For Plato, the idealist, Art is an imitation of an imitation. In his Republic, he uses the example of a bed. The painting of a bed is a copy of a concrete bed, which is itself a copy of the ideal form of a bed. If art is imitating an imitation of an ideal, then, art is doubly divorced from reality and doubly inferior.
For Aristotle, the realist, art is still an imitation, but imitation not of the ideal world like Plato but the real (physical) world. Art is a mirror of reality around us and within us.
The notion of art as mimesis (imitation), has a long and profound influence. And, the meaning of art is that which it represents.
The difficulty in this kind of understanding is what it implies. Works of art are judged according to similitude, that is, the better the imitation, the better the art. A perfect copy would be a perfect art. This view sets art squarely against documentary photography. A good school ID photo would be a good art.
Today we know that not all art is imitative or representative. There are surrealist, expressionist and conceptual art.
While some art are representative, the mimetic understanding alone cannot account for the nature or the value of art.
The rise of the Enlightenment in Europe gave new insights to the understanding of the nature and the meaning of art.
The essence of art lies in its power to express something, not only in its mimetic capacity.
According to the Romantics, like Benedetto Croce, RG. Collingwood and Leo Tolstoy, art is primarily the expressions of feelings or intentions of the artist. Not solely an imitation of an external reality, as earlier understood, but the expressions of an internal reality. And the best way to interpret art is by trying to understand the original intention of the maker of the artwork itself—the painter, the writer, the composer.
For Tolstoy, art is the contagion of feeling. This means that, the artist expresses feeling through the artwork which in turn evokes that feeling in the viewers (audience). Art is interpreted or judged by the quality of feelings it expresses and “infects” with us.
For Croce, art is the expression of emotion. Emotions are very real and a primal type of knowledge. When expressed and evoked by great works of art, it becomes powerful, often cosmic.
For Collingwood, the original intention of the artist is the actual art. The inward psychological vision of the artist is so primordial and it does not matter whether or not that vision ever got translated into art forms for the public.
Modern “hermeneutics” – the art and science of interpretation – still depends on this view, that art is the expression of an original intention or feeling or vision of the artist. Noted theorist along this line are Friedrich Schleiermacher, Wilhelm Dilthey, Emilio Betti, E.D. Hirsch. The key to correct interpretation, – whether artistic, linguistic, poetic – is the recovery of the maker’s original intention, a psychological reconstruction of the author’s or artist’s intentions in the original historical setting.
The paradigm of art as expression was historically paralleled by the trends of expressionism by the artists themselves. The 19th century Expressionists and Post Impressionists – Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Gauguin, Edvard Munch – directly opposed the realists’ and Impressionists’ imitation of nature.
Van Gogh wrote to Theo, his brother, “Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes, I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly.”
The Cubists and the Fauves reacted similarly. Henri Matisse said, “What I am after above all is expression.”
The various manifestations of Expressionism, including Kandinsky and Klee, and the abstract expressionism of Pollock Kline and de Kooning was not a mere stylistic alteration of external representation but a complete break with the mimetic tradition.
An offshoot of the broad Romantic movement is Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud. It pointed out that many human intentions are, in fact, unconscious. These intentions, though unconscious, can make their way in disguised forms into everyday life as neurotic symptoms, as symbolic dreams or as slips of tongue. The artist, writer or poet, like everybody else, has various unconscious intentions. These intentions in disguised forms would leave traces in the artwork itself. Hence the significant part of understanding an artwork is the unearthing of these unconscious drives, intentions, desires, wishes, etc. Art criticism in this respect requires psychoanalysis.
Aside from the Freudian unconscious intentions, there are other types of unconscious structures in the human being. The Marxist pointed out that the artist exists in a setting of techno-economic structures. His works will inevitably reflect the “base” of economic realities. The correct interpretation of a work involves highlighting the class structures in which the art is produced.
Feminists aggressively tried to argue that the fundamental and hidden structures were primarily those of gender. The Marxist were not spared of their thinly disguised intentions of patriarchal power.
A sudden surge of isms followed – racism, sexism, elitism, speciesism, anthropocentrism, androcentrism, phallocentrism.
All these isms view a particular artwork as symptomatic/ indicative of larger currents or forces, which the artist is often unaware of – sexual, economic, cultural, political, ideological.
Art, then, is an expression of an original feeling intention or vision of the artist who might have structures of unconscious intention.
The interpretation of art rests in the decoding and exposing of the hidden intentions, whether individual or societal.
A reaction to the expressive understanding of art is the “formal” view of art. Intentions alone, conscious or unconscious cannot define the nature and value of art.
The other side of the Enlightenment is Rationalism. The realist trends in literature and painting (Zola, Balzac, Flaubert, Courbet) had influenced the Impressionists. The impressionists repudiated much the Romantic-Expressionist trends.
The Impressionists (Monet, Renoir, Manet, Pissaro, Degas) sought to capture “the immediate visual impressions” and render them impersonally. The emotions of the artist becomes secondary. The objective rendering of contemporary and actual experience was sympathetic to the realist attitude, at the danger of becoming documentary.
The nature and value of art is in the form of the artwork itself. Formalism had its origin in Kant’s Critique of Judgment, in the music theory of Eduard Hanslick and in the visual arts of Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Other notable Formalists are the Russian formalists Jakobson and Propp; the American Critics Wimsatt and Beardsley; the French Structuralists Levi-Strauss & Barthes; the neo-structuralists (early) Foucault and the post-structuralists Derrida, Paul de Man, Hartman and Lyotard.
In Formalism, the meaning of an artwork is found in the formal relationship between elements of the work itself. The elucidation of these formal structures makes a valid interpretation of the work.
Formalism rejects/ denies aggressively the significance of the artist original intention. The artist is totally irrelevant to the work. “Amputate the art from the artist,” according to Barthe. For Monroe Beardley and William Wimsatt Jr., the artist intention is “neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of art.”
The viewer or audience must essentially look at the artwork itself. For, how can one possibly know the intent of the artwork if it is not expressed in the art itself? Intentions might be interesting, but if they don’t make it into the artwork, then they are not part of the work. Interpretation should center, first and foremost, on the elements intrinsic to the artwork considered as a whole in itself.
Eduard Hanslick maintains that the meaning of music is in its internal forms – rhythm, melody and harmony.
Roger Fry and Clive Bell both maintain that the nature and meaning of art is to be found in its “significant form.” Cezanne being the great exemplar.
Thus, Formalism places the nature and meaning of art, not in the intention of the artist, not in what the artwork represents, not in what the artwork expresses, but in the formal or structural relationship of the elements in the artwork itself. ©
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