ON NOT KNOWING

 

ON NOT KNOWING

Growing up in the UK in the 1950s and 1960s, at least if growing up in a non-metropolitan culturally determined area of the UK, one still imbibed certain ideas about culture, not least about “art’.  As became famously claimed a little later of a certain brand of lager, art managed to get to the parts of us that other culture had not reached. From the late 19thC, in Tolstoy’s claim that ‘’art is differentiated from activity of the understanding which demands preparation and a certain sequence of knowledge (so that one cannot learn trigonometry before knowing geometry) by the fact that is acts on people independently of their state of development and education, that the charm of a picture, of sounds, or of forms, infects any man whatever his plane of development’’(i) through to the later formalist claims of Bell and Fry, that one needed  only a sense of line colour and form to gain access/connect to art (ii), the separation of knowledge and the experience of art was well engrained in popular consciousness. Even if not a few of us felt a degree of discomfort at that: the elation and pleasure one experienced at “getting it” so easily displaced by a level of humiliation and inadequacy and anger if one didn’t: feeling one’s own muteness no less than ‘inappropriate’ comments  broadcast, even amplified one’s exclusion by/from the work.  The sharpest version of what I am trying to describe I think happened to me at the first Warhol museum show I ever saw, and initiated a change of mind that has lasted ever since about that received relationship between art and knowledge.

Orange Disaster Five Deaths. 1963

Marilyn Diptych, Tate Modern, 1962

Probably the most conspicuous differences between the Warhol paintings and their source material is one of the context of encounter and scale, though also of course all the features that Morphet adumbrates. The interesting thing  about the latter then becomes (not so much their shared features with established art but the difference that those properties make to our perception of the work as opposed to our perception of the source. What I  what to suggest is that the Warhol works underscore and make it impossible for us to ignore something that  we in a sense already know but in our normal encounter with these images where we are more preoccupied with what the image references, i.e. to look ‘through’ it to the ‘star’, accident,etc, that what we are looking at, is an image. All of Warhol’s work are not just images, but literally, and more strictly, images of images, and it is that we are shown. That imaging is not a copy of the real but is constructive of what the real it to us, what tragedy, what glamour, disaster, and desirability consist in. Further one might argue that the work also discloses how those meanings (despite what has been claimed for art) are not in the pictures – which are ‘simply’ and visibly deposits of pigment on a surface – but located somewhere else. It would probably be excessive to claim that the Warhols’ paintings at that time said where, (it took the dissemination of post-structuralist theory to make that possible) but they did evidence that the meaning of a work was not unconnected with the knowledge in relation to which it was read, and at least as devastatingly to me, and the likes of me, what work meant was not granted by divine authority but determined by what (and therefore whose) knowledge was in the ascendancy at a given time. And therefore open to challenge.

 Notes:
i) Tolstoy Leo “What is Art” (1898) 1969 OUP. London. p178
ii) Bell Clive.   “Art” (1913) 1958 Capricorn Bks . New York. P 28.
iii) “Warhol” 1971. Tate Gallery London. Text by Morphet Richard. P 20.

 

A more analytic and more detailed documentation of these issues is to be found in ”Missing Warhol” RM in Art Monthly No 130, Oct 1989.