261. A One-Question Challenge to Conceptual Artists

Let us agree that there are clear-headed, careful, deep thinkers among conceptual artists.  My question is, How, by their work, do you distinguish them from muddy-headed, careless, shallow thinkers?

260. Conceptual Art

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Why can't I just be bored by conceptual artists and keep my mouth shut?  Because I'm offended by the compliments they get.

I look at a photo of a Renault automobile on its side and somebody near me says "deep."  I argue for the presence of flaws in a friend's concept of omnipotence and nobody around us ever calls us deep. We're just "picky."

With the car on its side I'm out of the circle if "cool" is all I can work myself up to.  This is conceptual photography.  See the concept?  See it?

Shift to me trying to see, or understand, my friend's concept of an all-powerful, or omnipotent, Being.  We agree that a Being who can create a separate being is more powerful than a Being who can't, and that unless that being is free he's not separate.  He's just an extension of the Supreme Being.  A free being can choose to do things that the Supreme Being doesn't want him to do, like eat forbidden fruit.  If the Supreme Being prevents him he's turned him back into an extension of himself.  So we've got an all-powerful Being who can't do certain things.  This concept needs some work.  At it we go.

Using words.  Words, words, they're what you work with if you're interested in concepts.  And it's hard work.  If you don't think so ask English majors trying to get "the dissociation of sensibility" straight. 

You conceptual artists, you just lay your thing out there and let somebody else do the work.  If they don't get it done it's not your fault.  Maybe they're not deep enough.

How different you are from my friend, who has to get it out there clearly, the whole thing, and explain, and defend, and find the right words, until he satisfies you. 

Surely artists in the past have found that they weren't working with the best material for the job.  We had a sculptor in my town who wanted to make wavy structures out of brick.  The results were new and striking and some of them, with their wide curves away from plumb, made you gasp at the dare to gravity.  But when he came to build fireplaces with chimneys I think he saw he had his medium wrong.  People around a fire are uncomfortable seeing bricks hanging over them; gases want to go up, straight up, and smoothly. 

Use paint or a camera to lay out a concept and you use the wrong material for the job.  Words are the right material. But alas, they are very hard to use.  You have to work with them and work with them.  You often fail.  That's why success in it is so satisfying and compliments so pleasing. 

Here's an example of the difficulty.  You artists used words when you called what you are doing "conceptual art."   I want to know what "art" is doing in that expression. Say you give me this thing you've produced.  Its appeal is supposed to be conceptual.  Suppose I feel the appeal.  "What a concept!"  Where has "art" gone?  There's nothing left for it to do for me, or to have done for me.

Ah, but suppose I don't feel the appeal.  Here's where "art" goes to work.  On the bored, or the exasperated.  "But this is art."  The word lays on an appeal the producer, by himself or herself, hasn't produced.  And by doing something to me it does something for him, handing him a compliment.

You, conceptual artists, don't want me, your reader, your picky reader, thinking that way.  In a moment we'll be calling you "thinkers on the cheap."  This concept of concepual art needs more work.  I'd advise you and your friends to go at it.

NOTE. From Museum notices, New York Times, 10-10-14:

MUSEUM OF MODERN ART: 'CHRISTOPHER WILLIAMS: THE PRODUCTIOON LINE OF HAPPINESS' (through Nov. 2)  This meticulously considered and assembled survey of one of the deepest thinkers of the Pictures Generation is as beautiful as it is demanding.  No aspect of photography — as art, craft, science or commerce — or of exhibition making, has been left unturned, leaving a show that is a big brainy work of art unto itself.  (Roberta Smith)

73. Attention to Words as a Response to Relativism

Oh those conversations in the eighties and nineties. You could hear Richard Rorty quoted ("Truth is simply a compliment paid to sentences") in half the disciplines in the humanities. In the English Department the appeals were to Jacques Derrida ("There are only differences") and Chaim Perelman ("There are only audiences") — in addition to Rorty. Imply a claim for objective truth and you'd get one of them. Then you're in a troubling philosophical argument — and all you wanted to do, usually, was clear up a few problems in the Interpretation of Poetry course.

Get into trouble often enough and you'll figure out a way to get out. Here's my way. Say you're a scientist. You're accused of believing in the existence of a real world that can be objectively known. You say, "No, I just believe in the existence of a group of people who call each other 'scientists.' I take 'scientist' to be a compliment-word and I want them to apply it to me.

"What do I do to get the compliment? The same things I have been doing to discover objective reality. I examine nature, declare what I have discovered in a journal, and wait for the compliment. If readers of the journal, replicating my examination, get the same results I got I get the compliment. They were persuaded. That's all I'm doing, persuading people. Just as Aristotle's orator did.

"Except that there's a difference in our audiences. Mine isn't persuaded until the needles on their dials are in the same place I reported my needles to be. There's my rhetoric. When I work day and night in my lab I don't say I'm seeking the truth about the world, I say I'm working on a speech, the only kind that will persuade these people."

The scientist has something quieting to say, then, to each relativist. To Rorty: "With 'scientist' I merely take your compliment a step further, from sentence to sentence-maker." To Derrida: "I too deal only in difference; here it's the difference between language that gets me the compliment and language that doesn't." To Perelman: "I never go beyond the needs of my audience."

That's a scientist's response but it's not so different from mine. In my poetry class my audience needs reports on how English speakers form sentences and give meanings to words. Those reports they get from me, drawing on grammar book and dictionary. Without them they, with relatively little experience in the reading of English, can't construe sentences, the first operation in the reading of a poem.

It's to satisfy this need that I try to keep relativists quiet. Half my work is the work of a scientist, providing reports which, if believed, will allow my audience to proceed to the really rewarding part of their work, letting their imaginations go where the poet points them. In the first half of the job relativistic statements of the type we heard in the last century, are inadmissible. They are admissible in the second half, where differences in what's imagined are all the fun.

Keeping the two straight is one of the hardest jobs in the English classroom, if not in all of the humanities. You can convince beginning students — natural, self-protecting subjectivists — that scientific standards govern part of poetry-reading but it takes a lot of class time. Quarters are too short, life is too short, to allow relativists to lengthen it.