What Do Artists Know?

How Do Artists Think?

The question, What do artists know? is stimulating and thought-provoking, as demonstrated by the lively roundtable discussions that followed from it. The question occupied me over the past few months, when I continually felt forced to draw the absurd conclusion that artists know nothing. In the end I realized that that might not be such an absurd conclusion after all. To gather insight into what it is that artists do and how they apply their knowledge, and to develop an understanding about how art should be taught, why it is taught, and even whether it should be taught, as James Elkins puts it in his introduction, What do artists know? is not the proper question to ask. My argument is that the verb “to know” leads us in wrong directions, away from artistic practice and away from the artwork. I propose to recast this question as, How do artists think?, based on insights acquired from “Thinking,” the first part of Hannah Arendt’s book The Life of the Mind. I will put forward some speculations about what these insights might mean when applied to the practice of visual art. In “Thinking,” Arendt expands on Kant’s distinction between two ways of thinking, Vernunft and Verstand, which she translates respectively as “reason” and “intellect.” The distinction between the two coincides with the distinction between “meaning” and “cognition.” Reason and intellect serve different purposes , the first of “quenching our thirst for meaning,” the second of “meeting our need for knowledge and cognition.” In cognition, we apply criteria for certainty and evidence, in the kind of knowing that presupposes truth. Arendt closely follows Kant in stating that reason originates in our need to think about questions to which we know no answer exists and about which no verifiable knowledge is possible, for example, questions about God, freedom, death, and immortality. Reason therefore transcends the limitations of cognition and intellect, that is, the criteria for certainty and evidence, which she summarizes as follows: “The need of reason is not inspired by the quest for truth but by the quest for meaning. And meaning and truth are not the same.” In cognition, or knowledge, thinking is a means to an end of establishing truth or scientific knowledge. Verstand desires to grasp what is given by the senses. Cognition is a play between sensual perception and intellect, of applying laws and evident criteria to the phenomena as they are perceived by the senses. In this way, it is based on common sense, on faith in the reality of the world. The scientist approaches the world to dissipate sense illusions and to correct errors in science. HOW DO ARTISTS THINK? Janneke Wesseling 00i-228_Elkins_4p.indb 193 9/14/12 1:18 PM what do artists know? 194 Reason, on the other hand, has its end in itself. It is the pure activity of thinking, and at the same time it is the awareness of this activity while we are thinking. Reason is both reflexive and self-reflexive. The awareness of one’s own thinking activity creates the sense of being alive. Reason is the never-ending search for meaning, propelled as it is by constant doubt. Because it is ultimately founded on doubt, it has, as Arendt puts it, a “self-destructive tendency with regard to its own results.” To experience one’s thinking, to know of one’s mind’s faculties, one has to withdraw from the world of the senses. Sensual experience distracts us when we try to concentrate and think. The scientist may also temporarily withdraw from the world of appearances to solve a problem, only to return to it and apply the answer, to insert the solution into the sensual world. Arendt says reason is out of order with the world because of a withdrawal from the world that it demands, and also because it produces no results that survive its activity, and no solutions. According to Arendt, the gap between reasoning and the world of appearances is bridged by metaphor and metaphoric language. What might this tell us about art and the activity of artists? It will be clear that the kind of thinking that is relevant to art is reason, Vernunft. The artist will of course use her Verstand to solve concrete problems relating, for example, to technique, or to the marketing of her work. Such concrete solutions are important to her practice, but they do not constitute the meaning of her work; it is the kind of thinking called...