Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: How Pictures Complete Us
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 8/24/1953
WEBSITE:
CITY: Galway
STATE:
COUNTRY: Ireland
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Crowther * http://www.sup.org/books/title/?id=25401
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 88245076
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n88245076
HEADING: Crowther, Paul
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670 __ |a His The Kantian sublime, 1989: |b CIP t.p. (Paul Crowther)
670 __ |a The language of twentieth-century art, 1997: |b CIP t.p. (Paul Crowther) data sheet (b. Aug. 24, 1953)
670 __ |a Phenomenologies of art and vision, 2013
670 __ |a How pictures complete us, 2016: |b ECIP title page (Paul Crowther) data view (Chair of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway; recently curated a show of works from his own collection of Victorian Art at the National Gallery of Slovenia)
953 __ |a bd65 |b rc15
PERSONAL
Born August 24, 1953.
ADDRESS
CAREER
National University of Ireland, Galway, professor emeritus of philosophy.
AVOCATIONS:Collecting art.
WRITINGS
Contributor of articles to journals.
SIDELIGHTS
Paul Crowther, professor emeritus of philosophy at the National University of Ireland in Galway, has written extensively on a variety of subjects, including the work of Immanuel Kant and the way we perceive art. He became interested in philosophy in his teens, partly because of his love of Bob Dylan’s music. “I recall reading on the sleeve notes of Dylan’s first album that, at university, he once stayed up all night ploughing through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, rather than revising for a biology exam,” he told Richard Marshall in an interview at the online 3:AM Magazine. He went to a secondhand bookstore in search of Kant books and could not find one, “but I looked up ‘philosophy’ in encyclopedias and the like,” he told Marshall. “I wasn’t confident enough to think of doing it at university, but when I got there, I studied it as a subsidiary subject, and it got me hooked.”
In addition to Kant, Crowther has analyzed the work of such philosophers as Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He also has written frequently about the visual arts. He rejects postmodernist and poststructuralist theories, which place art in the context of how it is used by the dominant ideology of its time. He instead argues for the intrinsic value of art, the importance of how the viewer experiences it, and the interaction between the two. He defines his approach as “phenomenology.” To the 3:AM interviewer, he laid out his objections to postmodernist approach to painting, writing, and other creative pursuits. “My point is that these activities have an intrinsic fascination, they have the power to make the world of ideas exist sensuously at the level of the real,” he explained. “Over and above how images are used, it is what is done through creating them that is to say, their aesthetic significance, that is compelling.”
Art and Embodiment
Crowther deals with some of these philosophers and with the visual arts in Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, a collection of essays. He explores how Kant, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and others approached aesthetics, and he offers a few critiques, arguing, for instance, that Gadamer misinterpreted Kant’s ideas about subjectivity in the experience of art. He also explains his own ideas about art and the viewer.
Still, he leaves some things about his his philosophy unspoken, and that actually adds to the book’s value, remarked British Journal of Aesthetics critic Nicholas Davey. “By forcing readers to expand the steps of his reasoning, Crowther awakes the philosophical imagination of his readers prompting them to engage with the subject-matter,” Davey observed. He also found the essays on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to be “essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century ‘continental’ aesthetics.” Davey further noted that while some essay collections seem disjointed, this one does not. “The pieces which constitute Crowther’s collection have an inner coherence and momentum,” while appreciating “the diversity of aesthetic interpretation,” Davey commented. He concluded: “Crowther’s text is worthy of the hermeneutic plaudit ‘yet more.'”
Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame)
In Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame), Crowther discusses the “phenomenological depth” of artworks, that being the interaction of the work and the person seeing it. This is what makes art significant, Crowther writes. He deals with painting, sculpture, photography, digital art, and architecture. He notes that art exists, to a degree, outside of time and reality—artworks do not change, but the objects they represent do, and so do viewers. “Pictorial space allows the creator to symbolically reorganize and re-make visual reality itself,” he writes.
Some critics found his ideas intriguing. This volume “is quite useful in facilitating a cooperation between art history and aesthetics,” related Loretta Vandi, writing online at CAA Reviews. “The book expounds not just an aesthetic theory but one that seeks to enable art historians to compose a definitive art history.” Crowther, she explained, believes his assertion of art’s “intrinsic significance” makes such a history possible. Choice contributor J.O. Young considered the concept of “phenomenological depth” to be “somewhat elusive,” and thought some of Crowther’s pronouncements “less than revelatory,” but noted that the book will likely appeal to “a variety of scholars with a theoretical interest in the visual arts.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
British Journal of Aesthetics, volume 35, number 3, 1995, Nicholas Davey, review of Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness, p. 290.
Choice, May, 2010. J.O. Young, review of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame), p. 1672; November, 2010, R. Bonzon, review of The Kantian Aesthetic: From Knowledge to the Avant-garde, p. 513.
Guardian, November 10, 2008, Paul Crowther, “Taking on the ‘Canon.'”
Reference & Research Book News, August, 2006, review of Aesthetics, Imagination, and the Unity of Experience; December, 2012, review of The Phenomenology of Modern Art: Exploding Deleuze, Illuminating Style; August, 2013, review of Phenomenologies of Art and Vision: A Post-analytic Turn.
ONLINE
3:AM Magazine, http://www.3ammagazine.com/ (August 4, 2017), Richard Marshall, “Post-analytic Phenomenology vs Market Serfdom.
CAA Reviews, http://www.caareviews.org/ (August 3, 2011), Loretta Vandi, review of Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (Even the Frame).
National University of Ireland, Galway, Web site, http://nuigalway.academia.edu/ (August 4, 2017), brief biography.*
Paul Crowther
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
This article is about the academic. For the police officer, see Paul Crowther (police officer).
Paul Crowther (born 24 August 1953), is a professor of philosophy and author specialising in the fields of aesthetics, metaphysics, and visual culture. He has written nine books in the field of History of Art and Philosophy. He was born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, England, and he was raised in the Belle Isle estate, Hunslet, and Middleton areas of south Leeds. He began taking an interest in art and philosophy at the age of 16.[1] He is a proponent of an approach to aesthetics he dubbed "post-analytic phenomenology".[2][3]
Contents [hide]
1 Career
2 Academic work
3 Selected bibliography
4 References
Career[edit]
Crowther initially enrolled at the University of Manchester to study history and politics.[1] He subsequently migrated to the University of Leeds where he took a joint honours degree in Philosophy and the History of Art.[4] He was a graduate student at the University of York and also holds a teaching certificate in Classical Studies.[4] He obtained his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oxford.[4] Crowther is a former fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford where he was a lecturer at the Department of the History of Art and Reader in the History Faculty.[5] He has also taught at the University of St Andrew's (Fife, Scotland), the University of Central Lancashire, and Jacobs University Bremen.[4] At present, Crowther holds the post of Chair of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway.[4]
Academic work[edit]
Crowther's interests and expertise are in the fields of visual aesthetics, phenomenology, and Kant. Works by him on the philosophy of visual art have been translated into Chinese, Korean, German, and Serbian, amongst other languages.[6]
In 2014, Crowther — together with Slovenian artist Mojca Oblak, and assistance from the Ministry of Culture of Slovenia and the Moore Institute in Galway, Ireland — organized an exhibition of Victorian art entitled Awakening Beauty [7] at the National Gallery in Ljubljana, Slovenia.
Paul Crowther
3.2 | NUI Galway, Philosophy, Emeritus +1 | Aesthetics +26
Rationality makes humans special but the power of imagination, and the capacity to create visual, verbal, written, and musical images, is just as central to being human. Through imagination we can project what it might be like occupy times and places other than the present , or what it might be like to be other persons. Imagination thus transforms our relation to Being.
