'Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954' (MoMA)

When my friend Diana asked me at Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954, the art exhibit we saw at the Museum of Modern Art on 26 February 2016, what it is that I like about Pollock’s paintings, the best I could come up with was two vague statements.  The first is simple to say but impossible to define in any concrete terms as it’s purely aesthetic: I simply find his work, especially his later canvases up through the famous “drip paintings,” beautiful.  What does that even mean, though?  I can’t say, except to suggest that they please my eye in a certain way that moves me.  That’s the best I can do.  How do you define or explain beauty—after all, it really is in the eye of the beholder, isn’t it?  What’s beautiful to me may not be to you or anyone else.  How do you explain that?  I can’t; can you?  So Pollock’s painting are beautiful to me: they make me happy; I smile when I look at them. 

Susanne Langer, a philosopher of art and aesthetics, defined “beauty” as “expressive form,” which she maintained “do[es] something to us.”  “Beauty is not identical with the normal,” Langer admonished us, “and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”  She continued, “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous.”  Furthermore, Langer asserted that our responses to art are “intuitive,” and therefore can’t necessarily be explained, a condition we’ll see afflicted me in my reaction to Pollock’s paintings.  (I blogged on Langer on 4 and 8 January 2010.)

My other response was even harder to describe, much less to define.  I said that Pollock’s work excites me.  It’s dynamic, energetic, explosive.  His paintings make me feel infinitely animated—I don’t really know a word for it: in motion, active.  But it’s not physical—I don’t go running around the galleries like a Tasmanian devil or something.  It’s visceral.  I actually feel as if my insides are roiling, but not like I’m sick—like I’m exhilarated.  Could that be an adrenaline rush?  Can art get your adrenaline pumping?  I suppose it can, since art triggers emotions and emotional responses can trigger adrenaline, can’t it.  Maybe that’s it then. 

I’m not altogether certain you’re supposed to explain, at least not fully, a response to art.  Music is almost entirely an emotional experience, so why shouldn’t painting and sculpture be emotional—or psychological in their effects?  Pollock himself wrote: “I want to express my feelings rather than illustrate them.”  Diana, who turned out not to care much for Pollock’s art (I asked why she agreed to go with me to MoMA; she was curious and thought I might help her “understand” Pollock some), later when we made a short stop at the permanent collection on the fifth floor (Gauguin, van Gogh, Cézanne, Seurat, Rousseau, and so on), explained her appreciation of several of the pictures based on the artists’ use of various painting techniques—line and focus, and color and balance.  She’s a longtime student of the Art Students League (ironically, where Pollock also studied) and an amateur painter.  I, on the other hand, have no training in art—or even “art appreciation”—and whatever I know of art theory has been picked up haphazardly over the years of just looking at painting, sculpture, and drawings—and occasional reading.  (“The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer, and “the real [artistic training] is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling.”)  I’m the quintessential “I don’t know anything about art; I just know what I like” guy. 

This wasn’t the first, nor the last, time Diana asked me to explain what was essentially a visceral response to some work of art, both visual (she did the same thing after the Alexander Calder exhibit at the Whitney Museum of American Art about which I wrote on 21 August 2017) and theatrical (after the Suzan-Lori Parks plays The Death of the Last Black Man in the Whole Entire World and Venus; see the reports posted on 1 December 2016 and 7 June 2017).  I’ve never made a satisfactory reply to her query.  In any case, I didn’t help her at all.  What I see as dynamism—Pollock himself described his painting as “motion made visible memories arrested in space”—Diana sees as randomness and chance, which she dismisses as “not art,” which she insists requires control and selectivity.  Leaving aside that I don’t necessarily see that art can’t be random, at least in part at any rate, I disagree that Pollock’s work wasn’t controlled and selected.  An element of chance did enter into his work, but it didn’t operate exclusively or even dominantly.  Indeed, the artist himself declared: “I can control the flow of the paint.  There is no accident.”

We may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness,” Langer also admonished us.  Our response to a piece of art may be instinctive, but the philosopher explained that it can be prejudiced, because “the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.”  After all, “the function of art,” she declared, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.”  Additionally, Richard Kostelanetz, an artist himself as well as a critic of the avant-garde, submitted that since “audiences and critics would sooner acknowledge the familiar than explore works of art they cannot immediately comprehend . . . a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful.”  One friend of Vincent van Gogh’s, for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.”  Langer instructed that “if academic training has caused us to think of pictures primarily as examples of schools, periods, or . . . classes . . ., we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.”  I think this may have been what prevents Diana (and many others who share her opinion of Pollock) from appreciating Pollock’s work—as well as that of theater artists like Parks or Adrienne Kennedy—anywhere near the way I do.

Jackson Pollock: A Collection Survey: 1924-1954 at MoMA (22 November 2015-1 May 2016) was entirely composed of works from the museum’s collection and included over 50 pieces, among them engravings, drawings, lithographs, and silkscreen prints along with the paintings.  Collection Survey covered essentially the whole of Pollock’s short career (he died in August 1956 in an alcohol-related single-car crash at the age of 44), from 1930 (a painted wooden cigar box) to 1954.  (The artist painted two canvases in 1955, Scent and Search, and none in 1956.)  From one perspective, it traced the artist’s development from figurative work, visibly influenced by Pablo Picasso and Joan Miró, to deliberately non-representative paintings (and experiments in other media), ultimately to his drip paintings, the culmination of his distinctive style and the art form which distinguished Pollock from his contemporaries and set American Abstract Expressionism apart from European art.  In 1943, at an exhibit at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery Art of This Century (1942-47) of young American artists, the famous de Stijl modernist Piet Mondrian (1872-1944) remarked of Pollock’s paintings, “I think this is the most interesting work I've seen so far in America. . . .  You must watch this man.” 

Paul Jackson Pollock was born on 28 January 1912 in Cody, Wyoming, the youngest of five boys.  He grew up in Arizona and California, where his family lived a peripatetic life, moving from ranch to ranch, town to town, and in 1928 Pollock began to study painting at the Manual Arts High School in Los Angeles.  Plagued by disciplinary problems, Pollock was already drinking heavily by the time he turned 15.  In September 1930, 18-year-old Pollock followed his older brothers Charles (1902-1988) and Frank (1907-1994) to New York, and registered at the Art Students League, where Charles was already studying, to study under his brother’s teacher, the Regionalist painter and muralist Thomas Hart Benton (1889-1975), who encouraged him throughout the decade.  In 1937, Pollock began therapy for his drinking under the care of a Jungian psychoanalyst; he would go through several therapists in his lifetime.  Though most didn’t do him much real benefit, he was affected by Jung’s theories of the subconscious and the significance of signs and symbols and this knowledge became evident in his art. 

By the early ’30s Pollock knew and admired the murals of Mexican painters David Alfaro Siqueiros (1896-1974), José Clemente Orozco (1883-1949), and Diego Rivera (1886-1957).  He traveled throughout the U.S. during the ’30s, but spent most of his time in New York and he settled there permanently in 1933, sharing a Greenwich Village apartment with the now-married Charles.  (Brother Sande, 1909-1963, moved to New York City in October 1934 and he and Jackson shared an apartment.  Sande eventually changed his last name to McCoy—his father’s birth name before the older man was adopted as a child—to get around the Works Progress Administration’s ban on one household collecting multiple  WPA paychecks.)  Jackson Pollock worked on the WPA Federal Art Project (1935-42) and in Siqueiros’s experimental workshop in New York (1936).  (In 1931, Pollock watched Rivera paint his controversial mural at Rockefeller Center.  I posted an article on Diego Rivera on 12 and 15 April 2015.)  The painter also first met artist Lee Krasner (1908-84), a founder of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, who would eventually become his wife, in 1936, but they did not meet again for six years.

Pollock exhibited Birth (ca. 1941) in American and French Paintings at McMillen Inc. in January-February 1942.  Also exhibiting in the show was Lee Krasner and, impressed with his work, she sought out Pollock; Krasner began to support and promote Pollock’s work and introduced him to influential figures in the New York art scene.  (More outgoing than the introverted Pollock, Krasner, a native New Yorker, was one of those people who just seemed to know everyone worth knowing.  Among these was Hans Hofmann, an Abstract Expressionist with whom Krasner was studying.  He, in turn, introduced Pollock and Krasner to playwright Tennessee Williams, who, in 1969, wrote In the Bar of a Tokyo Hotel which features an artist character who resembles Pollock.  There’s even a scene in which the artist discusses color theory in terms reminiscent of Hofmann.)  In August, after Pollock’s brother Sande and his wife moved to Connecticut, Krasner moved into Pollock’s East 8th Street apartment.  At the end of that year, Pollock took a job at a printmaker where he learned the technique of silk-screening; the job lasted only a short time, but Pollock would use the skill in 1943 and ’44 when he branched out from painting to experiment with other expressive forms.

