concepts and critique
In yesterday's lecture, I discussed a couple of 'concepts' which seem to me to be key to the kind of work that we are asking you to develop during the module - the concept of a 'concept' and that of the 'critical'. I said I'd write up some of these thoughts and post them here, but what's probably more important is that you do some active research yourselves into what they might mean... I've attached a few notes as a comment to this post, but a few places to start looking are:
concepts:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept
(see especially the entries on Locke, William Jamesand Gilles Deleuze)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze#Epistemology
- try to think in particualr about how you were doing conceptual work in your last assignment by bringing artists together, irrespective of whether this work was done in writing...
- in what sense is 'conceptual' art conceptual?
the critical
a few websites to look at regarding the 'critical':
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/r.htm#critique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/
Also, think about what kind of 'critical' thought art can be. Look up the notion of institutional critique' in the Art Since 1900 book. Has institutional critique, one way or another been a primary strategy of avant-garde art throughout the twentieth century, in its constant testing of the boundaries of what art is?
a few artists to chase up:
* Marcel Broodthaers
* Daniel Buren
* Judy Chicago
* The Guerrilla Girls
* Jimmie Durham
* Mark Dion.
posted by Luke White @ 4:14 PM
6 Comments:
the concept of a 'concept'
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One of the things that we academics often ask students for in their work is for more of an engagement with 'concepts' or 'conceptual material', in order to enrich their essays, and lift it above the 'merely descriptive'. In fact this is explicit in the set of guidelines by which we tutors mark essays at Middlesex. But what does this actually mean? And what might it mean in the context of a module which is not set up around serving you up a series of ready-made, freeze-dried concepts which we might ask you to learn by rote and to parrot back to us?
So what is a concept?
In the history of philosophy, during the eighteenth century, the word 'concept' came to be understood primarily to refer to what is formed in the mind through a process of abstraction, when it brings together a series of separate perceptions into a single mental picture or form which it can then use to 'match' future impressions against. Thus, we might see several trees, and bring them together in the concept of a 'tree', which we can then use to recognise that further trees also match with our concept of a 'tree', and are thus also trees.
(If we think of the 'concept' like this, and not just as a 'word' with a 'definition', it might start to help think about how it is that the work you were doing bringing images/artists/quotes together can also be understood as work with concepts, even outside the articulation of this in written argument...)
One of the implications of this might be that since concepts are products of the mind, in its meeting with a real world, that concepts don't exist 'out there' somewhere, but only in the realm of the mind - in a sense there are no real 'trees' out there, there is only a swirl of matter. Concepts (such as that of 'tree') help us carve up that reality for ourselves in a meaningful and ordered way.
This might also imply that concepts are not eternal things, but, as man-made things, they are subject to change. We might be able to carve up the world using quite different sets of concepts, in quite different ways. And in fact over history different cultures have done exactly this. (See the famous and striking image of this in the preface of Michel Foucault's book The Order of Things)
During the nineteenth century American 'pragmatic' philosophers started to ask about what might be the implications of dividing the world up according to different concepts. Is it a matter of how 'true' different concepts might be to 'reality', or is what's important the fact that different concepts allow us to do different things to or with or in the world? Concepts, at this point, start to look a little more like tools, than just descriptions.
We might also at this point note that, in that concepts organise our world and what we can do in it, we might ask: to what extent do we organise the world with concepts, and to what extent do our concepts organise us, ourselves? To what extent do they structure our experience, the way we understand the possibilities open to us, our place in an order of things and even who we are?
This kind of argument was taken up in particular in the writings of French philosophers and theorists of the 1970s. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze thus argued that what philosophers (and I would add, all of us!) do is create concepts - we remake and rework them anew. Different philosophers might use the same term, but each will have a different 'concept' attached to it; each will have to take conceptual material from past philosophers to rework into their own concept. Thus for Deleuze it would be silly to talk about "the" concept of (for example) art, but only "Kant's concept of art," "Hegel's concept of art," "Nietzsche's concept of art," and so on. We should thus give up trying to find a single "truth" of the concept which all these philosophers are trying to express, and, being aware of the differences between their different formulations, use them to produce a new one. This of course, doesn't mean that "anything goes": some attempts to work with or (re)create concepts are still better than others. Conceptual work is still an activity that happens in dialogue with others, and with the concepts that other people are offering and working with...
This is the kind of active conceptual work that we'd like you to be engaging in in your encounters with the art-world, and the discourses that surround it. You will be encountering all kinds of 'concepts', and we expect you to be engaging actively and creatively with these...
see also:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deleuze#Epistemology
'Critical writing'
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The module is called 'Contemporary Art and Critical Writing', and you'll notice from the module outline that the term 'critical' comes up a number of times. You've probably also noticed that on the whole in academia (and probably also going back to school) you are repeatedly asked to show skills in 'critical' thinking.
But what are these things (Criticism, critical writing, critical thinking, critique)?
And again, what are they in the context of a module like this one? What might 'critical writing' about contemporary art be like?
Of course, the title of the module seems to have a double meaning: "critical writing" might mean on the one hand a written form or record of critical thought, but it might also mean "art criticism" - that body of (not always very critical!) writing that exists around and about art, and which the module is asking you in part to engage with. One meaning of the title of the module might thus be in the question: what is the relationship between contemporary art and the discourse of criticism that surrounds it?
(What do critics do? Do they all do the same thing? What kinds of thinking about art do they engage in? Judgements of quality? value? ethics? politics? Description of formal characteristics? Working out what 'kind' of an (art) object this is? Interpretation? Response? Discussion of 'relevance'? Analysis of the work's rootedness in a social, historical, economic and political context? etc.)
