why is this not true?
Out of context: Reply #18
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Arthur C. Danto, Author of The Transfiguration
of the Commonplace
KAREL CÍSAŘAbstract: Danto’s innovative theory of art – formulated in response to artworks that were made by being transfigured from commonplace objects – was to undergo two radical transformations. On the one hand, this theory instigated the
rise of the so-called Institutional Theory of art, whose conclusions are rejected by Danto; on the other hand, it produced a theory of the end of art, which he later
developed – as a reinterpretation of his original conclusions. Transformative appropriation is the most natural element of Danto’s philosophy, as well as of the art of the neo-avant-garde followers of the original avant-garde on which Danto’s theories are based.1. Danto’s book, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, also deals with this specific transfiguration. From the preface we learn that this is nothing other than the transfiguration of a commonplace object into an artwork, regardless of its aesthetic quality. The ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp and, in particular, the work of Andy Warhol are given as examples here. If Marcel Duchamp was the first to turn a bottle-rack, bicycle wheel or urinal into artworks, it was Andy Warhol who, in Danto’s view, turned Duchamp’s gesture into the actual subject of his artistic activity. Danto makes several references to his first encounter with Warhol’s work in a 1964 exhibition at the Stable Gallery in New York as being a turning point in his philosophical career (Danto 1981: vi-vii, 1994: 6-7 and 1992: 5-6). When he saw Warhol’s Brillo Box, at first glance piles of ordinary soap powder boxes, he realized that, for the first time, a genuinely philosophical question had arisen from the art world, namely how can we view these boxes as artworks, which is what his Brillo boxes undoubtedly were considered to be. Danto’s answer, as formulated initially in the articles ‘The Art World’ (Danto 1964) and ‘Artworks and Real Things’ (Danto 1973) and subsequently in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, is well known. The Brillo boxes cannot be revealed as artworks through mere observation. To be seen as such, it is necessary to have a certain knowledge of art theory and history and to be engaged in the art world. Only after adopting such an aesthetic approach can one see – albeit on the basis of perceiving what is indistinguishable – not piles of containers for soap pads but artworks. We cannot comprehend a work of art only by looking at it; it has to be interpreted in a kind of strategic way that is oriented in the art world. We have to set out a theory concerning the meaning of the work. It is such an interpretation that transfigures everyday utilitarian objects, such as cartons for soap pads, into artworks. Danto’s innovative theory of art – formulated in response to artworks that were made by being transfigured from commonplace objects – was, itself, to undergo two radical transformations, which are described at the end of the preface to The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. On the one hand, this theory instigated the rise of the so-called Institutional Theory of art, whose conclusions (as set out by Richard Sclafani and George Dickie) are rejected by Danto; on the other hand, it produced a theory of the end of art, which he later developed – as a reinterpretation of his original conclusions. Danto criticizes the Institutional Theory, which made famous his concept of the art world, for changing the position used when formulating the underlying issue. Danto was originally engaged in what was basically a Kantian question about the conditions governing the possibilities of artworks; in contrast, institutional theorists posed a different question, i.e. how can a mere thing become an artwork, which they answered, at sharp odds with Danto’s theory, in a non-cognitive way, i.e. that a mere thing becomes an artwork once it is appreciated as such by the art world. In the preface to his book, Danto outlines the distinct reinterpretation of his original theory that he fully developed three years after the publication of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace in his article ‘The End of Art’. Here, he only notes that, unlike previous definitions of art, his specification is capable of comprising also a revolutionary transfiguration of art of the kind that was brought about by Warhol. Moreover, in Danto’s view, this represents a culmination of art history, for it poses a question about the essence of art which, in a Hegelian way, is transfigured into its own philosophy Apart from differentiating Danto’s position from that of the institutional theorists, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace also presents objections to the position of the Institutional Theory itself. According to Danto, the main problem with this theory is that it continues to adhere to aesthetic qualities as a constitutive element for the creation of an artwork, a position from which Danto’s own theory radically differs. In this connection, Danto cites Dickie’s claim that Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ (a commonplace urinal) displays similar qualities, for example, to sculptures by Brancusi or Moore, i.e. an oval shape and shiny surface that reflects the surrounding space (Danto 1973: 93). Such qualities, however, are displayed by any other urinal – regardless of whether it is considered