Showing posts with label Roger Scruton. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Roger Scruton. Show all posts

Thursday, May 26, 2011

It is art

We went to see Werner Herzog's newest film, Cave of Forgotten Dreams. As the title indicates, the movie is steeped in the hocus pocus that pervades Herzog's excursions. Entering the cave at Chauvet with him, we are supposed to feel awe, perhaps even religious tremors. That said, the movie was tremendously interesting, though the relentless focus on the "mystery" of the cave -- and the supposed "dreams" of its paleolithic artists -- meant that the movie totally neglected how the paintings were executed.

Until seeing the movie, I had never paid much attention to prehistoric art. The examples I had noticed almost in passing, especially engraved or incised representations of animals, certainly show expertise in rock carving. They cannot have been "thrown off" in an afternoon. They were obviously consciously intended, for what purpose the archaeologists have not yet discerned, yet they do seem communal and perhaps representative of social values -- as at left, from Sweden, showing three men perhaps performing a ritual. An interesting point in Herzog's movie is that Neanderthal man, though he made tools, did not produce "symbolic representations." That distinction belongs to homo sapiens. Humans seem to have wanted to preserve memories.

According to the movie, the paintings at Chauvet date to at least 30,000 years ago. There is some controversy concerning that dating, despite the "scientific methods" (e.g., carbon dating) used, because the analysis has been carried out in a single French lab, one that also has sole jurisdiction over the cave. I would suspect also that the paintings were made in various stages. Perhaps some were begun on June 7 30,000 years ago, and others in 29,000. If so, we are talking about the difference between, say, the Book of Lindisfarne and Jacques-Louis David. Judith Thurman, in The New Yorker, calls the Chauvet painting of of horses and rhinos at the top of this post a "frieze." It strikes me, however, that the individual elements -- the horses, the rhinos -- might have been done at different times and by different hands.


The row of horses certainly seems "advanced" in comparison with other paintings in the same cave. Note the use of perspective with several of the horses on the same plane. According to the British sculptor John Robinson, the "panel" (as he called it), smudging had been used to produce shadow. The painter had also highlighted the outer edge of the drawing by chiseling into the white rock surface. I have also learned that, after sketching outlines in charcoal, in some cases red ochre (as in the painting of a horse from Lascaux) or charcoal would be spit, sometimes using a narrow tube, to create the infill. (For more information about Chauvet go to Don's maps.)

Nevertheless, whether they were painted 10,000 or 30,000 years ago, one has to say that the Chauvet horses are "art." They seem to have no utilitarian purpose, but are there for themselves. Their value, as Roger Scruton, has written in his small book on beauty, resides in them and not in their purpose. The technique for creating these works suggests they were not done in the laborious and time-consuming manner of rock carvings. Thus, there was more play involved.

Monday, May 16, 2011

But is it art?

Having finished my article on the "pre-Kantian" sublime, I have now turned to a long overdue book review. The book in question, by Jesko Reiling, is entitled Die Genese der idealen Gesellschaft: Studien zum literarischen Werk von Johann Jakob Bodmer (1698-1783). Yes, I seem not to be able to get away from Bodmer. There is not much in Reiling's treatment on the sublime in Bodmer (though he did give me a few ideas). The subject, per the subtitle, is Bodmer's "literary work," in particular the epics Bodmer began to write in the 1740s and his "political dramas." Nevertheless, there has been so little scholarship on Bodmer's literary work that Reiling spends the first half of his book filling in Bodmer's intellectual and cultural background.

As I already noticed when I began working on Bodmer's early criticism, in the 1720s, it was clear that Bodmer was interested in the improvement of "manners." He had been much affected by Joseph Addison's Spectator essays and hoped that The Discourses of the Painters, the "moral" journal he founded with Breitinger, would play a similar role in shaping the manners of the newly emerging bourgeoisie in Switzerland. And, like Addison in England, he was rather lighthearted in imparting "lessons" to his readers and in his treatment of socially backward customs and practices. As I learned when I began reading Reiling, however, Bodmer became decidedly heavy-handed in his literary works, especially in the Noah epic and in the political dramas. Critics have judged them harshly, speaking of "Tugendterror" (virtue terror) and "Totalitarismus der Sitte" (totalitarianism of manners).

