I recently came across a wry Father’s Day card my younger daughter sent me when she was living in France. It reproduces as a paper doll the famous official portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinth Rigaud done in 1701. It is as political a painting as I can imagine, as much so as those standard Socialist Realist portraits of Stalin, ironized by the witty émigré painters Komar and Melamid in such marvelous pastiches as Stalin and the Muses or The Origins of Socialist Realism, which are brilliantly political in their own right, as irony often is. Anyone who thinks that Rigaud’s masterpiece is just a striking likeness of the great Bourbon monarch must be numb to what one might call the visual poetics of awe. It is political the way that Versailles itself is in creating an architectural embodiment of absolute power. Everything about Louis XIV, from his heavy ermine wrap to the delicate body language—it is as if the king enacts a little power dance, like the god Krishna or Adolf Hitler at the news that Paris had fallen—the baroque wig, the way his scepter conducts the flow of power between himself and his crown, is meant to translate into visual terms the ne plus ultra of seventeenth-century sovereignty. In contemporary arguments in favor of monarchy, recourse was often made to the design of the universe, with the sun in the dominant position. Louis XIV is the roi soleil, the supreme ruler, and all his representations are configured to convey his absolute power, with the political order of society symbolically implied through the complex of his attributes.
Someone might say, That’s not art, it’s propaganda. What then would we say about Leonardo’s colossal equestrian sculpture of Ludovico Sforza commissioned by his son Francesco? A contemporary described it as “the most gigantic, stupendous and glorious work ever made by the hands of man.” It would have stood thirty-one feet and weighed seven tons. It was meant to intimidate, if you were an enemy of Milan, and to dominate, if you were his subject. When the French, under Louis XII, conquered Milan in 1499, their bowmen used Leonardo’s terra-cotta model for target practice. Whoever believes that to have been mere philistinism is blank on the meaning of iconoclasm. Francesco had already ordered that the bronze, into which the sculpture was to have been cast, be melted down for cannons. War, it is famously said, is politics conducted by other means. And there is a natural moral equation between political art and armaments. When the Declaration of Independence was read aloud in New York by George Washington on July 9, 1776, a rowdy crowd pulled down a gilded equestrian statue of George III, which in time was converted into forty-two thousand musket balls—“melted majesty,” a wit commented at the time.
I have always been dubious regarding the various rules of art criticism that take the form “If A is X, then A is not art” for any chosen value of X. These make it inherently impossible for something to be art and X at the same time, giving the critic a tool for a priori dismissal. But what is left over when we subtract from most works of art the factors that at various stages in the history of criticism have formed the basis for ruling them out as art—or, better, that we are enjoined to disregard in approaching them as art? In Other Criteria, Leo Steinberg discusses an injunction by Alfred Barr regarding the Demoiselles d’Avignon to see it as a kind of geometrical diagram, which means to erase from critical consideration the raucous eroticism of the work—not so much “If A is erotic, then it’s not art” but “If A is erotic, then its eroticism must be bracketed in addressing it as art.” “Can we be looking at the same painting?” Steinberg wondered aloud. In bracketing out as not pertinent to art the features for the sake of which the art was originally made, we may find that we have robbed art of its entire point and function. Seeing a painting as a geometrical diagram was as good a way of blinding viewers as can be imagined. Formalism was a way of seeing all art in much the same way.
In discussing with the critic Pierre Chabanne his
Large Glass—a work, since we have touched upon eroticism, whose proper title is
The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even—Marcel Duchamp made it plain that in “looking at” the glass in “the aesthetic sense of the term,” one was addressing only a part of the work, which consisted in the glass itself, together with the notes he gathered in what is referred to as the book: “One must consult the book, and see the two together. The conjunction of the two things entirely removes the retinal aspect, that I don’t like.” What Chabanne refers to as Duchamp’s “antiretinal attitude” is in effect an antiaesthetic attitude. I want to emphasize that Duchamp was not saying in effect that if something is aesthetic, it isn’t art. Rather, he was opposing the narrow identification between art and the aesthetic, opposing the “too great importance given to the retinal,” that is, the aesthetic. And he elaborates: “Since Courbet it’s been believed that painting is addressed to the retina. That was everyone’s error. The retinal flutter! Before, painting had other functions: it could be religious, philosophical, moral … Our whole century is completely retinal, except for the surrealists, who tried to go outside it somewhat. And still, they didn’t go so far! … Down deep [they’re] still really interested in painting in the retinal sense. It’s absolutely ridiculous. It has to change; it hasn’t always been like this.” My sense is that it is whatever is designated by the term “retinal” that people have had in mind as what is really art, in contrast with the various factors Duchamp mentions—“religious, philosophical, moral”—to which we may as well add erotic and political. So that art, or at least painting, is all and only what is retinal, everything else being “not really” art. It behooves us, then, in asking what is wrong with art being political, to address retinality with some care.
