Essay III, art

Lifeworld and art

Our lifeworld manifests itself in the cultural artefacts of the long history of humankind. These include technical infrastructure, buildings and tools as well as items of art or its symbolic representations like sheets of music. We can see the aesthetic element not only in the works of art but also in many utility articles, in the built environment, and in nature, too. In utility articles the aesthetic aspect is part of their design. Enjoying arts takes up a large part of our leisure time. Generally, sports and entertainment are even more popular than arts, but the borderline between art and entertainment is not clear. Arts are important elements in defining our lifeworld, but visual arts and classical music have been perceived difficult to understand, so they challenge the preunderstanding given by the lifeworld. The last hundred years have added to the bewilderment in experiencing art and music, as artists and composers have taken their works to spheres that differ a lot from what people have earlier seen and listened to. Some art philosophers have even declared the definition of art impossible (Weitz). So I will not start with any definition of art either.

I cannot discuss at length the various views of the philosophy of art.  I will only clarify some borderline ideas when necessary. I have to name two books that have given inspiration to the following treatment: Göran Schildt’s Cézanne, and Arthur Danto’s Encounters & Reflections. Art in the Historical Present (1989). I don’t know whether Schildt’s book is available in English (it was originally published in Swedish), and unfortunately I do not have the English edition of Danto’s book, so I cannot give exact quotations. The essays of Danto’s book are mostly critiques of art exhibitions and were originally published in the Nation journal. 

From my viewpoint, the essential questions are the following: In what respect do the artefacts of art belong to the lifeworld? To what extent do the preunderstanding of the lifeworld and the tradition of art give means of interpreting works of art? Why and how do we experience something as art? I start to seek for the place of arts in our lifeworld within the visual arts and proceed from the modern times towards the Renaissance. There is a reason for going backwards in history, which will be explained later.

From the perspective of the lifeworld, a good starting point is given in Danto’s essay on Christian Boltanski (1989). This essay compares Boltanski’s work directly with the lifeworld (Lebenswelt). Danto pays special attention to a work in which children’s shirts are hung out on the walls of the exhibition room. The shirts are ordinary items of the lifeworld but are displayed as a work of avant-garde art, which is itself brought to be an object of our lifeworld. The shirts have become symbols of themselves. Other elements of the work (wires and lamps) suggest that the work refers to the Holocaust. The children have been destroyed naked in gas chambers and only the shirts have been left behind. Boltanski’s aim is to make the audience perceive his works as ordinary objects of the lifeworld although they will be revealed as artworks in the end. 

Danto points out that the usual signs of an art museum – a fee, posters for sale, catalogues, and guards – obviously work against that goal of the artist, and remind the spectator that he or she is attending an art exhibition, and not going into a laundry instead. The institutional setting reveals the artefacts as pieces of art, but it is still possible to make a mistake. Not a long time ago, there was a piece of news about an art exhibition, in which cleaners had mistakenly taken away an installation of champagne glasses, because they thought that the glasses had been left behind from the opening. In Danto’s famous paper, The Artworld (The Journal of Philosophy, Vol 61, #19, 1964), the definition of art is credited to social institutions. I will come back to this issue later. The cleaners’ theory of art was then not quite up to date in the anecdote above. 

The next example is from the time twenty-five years prior to the case Boltanski:  Andy Warhol’s Brillo boxes. According to Danto, this was one of the greatest turning-points of art last century. Danto reminisces Warhol’s work in an essay addressing a new exhibition of Warhol’s art in 1989, and Brillo boxes have also an important role in Danto’s paper of 1964. Andy Warhol showed hand-made wooden copies of industrial Brillo boxes. Danto compares Warhol’s work to Duchamp’s dodges fifty years earlier. Duchamp brought to an exhibition various ready-made items like a spade, a bicycle wheel, and a urinal that he named Fountain. Danto regards Duchamp’s objects merely as jokes, a giggle of a bystander, whereas Warhol’s work took its place in the mainstream of Art in the 1960’s. In a history of art edited by Krausser, Duchamp’s trick was regarded as one of the most brilliant challengers of the definition of art. The messages of the two artists are obviously different. Duchamp’s ready-made products raised the question of what was considered art, and laughed at hypocritical works of art. Warhol’s works showed people the state of modern culture without mocking it in the context of art. They provoked people to look at their environment from a new perspective. Warhol also moulded the concept of art, and very much so. His message was (I am not quoting Danto): The world today is like this, no need to say that this is the artist’s view of it. But this is essentially what impressionists and the artists close to them wanted to say, only their way of saying it was different, and they also defined art. 

Perhaps the most radical turning-point in art since the Renaissance was in the last decades of the 19^th century, when it became possible to look at an artwork as an independent object, not just as an imitation of something “in reality”. Artworks themselves were then seen as part of reality. Danto (1964) calls these views “imitation theory” (IT) and “reality theory” (RT). There is not unanimous understanding as to who can be credited for the change from IT to RT, and it would not be fair to pinpoint it just on one artist or art philosopher. However at least after the first decade of the 20^th century, artworks were liberated from the sole imitation of reality. But we are not quite there on our time journey back to the Renaissance. 