to be an artwork. For this reason, it is not possible for the art world to appreciate Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ as an art work for these qualities. Furthermore, according to Danto, the Institutional Theory cannot properly specify either who is a member of the art world or how one can become a member. For in 1964, in relation to the Brillo Box, according to the Institutional Theory, the philosopher Arthur C. Danto would be included as a member of the art world, as opposed to indisputable art experts such as the director of the Stable Gallery, Eleanor Ward, or the director of the Canadian National Gallery. Charles Comfort, who, at the time, refused to appreciate the Brillo Box as an artwork (Danto 1992: 36-37). It was precisely this experience that led Danto to adopt the familiar position of Heinrich Wölfflin, according to whom the definable basis of art does not change but is interpreted in considerably different ways in various historical periods. What is now seen without difficulty as art could not have been seen as such earlier on. Moreover, according to Danto, Warhol’s Brillo Box exhibition at the New York Stable Gallery in 1964 can, from a certain perspective, be seen as representing the end of art, for in it – by questioning its very essence – transfigures art into its own philosophy. Danto’s book contains three references to the theory about the end of art, each time in the context of Hegelian influence. Hegel’s philosophy of history is basically correct: the development of art did not come to an end, but to a logical climax: art became self-conscious in a philosophical theory about itself (Danto 1981: vii-vii, 56-57, 111). The above theory was fully developed in the 1984 essay on ‘The End of Art’ (Danto 1984: 5-35). Even here, Danto’s perspective is based on the historical conditionality of art activity and a Hegelian conviction as to the progressive nature of its development. This may be illustrated by the gradual sophistication of the visual reproduction of reality by means of visual art, which was dropped only with the full development of the narrative means of cinematography, which gradually took over this role from visual art at the beginning of the twentieth century. The alternative is a theory that subordinates the mimetic function of art to one that is expressive. Such a theory, however, cannot satisfactorily interpret the development of art history as a continuum, for it holds individual artworks to be a mere expression of the artist’s disparate and isolated emotions. Against these two theories, therefore, Danto sets a different development model based on the Bildungsroman, that is a novelistic description of the narrator’s character development. By applying schemata from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Danto concludes that essentially self-reflexive philosophy is the culmination of the spirit and art. According to Danto, this is borne out by the development of art in the last few years, in which theory has been increasingly shown to replace the actual artwork. Art has ended, for it has transformed into its own philosophy. From now on, all artworks may be considered to be post-historical works, for Warhol’s ‘Brillo Box’ deprived them of their historical role in 1964.
2. The possibility of there being two observationally identical artworks – like the ‘Brillo Box’ where the artwork is perceptually indistinguishable from a commonplace object – was, according to Danto, first described in Borges’ story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of The Quixote’ (Danto 1981: 33-39). This story is about two completely identical texts of Don Quixote, one of which was written by Cervantes, the other by the early twentieth century symbolist poet Pierre Menard. In Danto’s view, this raises an ontological question about the identity of an artwork. The answer, however, cannot be found in the perceptual qualities of the two works, for they are observationally identical. Danto finds support for his assumption that they are different with Borges’ narrator, according to whom the Quixote of Menard is infinitely richer that Cervantes’ ponderous Quixote. The explanation for this difference, however, cannot be found in the internal qualities of the text; one has to look at the external qualities which place the text in a specific context. For the texts were written at different times and by different authors whose nationalities and aims also differed. According to Danto, their place in the history of literature is also an essential part of these works. Although Danto’s interpretation emphasizes the identity of both works, his intention from the outset is, by contrast, to underline their difference. Besides, he cannot find support for his claim as to textual identity in Borges’ story, for Menard’s undertaking is described in several places as being impossible to carry out. What we have in front of us are not two identical texts, but the complete original work of Cervantes and several fragments of this work written by Menard. So it is hardly about an identical work. As far as Danto’s interpretation is concerned, the intellectual experiment mentioned by Borges’ narrator should be seen as a productive rather than unsuccessful attempt by Pierre Menard. For the narrator admits to being able to read Cervantes’ Quixote as if it had been written by Pierre Menard. Adding such a footnote necessarily transforms the meaning of the text, turning it into a different work. As mentioned above, it is Borges’ narrator who declares