On Sampling the Pleasures of Visual Culture: Postmodernism and Art - Part 1

  Robin Marriner 

 I want to explore two issues from ideas about the postmodern that seem to me to raise problems about the practices of art education. Presently I feel more confident that there are difficulties here that need to be addressed than I do about knowing how practice should be redrawn to meet them. First, I want to briefly discuss post- structuralist accounts of meaning and their implications for our concept of the art work as ‘object of experience,’ ‘object of study,’ or ‘object of knowledge.’ Secondly, I want to discuss something which, though separate, has some connection: namely the fairly ubiquitous claim (though with differing value judgments attached), that one of the significant features of the postmodern, and therefore of our present condition, is the erosion or effacement of difference between what has formerly I been deemed high and low cultures. 

 A. Post-structuralist theories of meaning 

 A1. The relationship between post-structuralism and postmodernism is evidently contentious. Where Jameson’s characterisation of the postmodern seems in part constructed from annotating certain facets of post-structuralist thinking, for example, the notion of the ‘subject,’ and the concept of the ‘real,’1 Huyssen argues that ‘we must begin to entertain the notion that rather than offering a theory of postmodernity and developing an analysis of contemporary culture, French theory provides us primarily with an archaeology of modernity, a theory of modernity at the stage of its exhaustion.’2 Perhaps we can say that if not offering a theory of the postmodern, post-structuralism offers an epistemology which is inconsistent with, or oppositional to the epistemological commitments that underpin modernist culture, and in particular modernist art culture. To that degree it seems, that if not a theory of postmodernism it is profoundly imbricated in what we understand by it. 

 A2. What is of particular relevance here both to an understanding of postmodern art practice and its implications for art education is the manner in which post- structuralist accounts of meaning run contrary to those to which modernism has covertly, or more recently overtly, had an allegiance. 

Within philosophical aesthetics, within art criticism, within art education, our thinking has been traditionally structured by certain oppositions: oppositions for example, between the object and its context; between that which is interior to it and that, exterior; between that which is essential to its meaning and that which is only contingent. Though we have different accounts of what the relationship between the interior and the exterior might Be - in some cases that the latter doesn’t count at all (for example, formalism), in others that it is heavily determining (for example, the social history of art) - in all such accounts our thinking has already posited or assumed the intelligibility of the concept of an object that exists in separation from that which .‘surrounds’ or can be brought to it. It is the legitimacy of this assumption that in their different ways, for example, Foucault in his discussion of the ‘objects of discourse,’ and Derrida in his discussion of the ‘parergon’ put into question.3 Both in effect show how that which we take or posit as ‘exterior’ to the object is a sine qua non of the object’s visibility and intelligibility to us; that which we take as contingently related to the object is necessarily related to it and in that respect not exterior to our conception of the object at all. 

To try and make this more concrete; and at the same time underscore its difference from modernist ideas, I want to look at one example of an argument in support of the autonomy of art works. 

The concept of the totally self-sufficient and/yet meaningful art work perhaps received its most rigorous articulation in American art practice and criticism of the Sixties, here I am thinking particularly of the criticism of Michael Fried and Don Judd.

Untitled 1974 by Don Judd, Plywood 36x60x60"

 Though at the time the latter thought himself to be marking out ground in opposition to Fried’s modernist notion of ‘presentness’ through his concept of ‘literalness,’ retrospectively the consensus is that he was working within a modernist paradigm.4 In his essay ‘Specific Objects,’ Judd elaborates on and secures our understanding of the particular nature of . the work he is promoting (in essence minimalist sculpture) through distinguishing it from what it is not: its ‘literalness’ is spelt out in terms of its being non-illusionistic, non-allusionistic, non-referential, non-representational, etc.5 ‘Literal’ is also used within the text to signify that the meaning of the object is given by or consists in just what is there: the obdurate thing, its materials, the simple relation of its parts, etc. These two uses are taken as equivalent or synonymous to underpin that ‘… only what can be seen is there ... What you see is what you see.’6 At first glance, in fact at several glances, given how long these ideas have had a currency in the art world, a convincing case seems to be made for the idea of an object that is totally self-sufficient and meaningful: it is self-referential, literally ‘just what it is,’ and declares that. 