I trace how imagination operates as a necessary condition of personal identity, and in the making and experience of art - especially visual modes. My approach is object-based, centering on close phenomenology of artworks (as things made as well as perceived).
My more general approach in aesthetics and philosophy of art is normative - based on the primacy of embodiment. I argue that there are sound objective grounds for judgments of aesthetic and artistic value, and that the phenomenon of art is not some existential luxury but central to being human at different levels. I try to link the analytic and Continental traditions through a method I call 'post-analytic phenomenology'. The attached paper on ' Imagination, Language, and the Perceptual World' describes this.
I've published many books on the aforementioned topics. These are listed elsewhere on my academia.edu entry. Publishers aren't keen on authors uploading books, so where I can, I have attached summaries of the more recent volumes.
I collect Victorian art in collaboration with Mojca Oblak and have posted the catalogue from the first public exhibition of the collection (at the National Gallery of Art in Ljubljana, Slovenia). Our collecting strategy is one intended to develop my own work in iconography and philosophy of art History, and Mojca's practice as an artist.
Taking on the 'canon'
Squarepusher says: 'As a music-maker, my most ready sense of the wider value of my work is from a critical response to my cultural situation. Partly to keep from getting stuck in a pattern of simply reacting, I consider what value might exist in my work beyond this response, and what the foundation of that value might be. In researching this I encountered Paul Crowther's work which advances a theory of intrinsic aesthetic value in art.'
Composer Steve Reich
Composer Steve Reich ... Some say he pushes the boundaries of music further than the Pigeon Detectives
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Paul Crowther
Monday 10 November 2008 07.31 EST First published on Monday 10 November 2008 07.31 EST
Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in an Era of Doubt responds to the neo-conservative/global consumerist degradation of artistic value. It responds also to postmodern theory's unwitting tendency (in its affirmation of relativism and anti-elitism in questions of value) to offer indirect support for this degradation. Both standpoints reduce the human subject to a nexus of ever-changing desires driven by economic and social demands. They privilege also the reception of artifacts over the significance of how they are created.
To overcome this degradation, I developed a theory based on the intrinsic value of creating images, and its development through historical refinement and innovation. The longest chapter in the book applies this to music as follows:
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Musical meaning has a unique image-character. It involves the virtual expression of gestural aspects of possible emotions and their narrative transformations. Music is a form of experiential possibility that is not tied to any definite owner. It is shareable at a level that other art forms cannot attain.
Given this uniqueness, it follows that the decline of musical provision in schools is not the withdrawal of some luxury commodity, but the denial of a unique idiom of experience. And what makes this even worse is that this idiom is not only unique, but it is educable. By this, I don't just mean that pupils can improve their musical abilities, I mean that composition itself continues to have canonic possibility (ie the capacity to be historically refined and developed in ways that extend its experiential scope).
This notion of the canonic must not be understood in narrow traditionalist terms. In the late 20th-century, for example, rock music and related pop idioms have been major players in melodic and harmonic inventiveness. They have extended the scope of music – often in subtle and profound ways. And while postmodern idioms of more classically based music are often supposed to be contra-canonic, I argue otherwise.
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In this respect, consider Steve Reich's 1988 masterpiece Different Trains. It embodies a stunning combination of string-quartet and pre-recorded tape, and collapses the often posited antagonism between original works, and techniques of mechanical reproduction. This work, indeed, takes previous innovations in this area (by Reich and others) to a new and harrowing level of experiential insight.
I suggest, also, an even more general case for canonic musical value in the postmodern era. It is commonly supposed that the plethora of different styles and musical idioms on a global scale demands the erasure of canonic distinctions between works. However, in dialectical terms, the opposite is true. Globalisation brings great mediocrity, but it does not have to. The information age offers a vast body of potential critical tools and materials that might, at long last, allow informed judgment to an unprecedented degree. Of course, engaging with this demands critical commitment rather than entertainment. But this, in itself, offers a means for breaking free of contemporary illusions of the passive and facile human subject.
Defining Art, Creating the Canon: Artistic Value in the Era of Doubt by Paul Crowther is available from Clarendon Press.
Paul Crowther is professor of philosophy and the visual arts at Jacobs University.
Quoted in Sidelights: “I recall reading on the sleeve notes of Dylan’s first album that, at university, he once stayed up all night ploughing through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, rather than revising for a biology exam,”
“but I looked up ‘philosophy’ in encyclopedias and the like,” he told Marshall. “I wasn’t confident enough to think of doing it at university, but when I got there, I studied it as a subsidiary subject, and it got me hooked.”
“My point is that these activities have an intrinsic fascination, they have the power to make the world of ideas exist sensuously at the level of the real,. “Over and above how images are used, it is what is done through creating them that is to say, their aesthetic significance, that is compelling.”
post-analytic phenomenology vs market serfdom
Paul Crowther interviewed by Richard Marshall.
Paul Crowther bites the hands of both analytic and continental philosophical approaches to aesthetics. Whilst chewing he thinks about how post-modernism is linked to market forces and Supermodernity, about how civilising is organised round self restraint, about how Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze have created a distorting orthodoxy, about rejecting analytic philosophical approaches to art, about White Aesthetics, about post-analytic phenomenology, about phenomenological depth, about subject-object reciprocity, about meaning in abstract art, about Kant and German Idealism. Take this one neat and then go for a walk…
3:AM: What made you become a philosopher?
Paul Crowther: When I was fifteen and sixteen, I had a strong sense of the 1960’s as a special time that was about to be lost. This brought home the importance of the relation between human experience and the passing of time. I also began to develop an interest in modernist painting (impressionism and the like) and the songs of Bob Dylan – which seemed to be wonderfully defiant as well as beautiful. In fact, I recall reading on the sleeve notes of Dylan’s first album that, at university, he once stayed up all night ploughing through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, rather than revising for a biology exam. This intrigued me; so in the spring or summer of 1970 I went to a second-hand bookshop at the bottom of Kirkgate in Leeds to see if they had a copy of the Kant book. They didn’t, but I looked up ‘philosophy’ in encyclopedias and the like. I wasn’t confident enough to think of doing it at university, but when I got there, I studied it as a subsidiary subject, and it got me hooked.
I recall walking round some of the mustier shelves of the John Rylands Library at Manchester University, browsing through tomes by McTaggart and Bradley, thinking how wonderful it would be to think thoughts as deep as that. Anyway as I couldn’t switch to philosophy as a single subject at Manchester, I returned to study it in my home city of Leeds.
3:AM: You once indicated that relativism was our age’s ‘special vanity’ and in the hands of Lacan, Derrida and Foucault it has regretfully become a dogma. But you also say that it doesn’t mark a break with modernist foundationalism and results in what you call ‘supermodernity’. This seems to be paradoxical. Can you say how we are to negotiate this apparent contradiction and what is at stake in this issue, in particular in the domain of values?
PC: In Philosophy After Postmodernism and other works, I show how the anti-foundationalist discourse of the poststructuralist tradition is intimately connected with the ideology of market forces. The rhetoric of the transient and relative structures of cognitive perspectives, and the idea of the ‘de-centred’ self are often presented as a basis for ‘oppositional’ thought. They are not. In fact, they are tacit expressions of the constant need for new brands and the need to ensure that the consumer exists as permanently unsettled agency (expressed through such things as shopping and ‘lifestyle choices’). The modern world in the twentieth-century and beyond has developed around consumerism and the technologies associated with it, and this has now been taken to a global level. I see the anti-foundationalism of the poststructuralism and other relativisms as key expressions of the intellectual mind-set of this ‘Supermodernity’.