The artist participated in his first show at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Artists for Victory, in December 1942-January 1943; on 20 May 1950, Pollock would sign an open letter (published in the New York Times) in which 28 artists (18 painters and 10 supporting sculptors) accused the MMA of “contempt for modern painting” and refusing to participate in the upcoming juried MMA show, American Painting Today – 1950.  (On 23 May 1950, the New York Herald Tribune published an editorial response entitled “The Irascible Eighteen” defending MMA, giving a name to the group of protesting artist.  In its 15 January 1952 issue, Life published a photo of 15 of the original signatories, including Pollock, under the headline, “Irascible Group of Advanced Artists Led Fight Against Show,” establishing the name “The Irascibles” for the painters.)  

In 1943, Pollock briefly worked as a custodian at the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (since 1947 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum).  In May and June that year, the artist’s work was included in the Art of This Century’s Spring Salon for Young Artists, an exhibition of young American artists that attracted considerable attention.  In July, Peggy Guggenheim (1898-1979) gave Pollock a contract that was extended until 1947 that paid him $150 a month as an advance against sales, permitting the young artist to devote all his time to painting.  This was followed in November with Pollock’s first solo show, at Guggenheim’s Art of This Century; Guggenheim would eventually house four solo Pollock exhibits at the gallery.  In May 1944, MoMA bought The She-Wolf (1943), Pollock’s first piece in a museum collection.  That summer, Pollock and Krasner spent the season in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Hofmann ran a summer art school.  (Tennessee Williams was also spending summers in Provincetown, surrounded by several artists, models—many of them dancers—from Hofmann’s school, and sundry others from the art and theater world.) 

Before 1947, Pollock’s art manifested the influence of  Picasso, Miró, and Surrealism, and in the early ’40s, he contributed paintings to exhibitions of Surrealist and Abstract art.  By the mid-’40s, though, Pollock was painting in an entirely abstract manner, liberating himself from the vertical constraints of an easel by affixing unstretched raw canvas to the floor.  “On the floor I am more at ease,” he would explain later.  “I feel nearer, more a part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”  In 1947, his “drip style,” marked by the use of sticks, stiffened brushes, or palette knives to drip and spatter paint, as well as pouring paint directly from the can (or simply punching holes in the can and letting the paint dribble out), emerged.  Pollock’s drip technique, also called “action painting,” was derived from the Surrealist focus on the subconscious and the notion of automatic drawing (“automatism”).

Abstract Expressionism, also known as the New York School, for those who don’t already know, is an art movement—but not a unified style—that began in the United States around 1940 with artists of European origin like Hans Hofmann (1880-1966), Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944), and Arshile Gorky (1904-48).  It emphasizes the act of painting, as expressed in the textures and colors of the media used, and the connection between the artists, who found universal themes within themselves, and the media.  By the late 1940s, a second phase of the movement began, the principal expression of which was “gesturism” or “action painting,” which stressed the texture of the medium and the physicality of the act of painting.  (The first strain was color field painting, emphasizing unified color and shape.  Some of these artists are Sam Gilliam, b. 1933; Kenneth Noland, 1924-2010;  Morris Louis, 1912-62; and Helen Frankenthaler, 1928-2011).  Pollock, the best-known exemplar of this form of art, vigorously splashed, dripped, and splattered paint on the canvas.  (Time magazine dubbed Pollock “Jack the Dripper” in 1956 because of his technique.)  Other artists from this school included Mark Rothko (1903-70), Willem de Kooning (1904-97), Franz Kline (1910-1962), and Larry Rivers (1923-2002).

In March 1945, Pollock had a solo exhibition of 17 canvases at the Arts Club of Chicago; some of the pieces from the show went on to the San Francisco Museum of Art, giving the artist national exposure outside New York City.  On 25 October 1945, Krasner and Pollock were married and moved to a farmhouse in The Springs, East Hampton, on New York’s Long Island.  Eventually, he turned the property’s barn into his studio, which figured in many photos and films of the artist at work with his canvases spread out on the floor.  From December ’45 to January ’46, Pollock exhibited for the first time (of five) in the Annual Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art—known as the Whitney Annual (precursor to the current Whitney Biennial, launched in 1973).  In April and May of 1947, Pollock’s Mural (1943) was included in MoMA’s Large Scale Modern Paintings.  In October ’47, the most influential art critic in the country, Clement Greenberg (1909-94), declared in the British magazine Horizon (October 1947): “The most powerful painter in contemporary America and the only one who promises to be a major one is . . . Jackson Pollock.”  The 11 October 1945 issue of Life magazine included “A Life Round Table on Modern Art” which put Pollock among such modern masters as Picasso, Miró, Georges Rouault (1871-1958), Henri Matisse (1869-1954), and de Kooning.  The following 8 August, Life published “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?” by Dorothy Seiberling (b. 1922) that included photographs by Martha Holmes of Pollock at work.  In November and December 1949, Pollock exhibited an untitled painting in The Intrasubjectives at the Samuel M. Kootz Gallery in New York, a seminal show in the evolution of what would eventually be called Abstract Expressionism.

Peggy Guggenheim gave Pollock international exposure when six of his works are included in a display of her collection at the Venice Biennale in May-September 1948; with four additional pieces, the collection traveled to Florence in February 1949 and to Rome the following June.  In July through August 1950, Hans Namuth (1915-90) took his now-famous series of some 200 photos and extensive film footage of the artist at work in his Long Island studio.  One of the canvases the painter completed while Namuth was shooting was the iconic One: Number 31, 1950, arguably Pollock’s most famous and recognizable drip painting.  Some of the photos were published in ARTnews in May 1951 and in the 1951 issue of Portfolio.  In November ’50, Namuth filmed Pollock painting on glass—so the photographer could film some of the work from below.  The film, shot outdoors and in color, was shown at MoMA in June ’51. 

Guggenheim organized Pollock’s first European solo exhibition at the Museo Correr of Venice in July and August 1950 with a show of her own collection of over 20 pieces.  Venetian art critic Bruno Alfieri (1927-2008) described Pollock’s work in L’Arte Moderna as “chaos”; “absolute lack of harmony”; “complete lack of structural organization”; “total absence of technique, however rudimentary”; “once again, chaos.”  This sounds a lot like Diana’s criticism of the artist’s work, but it was what Alfieri confessed was only “superficial impressions, first impressions,” and continued: “Pollock has broken all barriers between his picture and himself: his picture is the most immediate and spontaneous painting.  Each one of his pictures is a part of himself. . . .  The exact conclusion is that Jackson Pollock is the modern painter who sits at the extreme apex of the most advanced and unprejudiced avant-garde of modern art. . . .  Compared to Pollock, Picasso . . . becomes a quiet conformist, a painter of the past.”  (Time published the negative excerpts from Alfieri’s review, entitled “Chaos, Damn It!,” in its 20 November issue and Pollock responded in a letter to the editor, published on 11 December, declaring: “No chaos damn it.”) 

In March 1952, Pollock’s first solo show in Paris opened at the Studio Paul Facchetti and in November, art critic Clement Greenberg arranged the artist’s first retrospective at Bennington College in Vermont.  In April and May 1953, four paintings by Pollock were included in 12 Peintres et Sculpteurs Américains Contemporains, an exhibition organized and circulated by MoMA’s International Program.  The show opened at Paris’s Musée National d’Art Moderne and traveled to Zürich, Düsseldorf, Stockholm, Helsinki, and Oslo.  Despite his increased popularity and renown in Europe, Pollock didn’t obtain a passport until July 1955, and he never traveled outside the U.S.  By the spring of 1956, he hadn’t painted anything new in a year-and-a-half.  After several years of abstinence, he’d been drinking heavily since the fall of 1950 and his depression had deepened; his and Krasner’s marriage was deteriorating badly, and when she took off for a vacation in Europe in July ’56, he stayed home in The Springs.  While Krasner was away, Ruth Krigman (1930-2010), a young, aspiring artist with whom Pollock had begun an affair, moved into the farmhouse.  On 11 August, he was killed in a one-car, drunk-driving automobile accident in East Hampton; Krigman was with him in the car but survived, though a friend of hers who was visiting was also killed.  Krasner returned from Europe for her husband’s funeral. 