After World War II public interest in art turned towards the US. There are many reasons for this, including the international political situation, moral and economic turmoil and splitting of art movements in Europe after the war, the decline of socialist realism and fascism, and largely the purposive actions of many national institutions of the US. But let us not forget that European artists continued their work after the war. Mirò still painted his somewhat puzzling symbolic pictures, Braque continued with cubism, Picasso showed his excellency with whatever he did, and a new generation of artist was seeking its breakthrough, for example Francis Bacon. However, the leading art movement then was abstract expressionism in the US, which title was given to paintings by Rothko, Pollock, De Koonig and Newman as the best known representatives. The artists themselves did not established any movement. The movement was became to a public phenomenon mostly by the gatekeepers of public opinion, art critics, wealthy collectors, museum directors and art dealers. These people, together with the artists, form ‘the artworld’, which term Danto coined in his paper of 1964.  Be that as it may, the artworks were abstract in the sense that the spectator could not identify any subject in them, at first sight anyway. 

Pollock and Rothko had started their painting career along the tradition with recognizable objects of reality, but no one could call those works imitations. Pollock abandoned the easel and spread his enormous canvases on the floor. Besides using brushes, he dropped paint directly from the can, and even cycled over canvases. His technique was called action painting. Rothko painted after 1949 only large works with two or three coloured squares floating on a background that was visible between the squares and in narrow margins. Rothko emphasized that the squares themselves were objects, not just abstract coloured surfaces. The squares replaced the symbolic objects in his earlier works. Rothko wrote with a colleague an answer to a criticism of their exhibition that “there is no such thing as good art without a subject”. Rothko gave instructions for looking at his works: they should be seen so that the spectator feels as if she were inside the painting. He compared the paintings to music and dramatic art. They give the same kind of total experience. To me, Pollock’s works bring about the same impression, or an expectation of this impression when seen in an exhibition and not just as photos. These works are rich new elements of the lifeworld.

This total experience of an artwork as an object of its own in our lifeworld without any pictorial reference to something outside it has been seen as the end of art history (see Danto 1989). However, this did not mean the end to representational visual art, which still flourishes side by side with abstract painting. Visual arts still have a lot to say about other things in our lifeworld. To me one of the greatest experiences in any art museum was seeing Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks in Chicago. This work is from the 1940’s, from the time when Pollock and Rothko first experimented with abstract expressionism. Hopper’s work opens up easily as a snapshot of loneliness of a city, while being at the same time an impressive visual composition. 

To the general public representational art is still easier to digest than abstract art. When looking at an abstract painting there is at first the problem of the unguided intentionality of perception – the difficulty of ‘seeing as’, when one cannot recognize that ‘as something’. That is why we have no problem in admiring the colours of autumn leaves, although the composition of colours does not ‘mean’ anything as such. One does not need to understand the scene, it is just beautiful. Likewise, one should not try to understand an abstract painting either. A friend of Turner’s commented on his painting of a winter storm at sea, saying that his wife could understand the painting, because she has been in the same kind of situation. Turner replied that he did not paint the work to be understood. He only wanted to show how he saw an impressive drama of nature. So Turner was perhaps the first one to prepare us for the modern concept of art.

Around 1910 Kandinsky and Malevitch painted their first non-representational works. Kandinsky wrote out the idea of abstract painting in the 1910’s. He got the idea by looking at a work of Monet, one of his haystacks, at the first exhibition of impressionists in Moscow. Kandinsky did not recognize the motif of the work at first, but just admired its colours. His idea of the possibility of abstract art is based on theosophy. Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) was the first work of cubism and paved the way to seeing the subject from multiple viewpoints, not just through “a window”.

Although the motif had hardly any significant role in Monet’s later work, impressionism remained under the spell of imitation theory, which had been the idea of art since the Renaissance. Its works were still a window to reality, only now capturing an impression of the passing moment. In fact, the impressionists and the groups of other artists who showed their works in the so-called exhibitions of rejected works (rejected by the French Academy which controlled the works accepted to the Salon) wanted to protest against the fashion of romantic, historic paintings, which were not realistic at all. The new movement strived to expose modern life in artists’ works. Even more so did such social realists as Courbet, who painted people at hard work.

Well, who broke the window? Danto gives the credit to Gauguin, whereas Schildt praises Cézanne for the new theory of art (Schildt’s book was originally his dissertation of 1948). In this theory the painting becomes an object in itself. It does not just serve as an imitation of the subject of reality. We can say that Cézanne took the first steps towards this new concept of art, and Gauguin took it further, but neither of them totally gave up the motif. The essential change was abandoning the idea of the painting being a window, through which a spectator looks at reality. This was brought about by breaking the three-dimensional illusion by flattening the perspective and painting surfaces with minimal shadows. Gauguin especially painted his figures in even colours.