But another meaning is also to be found in the fact that you are also being asked to produce a critical reflection in written form on the artists, the institutions, the writings, and so on that you are faced with in your research.
In class, we thus discussed what 'critical' thinking might consist of. Some aspects we associated with it were:
- that it seems to involve forms of judgement (about different forms of value)
- that it involves a certain act of 'balance', weighing up arguments and counter-arguments
- the exercise of logic and skills in argumentation
What seemed particularly useful was contrasting the 'critical' with its opposite - the 'uncritical'. To be uncritical is to be passive, naive, innocent, trusting, unsuspecting, gullible and unquestioning - which would cast critical thought as active, suspicious, and questioning. Someone noted that in fact the attributes of the 'uncritical' are all childlike, which makes critical thought very much a case of becoming mature, of 'growing up'.
This in fact brings us close to some of the developments in philosophical thought which have also been incredibly influential in modern ideas of what it is to think 'critically', or to 'critique something', in particular as it is understood in arts and humanities subjects in Universities.
The term 'critique' is closely bound up with the Enlightenment (17th and 18th centuries) and the aim of this intellectual movement to liberate humanity from its illusions, superstitions and mystifications - from the power that (other people's / wrong?) ideas have over us. For Immanuel Kant, with whom the term 'critical philosophy' is associated, the task of such a critical philosophy was discussed precisely to help us 'mature', to make us self-sufficient, self-governing beings rather than existing in a child-like reliance on external authority. One of the terms that Kant set up in opposition to the 'critical', and which we might associate with such immaturity, is 'Dogmatism'. A Dogmatic use of concepts (!) will treat them, as they are handed down to them from authority without question, and will not bear any questioning of whether they are correct.
Kant's 'Critical' philosophy sought to challenge this form of thinking by taking a step backwards from itself, and looking at the grounds which might structure our knowledge of the world. His metaphor for this was that if we want to know how big the world is, we cannot do this simply from the direct experience of the senses. The horizon will just seem to go on forever. If, however, we realise that the world is a sphere, and that this spherical shape conditions the limits of our horizon, we can calculate from the curve of the horizon just how big the world is. Our simple perceptions, all along, are being structured by something we do not at first see, which is essential to understand the world in which we live properly.
Critical thinking, then, if it has a 'proper' sense, beyond merely making 'good' or 'fine' judgements of value, and if it is to be distinguished from the term analysis, is related to this fundamental move where we turn reflexively to look at what conditions and organises our beliefs, understandings, ideas, theories and actions in the world.
The term has been taken on in particular by Marxists (Marx's own famous book, *Das Kapital* was subtitled *A Critique of Political Economy*), and by those influenced by Marx. The term thus often involves a turn back to the social, historical, political and economic conditions which structure experience. In this 'critique' remains a matter of liberation, of freeing oneself from the domination of a way of seeing and knowing the world. Critique is a matter, as Marx put it, not just of knowing the world, but of changing it.
This kind of question of social, political and economic critique has also been taken up in particular by feminism and by those interested in the rights of those who have been marginalised on the grounds of sexual orientation, race or class.
Once we see critique in terms of these histories, in relation to art, and to the art world, key critical questions might them be about how its institutions - its markets, state funding bodies and government policies, its histories, its politics, museum spaces, kinds of display, its concepts, its forms of criticism, modes of socialising, not to mention its place within a broader contemporary culture and its relations to to 'pop' and 'subcultures' and to Hollywood spectacle - might in fact be involved in structuring what is and what isn't art, what is shown and what isn't, and ultimately what is and isn't made.
This is very much the kind of 'critical thinking'/'criticism' that the authors of _Art Since 1900_ are wedded to, and their investments are largely in Marxist, feminist, and identity politics. Perhaps your own attachments are not to these particular stances, and so your own critical thinking would run along somewhat different lines (though remember: thinking critically is also a matter of self-examination, and examination of your own attachments...). To think about art and its institutions critically, however, means fundamentally that one takes a step back to think about what structures our (collective) behaviour, beliefs, understanding and practice in this art-world.
Such critique doesn't only take the form of 'art criticism'; there is also art which looks at this itself. The strategy of art as 'institutional critique' grew in the late 60s and early 70s, and a prime example might be the work of Hans Haacke, who we discussed at the end of last semester. His work, in the form of art, rather than writing, probed the limits of the systems that surrounded art.
Looking further at how artists took on 'institutional critique' as a strategy might be a really useful way of thinking through some of the qualities of thought that are being asked of you. A few further artists to look at are:
* Marcel Broodthaers
* Daniel Buren
* Judy Chicago
* The Guerrilla Girls
* Jimmie Durham
* Mark Dion.
In what ways do these artists engage in a 'critical' engagement with the possibilities of their own work?
Can it even be claimed that avant-garde art, and 'neo-avant-garde art', with its permanent revolutions, has always had such a critical engagement with the limits of its own system as one of its primary aims, methods or modes?
a few websites to look at regarding the 'critical':
http://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/c/r.htm#critique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critique
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_thinking
http://www.uta.edu/huma/illuminations/
In general, if you want to develop your critical thinking skills, most of thbe study guides that we have in the library have sections on this, and often have exercises in critical thinking that you can run through.
Seems I am the second person to set up a blog.
http://nicholasowenjones.blogspot.com/
Nothing really of interest on there yet, but soon will be!
http://delaneko.livejournal.com/
...there ya go. Nothing on it yet though :/
fourth the one with the golden gun.
http://pw257.blogspot.com
http://honeycombe-art.blogspot.com/
http://rachelzpeckham.blogspot.com/
my blog
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