Philosophizing Art: Selected Essays (review)

Arthur Danto is known primarily as a philosopher of art, and this volume of essays on art is the companion to another collection of more philosophically oriented essays, The Body/Body Problem, reviewed recently in this journal.

At the start Danto lays out with deftness and clarity his well-known formulation of the problem of defining art in an age when the art object cannot be perceptually distinguished from the non-art object. The problem is so acute in the case of Warhol's Brillo Box (1964) that the mere fact of its institutionalization by persons acting on behalf of the art world (the so-called institutional theory) is not enough, for Danto at least, to account for the philosophical difficulties it provokes. For the box to be art is for it to be "internally connected with an interpretation," which means "precisely identifying content and mode of presentation" (p. 9). The core of Danto's thesis is that "persons embody representational states, as artworks embody their contents" (p. 9), thus linking the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of art, to the point where he speaks less of "philosophizing art" (as the title might suggest) than "of art philosophizing itself." Such is the case with Andy Warhol, where the work itself, he argues, constitutes a kind of philosophical discourse.

The way Danto then proceeds to write about art from a philosophical perspective is not so much to expound a particular doctrine or mode of analysis as it is to bring philosophical insights to bear on the difficulties inherent in (mostly) contemporary art. These difficulties—problems of representation, meaning, reference and interpretation—that Danto recognizes are no less profound, complex or urgent than the problems of contemporary philosophy.

In his chapter on Robert Motherwell, the seminal American expressionist, Danto claims that the artist

saw painting itself as a problem, very much as the great philosophers of the past saw knowledge itself—or understanding, or truth—as a problem, or as, in the twentieth century, philosophers found philosophy itself to be a problem to which increasingly radical solutions were proposed

(p. 14).

Motherwell's strategy for resolving the problem of painting was to adopt a mode of practice that "demanded a wholesale reconstructive methodological solution" (p. 15). This was the "psychic automatism" propounded by Breton in his literary work, but hardly applied to visual art by the original Surrealist circle.

The paintings and drawings Motherwell made using the automatist approach (originally popularized by the psychics and mediums of the 19th-century spiritualist revival) pose a number of problems, not just for the philosophy of art, but for the philosophy of mind. In these works we are presented with urgent, mostly scruffy, marks that speak of meaninglessness, holding cognition at bay, but which we inevitably try to reconcile with memory, to find in them known objects or meaning. Consequently, the ordinary perceptual process is somehow challenged or disengaged so that one becomes conscious, as it were, of one's act of viewing, sifting and guessing. One is left, like Danto talking of the Altamira Elegy (1979-1980), hypothesising that "the four heavy forms could be bunches of grapes, or fruits on a table, as in a famous painting of persimmons by the thirteenth-century Japanese artist Mokkei" (34). Although Danto does not say it, in a suitably Zen-like way one is confronted in Motherwell's automatist marks with something like "pure sensation," a state almost devoid of cognition, a state of great philosophical significance.

But in an essay devoted to Warhol, "The Philosopher as Andy Warhol," Danto could be accused of setting himself up for a fall, or at least an anticlimax. Given the centrality of Warhol to Danto's life's work, and the extraordinary claims made on behalf of his art ("[Warhol] made a philosophical breakthrough of almost unparalleled dimension in the history of the reflection of the essence of art" [p. 74]), we are entitled to expect something definitive on the...