In the Old Testament the story of Noah begins with his birth (Gen. 5, 28). At the age of 500 (so Gen. 5, 32) he becomes father of Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The next chapter opens with the increasing wickedness of humankind, while supplying very little detail. The Lord, regretting that he had created men, simply decided to wipe out all life on earth, sparing only Noah and his family, who had found favor with Him. Though there is very little "back story," Bodmer nevertheless provides one, as Noah, in a dream, travels over the earth with the angel Raphael and views all the evil ways of men. As contemporary readers noted, the vices on display were those of European men and women over the past several centuries. The desire to turn a profit or to make oneself better than one's neighbor existed in the antediluvian world as well. Noah and his breed, on the other hand, were perfect in every way, untouched by jealousy, envy, greed, lasciviousness.

I must admit that I have not slogged through any of these works by Bodmer. It was enough to slog through Reiling's descriptions. In Bodmer's defense, however, he was simply adhering to an earlier tradition concerning the purpose of art, namely, that it was supposed to be edifying. I wonder what Bodmer would make of the exhibition now on display at the Metropolitan Museum: "Reconfiguring an African Icon." On display are what are called "highly creative reimaginings of the iconic form of the African mask."

Two of the artists are Africans from Benin (which has a rich sculptural tradition in any case), Romuald Hazoumé (mask at top of post) and Calixte Dakpogan (at the right). Among the materials they use are discarded plastic containers, shells, computer wiring, hair brushes, and lots of metal scraps. All very inventive and delightful. They remind me of something I have posted on before, namely, Schiller's notion of "Spieltrieb." There is nothing useful, nothing to be gained even morally from these objects; they are simply playful, and play is fun. A child's game is fun, but it is not art, not made, whereas these contemporary masks are made and, as Roger Scruton writes, are "consciously intended."

Saturday, April 16, 2011

The Natural Sublime

I have occasionally read articles by Roger Scruton over the years, but recently my friend Maureen Mullarkey posted an item on her blog about his book Beauty. Maureen has great taste in writing and in artists, so I immediately acquired the book. Scruton writes the clearest, most accessible prose, breaking down really big ideas into portion athat non-philosophical minds (like mine can grasp. Herewith an example, from the chapter "Natural Beauty," in which he distinguishes our experience of, say, the songs of birds and the colors or shapes of flowers from works of art:

"Works of art are expressly presented as objects of contemplation. They are framed on a wall, contained between the covers of a book, installed in the museum or reverently performed in the concert hall. To change them without the artist's consent is to violate a fundamental aesthetic propriety. Works of art stand as the eternal receptacles of intensely intended messages. ... Nature, by contrast, is generous, content to mean only herself, uncontained, without an external frame, and changing from day to day."

I also like his use of the term "apartness" to speak of natural phenomena, "their capacity to show that the world contains things other than us, which are just as interesting as we are."

Now, it was in the 18th century that people discovered nature as an object of aesthetic interest. Starting with the English critic John Dennis and then expanded on by Joseph Addison, the experience of the natural sublime was practically synonymous with an encounter with grand mountains (and also with the starry skies above and so on). In the essay I am writing on Bodmer, I have posed this question: Why in none of his treatises on poetry did Bodmer consider natural experience or natural beauties as potential poetic subjects? Surrounded his entire life long (1698-1783) by the mountains of Switzerland, about which otherwise so much ink was spilled in the 18th century, he never even mentions them when writing of "the Great" in nature, a notion he took over from Addison. Bodmer never uses the term "sublime" in reference to nature's effects. "Sublime" is reserved for the portrayal of noble and grand actions. Even the actions of Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost can be described as sublime, exceeding as they do in evil. When speaking of the grand in nature he resorts to stock formulas that are repeated by almost every writer on the sublime in the 18th century -- mountain gorges and abysses, violent storms, shipwrecks -- all drawn from literary accounts. The real world of nature does not interest him.

Bodmer's late essay on the sublime of 1746 indicates that he was aware of the connection that was being made between the sublime and personal encounters with nature. Reading Scruton, I seem to see that Bodmer's conventional references to nature, whether of natural beauty or of grandeur, are attempts to "frame" nature, to place it in a poetic world of its own, where the imagination can, as Scruton writes, "wander freely, with our own interests and desires in abeyance." Thus, his literary examples came from Homer and Virgil and even from some early 18th-century German poets (e.g., Brockes). Whether it is scenes of nature or of human action, the works of those poets, as Scruton writes, "come to us soaked in thought." Art is thus "freed from the contingencies of everyday life."

Scruton doesn't mention it, but it may be that freedom "from the contingencies of everyday life" is what attracts us to nature, whether to walks in the country or, in my case, kayaking on the river in the summer. (Kayak season starts in exactly one month, when the water temperature reaches 55 degrees.) Just being lazy, without any purpose.