Apprehension? Performativity and Medium-Specificity in Modern Art

For all the talk about feeling, pleasure, and beauty, the aesthetic remains at its root a proposition, and a "disturbing" one at that. Admittedly what is disturbing also has a strong allure; thus the "idea" of the aesthetic has reverberated like a tremor through subsequent aesthetic inquiry. The issue, in short, is, How does one come to terms with the aesthetic? Indeed, Kant grappled with the idea of the aesthetic on precisely such terms of adequacy: "By an aesthetic idea I mean a presentation of the imagination which prompts much thought, but to which no determinate thought whatsoever, i.e., no [determinate] concept, can be adequate, so that no language can express it completely and allow us to grasp it." ¹ Kant makes clear that the aesthetic possesses discursive significance even though it cannot be adequately grasped by language or concepts. To be sure, an entire armory of intricate elaborations is erected to keep its critical momentum afloat, yet it holds a distinctive position insofar as it amounts to an idea without entirely adequate thought.

With modernist abstraction, the subtle but always seemingly precarious delineation of the aesthetic idea was again featured as a crucial issue—and thus became exceedingly important—because the fine line between modern abstract art works and design patterns or ornamentation appeared to have diminished—meaning that the fine line between autonomous, purposeless art and purposeful design also became precarious. At such moments, the recourse to Kantian formulations became more pronounced in criticism, even though Kantian philosophy was rarely examined in any detail. A crucial moment is that of American formalist criticism. In a book surveying art of the 1960s, Thomas Crow touches on formalist accounts of abstract art in the 1960s, which had vaguely Kantian aesthetic justifications at least partially in view. Crow asserts that the vital issue for such analyses was the assumption that painting, unlike design or ornamentation, constitutes an "expressive communication" between an artist and a "contemplative spectator." ² Although not particularly drawn to defend all the propositions of the formalism he is discussing, Crow merely mentions this basic distinction in passing, as though it were an unimpeachable founding proposition that did not require any elaboration or defending. This is, of course, both a permutation and an elaboration of Kant. Yet it represented an article of faith for the avant-garde, which defended a certain critical approach to the visual image, by risking the presumption of a coherent identity between an artwork and its conventions and medium.

Another example helps to amplify the critical attitudes to the visual image alluded to here. Lindsay Barrett has written a fascinating book about the purchase of Jackson Pollack's Blue Poles by the National Gallery of Australia in 1973. The study provides numerous social, cultural, and political insights into controversies behind this purchase because it amplified tensions surrounding the reformist zeal of the then Whitlam Labor government. As such, the book, while extremely engaging, has very little to say about the actual painting Blue Poles, beyond this social-historical context of social and psychic disturbances at the fringe of the American economic-cultural horizon. The work is then the cipher for an analysis of this specific context. In this sense, it provides an exemplary case of a particular type of visual culture or cultural studies reading. In fact, in the context of Life magazine's treatment of Pollock in 1959, Barrett reiterates an analysis by Wendy Kozol, which delineates the key emphases of this kind of reading. Life's audiences, quoting Kozol, "did not, nor were they meant to, read isolated photo-essays; they read them along with other photo-essays and advertisements and related them to other cultural discourses." Barrett takes up this point to endorse it further: "These texts speak directly in fact, in the political language of the time, to the constituents of the new global society, informing them as to what was happening in ‘their' world...