Kant,
Celmins and Art after the End of Art
Sandra Shapshay·
Hunter
College & the Graduate Center,
City
University of New York (CUNY), U.S.A.
Abstract
One typically thinks of
the relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to Western art in terms of Modernism, thanks
in large part to the work of eminent critic and art historian Clement
Greenberg. Yet, thinking of Kant’s legacy for contemporary art as inhering exclusively
in “Kantian formalism” obscures a great deal of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In his
last book, Arthur Danto suggested just this point, urging us to enlarge our
appreciation of Kant’s aesthetic theory and its relevance to contemporary art,
because, for Danto, “Kant had two conceptions of art.” In this essay, I support
and build on Danto’s claim that there are really two conceptions of art at work
in Kant’s third Critique, and that the second conception offers a
non-Modernist/formalist way that Kant’s aesthetic theory remains relevant to
post 1960s art (art “after the end of art” in Danto’s terms). My ultimate aim
is to highlight another facet in the continuing relevance of Kant’s aesthetic
theory to post-Abstract Expressionist contemporary art, namely, the explicit
attention to the differential aesthetic values of nature and art respectively.
I shall do this by putting it in dialogue with the art practice of
Latvian-American artist, Vija Celmins (1938- ) whose illustrious career since
1960s has made her an ‘artist’s artist’ but who has also recently garnered much
wider attention with a retrospective titled “To Fix the Image in Memory.”
Celmins takes up artistically a problematic that is quite central
philosophically to the concerns of the third Critique, and thus her work
illustrates (even if unconsciously) another way in which Kant’s aesthetic
theory is of great continuing relevance to the artworld today.
Key words
Kant, Danto, Celmins,
nature, art, contemporary art, beauty, sublimity
I. Introduction
When
one thinks of the relevance of Kantian aesthetic theory to Western art, one
typically thinks of Modernism, that is, the tendency (especially in the visual
arts, starting arguably with Van Gogh and Gauguin) toward greater abstraction
and preoccupation with the materials and process of art making itself over the
hitherto fundamental concern of artists with mimetic representation (Danto,
1997: 7-8). This dominant association between Kantian aesthetics and Modernism is
due largely to the eminent critic and art historian, Clement Greenberg, who,
following in the line of British critics Roger Fry, and Clive Bell, embraced and
promoted “Kantian formalism” in art. Abstract
Expressionist painters such as Piet Mondrian, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Barnett Newman, among
others, seemed to Greenberg be taking a leaf out of the Analytic of the
Beautiful with their emphasis on artistic-formal
concerns, thus constituting for him the true avant-garde of painting in
the mid-20th c.[1]
Yet,
thinking of Kant’s legacy for contemporary art as inhering exclusively in
formalism obscures a great deal of Kant’s aesthetic theory. In his last book, What
Art Is, Arthur Danto suggests just this point, urging us to enlarge our
appreciation of Kant’s aesthetic theory and its relevance to contemporary art,
because, for Danto, “Kant had two conceptions of art” (Danto, 2013: 117). The
first conception is indeed formalist and in Danto’s terms, “ornamentalist” (and
includes wallpaper borders, free musical fantasias, and in general visual works
of art that display taste but lack ‘spirit’[Geist]), but the second is proto-Romantic:
It is art with ‘spirit,’ that is, art which embodies aesthetic ideas. While the
former notion of art marks out similarities between works of art and the “free
beauties of nature,” the latter notion marks out those works which stimulate to
a much greater extent our cognitive powers, pushing the boundaries of thought
via the subject’s free play with sensible presentations of rational ideas.
Despite
Danto’s quasi-Hegelian “end of art” thesis—meaning, of course, the end of the
“grand narrative of art” with Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (a work that opens
the floodgates on what can legitimately be called ‘art’), not the end
of artmaking or the value of art tout court—he argues for the
ongoing relevance, and in fact, the universal, perennial relevance of Kant’s
second view of art. It is the one that captures the essence of post 1960s, more
conceptual art, and the one that accords with Danto’s own (admittedly partial)
definition of art as “embodied meaning.”[2]
Thus, Danto hypothesizes, if Kant himself (equipped with only his late 18th
-early 19th c. experience of art) were be to be taken to see a
contemporary exhibit such as David Hammons’ installation of spotlighted fur
coats on stands slathered with paint, it is likely that Kant would not recognize
this as a work of art. Notwithstanding, the crucial thing for Danto is that
Kant’s own second conception of art--as the embodiment of aesthetic
ideas--along with the benefit of 200 additional years of the history of art, would
indeed see Hammons’ ‘artfully defiled’ fur coats as art![3]
My
aim in this paper is to defend and build on these Dantonian thoughts about the
continuing relevance of Kant’s aesthetic theory to post-Abstract Expressionist contemporary
art. My first task is to offer textual support for Danto’s claim of two conceptions
of art in Kant’s third Critique (not being primarily an historian of
philosophy, Danto offers very little evidence for this claim in his chapter).