The challenge to the realm of values presented by Supermodernity is colossal. As embodied beings, we exist in a world – both natural and cultural – that is rich, diverse, complex, and full of different aspects. However, Supermodernity violates this complexity. It is permeated by the cult of management that seeks to promote ‘efficiency’ by reducing everything to models of social interaction and outcomes derived from cybernetics and the advertising industry. What it is to be human, and what it is to change oneself and be encultured in a deep sense is lost. Indeed, the very notion of freedom itself is reduced to consumer choices. Of course, there has always been a difficult relation between money and civilization, but in most eras there was always a strong sense that some things were more important than money-power. Values of a moral and aesthetic nature, and such things as self-development and bettering oneself and one’s community, were acknowledged as things that had to be protected from market forces. This critical distance has been lost. And the intellectual relativisms of Supermodernity are not the slightest help in reconfiguring it, because they are complicit in the new market serfdom.
3:AM: You argue for civilization rather than the end of civilization don’t you? How do you map out your theory of civilization and does it bridge the gap between analytic philosophy and continental philosophy and social theory?
PC: I follow Elias in his theory that the civilizing process is organized around the development of self-restraint. What makes this possible is its emergence from various cognitive capacities, the most central of which are language, empathic identification, aesthetic experience, and imagination in general. These are the foundational to embodied subjectivity. However, this is perhaps better described as ‘refoundational’ because the cognitive capacities just described are exercised differently and have different effects under different historical conditions. By definition we are self-conscious beings but the structure and pattern of self-consciousness changes, and can be developed to higher stages. As well as the need to satisfy physiological needs and procure the means of subsistence and security, humans develop needs related to self-consciousness itself. They need to know who they are as individuals and members of a collective, as well as their relation to the universe as a whole.
Self-consciousness and self-restraint develop around this through various symbolic practices that refine the scope of language and imagination. This refinement also leads to technological development and a greater ability to adapt the world to human needs. It allows also for increasing complexity in modes of social organization and religious ritual. The civilizing process just is the generation of these changes. It is self-consciousness regarded from the viewpoint of its diachronic development.
This theory is based on the view that there are necessary structures in human experience which can be shown through systematic structures of discursive argument. In this respect, I relate closely to the tradition of Analytic philosophy. Unfortunately, Analytic philosophy – with the exception of figures such as Charles Taylor, who, like myself, cross its boundaries – has little or no sense of the constitutive role of historical understanding in all aspects of cognition. The Continental tradition, in contrast, (as I noted earlier) has emphasized the perspectivalist basis of knowledge and the de-centred self, an approach that emphasizes transient relationality and change. They take this too far, but their approach at least points towards the historical dimension in cognition. My theory goes further. By arguing that the civilizing process refines functional constants in experience through different historical realizations of them, I am, in effect, integrating the Analytic approach with the Continental emphasis on change and relationality, and , in so doing, offer a normative social theory.
3:AM: Derrida, Foucault and Lacan are important to you aren’t they in that they set the terms of the contemporary landscape whereby art historians and theorists who thought art was a unique form of meaning has been subjected to sustained critique. What is the challenge that these three thinkers raise?
PC: In conjunction, Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, and others create the perspectivalist/de-centred emphasis that I’ve already described. As I’ve also said, this has some importance in drawing attention to the more transient dimensions of cognition. However, I now think that in the context of studying the arts, this has had a very distorting effect. These relativist approaches underline heterogeneities, aporias, rhizomatics, divergences, dis-affinities, and anything else that can make art and its history seem unstable – nothing more than a network of ‘discursive practices’ driven by power relations. However, this approach is no longer a challenge, it has become something of an orthodoxy.
The real challenge consists in resisting the imperial scope of the orthodoxy. There is one vital issue, in particular. On the basis of the orthodoxy, art and the aesthetic are regarded as no more than historically specific expressions of dominant power relations. But this raises a question, namely what is it about certain varieties of representation that allow them to be invested with such cultural kudos? You can map out all the different uses to which representations are put, historically, and the different ideological attitudes that inform them, but why does making pictures, writing stories and poems, and making music lend themselves to such uses, in so many different times and places? My point is that these activities have an intrinsic fascination, they have the power to make the world of ideas exist sensuously at the level of the real. Over and above how images are used, it is what is done through creating them that is to say, their aesthetic significance, that is compelling.
3:AM: You worry however that the approach [ of the poststructuralists] is too reductionist don’t you, and avoids detailed descriptions of aesthetic and phenomenal structures. Despite this, you seem very interested in Heidegger’s approaches to art so why do you think you’re describing a post-analytic turn rather than developing a line of research of the continental camp?
PC: This relates to the previous question. There is a tradition in Continental thinking that retains a proper regard for the artistic/aesthetic dimension of art – its sensuous presentation of ideas. It comprises thinkers such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Dufrenne, Gadamer, Deleuze, and even Lacan (though this aspect of his thought is rarely discussed). However, all these thinkers approach art very strongly from the viewpoint of their own philosophies. This presents a very one-sided approach that does no justice to the importance of what is involved in the making of art. Artists change how the world appears and to recognize this transformation you not only have to look at the work in relation to how it represents things, you also have to understand the individual way it achieves this. Such understanding centres on how the artist uses the medium of which he or she is a practitioner, and this, in turn, entails knowledge of the comparative history of the medium.
The point is that, in aesthetics, attention has to be shifted from the conditions of spectatorship to those of how art is created. This does not mean fantasizing about what the artist’s intentions were, but in looking or reading the work itself in relation to what it represents and how it represents it. This requires detailed discussion of particular artworks, and relating them to those transformative powers that produce effects distinctive to the individual media. These effects often have far-reaching ontological/aesthetic significance that is elided by more global terms such as Heidegger’s and Gadamer’s notions of ‘Truth’ or Merleau-Ponty’s ‘visible/invisible’ pairing, or Deleuze’s notion of the ‘Figure’.
In order to bring out this ontological/aesthetic significance, the Continental approaches have to be conceptually unpacked, clarified, and extended by reference to historical and conceptual factors bound up with the relevant media. This latter feature takes us far beyond what the Continental tradition itself has attempted (with the problematic exception of Deleuze), and marks my major problem with it. True, the relativist approaches draw attention to the way things change , but in the context of the arts, we need to combine phenomenological attention to the works, with a proper critical analysis of the traditions of making within a medium. This why I advocate a post-analytic phenomenology rather than just working in the Continental tradition. The ontology of artistic media requires close analysis rather than immersion in an atmosphere of jargon and/or ill-defined terms. It’s true that Adorno’s paratactical method – where artworks are approached from different cognitive directions in order not to do violence to the their sensuous particularity – offers many insights about the relation between artistic meaning and society. However, even he scarcely touches the question of what is special and distinctive about the individual art media.
3:AM: The analytic tradition is not much good either for aesthetics is it? Do you see Richard Wollheim as part of this tradition? What’s so wrong that we need to take a post-analytic turn?
PC: In terms of clarifying the centrality of art and the aesthetic, the Analytic tradition is now more or less useless. It has recently tried to re-brand itself as ‘Anglo-American’ but is better described as White Aesthetics. Instead of regarding the Duchampian tradition of ready-mades as secondary and parasitic upon traditions of sensuously embodied art-making – as (in other words) something whose artistic status has to be justified, Analytic philosophers have now made this tradition, dogmatically, into the very focus of artistic meaning. In this way, over thirty thousand years of artistic practices in different parts of the world and different historical periods, are made subservient to the marginal idiosyncracies of a white Euromerican avant-garde elite. I regard this as a tacit form of racism.
The narrowness of White Aesthetics is shown by the fact that it appears to be of no significance to anyone except its own practitioners. Contemporary art and criticism, and historical studies rarely make reference to it. White Aesthetics is very interested in the semantic and syntactic structures of art media, but not in what makes art matter to those involved in its creation or appreciation. Insofar as it does wrestle with these issues, it tends to do so through the clumsy notions of ‘expressive qualities’ or the artist’s intentions. However, these are not concepts that solve problems but ones that have to be explained in more fundamental terms. OK, art is expressive, and artists have intentions, but these are only significant if we can link them to how the artist transforms the medium so as to achieve distinct communicative effects.
