Deep & Difficult

The difficulties of trying to explain creative practice

This text is adapted from lecture notes. I have tried to keep pretty much to the original format hence the layout and asides. The lecture is part of a series of interconnected themes and is on occasion preceded by another that reviews objectivity and relativism. The prior lecture develops the dichotomy of 'seeing' versus 'reading' as interpretive models in the visual arts. It also asserts prelingual senses as universal. Deep and Difficult picks up this thread and reviews the nature of 'reading' works of art. The lecture normally concludes with a critique of various images drawn from the visual arts.

READING

I will try to take a metaposition on the notion of reading and ask the question is this a form of objectivity?

... so we are talking about the use and nature of linguistically based understanding of the image (in the broadest sense the use of theorisation/theory)

...I include in this both ‘voiced thought’ & the read & written word

...and the mechanism of interpretations, the cultural and historical dialogues that gradually encrust a work, an oeuvre or a genre.

- but...First lets start with the ‘end’ of explanation and the beginning of description

...because this is where we are now, the postmodernists refutation of objectivity

... or at least their inability to pursue it through the use of language

“There are thus two interpretations of interpretation, of structure, of sign, of play. The one seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering a truth or an origin which escapes play and the order of the sign, and which lives the necessity of interpretation as an exile. The other, which is no longer turned toward the origin, affirms play and tries to pass beyond man and humanism, the name of man being the name of that being who, throughout the history of metaphysics or of ontotheology - in other words, throughout his entire history - has dreamed of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of play.”

(An extract from Derrida's book Writing and Difference page 292 in the Routledge version)

...I suppose what Derrida means is that there are either more things than we can describe (in which case we can't ultimately have the happy and final explanation...or...we can go on describing the same thing for ever (in which case we still won't get to the happy and final explanation). This, I guess, is supposed to be a miserable position for any enquiry or discourse and implies that theory and theorists will go on and on until the end of the universe and still never get to agree on anything. The rest of us being appropriately upset at not having a reassuring foundation.

Q. What kind of position was tenable prior to this?

There was Modernism an optimistic philosophy of progress and solution drawing power from scientific and industrial expansion. In the arts Modernism was about having a manifesto, a view or a stance. This kind of philosophy, developed from certainties, had the kind of vigour that arises from knowing what you are going to do. It is somewhat littered with evidence that many of its proponents actually weren't quite so certain after all.

There were 'movements' like Impressionism where some fashionable concern or interests started to become an epistomology for practice...a kind of reference discourse about what you should be doing and why that way...so with Impressionism the painting becomes an object at the other end of the intellectual's microscope, the eye at one end, the painting at the other, there is an apparatus between...time for noise...it was a formula that produced pretty pictures and, in spite of antagonisms, a gorgeous prettiness the artists themselves must have understood.

EXPLANATION

Let's look at two models of interpretation...or...explanation that in combination reveal a certain type of inadequacy of theorisation in the arts.

... Modernism

... The ‘social’ or ‘cultural’ view of ‘art’.

Firstly two samples of Modernism...

Expressionism 30's & Composition...an example of how you can have two (or more) different explanations of something...

Art as research 70's & 90's...an example of how fashion and stance either stretches plausability or ghettoises types of practice

Regardless of whether you think Modernism tended to be a bit too dramatic, it nonetheless was positive rather than cynical, concerned rather than clever and ultimately energising rather than archly manipulative. The Post-Modern era in the arts, seems in comparison, smarmy, oily, confusing, debilitating, powerless. It is ruled by arts journalism and sycophantic and feeble theorists drawing on cultural studies and hermeneutics of one kind or another and ultimately...consumerism.

What happened?... We can recall Derrida (lots of others theorists would do) as...symptomatic of the post-modern, the emphasis on language as a centrepiece, language as the power of self definition, language as the geometry of the hive. In fact language described as if it's presence and performance, dependent on the collective of speakers and hearers, is all we are. In arts criticism this might be called the linguist's folly, it is implicated in the ‘social’ definition of art as culture and knowledge. It defines art as a variety of knowledge ruined within a description of the rationalist project... and hence provides a definition of art as infinitely flawed. The manifestation of this is the dwindling temporal cycle of its worth, a journalistic phenomenon.

... If we consider another idea...

...that of sense as at once universal/personal...we must ask ourselves

how tenable is the social (or any other) definition of art when based on the linguistic model...the prevailing model of ‘reading’?

...a good testing ground is the issue of Novelty...

The many debates that have arisen from the study of language and meaning (and that have rolled into the studies of culture and communication) have always presumed a tidy envelope to the nature of language, as if it were apart from the repertoire of senses we all possess. Such discourses have also confused the permutability of language with its permeability, the way other aspects of our physiology and circumstance subvert or govern language. Consequently to talk about culture as if it were language itself is a profound nonsense. Such talk disempowers the artist.

DEEP AND DIFFICULT

For the individual practitioner what position remains tenable if we refute the ‘modernist’ approach for being over simplistic as a strategy...&...if we refute the utility of postmodern theorising for its inability to deliver a sense of purpose?

The answer is, as it has in fact always been... in the nature of practice and in the incidental and particular experience of the practitioner. The ‘mindset’ of practice has always been messy, opportunist and responding...Somehow practitioners have always managed plurality (before it became problematic for postmodern philosophy)...The self was never one-dimensional and the desire within rationalism for the evolution of a single ‘voice’...Derrida’s “...full presence, the reassuring foundation...”was bound to be at odds with the nature of practice.

How we use language/reading is not about the ‘one explanation / the unifying theorisation’...it is an aid to understanding ‘the complex’, to devise ‘handles’ on subjects, to provide shorthands & mnemonics. Throughout history there have always been philosophies which assert both the contradictory nature of experience and/or the contradictory outcome of applying language to experience, ranging from Lao Tsu's Tao Te Ching to pre-Socratic philosophy in the ancient world. They lead to a rather straightforward truism that whatever we are thinking about, experiencing or looking at, as a referent, is multi-valued, it will have more than one description...and the descriptions themselves need not be of the same 'order' or logically compatible. Finally they lead to the position that, as a state of affairs, this is entirely natural and completely unremarkable.

... This takes me to my final point, which is about how the contemporary practitioner can cope with contemporary theory...

There is a point it is necessary to pass through in any practice, which is the recognition that some intellectualisation of personal practice is necessary (as the word intellectual puts some people off let's just call it thinking about your work). The reasons for this are to do with control, versatility, ingenuity and dealing with the professional context for the work. As soon as this is done, you encounter a bewildering array of strident and very clever writing. The effect is usually confusing and debilitating because the contemporary use of dialectic method is not conceded in what you read, the tensions and contradictions between arguments/descriptions are left to burst inside your head. How do you stop this happening? As an antidote I offer two terms that are rather more forgiving than the usual repertoire. They also have the added virtue that they can co-exist and be applied simultaneously in varying degree to an analysis of creative work.

DEEP & DIFFICULT