Next, I shall highlight another major Kantian contribution related to these two
conceptions of art, namely, the explicit attention to the differential aesthetic
values of nature and art respectively. And I shall draw out this
important Kantian aesthetic legacy for contemporary art by putting it in
dialogue with the art practice of Latvian-American artist, Vija Celmins (1938-
), an artist who has been well respected in the artworld since the 1960s as ‘an
artist’s artist,’[4]
but who has only recently garnered wider attention and critical acclaim with a
retrospective jointly organized by curators at the San Francisco Museum of
Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2018-2019, titled
“To Fix the Image in Memory”).
As
I shall argue in what follows, Celmins’ work—much of which focusses on what she
calls the ‘redescription’ of natural objects and environments such as the ocean,
the starry night sky, river stones, spiderwebs, the surface of shells, sometimes
from photographs and sometimes from direct observation of nature, can be understood
as a sustained artistic meditation on what distinguishes the aesthetic values
of art from those of nature. Especially in her sculptural works To Fix the
Image in Memory I-XI (1977-1982) and Two Stones (1977/2014-16)—where
she displays pairs of perceptually indiscernible stones, one found, one made—we
can see her as taking up from Marcel Duchamp’s readymades in a manner similar
to Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964), but now with an exclusive focus
on the “readymades” of nature.[5]
The perceptually indiscernible copy or “redescription”
in Celmins’ case is not a provocation about what if anything distinguishes a
work of art from a common manufactured artefact (Duchamp) or from an ordinary
product of consumer Capitalism (Warhol), rather, Celmins, on my interpretation,
goes back to the original remit of Western art—the imitation of nature, ‘Aesthetics
101’ as it were.[6]
Taking up from Duchamp she forges an alternative path to the
one that taken by Warhol, inviting us to contrast how we value a natural
object, like a lovely, smooth, dappled stone, from how we value its painstakingly,
artistically constructed twin. In raising these questions about how we
aesthetically value nature versus art, Celmins takes up artistically a problematic
that is quite central philosophically to the concerns of the third Critique,
and thus her work illustrates (even if unconsciously) another way in which Kant’s
aesthetic theory is of great continuing relevance to the artworld today.
II.
Two conceptions of art?
One
of the first mentions of works that we and Kant’s contemporaries would generally
class as works of fine art in the 3rd Critique comes in
section 16 where he distinguishes “free beauty” [freie Schönheit] from “merely adherent
beauty” [die bloß anhängende Schönheit]. As is well known to Kant scholars, the
former type “presupposes no concept of what the object ought to be” whereas the
latter type “does presuppose such a concept and the perfection of the object in
accordance with it.” (Ak. 5: 229).[7]
Among free beauties, natural objects figure prominently.
Importantly
for this inquiry, however, works of art also factor among the free beauties
that Kant lists in this section: “designs à la grecque, foliage for borders or on
wallpaper … and music fantasias (without a theme), indeed all music without a
text.” (Ak. 5:229). These works of art
are also appreciated along the lines of free natural beauties, for we don’t seem
to appreciate them under the description of a concept—not even under the
concept of “work of art”—nor by virtue of how well they attain to the
perfection of their kind. Rather, it seems for Kant, we enjoy such designs and
music without a text for their formal qualities alone. It is noteworthy that works
of art (at least prima facie) also factor among Kant’s examples of sublime
objects, e.g. the pyramids of Egypt and St. Peter’s in Rome (Ak. 5: 252),
though Kant stresses that the paradigm cases of the sublime involve “raw
nature” (Ak. 5:253).[8]
So long as the pyramids and St. Peter’s cathedral are
appreciated for their formal qualities alone (in this case, their overwhelming scale,
which makes them from a certain vantage point seem formless or contra-purposive
for our cognitive faculties), they can arguably be numbered among “free
sublimities” along with vast and/or overwhelming natural environments.[9]
Yet,
all of these mentions of works of art that constitute free beauties or free
sublimities occur before Kant gets down to the business of discussing fine art
(in section 43). Up to this point, he seems to be operating with a notion of a
work of art that allows for appreciation of art in the same manner as a free
beauty (or sublimity) of nature. This is a notion of a work of art that is
formalist and even in the case of the “designs à la grecque” or “foliage for
borders or for wallpaper” one might call, after Danto, “ornamentalist.” This is
the notion of the work of art that was so influential for and through Clement
Greenberg.