That there is a problem lurking here can be brought out if we remind ourselves that there is a perfectly legitimate way of describing what we literally see when we look at a Judd work as a plywood box of certain dimensions with a recessed edge, or say in the case of an Andre, a pile of one hundred and twenty fire bricks in a certain arrangement. This is not of course what Judd means when he says of the object that it is literal, that its meaning is given by what is literally there, for Judd is not talking about objects that are (simply) plywood boxes or piles of bricks but about objects that are art. The difficulty is that in the sense in which being made of plywood is a literal property of the object, literally visible and amenable to sight (which is what the persuasiveness of the argument hangs on), it seems to me that the artness isn’t. If we see the plywood box, or see the pile of bricks but are unable to see the art, there is nothing more to see, there is no further literal property that we have overlooked that is going to make visible its artness. In order to ‘see’ the sculpture what we need is something that is precisely not given in the literal/visible properties of the object: we need a familiarity with other objects, values and knowledges,

Equivalent VIII 1968 by Carl Andre, Fire Bricks

only in relation to which do the ‘literal’ properties take on the meaning of art. One might say it is only because these relations are put into play within Judd’s text, (e.g. we know what it is for something to be’ ‘non-illusionistic’), but are not overtly acknowledged, that the idea of an object that has no relations and is meaningful gains any credence and seems to become intelligible to us. One might go further and say that though when we perceive the object (simply) as a physical object, a plywood box, the relations of which I speak are exterior to the object and contingent, in so far as the object is perceived and experienced as a work of art those relations are absolutely necessary; without them the object which is the object of art, the aesthetic would not come into being. In so far as that is persuasive, those relations are then not contingently related and exterior to the object but interior and constitutive of it.7 

In a large nutshell I am suggesting that theories of autonomy in relation to artworks are highly problematic if we accept a post-structuralist account of meaning. Despite the differences (that in this context I have chosen to ignore) between thinkers designated as poststructuralists, they have in common a shared acceptance of two of the fundamental propositions put forward by de Saussure, namely, that a sign comes into being qua sign, i.e., means, in virtue of its relation to and difference from other signs within a system; secondly, that the relationship between the elements of a sign, between a signifier and a signified is not natural and motivated but arbitrary and conventional. Though post-structuralists differ from Saussure and structuralists in their rejection of the weight that the latter give to the system, (‘langue’) as the object of study, they all have in common the belief that meaning is relational. Theories that meaning can be inherent, immanent or present in/to the sign are cast as untenable because they have misconstrued the logical conditions under which meaning can transpire.

A3. One educational implication of this seems to me to be for what has to be included within the ‘object of study’ when we are studying art objects. If, as was claimed above the ‘work of art’ as an ‘object of experience,’ or an ‘object of criticism’ only comes into being in its relations, then those relations are not contingent but (logically) necessary to both its ontological status and its meaning. If we allow that ‘theory’ can be taken as equivalent to having epistemological commitments or allegiances, (rather than overt theorising), then it follows that theory is always at work in the ‘work’ qua ‘work of art,’ or the ‘object’ qua ‘object of criticism.’ There is no ‘work of art’ without theory being at work, and no ‘object of criticism’ without theory. (To claim the former, it should be stressed, is not equivalent to claiming or implying that all art works are overtly ‘theoretical’ or concerned with their own ontological status). It would seem to me that theory therefore has to be included in an art education that is to give an understanding of and access to how works mean. 

Another implication of the above is that if something takes on the status of ‘art work’ and signifies meaning qua art work in virtue of its relations, then those relations are productive in generating that art work in its specificity - as that kind of object meaning this, e.g., Andre’s ‘Equivalence No 8.’ We need to reflect further on now these relations come to pass. Rather than see talking about art, writing about art, and the other modes through which we approach and present art to ourselves as in some way mediating or translating or making ‘available’ an anterior formed (and in respect of meaning ‘complete’) object, we have to acknowledge the performative aspects of our activities. In the acts of speaking, writing, presenting slides, hanging work we are placing or locating that on which we act, we are generating relations through which the art object in its specificity is produced. (One might say the artist does the same.)8 This seems to me unavoidable, the problem is that rarely in any of the areas in which art is engaged or studied is it presently acknowledged. (I’m sure we all could cite innumerable talks, lectures, exhibition guides, catalogues, journal articles, etc., wherein, under the guise of an exclusive concern to present the meaning of work, certain relations are taken as already in place but not ‘spoken’: that is, a ‘placing’ of the work for the student/reader/viewer is effected by presenting to the student/reader/viewer a work that has already been ‘placed’ in relation to a body of knowledge or theory.) What in part needs consideration and further examination is the possible ways in which relations can be generated and put in place if certain kinds of experience are to become available/accessible ... but at least as importantly, that in our making of claims about the meaning of works we disclose that it is always in relation to some body of knowledge that they are being made: that that knowledge is itself declared. 

It seems to me that art education, criticism, shows/exhibitions cannot themselves guarantee that certain experiences will happen, nor can they (ever) offer a definitive meaning of works; relations can always change both across time and different audiences. A defensible characterisation of education, criticism and exhibition culture has to recognise that conditionality, that though my not having an experience or not perceiving meanings posited by a particular critical practice can come about through my lack of awareness of the relations and knowledges that the practice aspires to put in place, equally they can come about through a refusal of those relations and knowledges in favour of my commitment to others. Embracing particular experiences and meanings in relation to an art work always involves embracing far more than is overtly on offer. Though art culture too often operates like a ‘Goodfella,’ if not on pain of death, at least of social exclusion, it doesn’t make an offer that can’t be refused.