You could say that Pollock led a tumultuous, if short, life.  And maybe that’s what made his art so turbulent.  One reviewer called his work “a mop of tangled hair I have an irresistible urge to comb out.”  But if, like me, you just let it move you, the pure emotionality of the action painting, the intricacy of the lacy lines, the astonishing endlessness, boundlessness of the paintings—I’m speaking of his late work, though the early- and mid-career pieces like 1934-38’s The Flame or The She-Wolf of 1943 tend in this same direction—the lack for formality won’t amount to much.  Perhaps because he was one of the first American artists of any stature who never went to Europe to study or work, Pollock’s art showed few signs of the European refinement of Picasso, Miró, and the other continental Expressionists and Surrealists who were the vanguard of contemporary art.  He acknowledged an impact of his upbringing in the American west which can be seen and felt in the roughness and rawness of his earliest paintings in contrast with his European models—some of which was born of his familiarity with the Mexican muralists and the teaching of Thomas Hart Benton whose style was a sort of brawny social Realism.  When Pollock finally found his own style, namely the drip painting, that American vitality took the form of the dynamism and energy that make his canvases so stirring.  At least to me—for not everyone agrees even today, 60 years after his death.  Art critic Robert Coates (1897-1973), who coined the term “Abstract Expressionism,” once dismissed Pollock’s work (also sounding like my friend Diana) as “mere unorganized explosions of random energy, and therefore meaningless” in 1948 in the New Yorker.

Competitive Art

I’ve hinted in the past that I don’t think much of awards and prizes in the arts, including the Tonys, the Oscars, the Emmys, and even the Pulitzers—as well as the scores of other awards for music, writing, dance, or aesthetic basket-weaving (see “Tony Committee to Theater Journalists: ‘Yer Out!’” ROT, 17 August 2009). 

I’ve never articulated my reasons for this disdain except privately to a couple of friends, especially around award times when the big galas are on TV and everyone else I know is watching them. I’ve decided it’s time to try to explain my position. Let’s see if I can.

First of all, let me clear up one confusion that’s come up a few times when the Tonys or the Oscars come on TV and friends ask if I’ll be watching and I tell them I won’t be. “Oh, yes,” some of them reply, “you don’t approve of them.” 

Well, yes—as you’ll see, I hope—but that’s not really why I don’t watch the shows. The very simple reason for that is that I find them awful and boring as TV fare. They’re overlong, the speeches and appearances are dull, the humility is mostly artificial, and I’ve seldom seen most of the performances being “honored.” 

That leaves only the entertainment the award show’s producers have interspersed in the parched desert that fills the rest of the hours, the patter of the host and the presenters and the scenes and musical numbers from the nominated productions. As for the former, the attempted levity of the MC’s and their cohorts . . . well, it’s seldom all that good: most of it’s inside jokes and industry banter—and occasionally the host really lays an egg. 

(I made the mistake of making an exception to my own practice several years ago to watch the Academy Awards the night Dave Letterman hosted in 1995. I’m a fan and I wanted to see what he’d do with the gig. Man, was that a bad call. Even he acknowledges he was lousy. And does anyone remember Rob Lowe’s auspicious appearance in ’89. Can you say “Snow White”?) 

So it’s not because I disapprove that I don’t watch the award shows—it’s simply because I don’t like them. (If I thought the broadcasts were any good, I might be conflicted about watching them because of the way I feel about performance awards, but as it is, that’s irrelevant.)

Second, I should admit to being something of a hypocrite when it comes to art awards. I do disparage them and on the few occasions when I’ve been eligible to participate (I can vote for the SAG Awards and I’ve been qualified to vote for the Regional Tony and some ATCA playwriting awards in the past), I haven’t done so because I don’t like the idea of awards in artistic fields. 

(In the interest of full disclosure, I should also acknowledge that for several years, my late father was a voter on the Helen Hayes Awards panel in Washington, D.C., and I never remonstrated with him.) Yet I cite the awards when I write about actors, directors, or productions that have won or been nominated for them. I even made an argument opposing the Tony committee’s elimination of theater journalists from the voter list for that theater award (in the 2009 ROT article I referenced earlier).

The problem seems to be that though I don’t put store in such awards, I know that other people do, so when I name an artist or an artwork, I mention awards they’ve won, but I feel awkward doing that. Still, I do it.

Finally, I make distinctions among awards, and that may be a little hypocritical, too. For instance, I don’t object to recognition for sales or popularity, like best-seller designations because that’s based on book sales and not a judgment of quality. It’s also theoretically objective—one book sells more than another. I have the same feeling about gold and platinum records in the music business—again, because it’s based on sales. 

I think the People’s Choice Awards are silly, but I don’t really object to them because they’re based on a straightforward popularity contest, not a presumptive quality evaluation. I also don’t have the same problem with halls of fame as I do with awards for superiority. (I have also been eligible to vote for candidates for the Theatre Hall of Fame, though I don’t—but that’s because I just don’t feel qualified to judge.) 

Halls of fame seem different to me because they honor artists for a lifetime or career of contributions to their fields, which seems like a sufficiently substantial basis for some kind of judgment. Also, voting one artist into a hall of fame one year doesn’t preclude that another artist who’d been passed over won’t be honored in another year; if someone doesn’t get an Oscar for a particular performance or a Pulitzer for a specific book or play, it’s finite—that work won’t get a second consideration.

Okay, let’s get to the heart of my problem—and I admit it’s my problem and I’m in a minority here. I object to awards in the arts for two main reasons: they’re a terribly subjective call and I feel they demean the arts they purport to celebrate. Here’s what I mean:

I guess the subjectivity issue is straightforward. If a runner beats everyone else’s times, he’s the champ, right? That’s clear. It’s objectively measured. If a soccer team scores more goals than its opponent, it wins the match. No question, right? If a tennis player accumulates more victories than any other on the tour, she’s number one in the sport. That’s self-evident. 

But how do you really adjudge one performance better than another or one movie or play better than the next? It’s a personal and individual response. I’m sure many of the Oscar or Tony judges can come up with justifications, citing all kinds of film-study or performance-study explanations for why they decided the way they did, but many others will just tell you they like one better than the others—and I submit that all arts-awards judges really go with a gut feeling. 

(I’m not going to get into the potential for professional politics in these contexts. It makes the whole process way too complicated even to discuss cogently.) 

I can’t even imagine what someone’s criteria would be for making such a judgment. Look what some people use for their evaluative basis: I took a group of high school theater students to a play competition one year. (It was part of my job and I wasn’t about to impose my private objections on the students for whom participation was a valued tradition.) 

One entrant was a student-directed staging of a Chekhov one-act. The production didn’t win its category and after the awards were announced, the judges held a critique for the participants. I was appalled when one judge objected to a line in the text that included a phrase which the judge felt sounded too contemporary. 

First of all, the student director, a senior who was a serious theater student, hadn’t translated the script; she was using a published English rendition, so she wasn’t responsible for the text. Second, I had brought along a Russian edition of the play (just to share with the director), and I found that the original words were exactly the same as the English. The translation wasn’t even inaccurate! 

I was aghast: this was what the judge found to object to in the production? (I did point this out, but the prizes had already been awarded. I also wrote to the competition’s organizers, but nothing came of that, either.)

Now, granted, this was a high school theater competition, but I have no doubt that the big-league judges engage in identical inanities. We all know that after an awards ceremony, or even after the announcement of the nominees for an award, there’s a lot of moaning and groaning about what got left out, overlooked, or misjudged. No arts award goes without some second-guessing or caviling among the disappointed. 

Of course, it’s subjective. Art is subjective. If there were ever such a thing as objective art, it would almost certainly be boring. Art succeeds because it is personal: it comes from a personal place in the artist and it speaks to something personal in the consumer. 

Susanne Langer, the art philosopher (see “Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater,” parts 1 & 2, ROT, 4 & 8 January 2010), wrote succinctly, “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” Feeling, by definition, is subjective; you can’t rationalize feeling. Art, said Langer, “clarifies and organizes intuition” and therefore “elicits no conscious intellectual work (reasoning).” Art functions outside of reason: it’s not irrational, but arational.

Just to be sure we understand this idea, and its application to art competitions, Langer got specific:

Works of art are not usually comparable. Only prize-juries have to evaluate them with reference to some standard, which is inevitably arbitrary and in many cases inapplicable. A competent jury does not even define a standard. If it consists of people who have developed their powers of perception by long conversance with the order of art . . . in which their judgments are to be made, intuition will guide the verdict. There will be disagreements—not because good and bad works cannot be distinguished, but because among successful ones there is no sure principle of selection. Personal or social factors usually tip the balances; ‘ratings’ are trivial.

“Personal or social factors” are in evidence all the time. We can see in any given awards competition how sentiment for or against an artist affects the vote. We hear people say, “It’s her turn” or “He lost last year so he’ll probably get it this year in compensation.” 