Kant
finally defines schöne Kunst around section 44 of the third Critique.
When he does, he seems to give a definition of fine art that would exclude
these previously adduced examples from the category. In this section, the necessary
ingredients for beautiful art are “imagination, understanding, spirit and taste
[Einbildungskraft, Verstand, Geist und Geschmack]” (Ak. 5:320). This requires
some unpacking.
Taste,
is “merely a faculty for judging” the beautiful in either nature or art, and
artists can cultivate their tastefulness in producing art, e.g. through
“acquaintance with ancient languages, wide reading of those authors considered
to be classical, history, etc.” (Ak. 5:305), but for the production of
beautiful art, in addition to taste, the artist must also have genius
“the inborn predisposition of the mind through which nature gives the rule to
art” (Ak. 5:307). And the key aspect of genius for the production of genuinely beautiful
art is spirit. In its “aesthetic
significance,” spirit is “the animating principle in the mind” that is, “that
which purposively sets the mental powers into motion” or play (section 49, Ak.
5:313). Putting a bit more flesh on the bones of “spirit,” Kant explains it as
the “faculty for the presentation of aesthetic ideas” (Ak. 5:314). And an aesthetic
idea is a “representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking
though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i.e. concept, to
be adequate to it…” (Ak. 5:314).
Kant’s
full account of a work of beautiful (fine) art is actually quite
revisionist. One might ordinarily suppose
a painting or a poem to be a work of beautiful art if it is elegant and
pleasing, even if it lacks the “je ne sais quoi” of spirit. But Kant is
clear on this: if it lacks spirit—that is, if the work lacks aesthetic
ideas, which occasion much thinking--it is not a work of beautiful art at all on
Kant’s second conception of art as the art of genius. The work may have taste,
it might please even universally, but insofar as it does not animate the mind
through aesthetic ideas, it is not a work of beautiful/fine art.
This
second conception of art—the official one—has ramifications for the first, unofficial
conception that Kant seems to have been employing before section 43. “Designs à
la grecque” and “foliage for borders or on wallpaper” and even “musical
fantasias”—the examples he furnished of free artistic beauties—would not, it
seems, pass muster with this second conception of fine art. They seem precisely
to be tasteful works, beautiful ornaments perhaps, but not the kinds of works
that contain spirit; that is to say, they are not the kinds of works
that occasion much thinking. Thus, it seems that there really are two working
conceptions of fine art in Kant’s text: (1) the earlier one, which is the
formalist/ornamentalist rather non-cognitive, unofficial conception, and (2)
the official one, which is a highly cognitive one—where the work
animates the mind with a rich array of thoughts even if these cannot be summed
up in any determinate concept, in language—because the work has spirit in addition
to taste.
These
two conceptions of art correspond to what Aviv Reiter and Ido Geiger have
identified (though not uncontroversially[10])
as Kant’s two, distinct conceptions of beauty: (1) non-conceptual natural
beauty and (2) conceptual, adherent, artistic beauty. Reiter and Geiger sum up the first conception
as follows:
[i]n
judging, we simply express our immediate pleasure in a particular shape. In
this precise sense, the judgment is singular, purely aesthetic, and thus not
conceptual. Indeed, people judging aesthetically would probably not
characterize their aesthetic pleasure as the feeling than an object is somehow
cognitively significant. Nevertheless, on Kant’s analysis, it turns out that
there is a noteworthy correlation between the shapes that arouse pure aesthetic
pleasure and the forms of natural kinds” (Reiter & Geiger, 2018: 80).
The
second conception of beauty, the beauty of fine art, for Reiter and Geiger
“does not fit the definition of beauty put forward in the Analytic without
emendation. Specifically, and with some noteworthy exceptions, it is not
typically to form alone that we respond in beautiful works of art” (Reiter
& Geiger, 2018: 83). Rather, it is to the aesthetic presentation of ideas
of reason, especially on the subject of the “breadth and variety of human
freedom” (Reiter & Geiger, 2018: 96) to which we respond in the beauty of
art.
Now,
in distinguishing two types of beauty in Kant, Reiter and Geiger, do not
claim that all works of art must partake in the latter, adherent type. In the
above-quoted passage, they allude to “some noteworthy exceptions” of works of
art to which we do respond in the manner of free natural beauties, namely, to
form alone. Thus, they hold that some works of art (e.g., musical fantasias and
music without a text generally) do constitute artistic examples of free beauty,
the beauty paradigmatic of nature (Reiter & Geiger, 2018: 87).
