The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics: Robert Rauschenberg, Walker Evans, William Carlos Williams by Alexander Leicht (review)

In contrast to a method of American studies focused on democratic themes such as individualism, or the role of art in a democratic society, The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics proposes that particular artworks are “doing democratic theory” using the formal resources of art. The first part of the book provides a theoretical framework by defining democracy as egalitarianism, or the equal respect for autonomous persons; as pluralism, or how individuals come together while maintaining their distinctive identities; and openness, or the idea that democracy is an ongoing process (19). These three dimensions of democracy offer a schematic outline of contemporary democratic theory to organize the interpretive chapters that follow on the paintings of Robert Rauschenberg, the photographs of Walker Evans, and the poems of William Carlos Williams.

The method of critical analysis in The Search for a Democratic Aesthetics makes use of interactionist theories of metaphor to map relations across the conceptual domains of art and social structures. And these relations provides an organizational structure for the methodological challenge of discussing how particular aesthetic strategies share characteristics (or interact) with democratic theory across the distinct practices of painting, photography, and poetry. These metaphorical relationships include links between the organization of ordinary objects and pluralism, the “respectful” perspective of a person in a photograph as an aesthetic corollary for egalitarianism, and the analogy between formal experimentation in a poem and the open-ended process of democratic society. However, these interpretive claims are “not to be taken too literally,” Leicht cautions, for he does not mean “to imply that either of the artists read, let alone was well-versed in, democratic theory and consciously thought about how to transfer democratic theory into the language of art” (70). Still, a skeptical reader may ask, do such “aesthetic correlates” actually help us understand and appreciate these works of art?

Leicht offers a series of convincing responses. He first builds on a discussion of the political philosopher Robert Dahl’s contrast of a hierarchical model of society, what Dahl calls guardianship, with the idea of “intrinsic equality,” or the moral value of every individual, Leicht considers examples of aesthetic strategies that reflect the “anti-hierarchical ethos” of democracy (27). Similarly, he aligns John Rawls and Will Kymlicka’s elaboration of “the balance of equal concern, on the one hand and structure and organization on the other, or the attempt to achieve some kind of order on the basis of equal respect,” with a similar preoccupation “for artists who pursued a democratic aesthetics” (37). And drawing on the political philosopher Michael Walzer’s claim in Spheres of Justice that democracy is “a process that has no definitive conclusion,” Leicht compares the openness and experimentalism in a deliberative democracy with particular aesthetic strategies focused on temporal and spatial openness.

The two chapters dedicated to Robert Rauschenberg and Walker Evans exemplify the generative convergence of art criticism, aesthetic theory, and political philosophy in this book. For example, Leicht suggests that “an egalitarian respect for individual elements of an artwork, combined with a non-hierarchical attention to the mundane” (74), animates both Rauschenberg’s assemblages of objects and image collages and the depictions of ordinary scenes and objects in Evans’s photographs. In addition, Leicht elaborates how “an acceptance of multiplicity and contingency, together with a search for coherence” is evident in Rauschenberg’s use of grid patterns and in his foregrounding the materiality of art.

These structural analogies to multiplicity and contingency, moreover, are similarly evident in the compositional features and sequencing of photographs in the work of Walker Evans. Leicht points to Alan Trachtenberg’s commentary on Evans’s 1938 collection American Photographs as a “continuous meditation, similar to William Carlos Williams’s in the Paterson books, upon the problem of coherence” (284). Yet the modernist aesthetic of Walker Evans does more, argues Leicht. “It provides a metaphor for the kind...