If an artist has offended the community (or, more directly, “the academy”), the work might be overlooked not for its lack of quality, but because the voters were miffed. Industry bias, such as the film academy’s putative leaning toward box-office hits rather than innovative, difficult work or its apparent preference for dramas over comedies are part of the equation. (The drama Pulitzer has only been awarded to eight musical plays in the nine decades since the prize was inaugurated—a period that spans the golden age of the American musical theater.) 

Politics can also come into play, both the internal or artistic kind and the actual kind. Say, if it were possible, a dramatist composed the best play ever written—but its theme was pro-Nazi. You know it would never win any award. (Hell, it probably wouldn’t even get staged!)

A work of art, by Langer’s estimation (and mine), can’t be judged in comparison with another with any claim to legitimacy. Furthermore, we know from experience that even individual taste changes over time. A work of art you liked ten years ago might seem silly and superficial today. Collective taste changes, too. 

Consider the well-known case of Vincent van Gogh, today acknowledged as one of the greatest painters of all time, who sold only one painting in his lifetime—and that was to his brother! Actors as respected as Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Maureen O’Hara, and Gena Rowlands have never won Oscars; Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Robert Altman, and Sidney Lumet have never won for directing some of our best movies; dramatists Lillian Hellman, S. N. Behrman, and Philip Barry never won Pulitzers (neither did novelists F. Scott Fitzgerald or Truman Capote). 

Now look at a list of past Oscar-, Tony-, or Pulitzer-winning movies, books, and plays. How many are almost an embarrassment by today’s standards? If we had it to do over again, we might select a different work to recognize. (And then, we might change our opinions again ten years from now.) On this basis, people declare one work or one artist the best of the year? It doesn’t work for me.

The assertion that such competitions demean the art itself is a little harder to put into words. It’s a pretty subjective statement itself, isn’t it? Okay, I’m writing about my own opinions here, not some universal sense I think is shared by a large majority, so subjectivity is the matrix in which I’m operating. 

I object, even resent, art being turned into a competitive effort like sports or hot-dog eating. Now, I don’t think artists, particularly playwrights, consciously compete with their peers for awards and prizes—they’re too busy making art. (I have no doubt that there are producers, both in Hollywood and on Broadway, who have one eye on Oscars and Tonys when they set out to put together a production—and there may be an actor or two who see statuettes in their futures when they read scripts.) 

I subscribe to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s sentiment, expressed in his essay “Art,” that “every genuine work of art has as much reason for being as the earth and the sun.” A work of art, whether it’s a painting, a poem, or a performance, should be its own justification, its own raison d’être; it shouldn’t depend on some outside recognition for validation.

As Langer said, art’s function is to raise feelings in the spectator—that should be the only evaluation needed. Either the art affects me, makes me feel something that wasn’t there before or understand something in a new way, or it doesn’t. If it’s a great work of art, it will have that effect on more people who experience it (each in his or her own way, of course), and it will continue to have an effect—though the effect may shift—over time. 

That’s what defines a classic artwork, like Hamlet, the Mona Lisa, Oliver Twist, or Citizen Kane. Shakespeare, Da Vinci, and Dickens all created quite nicely, thank you, without prizes and awards. (So did Welles, really, though he was working in the era of the Oscar, New York Film Critics Award, DGA Award, WGA Award, and Golden Globes. He was passed over for most of his work anyway.) 

Of course a work’s reception is important to an artist; despite what some artists say, few really create just for themselves. And I also recognize that grants and commissions, which go back to the days of Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and Da Vinci, are significant in an artist’s creative life—and they are a form of competition, I acknowledge. My argument is fraught with contradictions, I know. But singling out one work for recognition the way an award does, or one artist, as even the famous MacArthur genius grants do, disturbs me.

I know that some competition is always going to be part of the arts, just as it is in all human endeavors. We are a competitive species. There are limited resources and venues, so artists will always have to vie for access. Someone’s going to get the commission or the exhibit and someone else isn’t. And I’m sure that in some cases, whoever controls the desired asset deliberately sets the assignment up as a competition, but even that’s not quite the same as turning the creation of art into a race for recognition the way a prize does. 

It just seems unseemly to me. Artists should be concerned with the best work they can do, comparing their new work with their past accomplishments if they have to try to better something; they shouldn’t feel they have to outdo other artists. Yes, consumers and critics will inevitably compare one artist and one artwork with another—but the artists shouldn’t have to do that.

I think it’s also an element of my distaste for art awards and prizes that there are so many of them. The music business, for instance, seems to have awards for every song and musician the industry can define—which may explain why the Grammys have recently consolidated several categories. 

(Musicians in the fields that were eliminated are complaining about the action, perhaps because it’s gotten so that all artists feel that they deserve some kind of award of their very own.) 

It’s getting to be like some children’s activities where every participant gets recognition so no one feels left out. Is that what we’ve developed: a culture where artists are childish and infantile? If I don’t get a prize, I’ll hold my breath until I turn blue?

Some of the organizations which give out the awards seem gratuitous as well. The so-called Foreign Press Association, who presents the Golden Globes, doesn’t have any function except giving out the award, I don’t believe. And essentially, the award itself seems to be little more than an excuse to stage a TV extravaganza. 

On top of all the different Grammys, for example, what’s the need for the MTV Video Music Awards as well? Since MTV’s a cable TV network (which, umm, airs music videos!), I’m left to assume that its purpose is to, first, promote the network and, second, justify a big broadcast they hope will draw substantial ratings. (Do we need awards for advertisements or porn? Really?)

That most of the big awards are more about selling tickets, records, or books (or, in the case of TV, more ads) was, I think, exposed when the Tonys eliminated reviewers from the voting pool. (Journalists haven’t been part of the voting pools for most of the other major performance awards—though I’m not certain about the Grammys.) 

Of all the interested parties, the journalists were the least invested in the outcome: they didn’t stand to make more money or get better jobs if a show they liked won an award. Everyone else, all industry insiders, has skin in the game, to a greater or lesser degree (even if it’s only to scuttle a rival’s prestige), but the journalists also had an occasional tendency to vote for artier little plays that caught their fancies instead of the big commercial hits the producers want to promote for long Broadway runs and later lucrative tours. 

In other words, the reviewers voted for the art while the others are focused on the commerce. Now the award won’t stand in the way of recognizing the money-making crowd-pleaser rather than the innovator that might attract a smaller audience.

I have no idea if any of the award shows actually does draw a large audience, but that seems to me to be their major rationale—especially when they get more and more elaborate each year or make rules aimed at selecting more popular nominees. Doesn’t that give the game away? Particularly when it turns out that those additional crowd-pleasers aren’t really expected to win anything. 

In marketing, those are called loss leaders—and their sole use is to sell other stuff. That seems to be the intention: marketing, sales, promotion—not honoring artistic achievement. In fact, as far as I can see, even the major awards like the Oscars and the Tonys have only one benefit: they sell tickets. I suppose artists who win one get to feel good about their work, but beyond that, they’re an advertising gimmick to help put asses in seats. That may be the art of the deal, but it’s not art.

Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 2

[Here’s Part 2 of my short discussion of some of the theories of Susanne Langer. Occasional readers of ROT will find the first part, which covers art in general, posted on 30 December 2009. I make no apologies for the superficiality of this review, but I do recommend that frustrated readers turn to Langer’s own books to flesh out this introduction, especially Philosophy in a New Key and Feeling and Form.]

If, as Langer insists, art is defined by its capacity to express emotions, where, then, does beauty enter the equation? Well, in a way, it doesn’t. It kind of depends on what you mean by ‘beauty’ as applied to a work of art. “Beauty,” according to Langer, “is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.” ‘Prettiness’ isn’t the criteria Langer applies to art when she considers beauty. It may be present in the work, but it’s irrelevant. In fact, she wrote:

Every good work of art is beautiful; as soon as we find it so, we have grasped its expressiveness, and until we do we have not seen it as good art, though we may have ample intellectual reason to believe that it is so. Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous . . . . Such elements are the strength of the work, which must be great to contain and transfigure them. The emergent form, the whole, is alive and therefore beautiful . . . .

“Beauty is expressive form” by Langer’s definition. In other words, beauty is a function of the artwork’s main purpose: if the work successfully expresses feeling, that is, “may truly be said to ‘do something to us,’” it is by definition ‘beautiful’--whether or not it’s also pretty. (I quoted Langer--and some others as well--in a brief consideration of this topic in “The Art of Writing Reviews by Kirk Woodward, Part 4,” ROT, 14 November.)