The window metaphor had prevailed in art for the last six hundred years since Giotto, Massaccio, Alberti and other pioneers of the Renaissance invented the perspective. These six hundred years have been continuing refinement of the illusion of reality that a painting can give. Of course the notion of reality has changed a lot during these centuries. At first the masters of the Renaissance brought the tales of the Bible to present everyday life with real models. For medieval and Renaissance people the Bible was as real as the life around them, an essential part of their lifeworld. The portraits of the powerful and the wealthy came soon into the picture. The Dutch painters were pioneers in painting people in their own environment. After the Reformation these secular motifs were the artists’ main source of living, because the church did not order their works. This tradition produced wonderful pieces of art, for example Vermeer’s interior views of people carrying out their chores. These six hundred years would be far too long a story for this essay, but an interesting one, nevertheless.

Now I can tell you why I wrote this short history in a reverse order. This is a kind of application of Danto’s theory of predicates of artworks (1964). When an artist invents a new form of expression, a new paradigm of art as it were, he or she defines earlier artwork anew as well. Before the birth of abstract art, nobody could say of a painting that “at least it’s not abstract, thank god”, because the very idea of abstract art did not exist. The same observation concerns all characterizations of artworks. So when we now look back at the masterpieces of the Renaissance, for example, we see them in the context of our own broader preunderstanding. We do not ask why the old masters didn’t paint abstract works, but we can characterize their works as representational, unromantic, and so on. This takes nothing away from the earlier works, but we cannot step outside of our own lifeworld and forget what has come after them. In this way I wanted to emphasize the lifeworld as the starting point of our interpretation.

All these artworks are now part of our lifeworld, at least as far as we have let them become part of it. They have changed our way of seeing, and they are new things to be seen. One cannot say that people did not see the world in perspective before the artists invented the technique and Alberti wrote a book about it. However, this new way of catching scenes on canvas really put things in perspective. It was now possible to look at things from the spectator’s (or actually from the artist’s) point of view of instead of the point of view of a divine or secular power, which meant that the more powerful the person is the more space he got in the picture. To make this possibility real required courage from the artist. Even in the Renaissance art was seen as a craft. The artists themselves strived for the idea of the free artist, who could paint whatever he or she wanted (well, there weren’t really many women artists). One key to an interpretation of Velazquez Las Meninas is just the keys on his belt: They are a sign of his knighthood, which was not possible for a craftsman. 

If we always see things as something, then what does ‘seeing as’ mean to somebody looking at an abstract painting, who in a way sees nothing (recognisable)? Well, the answer is: we should see a piece of art. This may sound rather an empty statement, but only the artwork was left behind, when the window to the outer world was broken. This is the new situation, for which the birth of modernism prepared us. We should look at all painting as art, not only the abstract ones. The message did not reach an ordinary spectator then, a hundred years ago, and artworks have not quite become common features of our present lifeworld either. When a lady commented on Matisse’s work, saying that the girl’s arm in the picture was too long, Matisse replied:” Madam, it is not a girl. It is a painting”. Magritte spelled it out in his work ‘this is not a pipe’. 

This ambition to make artworks independent objects of our lifeworld is the core of modernism. It is the last step in making the difference between art and craft. The artist certainly needs great skills and knowledge of the materials and techniques, but his or her artistic vision is what makes an artist. Even after we agree to see art as art, there are many issues to tackle, for example: How do we separate good art from bad art? Who defines good taste in art? Here we meet the social processes of the shared lifeworld. Good art challenges and expands our way of seeing the world. Only in very rare cases does an artist manage to invent a radically new paradigm of art, but any genuine piece of art must be original in some respect. It should also have something that relates it to our expectations of art. The meaning giving action is important. In this sense art enriches our lifeworld. Now I must leave the answering of these questions at any length to another occasion, as I have to say something about other endeavours of art, music and narrative arts too.

Music is a story of its own, but it has many similarities with visual arts regarding its place in the lifeworld. Our way to hear music as something, “to understand” it, is based on our ability to discerns tunes, melodies, harmony and rhythm, which we have developed by listening to music, memorising those elements and in this way have implanted them into the interpretation framework of our lifeworld. When listening to a new piece, the more complicated it is and the more it differs from our earlier experiences, the more difficult we find it to understand. Modernism in music has come to the point similar to visual arts, where nothing can really surprise us. A composer can present any sequence of sounds as music, or a period of silence, if he so decides, but if the audience cannot make music of it, then the artist’s attempt has not succeeded. The listeners have not been able to perceive the piece by means of their preunderstanding of music. However, as it is often case with good art, a piece of music may demand and a good piece always allows several listening experiences.

Literature, drama and cinema are perhaps the forms of art which have the richest relationship to the lifeworld, as they in a sense present life itself. These art forms can really open their own world to the audience, which expects to be able to interpret this world of a novel or a play in its lifeworld or at least see the possibility of a form of life that is very different. Absurd theatre and literature challenge the border of interpretation just by presenting incidents that we cannot expect to encounter in our lifeworld. In narrative arts the aesthetic values go hand in hand with inspiration for moral reasoning. We experience a drama here and now, it is real, but at the same time we know that it is a play. 

Art can show us how temporary our life is, “ars longa, vita brevis”. Artists have often set art above earthly possessions. They have lived for art, as Tosca sang. Our worldview is condensed in the works of art.