Wollheim offered some brilliant phenomenological analyses of the arts, notably painting, but, as well as tying himself mainly to the spectatorial viewpoint, he also falls back on the weak mainstays of ‘expressive qualities’ and the ‘artists intentions’ – terms that have no explanatory value. (I justify this claim in detail in my book on Phenomenologies of Art and Vision… .)
As far as I can see, the only way to overcome White Aesthetics is by clarifying the cognitive uniqueness of the individual arts, and the complex varieties of aesthetic experience. The post-analytic phenomenology described earlier has great promise in this respect.
3:AM: So how does your approach of ‘post-analytic phenomenology’ attempt to overcome the shortcomings of the Analytic and Continental traditions?
PC: I’ve already explained this in relation to my work in aesthetics, so I’ll now explain it in more general philosophical terms.
Analytic philosophy tends to resolve phenomena into formal component features (such as, for example, the self’s persistence through time, and occupancy of the same body) and then takes such analyses to be sufficient for understanding the unity of the phenomenon in question. However, there is a prior unity based on the correlation of embodied subject and object of experience that tends to be elided by Analytic approaches.
Continental philosophers, notably Merleau-Ponty have been aware of this, but unfortunately have imagined that one can express the unity in question by making philosophical language become more poetic and ambiguous. The assumption is that, by doing this, we touch some kind of primordial mutual inherence of subject and world, that precedes the subject-object relation. I think this is a mistake. In fact, much ‘Continental’ philosophy after Merleau-Ponty strikes me as little more than bad poetry dressed up as philosophy.
To transcend the limitations of Analytic philosophy and the Continental tradition I have tried to develop a post-analytic phenomenology that looks to Merleau-Ponty, but which goes far beyond him by restoring the primacy of the subject-object relation in knowledge of objects and the self. By emphasizing that knowledge of an objective world, and the unity of self-consciousness are correlated – the one cannot be known without knowledge of the other – I am emphasizing a relation that is epistemologically fundamental but which has a different meaning and structure according to different historical circumstances.
I have actually formalized the notion of post-analytic phenomenology in some recent papers on the concept of imagination. It strikes me that if we are to get a proper phenomenological orientation we must be clear about which aspects of the object we are most interested in. This is especially the case with imagination, which is a term used in many different ways. I propose accordingly, that phenomenological inquiry starts with an analytic reduction. This is directed by two questions.
First, given a specific linguistic term (referring to a phenomenon, concept, relation, or whatever) do any of our uses of that term identify features that are logically distinctive to it, and, second, do other features seem to constellate around these distinctive features , even if only indirectly, or associationally?
If we can answer both questions affirmatively, then, we have identified what I call the nodal core of meaning for the term. By looking at how the term is used its ‘essence’ can be identified at the level of public discourse, rather than that of introspection. In the case of imagination, the idea of mental imagery with a quasi-sensory character provides this nodal core.
This allows us to proceed to a second level of investigation – namely, phenomenological description of the nodal core features as experienced. Such investigation focusses on how things are present to perception or before the mind. In the case of imagination, this involves attending to such things as the schematic and unstable character of the image, and the way, qua subject to the will, it exemplifies the personal style of the one who is imagining.
Phenomenological description of the nodal core identifies those features that clarify the term’s broader conceptual relations and cognitive significance. The investigation of these constitutes a tertiary level of analysis. This is especially important for the concept of imagination, as the features identified through its phenomenological description are what allow it to play a necessary role in our correlated knowledge of objects and self-consciousness. It has a cognitive fundamentality – as Kant recognized – but it takes a post-analytic phenomenology with the threefold methodological structure just described, to set out the complete grounds of this fundamentality.
One other outcome of the tertiary stage of analyzing imagination is an explanation of the origins of pictorial art. With more work, indeed, it might be able to identify further links between imagination and the origins of literature, dance, and music.
The post-analytic phenomenology that I have been describing here overcomes the limitations of Analytic philosophy and the Continental tradition, by combining what is best in them through an integrated method of inquiry. Obviously, I hope to take this much further.
Interestingly, a couple of former students of mine have just finished writing a book concerning the relation between my aesthetics and Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms. This is some justification for this, and, admittedly, I have made some use of Cassirer in the past. However, the transcendental arguments for the correlated unity of subject and object of experience that I provide, and the extended theory of imagination, are not found in Cassirer. (He falls back on the unwarranted authority of Kant to provide these things.) It should be emphasized, also, that the threefold method of post-analytic phenomenology that I advocate does not – as far as I know – have a counterpart in Cassirer’s thought. Cassirer and I are both committed to aesthetic cognitivism, but my general philosophical position goes beyond his.
3:AM: You use the term ‘phenomenological depth’ which you take from your reading of Merleau-Ponty , Hegel and a tincture of Kant. So what does this depth amount to?
PC: It consists of all the factors that are involved in the reciprocal correlation of subject and object of experience. These include those features of the immediate perceptual field – details, textures, relations, and the like, which are present but not noticed explicitly. (The object of present awareness emerges from this network of phenomena and relations.)
Also included is the role of imagination which – at will – allows us to project how the world not immediately present to perception might appear, and by implication, what it would be like for us to occupy different perceptual positions from the one we presently occupy, and which allows us to form playful associational chains of such imagery.
The other major feature of phenomenological depth is those switches of cognitive emphasis where we can sometimes think of our sensuous animal being and, at other times, consider ourselves primarily as rational beings. Related to this is our sense of being a part of nature and tied to physical limits, yet at the same time being able to create artifacts that can have effects far from the location we presently occupy, and which can survive long after we are dead. The most fundamental aspect of all this is our capacity to form a sense of who and what we are, and our place in relation to the universe. We are finite, but more than just finite.
All these aspects of phenomenological depth can be described explicitly through philosophical explanation, But since the artwork is a sensuous or imaginatively-intended individual, it shows phenomenological depth rather than states it. In a Cezanne still-life – of apples, say, the picture creates an appearance of these fruits that deviates from how they would appear in real life. They look more palpable because of the way they are painted, yet, at the same time, have an intenseness of being that almost transcends corporeality. Viewing the work in such terms requires that we attend to how compositionally, and texturally, Cezanne has rendered them. This means that – without being explicitly aware that we are so doing – we attend to both the way the perceived group of apples emerges from a ‘flesh’ of details, and the way it seems to be pregnant with other potential viewpoints that might be taken upon it. At the same time, however, we also know that it is an image of apples which discloses how Cezanne has understood the concept of ‘apple’ in particular sensuous terms. More than this, Cezanne’s treatment of this subject dramatically emphasizes the quiddity of the fruit. It has come to be and will pass away, but whilst here, it is fecund – not just biologically, but perceptually, and spiritually.
The above analysis resolves the picture into different aesthetic aspects. But the point is, that in the picture itself, they are present simultaneously and inseparably as a part of a whole that encompasses creator, image, subject-matter, and spectator. We intuit this complex whole on its own terms – as a phenomenon which is full of meaning that cannot be paraphrased except in terms that loose the fullness of its immediate unity. This is why aesthetic meaning – with all its phenomenological depth, is shown rather than said.
3:AM: That our perceptions and cognition has a pre-reflective character is really important to your theory isn’t it and has special relevance to the visual arts. Can you say something about this, perhaps illustrating it in terms of your discussion of a sculpture’s phenomenological depth and its relation to transcendence?