In the defining work of eighteenth-century aesthetics, Kant’s
Critique of Judgment, the perception of beauty was understood in terms of disinterested contemplation. But there was more implied in this formulation than just looking at something. For one thing, Kant did not believe that beauty was an objective quality of things. It was not like looking at something’s color or shape. Rather, the perception of the thing put the perceiver into a subjective state, which Kant identified as pleasure and which Duchamp eroticizes with his witty expression “retinal flutter.” It was like a visual
jouissance. Santayana, in his late-nineteenth-century
The Sense of Beauty, analyzed the perception of beauty as the projection onto the object of perception of the pleasure felt upon seeing it, so that beauty was, in his formulation, pleasure objectified. The idea that beauty is visual pleasure is too obvious not to be nearly as old as philosophical reflection itself: Saint Thomas wrote
Pulcrae sunt quae visa placent. What was novel with Kant was this: To claim that something is beautiful is to imply that everyone who perceives it ought to feel the same pleasure as I feel. It is in effect to universalize the pleasure, which makes beauty, in Kant’s striking formulation, the symbol of morality, since moral judgments in their nature must be universalizable if they are valid. Hence the judgment of beauty is disinterested, and that would be enough to extrude politics from the experience of beauty, since politics is interestedness through and through.
But Kant drew no distinction between artistic and natural beauty, and in the eighteenth century, aesthetics cut across the art-nature borderline, which was wholly understandable since art was understood as the imitation of nature. So if a work of art was political, aesthetic judgment screened that out: One saw it as one would see a natural object, and the pleasure it induced would have nothing to do with its political content. Thus one sees Ludovico on a Rearing Horse as one would see Ludovico on a rearing horse. Hence its being political had nothing to do with its being art. There are some rough edges in the “hence,” but that is what Duchamp found fault with in the retinal theory of art. There is a lot more to the Large Glass than what meets—or pleasures—the eye.
A far deeper but unfortunately far less
influential view was set out in Hegel’s
Lectures on Aesthetics, which was composed only a few decades after Kant’s book was published. Hegel distinguished sharply between natural and artistic beauty, the latter, in his wonderful phrase, being “born of the spirit and born again” (
Aus den Geistens geborene und wiedergeborene). It meant, as I see it, that artistic beauty was in some sense an intellectual rather than a natural product. Hence more was involved in perceiving art than retinal flutters. To perceive artistic beauty required that the meaning be “born again” in the mind of the beholder through an act of interpretation. A work of art embodies a meaning, and the meaning must be grasped if the work is to be grasped. Otherwise the work is no different from a mere natural object. And the artist, rather than someone who fashions pleasing objects, is accordingly someone who communicates meanings through the objects he or she fashions. And that means that, for Hegel, the perception of art is a cognitive activity: Grasping a work of art is like grasping a thought. Or better: It
is grasping a thought, not so much expressed through words as expressed through objects. That is the power and the limitation of art. But Hyacinth Rigaud’s magnificent portrait of Louis XIV does just that: Rigaud has had to find visual equivalents for the idea of absolute majesty viewers must understand if they are to grasp the thought the king wished to have conveyed through his portrait, viz, I am King Louis, greater than whom no mortal can be conceived.
Hegel held to the view that art, philosophy, and religion are three moments of what he termed Absolute Spirit. Art is limited in a way that philosophy is not by virtue of the fact that it is constrained to use objects (or images) as the medium through which to express thoughts. I don’t want to get my feet too deeply tangled in Hegel’s views, but it is not difficult to see why he thought art was historically so important. Art was able, through objects, to convey ideas that illiterate worshippers had to grasp for the sake of their salvation but that they could not grasp in abstract truth—ideas, say, like “God is One” or “God is all-powerful.” Typically, the artist would have recourse to size, as Leonardo did in portraying Ludovico on a colossal scale. He made Ludovico, relative to the statue’s viewer, more like a god than like a mortal. It diminished the viewer in exalting the subject of the work.
