The Challenges Of Being An Artist In A Civilization Looking For Truth
I.
Theodor Adorno was a contemporary Germanic philosopher whose critical theories have focused heavily on society. His ideas about art, though quite extensive and complex, include an artwork’s reception within society as well as understanding the importance of a work’s presence in the social sphere. In his book, Aesthetic Theory, Adorno focuses on the beauty and the sublime in art as it is revealed within society. In his chapter, “Theories of the Origin of Art,” he ponders what is seen and what is merely known in an artwork. Is reality seen, or perhaps, known within a work of art? What is the linguistic artwork?
Adorno discusses art’s unification in the process of Enlightenment and proceeds to focus on naturalistic imitation versus reification in order to see what is natural and closest to the real. As times have changed and the audiences for art have evolved, spectators have craved art that speaks the truth and presents what is actually real. Most viewers today feel that magic and spirituality is a disillusionment of reality and therefore, such works that provide this extraordinary deception are undesirable.
While art appears one way to many viewers, its physical expression is not always consistent or obvious. Art does, however, speak a language which varies from spectator to spectator. An artwork is not universal in its projections and, therefore, a work’s meaning is different for everyone. The underlying necessity that many viewers seem to have in order to appreciate art is that it must not lie or mislead them, and that is what magic seemingly accomplishes in art: fallacy.
What art tries to reveal is the magic within its self, but that very magic correlates to Adorno’s myth more than Enlightenment (explained below), and spectators are not amused with work that is deceptive and untrue, especially when trying to grasp the authentic and real. Adorno observes that “‘the dualism of the visible and the invisible, of the seen and merely known, remains absolutely foreign to Paleolithic art’… the element of undifferentiatedness from reality in the earliest art, as well as the undifferentiatedness from reality of the sphere of semblance” (Adorno 327). While magic was a large part of art’s presence and significance in the Paleolithic times, where all art was considered real, that magic has changed in the contemporary milieu and has become more of a representation of an idea or a sign of something real, rather than an imitated depiction of the real. Are spectators able to see what the work is trying to convey? Does truth exist within a work of art?
Truth is a complex idea in Adorno’s work. His book, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, which he co-wrote with Max Horkheimer, reflects many ideas about society, mass culture and truth. In their chapter, “The Concept of Enlightenment,” they focus on how society seeks to embody absolute truth and the real but become lost within myth and false illusions; the distinction here is between Enlightenment and myth.
According to Adorno and Horkheimer, Enlightenment tries to dispel myth in order to overthrow fantasy with knowledge. In society, where man has fought to overthrow nature, he has also continued to fight to obtain more knowledge in order to dominate that which is weaker as well as misleading. How does this relate to understanding reality’s relationship to a work of art? If an artwork exhibits illusions and not that which is real or true, spectators, seeking to embody truth and identify with the familiar, reject the work. As written above, in Paleolithic times, the magic in a work of art was imitative of something real; it held great power and significance over the real thing being represented; the artwork could come to life. In contemporary society, that magic is dismissed in a work of art because it appears misleading and untrue; it must be dominated as myth. Society does not want to believe in something false because that will drive them away from the intelligible path they wish to continue on; they want to dominate everything that is untrue in order to really cherish and accept the real.
Adorno and Horkheimer point out that the relationship between Enlightenment and myth is reciprocal. In order for one to exist, it must be able to rely on its opposing other. For society to be able to understand Enlightenment and truth, they need to be able to struggle with myth and the untruths of the world in order to see what truth and reality ultimately is. They must experience it for their selves and allow for the magic to help guide them into a better cognitive understanding of what is true.
Philosopher Arthur C. Danto writes about the distinction between art, imitation and reality in his book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. He discusses how an artwork, as imitation, produces visuals that reflect an idea, feeling or emotion but are not literally those things; an art object is separate and set aside from the inherent reality that exists; literal representation in art has turned into an abstraction of the real. Danto talks about how art is a mirror of reality, which makes art mimetic, especially in terms of imitation. Based on whether or not the illusory effects of the real are pleasurable, Danto writes that art has become a subjective declaration of its self in representational form in order to convey an idea, historical event, person, etcetera; with this, he focuses on the gap between art and reality, imitation and reality and art and contemporary life. Because art today does not exhibit a true representation of reality, its abstractions allow for misinterpretations of the real.
Similarly to Adorno and Horkheimer, Danto writes about determining an object as a work of art rather than as a “mere real thing,” as he puts it. For viewers, how are they to comprehend a work as art when compared to any everyday object? From discussing identical red paintings on canvas to writing about Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol who created art that reinvented a common thing, Danto notes that the art world has deemed things to be considered a work of art by its frame, stage performance, quotations, exhibition in an art space, or by an artist’s branded name within commodity culture. The distinction between that which is considered to be art to that which is a real thing can be a challenge for spectators and, in many cases, forces viewers to reject an artwork because they are unable to see the difference between the creative imaginary and the real.
Art critic Hal Foster discusses this idea in regards to Pop Art in his book, The Return of the Real. He writes, in accordance with Roland Barthes, that Pop art wanted to release deep meaning from art and that the “’pop artist [did] not stand behind his work’…he [was] merely the surface of his pictures, no signified, no intention, anywhere” (Foster 128); the artist, or author, becomes released from the work in the process of ridding their artwork of deep meaning and creating something which society can immediately relate. If an artist can detach his or her self from the work, how is society expected to engage or understand the artist’s intended object? Although society can identify with the familiar, is society able to identify the work as art?
Foster writes, “some art may attempt a trompe-l’oeil, a tricking of the eye, but all art aspires to a dompte-regard, a taming of the gaze” (Foster 140). In regards to an artwork’s audience, Foster writes that a work of art tries to deceive its audience in order to present the illusion in which it wants them to fall. Is a work of art intended to reject reality and solely present the imaginary? For Foster, the tricking of the eye is to stray viewers away from seeing an imitation and to attempt to have them experience a representative image outside of reality. Foster talks about this in relation to superrealism: “It is a subterfuge against the real, an art pledged not only to pacify the real but to seal it behind surfaces, to embalm it in appearances… super-realism seeks to deliver the reality of appearance…to delay the real” (Foster 141).
Superrealism attempted to capture the super reality of the subconscious mind; in doing so, superrealists created many experimental works which touched upon the senses of their audience who saw these works as “visual conundrums with reflections and refractions of many sorts” directly related to reality (Foster 142). The eyes of viewers were tricked because the work revealed something mysterious and unfamiliar even though it was a hyper imitation of the real and familiar. Trickery draws the viewer away from an artwork because of deception and feeling fooled and mislead. That trickery fails to allow spectators to really understand a work because of the fall into deception and, therefore, many reject the work.
How do these authors relate or differ from each other? How do these ideas pertain to the reality and representation of art? These questions will be answered in the following analysis, describing each author’s detailed writings and how society has been impacted by these ideas.
Work Cited:
- Adorno, Theodor W., Gretel Adorno, and Rolf Tiedemann. “Theories on the Origin of Art.”
Aesthetic Theory. Trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1997. 325-31. - Danto, Arthur C. “Works of Art and Mere Real Things.” The Transfiguration of the
Commonplace: A Philosophy of Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981. - Duchamp, Marcel. “The Creative Act.” Salt Seller; the Writings of Marcel Duchamp.
New York: Oxford UP, 1973. - Foster, Hal. “The Return of the Real.” The Return of the Real: The Avant-garde at the End of the
Century. Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1996. - Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. “The Concept of Enlightenment.” The Dialectic of
Enlightenment. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972.