PC: Suppose you look at Michelangelo’s Bruges Madonna, or Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. You might say you see a beautiful, tender image of mother and child, or a curiously angular representation of a striding figure. However, these works speak to more intuitive pre-reflective levels of experience as well. This can involve fundamental levels of experience. For example, if something exists it must occupy space, or be the effect of something that does. Space-occupancy is basic and fundamental to us that, of course, we scarcely ever take notice of it. Now the fact that sculpture is three-dimensional means that it acts on our sense of space. The sculpture makes space transcend its usual inexplicit existence to become manifest, though not yet the kind of thing that we can put firmly into words. We are interested in how the sculpture occupies space – its way of defining shape or shapes through strong physical embodiment. There is a beauty of space giving birth to things, or things taking on form (in terms of both the sculpture itself, and that which it represents) – an emergence that is all the more powerful since we know that it has been created by a fellow human being. When a work is free-standing, this effect is all the more pronounced.
Of course, architecture will give you similar effects, but there is one factor which makes sculpture unique. It creates depth by the semantic and physical articulation of a three-dimensional medium. Meaning arises from the emergence of spatial form rather than the enclosure of space. Painting does this in virtual terms, but in sculpture, the virtual aspect has real spatial physicality as well, through being three-dimensional. In fact, there is a supreme transcendence involved in this. We know that qua finite physical beings we emerge from inert matter, and pass back into it. In sculpture, brute matter is overcome. That which appears most indifferent to, and other-than organic life, is, as it were with spirit. Life transcends the inanimate in sensuous-symbolic terms.
The point is – again – that what I am describing in an analytic way is experienced intuitively in the sculptural work as a whole of aesthetic meaning. It engages us pre-reflectively, but in such a way as to make us want to reflect on it.
3:AM: So is it your view that the visual arts are best understood as making basic features of experiential subject and object reciprocity exist in a heightened and enduring form? And does this set constraints on what an artist can create?
PC: The characters of visual media engage with different aspects of subject-object reciprocity. There’s one especially important aspect of this that I’m currently exploring in relation to pictorial art. I call it ‘presentness’. All our perceptual activity fixes on moments of recognition or sequences of momentary perceptions in how we attend to things. Pictorial art intervenes on the transience of these features. If a work is representational, it links the viewer and the scene viewed in a present whose immobility and self-containedness exceed the limits of ordinary perception. A contrast is useful here. Photographs snatch a moment of time, by, as it were, snatching it out of a flow of visual events. But the painter represents by accumulating the visual elements to compose the image. He or she represents a single moment that – like the moments of human experience as such, are internally complex . In life we never completely possess our passing moments – they pass in the very act of trying to fix them in place. But pictorial art does fix them in place, symbolically. It offers a kind of eternalization of the represented present. This has the profoundest aesthetic and psychological ramifications. In presentness, the artist makes a moment of visual appearance available as a permanent possibility of experience.
Of course, not all visual art is pictorial. I ‘ve done a large amount of work on meaning in abstract art. Abstract works disclose features that are usually unnoticed in direct perception, or take unusual angles on it, or posit alternative modes of perceptual reality. Conceptualism also has its own special features, but here there is a significant constraint. We can invoke it through a question. Is there something about the conceptual ‘object’ that the artist creates or assembles that demands that it be directly perceived, or is it something which can be comprehended sufficiently by mere description? If it’s the latter there is no reason to regard it as art. Some conceptual works are like this, of course, and are better regarded as adjuncts to theory than as works of art. Other conceptual idioms, however, are hugely rewarding in what they offer to direct perception – such as, for example, Duchamp’s entwined exhibits at the First Papers of Surrealism exhibition in 1942. White Aesthetics, of course, tends not to ask this test question. On its terms, if the artist says its art, then that’s what it is.
3:AM: You’re clear that Heidegger, Adorno and Merleau-Ponty are important but that their strategies of elliptical address – adapting description to the irreducible concreteness of an art object – fails to bring descriptive clarity to their analysis. However, despite the shortcomings, Heidegger’s ‘Art And Space’ and ‘The Origin of a Work of Art’ are important for you aren’t they?
PC: Yes, as I pointed out earlier, they all have important insights but are somewhat one-sided in the way they frame general problems in aesthetics from their particular philosophical positions. Elliptical strategies bring their own internal problematics in accordance with the particular philosophical method involved
3:AM: Could your theory and approach link with German Idealism and Schelling just as well as the phenomenological-existentialist tradition you identify?
PC: Yes, almost certainly. I think that my stuff has affinities with Hegel more than Schelling, but to tell you the truth, I suspect that this is because I know Hegel’s work a lot better than Schelling’s. Probably the deepest debt of all that I owe is to Kant’s theory of cognition – especially the Transcendental Deduction, and to his terribly neglected theory of art.
3:AM: Do you see yourself as providing a comprehensive aesthetic theory?
PC: As comprehensive as can be. Obviously, I’ve paid special attention to the philosophy of the visual arts – with five published monographs and many papers. However, there are also three books on more general aesthetics, and two works where I develop Kant’s aesthetics into something of more general significance.
3:AM: And finally, are there five books other than your own which would help us go further into your philosophical world?
PC:
Hegel – Lectures on Aesthetics
Cassirer – An Essay on Man
Merleau-Ponty – The Primacy of Perception (the book of that title, not just the essay)
Adorno – Aesthetic Theory
Bradley – Appearance and Reality
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Phenomenologies of art and vision; a post-analytic turn
Reference & Research Book News.
28.4 (Aug. 2013):
COPYRIGHT 2013 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9781441119735
Phenomenologies of art and vision; a post-analytic turn.
Crowther, Paul.
Continuum Publishing Group
2013
195 pages
$120.00
Hardcover
N70
Crowther (philosophy, National U. of Ireland-Galway) investigates the intrinsic meaning of images and how it engages with fundamental truths
concerning people's relation to the universe. The clearest path, he says, is to trace how images become art, and so are enjoyed for their own sake
rather than for any visual information they might carry. Among the topics are painting as an art: Wollheim and the subjective dimension, vision in
being: Merleau-Ponty and the depths of painting, and dimensions in time: Dufrenne's phenomenology of pictorial art.
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
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Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Phenomenologies of art and vision; a post-analytic turn." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2013. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA338399517&it=r&asid=5e3604dcad3327ce8fb7a8a855b0a629. Accessed 6 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A338399517
---
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The phenomenology of modern art; exploding Deleuze,
illuminating style
Reference & Research Book News.
27.6 (Dec. 2012):
COPYRIGHT 2012 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9781441142580
The phenomenology of modern art; exploding Deleuze, illuminating style.
Crowther, Paul.
Continuum Publishing Group
2012
281 pages
$44.95
N6490
Crowther (philosophy, National U. of Ireland) addresses basic features of modern art "on the basis of style as a bearer of aesthetic meaning." He
defines style as "a way of visually disclosing attitudes toward aspects of the world (including social factors) and which engages, indeed, with
some of the deepest aspects of human experience." To this end, he comes out this study with a phenomenological approach, drawing on the
aesthetic philosophy and preoccupations of Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Immanuel Kant. He notes several
stylistic tendencies in modern art, which for his study is confined to visual forms: overcoming traditional academic notions of ideal form, an
emphasis on nonconventionally artistic subjects, new pictorial codes extending "the kinds of perceptual relations that can be expressed directly
through visual art", and an insistently planer emphasis. His interrogation with Deleuze's study of Francis Bacon is a critical one that argues
against essentialist, hierarchical "grand narrative" about modern art. He is interested in Deleuze and abstraction in art, which he argues in the end
"engages actively with the relation between visual appearance and reality at the deepest levels."