The upshot of this alternative definition of what’s beautiful and what isn’t, at least from my perspective, is that we consumers of art, whether we’re professionals who get paid to sound off on our opinions or private viewers, readers, and listeners, is that we need to allow for the possibility that something that strikes us at first as disturbing or even ugly may have artistic value if we delve beneath the surface appeal and get to the core of feeling inherent in the work. I fall back on the remark of a friend of Vincent van Gogh’s who admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.” I, at least, have always found van Gogh’s painting not just beautiful, but gorgeous--so full of fury and intensity. When I first saw Fernando Botero’s paintings 50 years ago, I thought they were strange and grotesque; I still do, but now I see them also as sublime and expressive. When I saw Tennessee Williams’s Camino Real for the first time, I didn’t understand it and I didn’t like it. Now I see it as one of the playwright’s most fascinating works and a classic of mid-century American Absurdism. We need to learn not to dismiss art that isn’t pretty, that doesn’t immediately appeal to our senses, and see if there isn’t something in it that stirs us if we let it in. Beauty, I think Langer was saying, affects us profoundly; prettiness just pleases us.

Langer’s criteria for beauty were very inclusive; she mostly told us how not to leave out creations we at first deem challenging. She didn’t provide us with a definition of what qualifies--primarily because there aren’t any . . . and there don’t need to be. We’re all equipped to discern effective art. “The entire qualification one must have for understanding art is responsiveness,” wrote Langer. This ability to appreciate art is natural, she said, though it can be enhanced or inhibited by various influences, including experience and upbringing. “Since it is intuitive,” Langer explained, “it cannot be taught; but the free exercise of artistic intuition often depends on clearing the mind of intellectual prejudices and false conceptions that inhibit people’s natural responsiveness.” I take this to mean that Langer thought we have to be open-minded to experience art in all its varieties. (That obviously doesn’t mean we have to like it all, but we shouldn’t be ready to dismiss any of it before we’ve contemplated it without preconceptions.)

We may not be able to teach artistic understanding, which Langer said is like creativity--though she stressed they are not the same thing--but we can direct or misdirect the ability to appreciate art by schooling--or the lack of it. If all we’ve learned about painting, for example, are the schools, genres, and styles of academic taxonomy, “we are prone to think about the picture, gathering quickly all available data for intellectual judgments, and so close and clutter the paths of intuitive response.” As we’ve already seen, Langer felt that our scientifically-oriented society has led us away from appreciating the creative aspect of human endeavor:

Our scientific convention of abstracting mathematical forms, which do not involve quality, and fitting them to experience, always makes qualitative factors ‘content’; and as scientific conventions rule our academic thinking, it has usually been taken for granted that in understanding art, too, one should think of form as opposed to qualitative ‘content.’

This carries over into our education as well:

People who are so concerned for their children’s scientific enlightenment that they keep Grimm out of the library and Santa Claus out of the chimney, allow the cheapest art, the worst of bad singing, the most revolting sentimental fiction to impinge on the children’s minds all day and every day, from infancy. If the rank and file of youth grows up in emotional cowardice and confusion, sociologists look to economic conditions or family relations for the cause of this deplorable ‘human weakness,’ but not to the ubiquitous influence of corrupt art, which steeps the average mind in a shallow sentimentalism that ruins what germs of true feeling might have developed in it. Only an occasional devotee of the arts sees the havoc . . . .

Art education, as I’ve argued myself (see “Missoula Children’s Theatre,” ROT, 25 August, and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow: Children's Theater in America,” 25 November), is “the education of feeling,” Langer declared, “as our usual schooling in factual subjects, and logical skills such as mathematical ‘figuring’ or simple argumentation . . . is the education of thought.” She was adamant about the importance of this training and observed that the only way to get it is to be exposed to creativity and experience it in our lives. So kids' theater, and art museums, and concerts, and so on are necessary--and basically all that is necessary--for teaching people to enjoy and appreciate cultural and artistic endeavors:

Few people realize that the real education of emotion is not the ‘conditioning’ effected by social approval and disapproval, but the tacit, personal, illuminating contact with symbols of feeling. Art education, therefore, is neglected, left to chance, or regarded as a cultural veneer.

Up to now, I’ve been concentrating on Langer’s discussions of art and beauty in a general sense. Her theories, however, did separate the arts and she wrote about the characteristics of each genre. Each art form generates a “virtual” sphere of its own. The visual arts, for example, create “virtual space”; music, “virtual time”; and literature and drama (by which Langer meant the written texts, not the performing art), “virtual history.” (Langer devoted three chapters to drama in Feeling and Form.) Each art’s symbolic vocabulary is used by the artists to express their impressions of life and the world; it is the task of the perceivers to interpret these same symbols in order to absorb those impressions in their own ways.

(Langer, who wrote before computers became common and therefore before the term ‘virtual reality’ took on the meaning with which we’re familiar today, used the non-tech sense of these phrases: “Existing in the mind, especially as a product of the imagination.” Having recently posted on “Theater and Computers” [ROT, 5 December], I don’t want to commit an unintentional act of equivocation here. In Langer’s own use, a virtual phenomenon is a “semblance,” which she equates with the Aristotelian “imitation.” So, a theatrical act “imitates” a real act, or “resembles” one.)

Literature, Langer asserted, “projects . . . virtual memory,” a vision of life “completed, lived. . . events that compose a Past.” Drama, by contrast,

presents the poetic illusion in a different light: not finished realities, or ‘events,’ but immediate, visible responses of human beings, make its semblance of life. Its basic abstraction is the act, which springs from the past, but is directed toward the future, and is always great with things to come.

While literature “moves toward the present,” drama moves “toward something beyond; it deals essentially with commitments and consequences.” Drama, “though it implies past actions,” Langer indicated, is “directed toward the future”:

This future, which is made before our eyes, gives importance to the very beginnings of dramatic acts, i.e. to the motives from which the acts arise, and the situations in which they develop; the making of it is the principle that unifies and organizes the continuum of stage action. It has been said repeatedly that the theater creates a perpetual present moment; but it is only a present filled with its own future that is really dramatic. A sheer immediacy, an imperishable direct experience without the ominous forward movement of consequential action, would not be so. As literature creates a virtual past, drama creates a virtual future. The literary mode is the mode of Memory; the dramatic is the mode of Destiny.

“In the theater,” Langer believed, “most people--and especially the most competent spectators--feel that the vision of destiny is the essence of the work, the thing that unfolds before their eyes.” After all, a fundamental element of theater is action, which Langer saw as “oriented toward the future.” As she explained this:

In actual life the impending future is very vaguely felt. Each separate act is forward-looking--we put on a kettle expecting it to boil, hand someone a bill and expect to be given change, board a bus with casual confidence that we shall leave it again at an intended point, or board an airplane with somewhat more conscious interest in our prospective exit from its inside. But we do not usually have any idea of the future as a total experience which is coming because of our past and present acts; such a sense of destiny arises only in unusual moments under peculiar emotional stress.

In drama, however, this sense of destiny is paramount. It is what makes the present action seem like an integral part of the future, howbeit that future has not unfolded yet. The reason is that on the stage, every thought expressed in conversation, every feeling betrayed by voice or look, is determined by the total action of which it is a part--perhaps an embryonic part, the first hint of the motive that will soon gather force. Even before one has any idea of what the conflict is to be (i.e. before the ‘exposition’ has been given), one feels the tension developing. This tension between past and future, the theatrical ‘present moment,’ is what gives to acts, situations, and even such constituent elements as gestures and attitudes and tones, the peculiar intensity known as ‘dramatic quality.’

The characters in drama are also “makers of the future”:

We know . . . so little about the personalities before us at the opening of a play that their every move and word, even their dress and walk, are distinct items for our perception. Because we are not involved with them as with real people, we can view each smallest act in its context, as a symptom of character and condition. We do not have to find what is significant; the selection has been made--whatever is there is significant, and it is not too much to be surveyed in toto. A character stands before us as a coherent whole. It is with characters as with their situations: both become visible on the stage, transparent and complete, as their analogues in the world are not.

The notion of destiny and “futurality” (my word, not Langer’s) in theater was only a small portion of Langer’s discussion of drama as a form of art. (She also entered the debate about whether drama even is an art. She affirmed that it is.) Nonetheless, I’m focusing on that segment of Langer’s theories (and encourage curious readers to go back to her original books to learn more) because it’s one of the more uncommon aspects of her perspective on drama and theater. As she explained the concept, in contrast to reality:

In actual life we usually recognize a distinct situation only when it has reached, or nearly reached, a crisis; but in the theater we see the whole setup of human relationships and conflicting interests long before any abnormal event has occurred that would, in actual life, have brought it into focus. Where in the real world we would witness some extraordinary act and gradually understand the circumstances that lie behind it, in the theater we perceive an ominous situation and see that some far-reaching action must grow out of it. This creates the peculiar tension between the given present and its yet unrealized consequent, “form in suspense,” the essential dramatic illusion. . . . The future appears as already an entity, embryonic in the present. That is Destiny.