Menard’s Quixote to be richer than Cervantes’ ponderous Quixote. In addition, it is the narrator who says that Menard “(perhaps without wishing to) has enriched” the rudimentary art of reading by means of a technique of deliberate anachronism and erroneous attributions, which makes it possible to interpret any text as having been written with different authorial intentions and in different historical contexts. Perhaps what brings together the positions of Danto and Borges’ narrator more than anything else, is that they both transfer the initiative for finding the meaning of a work from the author to the reader or observer. As is the case with Warhol’s ‘Brillo Box’ – where Danto does not enquire as to Warhol’s intention, but identifies it from an observational position – in Borges’ story, too, an evaluation of the meaning of Menard’s work is left to the informed reader. Danto proceeds in a similar way in other cases covered in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Perhaps the most famous example is his intellectual experiment involving a group of identical red square canvases, each having a completely different meaning and, in certain cases, a different ontological status. Depending on the external qualities of the work – e.g. its title, the author’s personality or the work’s place in art history – they may represent a historical painting, a psychological portrait, a landscape, a geometric abstraction, religious art, a still-life, or a red object that is not connected to art in any way. Everything depends on the ability of the observer to make use of these external leads and, on their basis, to formulate a theory about the meaning of the work. Although this possibility is treated only peripherally in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto’s theory about the difference of perceptually indistinguishable artworks need not be verified solely by considering intellectual experiments. They can be proved by viewing the actual artworks, in the way the author himself undertakes to do in his later texts. The relevant examples may initially be divided into two groups: monochrome paintings (artworks that reduce the means of expression to a single quality of colour) and ready-mades (artworks made by being transformed from commonplace objects). In the book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace Danto focuses on the work of Ad Reinhardt and tries to show, above all, the uniqueness in style of Reinhardt’s monochrome paintings (Danto 1981: 204); in his later monograph Beyond the Brillo Box he focuses on the theory about the end of art and considers the differences between the otherwise indistinguishable monochromes of Marcie Hafif (1981), Ad Reinhardt (1962) and the first ever monochrome paintings undertaken by Kazimir Malevich in 1915 (Danto 1992: 46-47). Paradoxically, an interpretation of later neo-avantgarde monochromes, which for Danto are only a post-historical repetition of an original avant-garde gesture setting the boundaries of art, is essential to prove his early theory about the role of a work’s external qualities when finding its meaning. For it is on these monochromes that Danto can convincingly show that a work of art necessarily relates to its precursors, and is even a kind of criticism. The pioneering works of Malevich and Rodchenko, however, are more difficult to interpret; in fact, they defy interpretation – at least from the perspective of the artists. In their radicalism they reject the traditional metaphoric structure of an artwork, upon which Danto explicitly leans in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Rodchenko’s famous triptych ‘Pure Colours: Red, Yellow, Blue’, dating from 1921, is a good example of this. According to Rodchenko himself, the aim of the work is, on the one hand, to rid colour of any denotative function and, on the other, to mechanize the process of painting. With this, however, disappear two fundamental leads for identifying the meaning of a work, as formulated by Danto in The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Retrospectively, it is possible to identify a place for Rodchenko’s triptych in the art world, but such a place is different to the one originally claimed by the work.1 A similar case applies to Danto’s interpretation of ready- 1 For the relationship between avant-garde and neo-avantgarde monochrome paintings, see Buchloh 1986: 41-52. mades. In The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Danto focuses on Andy Warhol, but in his later texts there are more references to the specific form of ready-mades, which is appropriation of another artwork (and not a commonplace object) (Danto 1994: 58). For Danto’s early theory about the difference of perceptually indistinguishable artworks, similarly to monochrome paintings, it is less difficult to interpret Warhol’s later readymades or the appropriations exhibited, for example, by Sherrie Levine.2 Levine became known mainly due to her photographic reproductions of works by Edward Weston (‘After Edward Weston 1’, 1980) and Alexander Rodchenko (‘After Alexander Rodchenko 3’, 1987); in addition, however she has also undertaken an appropriation of Duchamp’s Fountain – a copy consisting of several identical bronze casts. Moreover, Levine is one of the few artists to make explicit references in her work to Borges’ story ‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’.3 The meaning of Sherrie Levine’s works is actually focused on their external qualities, in particular the artist’s female name and the