly
pads so good for scouring? What then could account for the difference, if any,
between the object in the art gallery and what you got at the store?
I'm not going to summarize Danto's work, over a lifetime, on
this point, because, for one thing, it varied as he refined it. I will say he
was open to and appreciative of all sorts of possibilities in art, as other
critics were not. Danto's predecessor at the Nation was the hugely influential
Clement Greenberg, the prophet cum commissar of Abstract Expressionism, who
reserved aesthetic Gulag for those who did not follow his Ab-Ex creed. Danto's
dogma, if it can be called that, was that the age of dogma, with regard to art,
was over: art could be anything, which didn't mean that anything could be art
and certainly not good art.
But back to Brillo Boxes, Harvey's and Warhol's. The
difference has to do with what I'll call "aboutedness." The
supermarket box is about your pots and pans; its "visual rhetoric"
summons you to the checkout counter, the kitchen, the sink. The Warhol box is about
your life and the place of things like Brillo Boxes and Campbell Soup Cans within
it.
Danto adds, as an aside, that Warhol was "born into
poverty and . . . might therefore be in love with the warmth of a kitchen in
which all the new products were used." Who knows? It's difficult to probe
the glossy mind of Warhol, and unnecessary. More to that point, Danto writes: "Harvey
created a design that obviously appealed to popular sensibilities. Warhol
brought these sensibilities to consciousness. Warhol was a very popular artist
because people felt his art was about them. But Harvey's box was not about
them. It was about Brillo."
I'd like to thank Prof. Danto for teaching me, as a
corollary of his main thesis, to see my gas station anew, to appreciate its
logo and its sign even if they mean nothing beyond getting gas, checking oil,
and, please oh please, securing an inspection sticker.
The object of the second deep reading in What Art Is falls
at the opposite end of the cultural spectrum from Brillo. Danto takes up the
restoration of "Michelangelo's masterpiece, the great decoration of the
Sistine Chapel's vault, with the scenes of a narrative in which, when I first
saw it, figures move in and out of an enveloping dark." When Danto
revisits the Sistine Chapel in 1996 he becomes irate at what restoration had
wrought, including the fact that the "enveloping dark" has been
expunged. Danto couldn't disagree more with the credo of Gianluigi Colalucci,
who had supervised the restoration, ordaining it to proceed: "Step by step
and brushstroke by brushstroke [so as to arrive at] the true nature of Michelangelo's
art."
But Colalucci starts cleansing the Sistine Chapel at the
very end of the sequence of Biblical narratives Michelangelo depicted, thus
annulling any sense of order or coherence the artist might have intended.
"Brushstroke by brushstroke" would be the ideal way to restore a
Monet, for example, but, for Danto, was precisely the wrong approach to
Michelangelo, who was not, like an Impressionist, devoted to vagaries of light
and color. Especially with the Sistine Chapel Michelangelo had overarching
meanings in mind.
All were absent, for Danto, from the restored Chapel. Danto
asks if after all Michelangelo was better served with "time and grime as
benign collaborators." Now, he says, viewers are "left with a choice
of whether what has been taken away is dirt or meaning."
***
To summarize Danto's last work this way makes no room for
how much the book is shot through with observations and asides that season the
central points.
For example: Why was philosophy spared the ravages and
obscurities that Theory —Derrida, Foucault et al — visited on other
disciplines? Because, as per Danto, philosophy had made a career out of
ravaging, purging and at least arguing strenuously with itself. Philosophy
regularly tore itself to pieces. Since that was philosophy, who needed
"Theory"?
Much as I relish this book, I don't mean to imply it, or
Danto's work as a whole, are complete. Danto never really comes to terms with
the art market. Why is a Warhol Brillo Box so many orders of magnitude more
expensive than the original? What does it mean that today's art market has
astronomically little relation to the place it occupied when Duchamp turned a
urinal upside down? Danto doesn't take this up; it doesn't engage him
philosophically, even though the art market has challenged and changed art.
Then there is the question of philosophy itself. In What Art
Is Danto alludes often to ontology, the branch of the discipline devoted to
"the study of what it means to be something." Ontology, for example,
is called on to distinguish art from resemblances and sources — the Warhol
from the Harvey. But why is this not merely a question of classification? Why
invoke ontology?
In short, what is philosophy, Professor Danto?
I called him to ask him this several weeks before he died.
His caretaker said he could not come to the phone. Knowing how he had got on in
years, I did not have the heart to call again.
We do have his works. There is nothing quite like them in
the writings of art critics today, however passionate and astute they might be,
nothing with the same height and depth.
Perhaps that speaks best of all for the value of philosophy.
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