What
I’d like to suggest, though, is that Danto was right to press the issue further
in seeing such free-beauty artistic examples as evidence of another
conception of art altogether at work in the third Critique. If musical
fantasias do not contain spirit--and it seems at least on Kant’s account that
they really don’t, for they are appropriately appreciated for their
temporal-formal qualities not for their cognitively rich aesthetic ideas—then
they do not have the beauty paradigmatic of artistic beauty, and, therefore, they
really cannot be art on the second conception of fine art on offer (in sections
43-51). Nonetheless, they do seem to be considered examples of art in
Kant’s text, and thus bespeak a first, unofficial conception of art (the conception
of the Analytic of the Beautiful/Analytic of the Sublime). It seems we
have good textual grounds, then, to conclude that Kant really does have two
conceptions of art in the third Critique.
One
reason why it is important carefully to distinguish between Kant’s two
conceptions of art, which run roughly parallel to Kant’s two conceptions of beauty,
is that Kant makes a rather large deal out of the moral importance of the
appreciation of natural beauty over artistic beauty.[11]
Although artistic beauty is important for promoting “the cultivation [Cultur]
of the mental powers for sociable communication” (Ak. 5:306) and brings the
rational ideas closer to perception (via their aesthetic embodiments) (Ak. 5:
314), it is natural beauty (and one might make a case for natural
sublimity as well) that seems to hold greater moral importance for Kant,
overall.
The
main textual evidence for this comes in section 42, “On the intellectual
interest in the beautiful,” where Kant contrasts the lovers of beautiful art with
the lovers of beautiful nature. He “gladly concede[s] that the interest in the
beautiful in art … provides no proof of a way of thinking that is devoted to
the morally good or even merely inclined to it” (Ak. 5:298) whereas he does
“assert that to take an immediate interest in the beauty of nature … is always
a mark of a good soul, and that if this interest is habitual, it at least
indicates a disposition of the mind that is favorable to the moral feeling.”
(Ak. 5:299).
Kant
goes so far as to say that even if the forms of art were to surpass
those of nature in their beauty,
[i]f
a man who has enough taste to judge about products of beautiful art … gladly
leaves the room in which are to be found those [artistic] beauties that sustain
vanity and at best social joys and turns to the beautiful in nature, in order
as it were to find here an ecstasy for his spirit in a line of thought that he
can never fully develop, then we would consider this choice of his with esteem
and presuppose in him a beautiful soul, to which no connoisseur and lover of
art can lay claim on account of the interest that he takes in his objects (Ak.
5:299-300).
The
ultimate reason for why it is morally better to be a lover of natural over
artistic beauty, for Kant, is that the lover of natural beauty takes an
interest in the signs that nature seems to give via its beauty that it “contains
in itself some sort of ground for assuming a lawful correspondence of its
products with our satisfaction that is independent of all interest (which we recognize
a priori as a law valid for everyone, without being able to ground this on
proofs).” (Ak. 5:300). In other words, the lover of natural beauty takes an
interest in the aesthetic hints that nature is amenable to our moral ends. Only
nature’s beauty—not the beauty of art—can show “some trace” or “give[s]
a sign” that we will be able to realize our moral ends in this world (Henrich,
1992). By contrast, the beauty of art can only bespeak “at best social joys”
(Ak. 5:300).
To
drive the point home, Kant contrasts perceptually indiscernible birdsongs, one
made by an actual nightingale “in a lonely stand of bushes, on a still summer
evening, under the gentle light of the moon” and the other by “a mischievous
lad who knew how to imitate this song (with a reed or a pipe in his mouth) just
like nature” (Ak. 5:302). In this case, there is a trick afoot: a landlord
wants to charm his guests with the song of the bird and arranges to have the
kid hide in the bushes. But, Kant believes, “as soon as one becomes aware that
it is a trick, no one would long endure listening to this song, previously
taken to be so charming … It must be nature, or taken to be nature by us, for
us to be able to take such an immediate interest in the beautiful, and even more
so if we are to be at all able to expect of others that they should take this
interest in it…” (Ak. 5:302).
Thus,
when it is a question of rendering a pure judgment of taste, it doesn’t matter
whether the song is produced by an actual bird or a mischievous lad. The disinterestedness
of a pure judgment of taste means that the actual existence of the
beautiful object—and, accordingly, whether it is natural or artistic, is beside
the point--only the perceptual form matters. But from the perspective of the
moral interest we take in beauty, that the beauty emanates from nature
itself is crucial, insofar as we are keen to read the purposive signs that
nature (not art) seems to be sending.
III.