([c] Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
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"The phenomenology of modern art; exploding Deleuze, illuminating style." Reference & Research Book News, Dec. 2012. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA312255359&it=r&asid=3effcbe0b1bddf790e08e39f298d5b48. Accessed 6 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A312255359
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Crowther, Paul. The Kantian aesthetic: from knowledge to
the avant-garde
R. Bonzon
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
48.3 (Nov. 2010): p513.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
48-1388 B2799 MARC
Crowther, Paul. The Kantian aesthetic: from knowledge to the avant-garde. Oxford, 2010. 209p bibl index afp ISBN 9780199579976, $60.00
Crowther (National Univ. of Ireland, Galway) begins his dense study of Kant's aesthetic theory, unusually, not from the first pages of the principal
Kantian text on aesthetics, Critique on Judgment, but from near the beginning of Kant's whole critical project in Critique of Pure Reason. The first
two chapters closely examine the Transcendental Deduction (2nd edition) and the Schematism of the Critique. Crowther is concerned to
emphasize and develop the role of the imagination in these two sections, anticipating the central role it assumes in the Critique of Judgment. The
remaining five chapters are then devoted to Kant's discussions of aesthetic judgment, taste, beauty, fine art, and the sublime. Although this book is
an intricate and scholarly negotiation of Kant's text, it is not intended primarily as a contribution to minute textual interpretation but to the bearing
of Kant's theory on contemporary problems in the philosophy of art. The chapter on fine art draws interesting connections with avant-garde art,
with particular attention to Duchamp and his successors. The author also makes suggestive links to color-field painting and postmodern art in the
chapter on the sublime. Summing Up: Recommended. ** Graduate students and faculty/researchers.--R. Bonzon, Augustana College
Bonzon, R.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Bonzon, R. "Crowther, Paul. The Kantian aesthetic: from knowledge to the avant-garde." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries,
Nov. 2010, p. 513. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA249221308&it=r&asid=c262d643385f43dc12d43fae07a34f82. Accessed 6 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A249221308
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Quoted in Sidelights: “somewhat elusive,” “less than revelatory,” “a variety of scholars with a theoretical interest in the visual arts.”
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Crowther, Paul. Phenomenology of the visual arts (even the
frame)
J.O. Young
CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries.
47.9 (May 2010): p1672.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association CHOICE
http://www.ala.org/acrl/choice/about
Full Text:
47-4817 N66 2009-7529 CIP
Crowther, Paul. Phenomenology of the visual arts (even the frame). Stanford, 2009. 252p bibl index afp ISBN 9780804762144, $55.00
This book is a bit of a novelty. While located within a Continental philosophical tradition, it firmly rejects postmodernism and "reductionist"
accounts of the visual arts that understand artworks as manifestations of various sociohistorical factors. Crowther (National Univ. of Ireland,
Galway) is also familiar with analytic philosophy. (He characterizes his position as analytic phenomenology.) The book treats artworks as
aesthetic objects with "phenomenological depth." This crucial concept is somewhat elusive, but it has to do with the interdependence of the
perceiving subject and the perceived object. Phenomenological depth is used to explain how works of visual art have significance. Sometimes the
conclusions of the book seem less than revelatory, as when some tough theoretical sledding results in the conclusion that pictures remove objects
from their normal conditions of observation and, in particular, the temporal conditions of observation. That is, a picture makes it possible to
experience the represented object without it changing through time. Still, this book should interest a variety of scholars with a theoretical interest
in the visual arts. The book addresses pictures, sculpture, abstract art, conceptual art, photography, digital art, and architecture. Summing Up:
Recommended. ** Graduate students and faculty.--J. O. Young, University of Victoria
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Young, J.O. "Crowther, Paul. Phenomenology of the visual arts (even the frame)." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, May 2010,
p. 1672. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA251861714&it=r&asid=cebb70498cffc10ddf98f89a2df3caf5. Accessed 6 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A251861714
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Aesthetics, imagination, and the unity of experience
Reference & Research Book News.
21.3 (Aug. 2006):
COPYRIGHT 2006 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
0754604330
Aesthetics, imagination, and the unity of experience.
Elliott, R.K.
Ashgate Publishing Co.
2006
195 pages
$89.95
Hardcover
BH221
Elliot enjoys the reputation of being one of the most influential late twentieth-century aestheticians, a master in combining analytic and
continental traditions, a formidable task he accomplished in this collection of papers drawn from their numerous journals and anthologies from
1967 to 1981. Editor Paul Crowther (International U., Bremen) offers Elliot's work in the unity of Kant's Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, his two
articles on imagination (in the experience of art and as a magical faculty), aesthetic theory and the experience of art, poetry and truth, the critic
and the lover of art, the aesthetic and the semantic, Bell's theory and critical practice, Wittgenstein's speculative aesthetics and its ethical context,
Socrates and Plato's cave, and aestheticism, imagination and schooling. Crowther includes a bibliography of Elliot's work.
([c]20062005 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Aesthetics, imagination, and the unity of experience." Reference & Research Book News, Aug. 2006. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA148972360&it=r&asid=f2f8a2576d9707fb00c735e6a7bf1854. Accessed 6 July 2017.
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Gale Document Number: GALE|A148972360
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Futures: Four Novellas. (SF/Fantasy)
Regina Schroeder
Booklist.
98.6 (Nov. 15, 2001): p560.
COPYRIGHT 2001 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Futures: Four Novellas. Ed. by Peter Crowther. Dec. 2001. 384p. Warner Aspect, paper, $6.99 (0-446-61062-3).
Futures is part of an ongoing series of novella anthologies. Contributing to this volume are Peter Hamilton, Stephen Baxter, Paul McAuley, and
Ian McDonald. The stories are quintessential sf. Suspense they have aplenty, and action and space travel are givens. Conveying something about
today's world as well as an alien future, "Tendeleo's Story," the most notable of the four, concerns Tendeleo's struggle to survive as the alien
chaga takes over her world; it isn't lacking in thrills, but it's also a human story. "Making History" looks at an issue that obtains in our world, too:
who writes history, and how do those writers arrive at their conclusions? Satisfying enough as sf, this quartet of tales lacks something if one is
looking for pure literary pleasure.
YA/L: Thought-provoking plots and characters will appeal to serious sf fans. CS.
Schroeder, Regina
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Schroeder, Regina. "Futures: Four Novellas. (SF/Fantasy)." Booklist, 15 Nov. 2001, p. 560. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA80681685&it=r&asid=4a46ac1a7fe626704a7ce2f22fa2bf20. Accessed 6 July 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A80681685
---
Quoted in Sidelights: “By forcing readers to expand the steps of his reasoning, Crowther awakes the philosophical imagination of his readers prompting them to engage with the subject-matter,”
“essential reading for anyone concerned with
twentieth-century ‘continental’ aesthetics.”
“The pieces which constitute Crowther’s collection have an inner coherence and momentum,” while appreciating “the diversity of aesthetic interpretation,”
“Crowther’s text is worthy of the hermeneutic plaudit ‘yet more.'”
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Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to SelfConsciousness
Nicholas Davey
The British Journal of Aesthetics.
35.3 (July 1995): p290.
COPYRIGHT 1995 Oxford University Press
https://academic.oup.com/journals
Full Text:
A philosophy text which does not provoke questions about that with which it deals must conspicuously fail as a philosophy text. Paul Crowther's
book Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness must be counted a philosophical success not just because its central arguments
stimulate a good deal of critical conjecture but also because this volume of essays operates both intensively and extensively. Crowther's terse style
provides some stunningly succinct and highly focused articulations of Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's aesthetic positions but it also leaves one
struggling to fill in the detail of his own evolving aesthetic. By forcing readers to expand the steps of his reasoning, Crowther awakes the
philosophical imagination of his readers prompting them to engage with the subject-matter. Such engagement is surely the point of philosophical
discourse and in this respect Crowther succeeds very well.