In reference to the Aristotelian dichotomy I mentioned earlier, Langer specified, “Destiny is, of course, always a virtual phenomenon--there is no such thing in cold fact.” But, she concluded, it is still “an aspect of real experience” and part of what separates humans from other animals because it enables us to sense “past and future as parts of one continuum, and therefore of life as a single reality.” Drama, therefore (if I may extrapolate a little), is a fundamental aspect of human intellectuality because it facilitates one of the basic distinctions of human existence. I think the evidence of this axiom can seen in plays like Eimuntas Nekrosius’s The Square, a Lithuanian play from around 1991 that depicts the difficulties of learning how to live in a free society after years of Soviet repression. Even more recently, the Iraqi National Theater is planning to reopen (after an abortive attempt a year ago) as if the drive to perform were too strong for Baghdadis to suppress for too long. In words that are the prosaic echo of Susanne Langer’s philosophical analysis, one actress said: “It’s as if the spectators want to send a message . . . they are not afraid, and life goes on.” Destiny, indeed.

Susanne Langer: Art, Beauty, & Theater - Part 1

Susanne K. Langer (1895-1985) was an art philosopher whose best known books are Philosophy in a New Key (1942) and Feeling and Form (1953), the latter of which I want to discuss a little with respect to art, beauty, and theater. Her magnum opus, ranging across many academic disciplines, is Mind: An Essay on Human Feeling, a massive study of the human mind that attempted to incorporate feeling into a grand scheme of human thought, published in three volumes in 1967, 1973, and 1982. A trained musician, Langer played the piano and the cello and music was an enduring pleasure of her life. She was a poet in her early life, composing poems before she knew how to write them down and her first published book was The Cruise of the Little Dipper and Other Fairy Tales (1923), a collection of children’s stories. She even wrote a play called Walpurgisnacht, performed by family members in a grove of woods near Lake George, New York, where her family vacationed. (Langer and her cousins also presented a Hamlet whose text they rewrote themselves.)

To summarize the work of any philosopher is to court distortion and oversimplification. Langer’s subject was vast and her ideas were complex and difficult to unpack, though her writing was straightforward and, given the complexity of her ideas, clear. But I’m pulling her words on one or two particular topics out of the entirety of her generally unified theories, which runs the further risk of misrepresentation. Nevertheless, I expect I’ll be quoting her directly a lot here because not only do I feel Langer’s own words are the focus, but I couldn’t articulate her thoughts better than she herself did. Furthermore, I guess that because privately I find enlightening what Susanne Langer has to say about art--she makes about the best intellectual argument for the significance of art in society, in human existence, that I’ve ever encountered‑‑I also think it’s something everyone should find worth contemplating, so I’m promoting her writing, not my own. (There’s no book-length biography of Langer--a subject I’d imagine would be interesting to research--so the best published source of details about her life is a lengthy interview article written when Langer was at the height of her career: Winthrop Sargeant, “Profiles: Philosopher in a New Key,” New Yorker 3 Dec. 1960: 67-100. Another, shorter article of note is James Lord, “A Lady Seeking Answers,” New York Times Book Review 26 May 1968: 4-5; 34.)

Langer, one of the most-read philosophers of the 20th century, was among the first to work in the field of aesthetics and write about how we perceive beauty and art. Until she began to write about aesthetics, it was all but ignored by philosophers. Langer, however, saw art as a fundamental human activity, equal in significance to the acquisition and use of language. In Philosophy in a New Key, she wrote:

I do believe that in this physical, space-time world of our experience there are things which do not fit the grammatical scheme of expression. But they are not necessarily blind, inconceivable, mystical affairs; they are simply matters which require to be conceived through some symbolistic schema other than discursive language.

Of course, she’s talking about art, which she defines in Feeling and Form as “the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” Art, Langer felt, is what humans use to express things they feet that resist reduction to ordinary “discursive” language--everyday speech and writing. We need art, in other words, as much as we need language because without it, we can’t express much of what we sense, perceive, or feel. Indeed, for Langer, the drive to find meaning through symbols and art is a coequal endeavor for humans with the scientific impulse to find facts, both being at the apex of human intellectual refinement. She viewed art, among other disciplines, as a form of language:

[T]he term ‘language’ encompasses not only the written and spoken forms that most people use in everyday life, but also the less common symbolic forms of the mathematician, the physical scientist and others. These forms have been developed just because of the limitations of ‘ordinary’ language and permit their users far greater precision in expressing thoughts.

The symbolic language of art, however, “has no vocabulary, no dictionary definitions,” Langer explained. It is . . . an expression of non-discursive thought.” Discursive language--that is, the language of discourse--comprises only one portion of human expression, covering a limited aspect of human experience. Humans are symbol-makers--dreams and myth, Langer demonstrated, are other forms of non-discursive, symbolic expression; we perceive the world around us in symbols of all kinds and even think in symbols. “Freud . . . observed that in dreams speech has the same function as visual image,” Langer noted, for instance. Discursive language, she found, is inapt for communicating many of the activities of the human mind, aesthetic experience among them. “The making of this expressive form,” proclaimed Langer, “is the creative process that enlists a man’s utmost technical skill in the service of his utmost conceptual power, imagination.”

Ordinary discursive language also has an inadequacy in that is it linear. When we view a painting, a movie scene, a live performance, or even a landscape, we experience many things at once; the images hit us simultaneously. But try to describe that painting in words, either orally or in writing, and we are reduced to explaining the images serially--first the size and dimensions, then the colors and textures, the figures and shapes (or some version of that scheme). The same is true of performance description (which I’ve made something of a practice so I can attest to this predicament). Only the non-discursive, symbolic language of art can accomplish this simultaneity. Without it, we can’t communicate with one another a significant aspect of our lives.

While many philosophers before Langer began her writing saw art as mystical and non-rational, beyond coherent thought in the mysterious realm of emotion and intuition, Langer saw art as another form of human rationality, the form that deals with ideas that can only be expressed in symbols. Langer placed considerable value in art which has been informed by human thought. After all, she proclaimed, “‘feeling’”--the basis of art--“is not something opposed to reason.”

The foundation of Langer’s philosophy was the work of Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a German-Jewish philosopher who fled the Nazis in 1933 and settled in the U.S. in 1941. (Langer’s own family left Germany in the mid-19th century during another round of revolutions and violence in Europe. She grew up speaking only German in her home--her mother never learned to speak English--and, though born in New York City, always spoke with a pronounced German accent.) Cassirer understood that disciplines which seemed to be in conflict with one another like art, religion, and science were really different forms of symbolic thought. By isolating artistic expression as some unknowable construct, Langer’s predecessors couldn’t contemplate the whole of human intellectual activity, as she saw it. And by accepting this dichotomy, relegating the arts to a lesser plane of human endeavor and stressing a world of science and logic only, we have developed a society devoid of symbolic expression, a poorer place for all of us to live in. “A life that does not incorporate some degree of ritual, of gesture and attitude, has no mental anchorage . . . . Technical progress is putting man’s freedom of mind in jeopardy,” said Langer. “Indifference to art,” she declared, “is the most serious sign of decay in any institution.”

“[T]he function of art,” Langer wrote, “is to acquaint the beholder with something he has not known before.” Langer observed that

there are two opposite perspectives from which any work of art may be viewed: that of its author and that of its spectators (or hearers, or readers, as the case may be). One perspective presents it as an expression, the other as an impression. From the former standpoint one naturally asks: ‘What moves an artist to compose his work, what goes into it, what (if anything) does he mean by it?’ From the latter, on the other hand, the immediate question is: ‘What do works of art do, or mean, to us?’ This question is the more usual, even in serious theoretical thought, because more people are beholders of art than makers of it, and this counts for philosophers as well as for any unselected public.

If, I think Langer believed, the unexamined life isn’t worth living, then omitting the part of life expressed by art--not just by those who make it but by the rest of us who perceive it--leaves a huge portion of our lives unexamined. “[I]t is the whole life of feeling--call it ‘felt life,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘direct experience,’ or what you will--which finds its articulate expression in art,” she insisted, “and . . . only in art.” As a crucial aspect of human existence, “art penetrates into personal life because in giving form to the world, it articulates human nature: sensibility, energy, passion, and mortality. More than anything else in experience, the arts mold our actual life of feeling.”

On the significance of artistic expression, Langer specified that “it clarifies and organizes intuition itself” by “formulat[ing] our conceptions of feeling and our conceptions of visual, factual, and audible reality together.” It puts everything together, she posited, and functions as an important societal asset “because the formulation of ‘felt life’ is the heart of any culture, and molds the objective world for the people. It is their school of feeling, and their defense against outer and inner chaos.” Langer concluded:

Art does not affect the vitality of life so much as its quality; that, however, it affects profoundly. In this way it is akin to religion, which also, at least in its pristine, vigorous, spontaneous phase, defines and develops human feelings.