Vija Celmins
In
a manner reminiscent of Kant’s two perceptually indiscernible birdsongs, the
Latvian-American contemporary artist Vija Celmins, has displayed paired river
stones—one found and one painstakingly hand made in each pair—in a work titled To
Fix the Image in Memory I-XI (1977-82).
Fig. 1. Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory I-XI (1977-82),
Museum of Modern Art, New York. ©Vija Celmins, Courtesy Matthew Marks Gallery
Celmins
collected these “rather beautiful” stones in New Mexico, along the Rio Grande,
and over the course of approximately 5 years, she cast them in bronze and
meticulously hand-painted the surfaces to render astoundingly identical twins
of the stones. She describes these pairs in Duchampian terms as “readymades and
mades” (quoted in Alteveer, 2018: 159). More recently, Celmins has added another,
solo set of paired stones to this series, titled simply Two Stones (1977/2014-16).
The
superficial game here is to tell the real from the copy. And when I saw these
works displayed at Celmins’ recent retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of
Art’s Met Breuer, many spectators were happily and wondrously engaged in doing
just this, even though there was nothing at the exhibit to let us know if we
had gotten it right! And certainly, Celmins entices us to engage in this
looking and guessing, writing that “[the stones are] an invitation to look
harder than you would look, normally … And so, somebody goes by and has a
double take on it, and maybe a little smile comes out of it” (quoted in
Garrels, 2018: 19).
But
the more profound task at hand is to figure out what these displayed,
“readymade and made” paired stones mean. And for that, the artist
herself offers few hints. She admits that the spectator is left to her own
devices in an interview with artist Ken Price where she asserts, “I don’t mind
talking about making work. What it is supposed to mean is what I can’t talk
about. Can you give rational explanations of your work?” In another interview,
she cites Brancusi--a model of artistic-discursive reticence—saying that “art
should be like a well-planned crime” meaning: “you don’t discuss it before, and
you don’t talk much about it afterward either” (quoted in Garrels, 2018: 235).
So,
what could these works mean?
Unlike
Kant’s birdsong example, Celmins is not, like the landlord, trying to trick us
into taking a fake stone for a real one. Although she certainly has the
visual-art equivalent of the lad’s bird-impersonation skillset, in her works, she
makes no secret at all of the artistic copies lurking among the natural stones.
On the contrary, she draws our attention to the “madeness” of one of the paired
stones by displaying it alongside the natural, found stone.
A
clue as to what is going on here comes from Celmins’ description of the natural
stone as a “readymade” and the bronze, painted copy as the “made.” And it is fruitful
to think through her practice with Duchamp’s conceptual provocations in mind. Indeed,
according to Met Curator, Ian Alteveer, “Duchamp was a particularly important
figure to Celmins, for both his conceptual rigor and his radical philosophy
regarding the readymade, [and] Celmins has adopted and transformed this gesture
for her own purposes” (Aleteveer, 2018: 159).
Recall
that the readymades of Duchamp were factory or artisanally-manufactured objects
such as urinals, bottle racks, and snow shovels, sometimes modified [and signed
R. Mutt in the case of Fountain (1917)] and sometimes simply displayed qua
art, without modification. The Dada provocation in the case of Duchamp goes
something like the following: ‘This is art! Why? Because I, the artist, say it’s
art. Bourgeoisie be damned--this is finally what art has become, ha!’[12]
In
Celmins’ case too, by her own account, there is something playful and even a
bit Dada-absurdist in her “constellation” of paired stones, writing,
I
developed this desire to try and put them [the found river stones] into an art
context … sort of mocking art in a way, but also to affirm the act of making:
the act of looking and making as a primal act of art (quoted in Garrels, 2018:
17).
However,
Celmins’ “readymades” (the natural stones) are importantly different from those
of Duchamp: they aren’t made by any human artisan, they are “made” by nature. Paradoxically,
this means that they really aren’t readymades at all—they are simply found
among the profusion of lovely river rocks scattered along the Rio Grande. It is
only if one employs a notion akin to the Celestial Artisan, that these stones count
literally as “readymades.” And Kant, for one, did think along these lines, for
as sketched above he held that natural beauty invites the lover of nature to
“find … an ecstasy for his spirit in a line of thought that he can never fully
develop,” namely, that there is “a lawful correspondence of its products” and
our moral interests as human beings. Thus, for Kant, although we may not conclude
(as a matter of theoretical knowledge) that the natural world is designed/made
by a benevolent creator and is therefore not hostile to our moral ends, natural
beauty does give us a hint that this is the case. Although I don’t think
that Celmins’ work suggests this particular link between natural beauty and moral-theology,
I do think that drawing our attention to the “readymade” status of natural
objects does invite reflection on the way nature “makes” things in a manner
that is rather different from the way an artist like Celmins makes things.