title, in which a key role is always played by the ambiguity of the word ‘after’ (following in time and in imitation of). Only with these leads is it possible to differentiate her works from their perceptually indistinguishable models and to successfully interpret them as subversions – often openly feminist – criticism.4 Duchamp’s Fountain is harder to interpret from the perspective of Danto’s theory. Unlike Sherrie Levine’s reproduced bronze copies, which subversively transform the original readymade into a traditional sculpture in a traditional style, the status of Duchamp’s work is questionable. It is well known that Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ is actually lost – there are now only copies of the original and one photograph taken by Alfred Stieglitz. Duchamp sent his Fountain – a commonplace urinal, furnished only with a signature (‘R. Mutt’) and a date (‘1917’) – to the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists, of which he was a member. Although it fulfilled the only condition specified in the third section of article three of the society’s regulations, according to which the exhibition may involve the 2 For the relationship between avant-garde and neo-avantgarde ready-mades, see Buskirk and Nixon 1996. 3 Levine 1987: 92-93. See also Wallis 1984, which contains a reprint of a translation of Borges’ story. 4 Cf. Crimp 1993: 126-136; Krauss 1986: 151-170. For the legal aspects of appropriation, see Buskirk 1992: 82-109. participation of anyone who sends the required fee of six dollars, Duchamp’s Fountain was not accepted for the exhibition. Only much later was it appreciated as art, as were Duchamp’s previous ready-mades, which successfully resisted being classified as artworks not only due to their radical limitation of their denotative functions but also due to their anonymity and means of display (Duve 1996: 89-143). It is not Warhol’s ‘Brillo Box’ or Ad Reinhardt’s black canvases, but Duchamp’s ready-mades – “still almost not art” – and Rodchenko pure colours – “almost no longer art”, that represent the original demarcations of the boundaries of art. As such, however, they defy both of Danto’s theories. On the one hand, they shake off the external leads by which they can be identified as art, and, on the other, they foreshadow Danto’s end of art. Danto’s theories are based on an interpretation of the neo-avantgarde followers of the original avant-garde. Transformative appropriation is the most natural element of Danto’s philosophy, as well as of their art. This is also why the author of The Transfiguration of the Commonplace is Arthur C. Danto.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Buchloh, Benjamin H. 1986. ‘The Primary Colors for the Second Time: A Paradigm
Repetition of the Neo-Avant-Garde’ in October 37: 41-52.
Buskirk, M. and Nixon, M. (eds.). 1996. The Duchamp Effect. Cambridge, MA,
London: MIT.
Buskirk, Martha. 1992. ‘Commodification as Censor: Copyrights and Fair Use’ in
October 60: 82-109.
Crimp, Douglas. 1993. ‘Appropriating Appropriation’ in: Crimp, Douglas (ed.) On
the Museum’s Ruins. Cambridge (Mass.), London: The MIT Press: 126-136
Danto, Arthur C. 1964. ‘The Art World’ in Journal of Philosophy 61(19): 571-584.
Danto, Arthur C. 1973. ‘Artworks and Real Things’ in Theoria 39: 1-17.
Danto, Arthur C. 1984. ‘The End of Art’ in: Lang, Beryl (ed.) The Death of Art.
New York: Haven Publishing: 5-35.
Danto, Arthur C. 1981. The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Cambridge
(Mass.): Harvard University Press.
Danto, Arthur C. 1992. Beyond the Brillo Box. The Visual Arts in Post-Historical
Perspective. New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux.
Danto, Arthur C. 1994. Embodied Meanings. Critical Essays and Aesthetic Meditations.
New York: Farrar Strauss Giroux.
Duve, Thierry de. 1996. Kant after Duchamp. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Krauss, Rosalind E. 1986. ‘The Originality of the Avant-Garde’ in: Krauss, Rosalind
E. (ed.) The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths. Cambridge,
MA: MIT: 151-170.
Levine, Sherrie. 1987. ‘Five Comments’ in Wallis, Brian (ed.) Blasted Allegories: An
Anthology of Writings by Contemporary Artists. Cambridge, MA: MIT: 92-93.
Wallis, Brian (ed.). 1984. Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. New
York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art.- Not true cause it lacks knowledge of art theory.yurimon
- because of this fact, it is only not true because you posted it.yurimon
- I recognize the words individially but the way you put them together doesn't make much sense. Make an effort, I'll hold your hand if you need help.ORAZAL
- based in the logic of your post if you read it.yurimon
- OK, here we go.
You think the paper lacks knowledge of art theory, therefore it is not true?ORAZAL - thats what this guy says in one line.yurimon
- I'm trying to understand what YOU are saying. I'll take that as a yes then. So the 1st condition to it not being true is that the paper lacks knowledge of art.ORAZAL
- And the 2nd condition is that because of that fact (lack of knowlege of art) it is ONLY not true because I posted it.ORAZAL
- Is the paper not true ONLY because I posted it? In this case why mention the first condition?ORAZAL
- And how does "because of this fact" tie your 2 comments together. This is the part I really have a problem getting my head around.ORAZAL
- 2016 update: From reading your latest notes I have noticed that you've made a lot progress in your writing. Kudos!ORAZAL
- von?Drumpf