Notes from Session Three of Tate Modern course 7 Ways of Thinking About Art
Following on from last week's discussion about the relevance of artists' intentions to understanding a work of art, we began by thinking about its seeming opposite: chance in art. Clearly chance is something many artists exploit in various ways. The Boyle Family have, for example, for many years been following through a programme of making large reproductions of parts of the world's surface that were chosen by chance. A painter such as Jackson Pollock could not have known in advance precisely where the drips would fall. Many of the Surrealists used what they called 'automatism', a range of techniques for unleashing creativity that exploited apparent chance. In these cases the artist often consciously embraces chance, sometimes deliberately choosing objects which though produced by chance rather than design, have all the appearance of something deliberately and carefully made (some found art is like this).
But what is chance? According to the great 18th Century philosopher David Hume there really is no such thing as chance. What we mean by 'chance' is that we are ignorant of the causes of something. Unknown causes in art may be largely physical events - as in the patterns of dripped paint; or they may be psychological (e.g. unconscious selection of subject matter that seems random, but can be seen to have a pattern that reveals the artist's psyche).
Many people believe that art essentially involves a conscious (or at least pre-conscious) act of some kind to create something that relates to previous art. On this view, someone (or, perhaps, an animal artist like Congo the chimp) who created 'art' without any sense of doing so, wouldn't really be an artist except in a secondary sense (we can, for example 'read off' seeming intentions where no intention was as a matter of fact present).
In the gallery we looked at a range of ways that artists have exploited chance in Room 3 of Poetry and Dream 'Elements of Chance'.
A second theme of the session was the relevance of historical context to interpretation. I identified a range of histories that can enhance our understanding of a work of art:
The general historical context (including world events - e.g. Kurt Schwitter's art at various points in his life can be illuminated by understanding his experience of the First World War, his later flight from Nazism and internment)
The artist's life and oeuvre as context (retrospectively we can see causes and developments that may have been opaque to the artist - knowing what was to come next in the artist's life affects our interpretation as in John Berger's famous example in his Ways of Seeing of showing Van Gogh's last painting of crows over a cornfield without and then with the caption that indicated that it was his last painting).
The history of how the object was made (knowing that the later version of Epstein's Rock Drill was the result of deliberate mutilations in the light of his changing attitude to war allows a different kind of understanding of this work - more on this in notes from a previous version of this course here. Knowing how Bill Brandt framed his Halifax 'Snicket' (this link is to a posthumous print) and the position he would have had to put the camera in illuminates what he was doing with the image - emphasizing the steepness of the path and eliminating extraneous detail, for example). For further information about this see my essay on the photograph in Sophie Howarth (ed.) Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs
(Tate Modern Publications).
Technological history (particularly relevant when understanding photography and film - there may be limitations imposed by the available film speed and so on).
History of the materials used (not always relevant, but some artists exploit materials which have a history prior to their use in an artwork, as with Cornelia Parker's '30 Pieces of Silver' where she used silver bought from junk shops to make the work and knowledge of where the ingredients of the work came from in general terms is relevant to our interpretation of what she was doing).
History of the object after it was created (with some works of art, the history of what happened to the work after it left the artist's studio can be relevant. In extreme cases the history can include aggressive restoration, or damage. Without understanding how the work came to look as it does, we may lack an important key to appreciating what we are looking at).
Next week: Art as Conceptual (meet in Members' Room on Level 7, Tate Modern as last week).
Following on from last week's discussion about the relevance of artists' intentions to understanding a work of art, we began by thinking about its seeming opposite: chance in art. Clearly chance is something many artists exploit in various ways. The Boyle Family have, for example, for many years been following through a programme of making large reproductions of parts of the world's surface that were chosen by chance. A painter such as Jackson Pollock could not have known in advance precisely where the drips would fall. Many of the Surrealists used what they called 'automatism', a range of techniques for unleashing creativity that exploited apparent chance. In these cases the artist often consciously embraces chance, sometimes deliberately choosing objects which though produced by chance rather than design, have all the appearance of something deliberately and carefully made (some found art is like this).
But what is chance? According to the great 18th Century philosopher David Hume there really is no such thing as chance. What we mean by 'chance' is that we are ignorant of the causes of something. Unknown causes in art may be largely physical events - as in the patterns of dripped paint; or they may be psychological (e.g. unconscious selection of subject matter that seems random, but can be seen to have a pattern that reveals the artist's psyche).
Many people believe that art essentially involves a conscious (or at least pre-conscious) act of some kind to create something that relates to previous art. On this view, someone (or, perhaps, an animal artist like Congo the chimp) who created 'art' without any sense of doing so, wouldn't really be an artist except in a secondary sense (we can, for example 'read off' seeming intentions where no intention was as a matter of fact present).
In the gallery we looked at a range of ways that artists have exploited chance in Room 3 of Poetry and Dream 'Elements of Chance'.
A second theme of the session was the relevance of historical context to interpretation. I identified a range of histories that can enhance our understanding of a work of art:
The general historical context (including world events - e.g. Kurt Schwitter's art at various points in his life can be illuminated by understanding his experience of the First World War, his later flight from Nazism and internment)
The artist's life and oeuvre as context (retrospectively we can see causes and developments that may have been opaque to the artist - knowing what was to come next in the artist's life affects our interpretation as in John Berger's famous example in his Ways of Seeing of showing Van Gogh's last painting of crows over a cornfield without and then with the caption that indicated that it was his last painting).
The history of how the object was made (knowing that the later version of Epstein's Rock Drill was the result of deliberate mutilations in the light of his changing attitude to war allows a different kind of understanding of this work - more on this in notes from a previous version of this course here. Knowing how Bill Brandt framed his Halifax 'Snicket' (this link is to a posthumous print) and the position he would have had to put the camera in illuminates what he was doing with the image - emphasizing the steepness of the path and eliminating extraneous detail, for example). For further information about this see my essay on the photograph in Sophie Howarth (ed.) Singular Images: Essays on Remarkable Photographs
(Tate Modern Publications).Technological history (particularly relevant when understanding photography and film - there may be limitations imposed by the available film speed and so on).
History of the materials used (not always relevant, but some artists exploit materials which have a history prior to their use in an artwork, as with Cornelia Parker's '30 Pieces of Silver' where she used silver bought from junk shops to make the work and knowledge of where the ingredients of the work came from in general terms is relevant to our interpretation of what she was doing).
History of the object after it was created (with some works of art, the history of what happened to the work after it left the artist's studio can be relevant. In extreme cases the history can include aggressive restoration, or damage. Without understanding how the work came to look as it does, we may lack an important key to appreciating what we are looking at).
Next week: Art as Conceptual (meet in Members' Room on Level 7, Tate Modern as last week).
, Tate Publications or 
(Routledge), especially Chapter 3 'Family Resemblances'.
).