As
she puts it in the above-quoted passage, the pairs of stones centers attention
on the “the act of looking and making as a primal act of art”
(emphasis mine). These intentional acts of art are implicitly opposed to
nature’s way of “making,” which seems by contrast unintentional: These
particular natural stones were not formed by a human action, but rather by a geological
happening. Further, nature’s way of “making” involves millennia,
a mind-bogglingly long process of shaping by the forces of the river, by the
heat of the sun, and a host of other natural forces operating at the glacial speed
of geologic time. From these came the beautiful stones, with their fortuitously
pleasing if irregular, dappled patterns, which could be appropriated into a
work of (human) art in the late 20th c. By contrast, the
artistically made stones were created intentionally, by a human mind and
body, that is, by an artist who looked closely and painstakingly “redescribed”
the natural stone over the course of a few years (a rather long time for art,
but certainly not millennia).
Yet,
what is the point of this comparison between the “making” of nature and the
“making” of art? On the one hand, there seems to be an uplifting message about
the power of that primal act of art—looking and making. One might reflect with
awe on the fact that a human artist is just as capable of creating, and further
has the advantage of capturing, these beautiful natural forms and fixing
them in individual and collective memory. Pace Kant, then, perhaps this
work signals that in the contest between natural and artistic beauty, the
latter is actually more wondrous for its revelation of human power.
But,
on the other hand, along more Kantian lines, Celmins may also be drawing our
attention to the greater value of the natural stone. It alone has an aura of “age
value,” for it and not its copy testifies to millennia of geological processes,
to the wonder that there is something rather than nothing, and to the fact that
some things in our world seem ‘as if’ designed to please us. Might the painstaking copy attest not so much to
the power of human intelligence and creativity then, but the frailty of human
“making” insofar as it takes enormous artistic effort to make an indiscernible copy
of something so promiscuously available on any rocky riverbed around the world?
Doesn’t human creative power really pale in comparison to nature’s great
fecundity of beautiful forms?
I
think all of these thoughts may be sparked by Celmins’ work and attest to the
fact that she has created genuine works of fine/beautiful art on Kant’s second
conception: These are works with spirit, that is, they embody aesthetic
ideas, which stimulate much thought—particularly on the nature/art relationship--without
one being able to sum up those thoughts adequately in language.
These
are also highly original works: With this focus on the nature/art relationship,
Celmins’ “readymade and made” pairs are also quite different from another
artist who took up the Duchampian project, Andy Warhol. In the case of Warhol’s
Brillo Boxes the “made” is a perceptually indistinguishable copy of a commercial
product (the readymade Brillo box that one might find in the 1960s on any
supermarket shelf). But Warhol didn’t display the commercial, ordinary Brillo
box alongside his artistically fashioned copies. Rather, the “made” Brillo
Boxes were exhibited on their own in the gallery. Thus, unlike Duchamp,
Warhol’s provocation was to display a copy of a commercial object as a work
of art—rather than displaying the manufactured article itself qua art—so
that the “made” on display was perceptually indistinguishable from the ordinary
object (the readymade), which remained, blissfully unaware of its Doppelgänger,
as it awaited purchase on the supermarket shelf. The key difference in Warhol’s
provocation, versus that of Duchamp, it seems to me, has to do with late
Capitalism. Building on Duchamp, Brillo Boxes says something like this: ‘Nowadays,
you can’t tell the difference between a work of art and an ordinary, banal,
commercially ubiquitous consumer product. Art has entirely lost its
aura, its aesthetic appeal can now collapse into that of the mundane Brillo box
carton in a supermarket. Anything, no matter how banal, no matter how crassly
consumerist, can be a work of art.’
By
contrast, Celmins seems to be taking a somewhat different path than that of Warhol.
Her route from Duchamp is decidedly not in the commercial, pop direction. In
fact, she’s going back the basics and the original assignment of Western art, namely,
the imitation of nature. She is self-consciously working in a
mimetic-representational lane, as suggested in an interview with Phong Bui, publisher
and artistic director of The Brooklyn Rail:
Only
later did I come to understand that we… [artists are] all stuck in between
Cézanne and Duchamp. Cézanne was probably the greatest painter … And there
is Duchamp, who was not a great painter, but was a wonderful thinker about art.
He really opened up the new century to artists who would never have gone in
that direction. (quoted in Garrels, 2018: 230, emphasis added).
On
my interpretation, the path that Celmins takes with her paired stones is actually
to bring Cézanne and Duchamp into a fruitful dialogue. Like Cézanne, Celmins’
aim is to imitate (or “redescribe”) nature, as generations of Western artists before
and after Cézanne have done. I shall come back soon to how she confronts this
traditional aim with Duchamp soon, but first allow me to supply a bit more
backstory.