But in Langer’s epistemology, “human feelings” isn’t a restrictive phrase. To be clear on this point, she specified that “by ‘feeling’ I mean everything that can be felt. This includes all mental acts and perceptions.”

Art, in Langer’s conception, “is envisagement of feeling, which involves its formulation and expression in . . . a symbol . . . .” But not all symbolic creations are equal. The “envisagement” can be distorted by interfering experiences which the artist hasn’t sorted out. “Candor is the standard,” wrote Langer. The feelings art “envisages” must be honest feeling: bad art is corrupted by false emotions.

In contrast, however, art which is merely imperfectly crafted by an insufficiently masterful creator is “poor art, which is not corrupt, but fails to express what [the artist] knew in too brief an intuition.” The product is “sincere enough,” said Langer, “but confused and frustrated” by “recalcitrant” media and lack of technical skill in the artist. While truly bad art must be “repudiated and destroyed,” insisted Langer, “as a lie may be exposed and retracted,” poor art is simply dismissed. (Langer also discusses non-art or false art, a creation which doesn’t fail to express an emotion because there’s no attempt to express anything. We’ve all encountered this: tourist art, airport art, junk art, artistic pabulum. It takes the form of an artistic object but not the content. Whether this is the creation of a charlatan or just an untalented producer is irrelevant from the perspective of aesthetics.)

I spoke just now of form versus content, which is misleading. In Langer’s artistic epistemology, while art may appear to be “formed content,” in actuality, the form and content are inseparable. She explained that

a work of art is a structure whose interrelated elements are often qualities, or properties of qualities such as their degrees of intensity; that qualities enter into the form and in this way are as much one with it as the relations which they, and they only, have; and that to speak of them as ‘content,’ from which the form could be abstracted logically, is nonsense. The form is built up out of relations peculiar to them; they are formal elements in the structure, not contents.

Furthermore, creativity doesn’t depend, in Langer’s theory, on either the form or the content being new, original, innovative, or novel. “A Greek vase was almost always a creation,” Langer observed by way of illustration, “although its form was traditional and its decoration deviated but little from that of its numberless forerunners. The creative principle, nonetheless, was probably active in it from the first throw of the clay.” The work need only be “symbolic of feeling,” even if “a thousand people may have used every device and convention of it before.” (Works of art, even great art, have come out of some of the most hide-bound traditional forms: canonical painting, Socialist Realism, Kabuki theater. Junk, in contrast, has come from some of the freest.)

Though art can be assessed as good or bad, however, doesn’t mean works should (or even can) be judged against one another.

Works of art are not usually comparable. Only prize-juries have to evaluate them with reference to some standard, which is inevitably arbitrary and in many cases inapplicable. A competent jury does not even define a standard. If it consists of people who have developed their powers of perception by long conversance with the order of art . . . in which their judgments are to be made, intuition will guide the verdict. There will be disagreements--not because good and bad works cannot be distinguished, but because among successful ones there is no sure principle of selection. Personal or social factors usually tip the balances; “ratings” are trivial.

(I’ve inveighed against turning art into a competition--the Tonys, Oscars, Pulitzers, National Book Awards, Carnegies, Pritzkers, and so on--on several recent occasions. I find it distasteful, but Langer makes an argument that it is also essentially impossible as well as meaningless--and I wholeheartedly agree.)

[This is only the first part of my brief discussion of some of Susanne Langer’s ideas. Please return in a few days for Part 2, which will cover Langer’s conception of beauty and one aspect of her analysis of drama and theater.]

'The Art of Writing Reviews' by Kirk Woodward, Part 4

[This is Part 4, the final installment, of my commentary on Kirk Woodward’s book, The Art of Writing Reviews (http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-art-of-writing-reviews/6785272).]

After treating the matter of reviewers closing productions with poor notices, Kirk raises the question of reviewers who know people connected to the production and fear their notices might hurt their friends and acquaintances. It’s hard, perhaps, for reviewers not to become engaged in the social whirl of the arts they cover. That’s probably more true in smaller markets than in large ones like New York or L.A., but there’s a danger here, too. I remember reading an article about New York Times chief reviewer Ben Brantley, who I thought had taken a pretty extreme action to avoid that--he literally absents himself entirely from the New York social scene. According to the report, he lived outside the city (though he may have moved in since then) and apparently doesn’t socialize with anyone connected to theater. (I thought this was extreme not because Brantley avoids the social aspects of the biz—that may be difficult but wise—but because, not living in the city he covers, he loses perspective on the atmosphere—political, communal, economic, cultural—that surrounds and informs the art about which he writes.)

The Times doesn’t permit its theater reviewers to participate in any awards program (editors and other journalists may, and I don’t know if reviewers in other arts are similarly enjoined) because the editors don’t want their reviewers even to appear to have conflicts of interest. A few years ago, Critics Quarterly (the newsletter of ATCA, which Kirk would insist ought to be called Reviewers Quarterly . . . or, maybe, Reviewers Review) did a series of articles, plus letters from members, concerning reviewers who got involved in other aspects of theater such as playwriting or acting. Some members felt this was a good way to learn more about the business, by seeing it from the inside while it was working. Others were vociferous in their opinions that this placed the reviewers in danger of becoming too personally acquainted with the artists they would be called on to criticize. I no longer was trying to act when I was writing reviews, but I still knew actors, directors, designers, and stage managers who were working in New York and there were theater companies run by friends and former colleagues producing plays I might have to review. The situation only arose once or twice, and I raised the potential conflict with my editor, but I was surprised when he said he didn’t really care. (I think the real situation was that he didn’t have that many writers on whom he could call and he couldn’t replace me.) It was very hard to be objective and I had to question myself very carefully when it came to writing about the people I knew, even slightly.

Interestingly, there’s an organization in New York City that was established essentially to address this situation. The Players, on Gramercy Park, was founded by actor Edwin Booth (in his last home, where his room is still preserved as he left it) to allow actors to meet the important citizens of the city on a social basis. He thought that members of his profession ought to know the people who supported the theater and the city’s movers and shakers in all fields, politics, finance, merchandising, letters, and so on, should know the theater artists who were so important to New York’s culture. (Theater was, at the time, the popular entertainment, much as movies and TV are today.) That is, all the professions except one. No reviewers could be members of The Players. Booth didn’t think it would be wise to put actors in the same room with the writers who from time to time may have said uncomplimentary things about them. Now, the all-male membership has been integrated in recent years, but the prohibition against reviewers still holds. (By the way, the organization is called The Players, not the Players Club.)

When he writes about reporting on the play’s plot, Kirk proposes, “We can ask, what happens to the characters? Do they grow, change, move from point A to point N?” This is very close to the question dramaturgs learn to ask when analyzing a script for their artistic directors: Who does the play happen to? It’s a way of determining which character is the focal one (which may not be the same as the lead role or the literary protagonist). It’s an interesting question to ask, even for a reviewer.

When it comes to the perspective of the spectator, Kirk reminds us that “not everyone in the theater sees—or hears—the same show.” It’s a fact of live performances that no two people see the same show and no two performances are the same. No matter where you sit in a movie theater, you see essentially the same movie as everyone else (barring sitting behind a pillar or a very tall person). But with a live performance, especially theater or ballet, there’s an element of Heraclitus’ tenet: “One cannot step twice into the same river, for the water into which you first stepped has flowed on.” The corollary is that no two people can step into the same river because the water where one stepped is not the same as the water where the other did. (Besides, no two people’s experience of that river will be the same, either. That’s true of movies and television, too, of course.) The trade-off is that in live theater, I can choose where I want to look. In film and TV, the camera, under the director’s control, does that for me.

Kirk asserts that theater pros feel “that opening nights are the worst performances” of a play’s run. Openings are still the traditional night for reviewers and the press, despite the scheduling of “critics’ previews.” (No matter when the reviewer sees the show, the notice traditionally appears the day after opening.) I was never a first-nighter, so I had the luxury of seeing the performances after the play opened and settled down, and even now, I generally avoid opening nights. To be frank, openings are more social events than artistic ones and the company’s emotions are high and tight. Friends and family are in the house; agents and managers come to see their clients; the producers, backers, and investors and their invited guests are there for the festivities; non-reviewing press—editors, feature writers, cultural reporters—are covering the “news” event. Everyone backstage is on edge, you can bet. (When I first started to perform, I couldn’t eat before a performance. When I got more used to the experience, that was no longer so—except on opening nights.)