This volume of essays is made up for the most part of articles which have been previously published. Part One on the 'Varieties and Structures of
Aesthetic Experience' includes three pieces: 'The Aesthetic Domain: A Logical Geography', 'Aesthetic Experience and the Experience of Art' and
'Alienation and Disalienation in Abstract Art'. Part Two entitled 'The Philosophical Significance of Art' includes the pieces 'Fundamental
Ontology and Transcendent Beauty: An Approach to Kant's Aesthetics', 'Heidegger and the Question of Aesthetics', 'Merleau-Ponty: Vision and
Painting' and 'Art, Architecture and Self-Consciousness: An Exploration of Hegel's Aesthetics'. Part Three entitled 'The Ecological Significance
of Art' contains the previously unpublished pieces, 'The Needs of Self-Consciousness: From Aesthetic Experience to Unalienated Artifice', 'Art
and the Needs of Self-Consciousness' and the partially published 'Defining Art: Questions of Creativity and Originality'. Too often nowadays this
composite manner of construction can be a blatant excuse for bookmaking resulting from questionable professional pressure. However, the pieces
which constitute Crowther's collection have an inner coherence and momentum which the author brings to particular expression in the
introductory essay 'An Ecological Theory of Art' and in the unpublished end pieces which are part of the section entitled 'The Ecological
Significance of Art'.
Concerning the specific essays, the pieces on Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are without doubt essential reading for anyone concerned with
twentieth-century 'continental' aesthetics. The Merleau-Ponty piece should certainly be read alongside Galen Johnson's recent Merleau Ponty: An
Aesthetics Reader (1993). The Heidegger essay, however, needs to explain more fully his connection with 'the question of aesthetics' since the
focal text 'The Origin of the Art Work' steers hard away from what Heidegger sensed was the infectious subjectivity of aesthetic experience.
Apart from the adequacy of Heidegger's understanding of the 'aesthetic', Crowther makes a key point: that although 'The Origin of the Art Work'
essay implicitly strives to supplant Kantian models of subjective experience with an ontological account of disclosure (aletheia), aletheic
experience appears to be indistinguishable from a mode of disinterested experience in that in it 'Being is . . . disclosed in a more heightened way'
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(p. 101). This is a profoundly important remark for there is much work yet to be done on the extent to which Heidegger and Gadamer have both
misunderstood the Kantian account of disinterested experience and, what is more important, cannot really escape it in their own respective
accounts of the experience of art. Here Crowther certainly breaks into important philosophical territory but he needs to secure it more
comprehensively.
One danger of composing a volume from composite essays is that some quickly become outdated. This is sadly the case with the otherwise fine
essay on 'Aesthetic Experience and the Experience of Art', a distinction which is worked out in the first part of H-G. Gadamer's Truth and
Method. The distinction which Gadamer articulates is a seminal one for anybody involved in the teaching of art and aesthetics. Crowther is
clearly unhappy with Gadamer's attempt to separate himself from a formal aesthetic as opposed to a broader phenomenological account of our
experience of art. He writes: 'If we were to grant Gadamer's point . . . and admit that a purely aesthetic approach to life is inherently alienated, this
would still not invalidate "aesthetic consciousness"' (p. 38). Does Gadamer seek to invalidate aesthetic consciousness or to re-appraise it from a
hermeneutical account of experience? It is certainly the case that in Truth and Method Gadamer argues that 'the experience of art must not be
side-tracked into the uncommittedness of . . . aesthetic awareness' (p. 87) but he also argues that 'aesthetic experience is not just one kind of
experience among others but represents the essence of experience itself' (p. 63) and furthermore that hermeneutics must assimilate aesthetic
experience. Indeed, when Crowther argues that he is 'claiming . . . that the experience of an artwork can bring a unique reflective awareness of the
nature of the human condition' (p. 46), he not only stands on the high ground of Gadamer's philosophy of art but unfortunately is a good deal less
specific than Gadamer on the relationship between art and the human condition. Crowther's account of Gadamer's aesthetic is perhaps too narrow.
It fails to account for the considerable corpus of Gadamer's writings on art which post-date Truth and Method. Indeed, in that it re-works an
organic theory of art, the recent essay Wort und Bild (1992) now published in volume 8 of Gadamer's Gesammelte Schriften (Mohr, 1994) would
not only force amendments in the reception of the latter's aesthetics but provide substantial supportive ground for Crowther's principal ecological
theory of art to which we shall now turn.
The ecological theory of art which Crowther presents is aimed at resolving some of the difficulties in excessively subjectivist or objectivist
accounts of our experience of art. Whereas the former concentrates entirely upon the formal aspects of aesthetic consciousness discounting the
influence of history and culture, the latter can overemphasize such factors to the extent that it renders aesthetic awareness nothing more than a
mechanical response. Crowther contends that in so far as the ecological theory deals with relations, the artwork can because of its integration of
symbolic content, sensuous material and personal experience, 'reconcile the general subject-object division in a number of ways' (p. 6). He goes
on: 'The artwork as symbolically significant sensuous manifold is able to express the decisive relation between subject and world (ontological
reciprocity . . .) at a level which does not obliterate the concreteness of the relation. . . . The art work . . . reflects our mode of embodied inherence
in the world and by clarifying this inherence it brings about a harmony between subject and object of experience - a full realisation of self. In the
creation and reception of art, we are able to enjoy a free-belonging to the world' (p. 7). Now there are clear advantages to this thesis. As we have
noted, Crowther is justifiably keen to defend a pluralist view of art-interpretation and, as he later argues (p. 206), an ecological definition of art in
effect deprives the right of any mode of social or political critique of aesthetics to be absolute. The definition does not deny such critiques any
effective status but merely insists that they be seen as enabling/determining elements in a more complex irreducible nexus of interactive factors
which contribute to the emergence of aesthetic experience. However, there are a number of questions Crowther might have answered which
would have made his case even more impressive.
Firstly, what, in the case of artistic experience, actually are the structures through which art's ecological transmissions occur: language,
mechanisms of perception or the phenomenological structure of experience itself? A fuller account of the ecological chemistry seems called for.
Secondly, is it the case that aesthetic experience is always concerned with the reconciliation of subject and object? Do the contradictions and
conflicts of Schnittke's musical collages invoke a reconciliation of subject and object or attempt to record the painful disjuncture of the inner
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personal world and the nature of the external world which became so characteristic of late Soviet culture? Adorno might argue that by denying
such reconciliation, Schnittke at least anticipates it. But, then, has not Adorno also to choose between the agonizing disjuncture between subject
and object which stimulates art and the resolution of that disjuncture which would end it? What of Nietzsche's account of Dionysian art the sole
aim of which is to disrupt the comfortable reconciliations of bourgeois art? These are not objections to Crowther's thesis but a suggestion that in
order to maintain themselves ecological systems require not reconciliation as Crowther suggests but much more in the way of tension and
counter-balancing forces. Thirdly, what does the term re-humanization mean within Crowther's thesis? Is he appealing to the humanist tradition,
the existentialist tradition or Gadamer's re-working of philosophical humanism? More seriously how does the appeal to humanization avoid the
charge that it re-invokes the very subjectivity which the ecological account of art is meant to free us from? In so far as Crowther's 'fundamental
contention' is that the essence of art is nothing less than the realization of the self and the conservation of human experience (p. 7), does not the
whole argument incline towards a form of subjectivism? This charge could be avoided if Crowther had offered a much fuller account of how the
event of aesthetic experience within the subject actually alters the external determinants which affect that experience. For Crowther's thesis to be
fully ecological, we need an account of the 'return loop' in the 'ontological reciprocity' the author speaks of. We can only hope that in his future
writing, Crowther will address this problem and strengthen what is a very credible thesis.