To
Fix the Image in Memory I-XI (1977-1982) and Two
Stones (1977/2014-16) can be seen as a kind of narrative culmination in
Celmins’ long career of redescribing natural objects and environments in
particular. Although she started her career with still life paintings of
ordinary manufactured objects lying around her studio (a space heater, a lamp,
an envelope), beginning in 1968 she took on a new subject that would preoccupy
her through the 1970s, the ocean. From photographs of the Pacific Ocean that
she took off the Venice Pier near her studio in Los Angeles, Celmins made a
long series of painstaking, allover (horizonless) graphite drawings of the
precise, undulating waves of the ocean. In the 1970s Celmins focused on images
of the rocky, desert floor and her main subject of the 1990s was the starry
night sky, with a large number of redescriptions of spider webs as well. It has
only been quite recently that Celmins has focused on making perceptually
indiscernible copies of artefacts—old-fashioned children’s school slates, and
antique books—otherwise, for most of her career her iconography has focused on
natural objects and environments.
It
is also important to note that while Celmins’ subjects are often the paradigmatically
sublime ones of nature—the starry night sky, the ocean, the desert—the works
that she produces are quite different from Romantic paintings (e.g. those by Caspar
David Friedrich) or the American Sublime painters of the Hudson River School in
that they don’t seem to aim to provoke a sublime response in the viewer.
The scale of her works is quite modest (most of the ocean drawings are about
18” x 22” in size) in contrast to American sublime painters like F.E. Church,
whose Heart of the Andes measures a gigantic 5′ 6″ x 9′ 11″.
And in an interview at the Tate Modern which put her work into dialogue with
that of J.M.W. Turner, she writes, “I think we [Turner and I] both like
wildness—the wilderness, the impossible image to capture and wrestle onto that
small piece of paper.” (quoted in Garrels, 2018: 247-8). But the main aim for Celmins
is to not overwhelm or awe the viewer with that wildness—as Turner strove to do
in some of his later, more sublime works--but rather painstakingly to wrestle
that complex, sometimes vast image onto an eminently human-scaled piece of paper,
canvas, or a bronze cast.
In
all of the cases of natural subjects other than the stones, however, she was
“redescribing” nature from photographs, but displaying the “mades” without the
source photos (let alone the natural sources) side-by-side. We had to take her
word for it, and judge by the uncanny similarity of the drawings or paintings
in the series, that she was faithfully redescribing the natural source.
It’s
only with the paired stones that we can really see for ourselves how much the
“made” stone looks like the “found/readymade” natural stone. Like Duchamp then,
with the paired stones Celmins draws our attention precisely to the question of
the nature of art—what is a work of art? Why can’t a “readymade” stone be or
become at least a part of a work of art? But by mixing in Cézanne—that is, by
putting the painterly practice of observing and redescribing nature alongside
the “readymade” of nature, she asks additionally the following sorts of questions:
What is the difference between natural and artistic beauty? What is the
difference between natural and artistic “making”? These are questions which Duchamp
and Warhol—with their emphasis on manufactured “readymades” and copies of
commercial products, respectively--did not thematize.
IV.
Conclusion
In
this essay, I have aimed to support Danto’s claim that there are really two
conceptions of art at work in Kant’s third Critique, and that the second
conception offers a non-Modernist/formalist way that Kant’s aesthetic theory
remains relevant to post 1960s art (art “after the end of art” in Danto’s
terms). Thanks to the illuminating work of Aviv Reiter and Ido Geiger (among
others), these two conceptions of art can more clearly be seen as related to
two distinct conceptions of beauty in Kant’s aesthetic theory: free beauty
(which is a response to form alone, paradigmatically to forms of natural kinds
such as flowers, foliage, birds and crustaceans) and adherent beauty (which is
not merely a response to form, but also, to the concept of what the object is
supposed to be), paradigmatically, a work of art that aims to present some
determinate content especially of the “breadth and variety of human freedom”
(Reiter & Geiger, 2018: 96). Next, I offered an overview and interpretation
of the work of Vija Celmins, focusing on her iconography—typically beautiful
and sublime natural objects and environments—and her artistic practice of
“redescription” in various media (drawing, painting, sculpture), but especially
her perceptually indiscernible pairs of stones, one found and one made.