In addition to the emotional tension, there are the various production issues that affect the performance. It’s a truism in theater that no planned rehearsal period is long enough. You always need another week. In many shows, the first time everyone has gone through the entire play with full tech and costumes the way it’s supposed to be seen by the audience is the final dress rehearsal. On opening night, there will be acting and directing problems from both nerves and from not being quite ready yet. In new plays, it’s not unusual for new lines and even new scenes to be inserted within days of opening; new songs can be added to musicals. Because of the labor-intensivity of the rehearsal period plus the union regulations, technical adjustments are often brought in at the last minute: costumes don’t fit quite right yet, set pieces haven’t been tested, lights aren’t focused right. (I once actually went on stage with a set still wet with last-minute, improvised “paint”: pea soup!) No, opening night is not a typical performance. It’s more like the first time a cook makes a new recipe—it’s not really ready for primetime.

Still, I remember an occurrence that remains one of the strangest of which I have ever heard in theater. In 1997, The Scarlet Pimpernel opened at the Minskoff Theatre on 9 November. It received mediocre reviews or worse. New producers stepped in and bought out the old investors, closed the show on 1 October 1998 for retooling, and reopened it on 4 November. Talk about not being ready on opening night!

In debating whether reviews are “art,” Kirk paraphrases Will and Ariel Durant’s definition of art: “significance expressed with feeling through form.” (The quote is from Writing Reviews, not the Durants.) I’d like to add another, very similar definition from Susanne Langer, another philosopher: “Art is the creation of forms symbolic of human feeling.” As you can see, it’s nearly the same language. Let me add here another of Langer’s statements that I have found revealing—because it’s a comment about “beauty” in a context we should consider when viewing many new kinds of art. (This harks back to the remarks Kirk and I made about standards and new art not resembling the old.) Langer writes: “Beauty is not identical with the normal, and certainly not with charm and sense appeal, though all such properties may go to the making of it.”

Beauty, I think Langer’s saying, ain’t always pretty. She also defines beauty as “expressive form,” by which she maintains that it affects its audience in some way. “Beautiful works may contain elements that, taken in isolation, are hideous,” she writes. This interpretation of beauty, which may owe something to Heraclitus’ view that there is beauty in a random collection of unrelated elements, can be seen as an application of Aristotle’s explanation that we get pleasure in drama even from seeing things we’d regard with disgust if encountered in reality because we learn from them, and learning gives us pleasure. Furthermore, Langer admonishes us that we may not recognize as good a work of art that puts us off until “we have grasped its expressiveness.” One friend of Vincent van Gogh’s, for instance, admitted that at first the painter’s art “was so totally different from what I had imagined it would be . . . so rough and unkempt, so harsh and unfinished, that . . . I was unable to think it good or beautiful.” It’s noteworthy that Marshall McLuhan calls “good taste,” often substituted for “beauty” in the judgment of traditionalists, “the first refuge of the noncreative . . . , the anesthetic of the public . . . , the most obvious resource of the insecure.” Richard Kostelanetz, whom I quoted earlier, also submits that “a truly original, truly awakening piece of art will not, at first, be accepted as beautiful.”

In his discussion of “good art” and “great art,” Kirk remarks, “I could write a play that conforms to all Aristotle’s principles and has no value at all—indeed, many have.” First, let me reiterate here, in the words of Susanne Langer, what I said about poor art earlier: “There may be poor art, which is not corrupt, but fails to express what [the artist] knew in too brief an intuition. . . . . The result is a poor and helpless product, sincere enough, but confused and frustrated by recalcitrance of the medium or sheer lack of technical freedom.” Langer takes a harsher line with “bad art,” but making poor art is not a criminal act. Now, I’ll draw a literary parallel between what Kirk wrote about writing a mediocre play that follows all the rules and an old play to which I once introduced Kirk, Plots and Playwrights by Edward Massey.

The plot concerns Caspar Gay, a successful Broadway playwright wandering Greenwich Village looking for “an inspiration” for his next play. He meets young short-story writer Joseph Hastings in front of a boarding house. Gay explains his desperation, and Hastings suggests that there’s a play on every floor of the house and the two writers challenge one another. Hastings composes small dramas based on the intimate, but revealing, stories of the residents of each floor of the house, one scene for each apartment. Gay’s output, on the other hand, is complex and predictable, a contrived melodrama about all the house’s residents in improbable relationships. Hastings reacts in disbelief to Gay’s creation, and the famous playwright responds, “But it will run a year on Broadway.” “My God,” cries the enlightened novelist, “it has.” And that’s what can happen when you merely follow all the rules!

I do want to take small exception to one thing Kirk writes. Actually, I want to expand it a bit. The author notes, correctly, that “some works are simply better than others.” I’d add, “. . . for some people.” As Kirk continues, “Our criteria and judgments about art will always be subjective,” so each of us will see and feel things no one else will, and vice versa. Hence, art I think is great may seem mediocre or even awful to you and art you love may leave me cold. (Furthermore, taste, like the truth, changes over time. But let’s not get into that.) I’ll admit here that I don’t much like Harold Pinter’s plays. I’ll acknowledge that he was probably a genius, but his plays always just confuse me and leave me frustrated. I don’t enjoy those feelings. Obviously, though, mine’s a minority opinion since he won a Nobel in lit in 2005. As my father liked to say, De gustibus non disputandum est: There’s no accounting for taste.

When it comes to defining who’s an artist, Kirk quotes some lines from 8th-century Chinese poet Li Po. Allow me to add another voice, William Shakespeare:

The poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

Further, Kirk adds that someone who writes, plays, or sings isn’t automatically an artist: an artist needs “to create something that changes the way people feel, hear, and think.” Living Theatre co-founder Julian Beck declared, “An actor who brings back from his adventures a moment of communicable penetration is a hero, the light of our lives.” It is perhaps noteworthy that the people who make commercials don’t call the performers who appear on the screen “artists”: they are simply “the talent.” I guess even the producers of TV commercials don’t figure it takes an artist to sell toilet paper or cars.

When Writing Reviews gets to contemplating how a reviewer actually goes about composing the review, Kirk addresses the question of whether or not to take notes while viewing the performance. (The question is less pertinent for non-performing arts, such as book or art reviewing, for obvious reasons.) His conclusion comes down on both sides of the question: “Take notes when you have to.” I’ve tried both ways, and a third in the middle (taking notes without looking at the pad!), and I end up in Kirk’s corner on this. You have to pay attention to what you’re watching and any distraction lessens your attentiveness. On the other hand, there are details that you recognize as potentially telling, like, say, a line of dialogue or a particularly revealing movement or gesture, and you know you can’t remember them for long without writing it down. Sometimes I’ve been able to keep the thing in mind long enough to jot it down in the lobby at intermission or right after the performance, which kind of splits the difference, but there’s no definitive answer for everyone; some people’s memories are just better than others' and some bits of performance are more memorable than others. You have to go with what works for you under the circumstances.

By the way, in an earlier paragraph, Kirk advises that “it is difficult for anyone . . . to take in an entire show at one sitting.” This is especially so if you’re taking notes while you’re watching. The trade-off is that if you don’t take the notes, you might not remember later what you did manage to “take in.” Going back, as some of the pros Kirk invokes suggest, is a good way to solve this dilemma, but that’s time consuming and, if you’re footing the bill for the extra tix, expensive. It also can get in the way of meeting deadlines. (TV reviewers have a much easier job here: they are usually provided with recordings of the program, several episodes if it’s a series, and can both pause the video to make a note and go back and re-watch parts or all of the show.)

I want to comment on something Kirk wrote near the end of Writing Reviews because I've always remembered it ever since I heard it. (I don't always follow the advice very well, but I do remember it!) In the "Reviewing your review" section, Kirk tells the reader to ask, "Can you say things more directly, cut out useless words, eliminate the unnecessary?" (That’s writing advice, of course, not just review-writing advice.) A teacher of mine used to say, "Kill your babies," meaning be willing to cut the things you like the most when they aren't really helping. Be ruthless, she meant. I often wish I could do that—but I have too much "ruth" I guess. But I hear her say that whenever I edit my work—especially when I come to something I know I should cut . . . but don’t want to.

Finally, one of the last observations of Writing Reviews is the statement that though we may “see a lot of bad art” over our lifetimes, “we’ll also experience things that enrich and possibly change our lives . . . .” Intentionally or otherwise, Kirk’s speaking of all kinds of art, not just theater or the performing arts. I could make a short list of the works of art, performances, texts, and visual art, that have moved me or showed me something so that I’ve never forgotten it or the experience. But I want to close out these comments by quoting an artist who made this point very clearly in his own way. I’ve written about the Inuit artist Pudlo Pudlat before (ROT, 28 September), and I quoted this then: “If an artist draws a subject over and over again in different ways, then he will learn something. The same with someone who looks at drawings—if that person keeps looking at many drawings, then he will learn something from them too.” A wise, wise man.