Paul Crowther has emerged as a valiant defender of the irreducible distinctness of the aesthetic. His earlier text The Kantian Sublime not only
announced his intense scholarship but also the concern with aesthetic disinterestedness which weaves its way through this text of this volume of
essays. What is particularly commendable about Crowther's approach is his willingness to trace the metamorphosis of the grounding themes of
aesthetics through contemporary thought. Indeed his concluding remarks which boldly celebrate the diversity of aesthetic interpretation and
refuse to allow the reduction of such variety to the common-denominators of social and political reductionism deserve ardent applause. If
Nietzsche marked his approval with the phrase de capo (once more), Crowther's text is worthy of the hermeneutic plaudit 'yet more'.
NICHOLAS DAVEY University College Llandaff, Cardiff
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
Davey, Nicholas. "Art and Embodiment: From Aesthetics to Self-Consciousness." The British Journal of Aesthetics, vol. 35, no. 3, 1995, p. 290+.
General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA17381582&it=r&asid=364719cc5ad36b4bc24797a7195de857. Accessed 6 July
2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A17381582
Quoted in Sidelights: “is quite useful in facilitating a cooperation between art history and aesthetics,” “The book expounds not just an aesthetic theory but one that seeks to enable art historians to compose a definitive art history.”
August 3, 2011
Paul Crowther
Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame)
Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. 264 pp.; 26 b/w ills. Paper $22.95 (9780804776028 )
Loretta Vandi
CrossRef DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2011.89
Thumbnail
Paul Crowther’s Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) is quite useful in facilitating a cooperation between art history and aesthetics. The book expounds not just an aesthetic theory but one that seeks to enable art historians to compose a definitive art history. Crowther’s approach might be called the “phenomenological depth theory” in so far as “depth” is a word with which he appears fascinated. The main theoretical issues are addressed in the second chapter, whereas the first turns present-day art history into two phantom camps—the one defined as “reductionist” as against the other, Crowther’s, which focuses on a picture’s “intrinsic significance” and thus makes possible an all-comprising art history. There are eight chapters more, but I will mainly concentrate on the theoretical framework.
In spite of a desire to cut nature off from art, Crowther prefers to look through the formidable problems put to his pronouncements by a good number of theories that attempt to illuminate this relation both from a historical as well as a perceptual point of view (of which Ernst Gombrich’s is of paramount importance, if only because he tried, in distinguishing painting from ornament, to systematically relate them).
Crowther assumes that pictorial space is made up of figure, plane, and frame. In defining what is figure (i.e., subject) he argues for the “pictorial representation’s relative semantic autonomy”; from this “logical property” he jumps to its “correlated ontological feature . . . modal plasticity.” The reasoning runs as follows. Since pictures are “artefacts which, once made, exist outside the body, and almost always, independently of it” (37), they cannot be thought to involve “ordinary visual perception” but “interpretation,” which is more than just language. On the other hand, interpretation “operates between two complementary vectors—the schematic and the particular” (37). At one and the same time the “schematic content” functions as class marker and the “particular” as description of a particular that nevertheless would not allow for a figure’s recognition unless transformed into the “individual.” Technically speaking this process of interpretation is based on the employment of “solid shapes . . . two-dimensional geometric forms . . . and color-based media” (37).
Inasmuch as these elements of construction are not borrowed from reality and the individualization of them engages exclusively with the painter’s imagination, the picture, while it may denote something real, need not be created with this end in view. Crowther argues that according to the theory of interpretation as described, the picture possesses the logical property (i.e., picture qua meaning) of “semantic autonomy” for which the corresponding ontological one (i.e., picture qua being) is “modal plasticity.” Here systems, scales, and correspondences are assumed either as self-evident or already known by the reader/viewer, so the only thing to be done is to explain the ontological property. In doing so, Crowther falls inadvertently back on what he was affirming in relation to interpretation (hence, “semantic autonomy,” etc.). “Modal plasticity” refers to the fact that a picture, since it is constructed regardless of denotative reference, shows “visual possibilities.” If proof is needed, it is reported that “humans can be represented as having wings, flying over a landscape, or as being alive in the midst of a fiery furnace” (39). The conclusion here is compelling—the picture is independent of physical laws (and thus of reality!). And what is more, granted “modal plasticity,” “pictorial space allows the creator to symbolically reorganize and re-make visual reality itself” (40).
At this juncture the viewer enters, and with her or him, aesthetic disinterestedness. How? We have been repeatedly told that a picture is ontologically independent of reality. Instead, the point to be made is not so much this as that the viewer, being aware of the fact that the picture did refer to a reality no longer available to her or him (“individual’s appearance will change . . . the landscape may be built over time”) (41), is enthralled by such ambiguity. This should mean that it is the pictorial space itself that sends out not only what the viewer perceives as ambiguity but also her or his own disinterestedness; in this way Crowther is able to insert the ontology of the picture within its aesthetic component. This is the first part of the theoretical chapter. There are still another two more—concerning plane and frame—which Crowther employs to maintain the picture’s already achieved independence from reality.
Before discussing the frame, it will be helpful to examine one of the arguments about plane, perhaps the most ingenious. After having declared that the picture possesses “planar structures” (i.e., simple and plain three-dimensionality which is found there a priori rather than created by the artist) on which the artist fastens a figure/ground subject, presenting it “from an absolutely stationary frontal view-point” (43), Crowther proposes that the two-dimensionality of the picture’s surface joins the fixativeness of the “planar structures” in order to “separate the subject from the conditions under which it is normally perceived” (45) (somewhat overlooking the fact that he has already raised three-dimensionality to the status of a property inherent in the surface). But how to demonstrate that a picture’s two-dimensionality differs from nature’s? According to Crowther, since the “solidified liquids are the main natural manifestation of flat appearance” (45) and the flatness of a picture’s surface is “virtual” (and, accordingly, immutable), the latter is “manifestly not the flatness of a solidified liquid” (45).
As regards the frame, it “presents the subject in a way that is significantly different from the circumstances of ordinary perception” (53). As a counterbalance, Crowther might have considered Meyer Schapiro’s “On Some Problems in the Semiotics of Visual Art: Field and Vehicle in Image-Signs,” a conspicuous essay of 1969, which would have provided a good introduction both to specific and general questions on the topic (it might also have been useful to address Gombrich’s discussion about the frame of Raffaello’s Madonna della Sedia because it would have entailed an engagement with Gombrich’s theory of ornamentation; after all, ornament is among the frame’s main features). Crowther then sets himself to explaining the preponderance of the rectangular format which he believes “suggests the virtual extendability of pictorial space left, right, and above the stationary viewer as well as in front of him and her” (54), perhaps overstating Heinrich Wölfflin’s case as expressed in the Grundbegriffe. For Wölfflin, neither the binary closeness/openness has any effect whatsoever on the frame’s limiting function nor is the Baroque’s open organization intended “as something to be continued, notionally, beyond” (52). Rather, for Wölfflin the relation is tektonische, that is, the Classic takes into consideration the frame in a way that the Baroque does not—the latter would look as a snapshot confined within a smooth rectangular frame as it were; Wölfflin, moreover, has addressed in his Gedanken the difference of right/left, while the Stimmungswert of a picture’s different parts also concerned Schapiro.
Crowther concludes Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) by offering a historical synthesis in which all the nagging problems of Art History are solved: “Such development would allow for a more balanced modus operandi in art history that allowed it to be enriched so as to avoid dangers of social and/or semiotic reductionism” (208). The reader is urged to consider whether or not this is a satisfactory resolution to the complex issues at hand.
Loretta Vandi
Professor, Art Institute—Scuola del Libro Urbino (Italy)
Please send comments about this review to editor.caareviews@collegeart.org.
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