On
my view, these sculptural works in particular culminate a genial narrative that
she is building on the conceptual foundation of Duchamp: Celmins’ art practice
offers a parallel but distinctly different narrative to that of Warhol, which
highlights another important legacy of Kant’s aesthetic theory for contemporary
art. That is, in addition to the formalism and the notion of art as the
embodiment of ideas, Kant puts forward what one might call an aesthetic
environmentalism, for in the contest between the beauty of nature and the
beauty of art, morally speaking, Kant sees the value of nature as more
important. Thus, for moral reasons, it is more important to cultivate people’s
habits of appreciating the free beauties of nature over works of fine art.
Celmins—whose
art practice has developed, in Danto’s terms, after “the end of art”--arguably
(pace Danto) continues the grand narrative by presenting a novel comparison
between art and nature. She sets up, artistically, a kind of competition
between them; unlike Kant, however, Celmins’ work is not clear on whether art
or nature has greater moral and aesthetic value. This ambiguity is to be
expected and applauded: After all, Celmins’ paired stones are not works of
philosophy, they are works of art, and a work can only count as a genuine work
of genius on Kant’s second (official) conception of art if and only if it sparks
a free play with aesthetic ideas. Celmins’ artworks problematize and unleash,
in an attentive spectator, a train of thoughts concerning the distinct
aesthetic experiences and values on offer in art and nature, without being able
to sum up these thoughts in determinate concepts and language. The result—on both
Kantian aesthetic theory and Danto’s philosophy of art—is a truly genial contemporary
work of art.[13]
Bibliography
Abaci,
Uygar, (2008), “Kant’s Justified Dismissal of Artistic Sublimity,” The
Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66: 237–251.
-----
(2010), “Artistic Sublime Revisited: Reply to Robert Clewis”, The Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism
68: 170-3.
Alteveer, Ian (2018), “Longer than Anywhere in
the World: Vija Celmins on the East Coast” in Vija Celmins, To Fix the
Image in Memory ed. Gary Garrels, Yale University Press.
Cannon, Joseph
(2011), “The Moral Value of Artistic Beauty in Kant”, Kantian Review 16
(1): 113-126.
Clewis, Robert (2010), “A Case for Kantian Artistic
Sublimity: A Response to Abaci”, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 68: 167-170.
Costello, Diarmuid (2008), “Danto and Kant,
Together at Last?”, New Waves in Aesthetics, 11:25, pp. 244-266.
Crowther, Paul (1997) “Review of Kant After
Duchamp” British Journal of Aesthetics 37: 4: 410-412.
Danto, Arthur C. (1981), The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace, Harvard University Press.
----- (1997), After the End of
Art: Contemporary Art and the Pale of History, Princeton University Press.
----- (2013), What Art Is, Yale
University Press.
De Duve, Thierry (1996), Kant after Duchamp,
MIT Press.
Garrels, Gary (2018),
Introduction, Vija Celmins, To
Fix the Image in Memory ed.
Gary Garrels, Yale University Press.
Gotshalk, D. W. (1967), “Form and Expression in Kant’s
Aesthetics”, British Journal of Aesthetics 7 (3), pp. 250-260.
Greenberg, Clement (1989), Art and Culture,
Critical Essays, Beacon Press, Boston, MA.
Guyer, Paul (2006), “The harmony of the faculties
revisited” in Rebecca Kukla (Ed), Aesthetics and Cognition in Kant’s
critical philosophy, Cambridge University Press.
Halper, Aaron (2020), “Rethinking Kant’s distinction
between the beauty of art and the beauty of nature”, European Journal of
Philosophy, January: 1-19
Henrich, Dieter
(1992), Aesthetic Judgment and the
Moral Image of the World, Stanford University Press.
Jacobus-Parker, Frances (2018), “Redescribing the
Photograph”, in Vija Celmins, To Fix the Image in Memory ed. Gary
Garrels, Yale University Press, pp. 85-89.
Kant, Immanuel (2000 [orig. 1790]) The Critique of
the Power of Judgment, ed. and translated Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews,
Cambridge University Press.
Kantor, Jordan (2019), “Beginning to
Understand: Jordan Kantor on the Art of Vija Celmins” Artforum January,
pp. 166-214.
Pillow, Kirk (2000), Sublime Understanding: Aesthetic Reflection in
Kant and Hegel, MIT Press.
Reiter, Aviv & Geiger, Ido (2018), “Natural
Beauty, Fine Art and the Relation between Them”, Kant-Studien, 109(1):
72-100.
Rueger, Alexander (2007), “Kant and the aesthetics of
nature”, British Journal of Aesthetics 47(2): 138-155.
Rosenberger, Christina Bryan (2019), “Vija Celmins;
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art”, Art in America, February, pp. 79-80.
Wicks, Robert (1995), “Kant on Fine Art: Artistic Sublimity
Shaped by Beauty,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 53:
189–193.