But how do we get contemporary political ideas into art? How do we convey, through images, that all men are equal? How do we convey through images the inalienable rights of life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness? Not so easy, if we think, for an example, of Norman Rockwell’s “Four Freedoms” paintings. But still, limited as his representation of these abstract ideas are, what else would an artist do charged with the brief to give visual embodiment to exalted political ideals? Hegel had an interesting and famous idea in this connection. It was that the end of art had been reached, not in the sense that artists had run out of ideas, or that the history of art was over, but in the sense that artists could no longer hope to express the kinds of ideas philosophy was capable of expressing, say, as in Hegel’s own book of political philosophy, which discusses freedom as subservience to the state. And indeed it is difficult to see how one would paint that, until we think of what we feel our relationship must be to the king as portrayed in Rigaud’s portrait if we are his subjects. But those limitations, so far as they are real, do not mean that it is illegitimate for art to convey political ideas in general, or that artists should confine themselves to inducing retinal pleasure in their viewers. The truth is that philosophy has hardly evolved to the point that it alone can deal with all the political and moral ideas we have to deal with in modern life. Humankind is far behind the point that Hegel believed he had attained in his philosophy. But it is far ahead of the political thought that is embodied in the political portrait of Louis XIV by Hyacinth Rigaud! Indeed, we can see the history of art as having attained the level of pluralism that is needed to make vivid the thoughts about love, identity, fear, and hope that define modern life. We need from artists all the help we can get—of expressing, through performances and installations, the complex political ideas we need to master in order to navigate modern life.
Meanwhile, it is important to recognize the way meaning inflects aesthetics itself. The eighteenth century had far too simple a concept of the retinal in restricting it to visual pleasure. Its central concept was that of taste and, really, the “ought” of universalization does not entail that everyone in fact will be fluttered by the objects that give us pleasure, but that they should be and will be as their taste is trained according to certain rules. Kantian aesthetics is more an agenda of education than something entirely modeled on morality, which he in any case says is only symbolically related to it. Or: There are interesting equivalences between moral education and aesthetic education. Kant wrote that if someone does not respond to something I feel he ought to, he lacks taste. But more than half the
Critique of Judgment is taken up with the sublime, and Kant adds that if someone does not respond to what I see as sublime, he lacks feeling. Already his century had felt taste to be too thin a concept to deal with the more intense experiences either of nature or of art—storms at sea, volcanoes, or the vastness of Saint Peter’s Basilica. But the range of aesthetic qualities is far wider than that acknowledged in his book, or, for the matter, in any book. The feeling of awe Hyacinth Rigaud aspired to elicit is a case in point. Or the feeling of patriotism that the flag elicited in Americans after 9/11. But these are feelings inseparable from meanings embodied in those representations.
Let’s consider, as a final example, Jacques-Louis David’s great painting, Marat Assassiné of 1793. One has to know something about Marat and the French Revolution to see it as a political painting, but when David painted it, everyone knew this and knew the circumstances: that Marat, the fierce polemicist, had been treacherously murdered by a young woman, Charlotte Corday, who had hoped to restore order in France by killing Marat. She was the female suicide bomber of the French Revolution. David did not depict the act of killing but rather the effect, through what Baudelaire describes as a visual poem. The painting looks like a descent from the cross. Marat is holding a pen through which he was to perform an act of kindness for his assassin by signing a petition. A knife is on the floor, blood stains the sheet, which has become his shroud. One is to see Marat as Jesus and be moved by pity to identify with his cause and his sacrifice. We know the feelings we are intended to have, but we don’t quite have those feelings since we are not part of the reality of the painting’s moment. We cannot translate into action the feelings we have, but the actions the painting is intended to arouse are political, as the feelings themselves are, and if we can do little more than look at the painting, that does not mean that the feelings and the intentions they enjoin do not belong to the experience. It was meant to arouse, and that power is still felt. As a philosopher, what strikes me is that visual beauty is, in this work, internal to its political effect. The beauty underwrites the metaphor between Christ and Marat, and validates his suffering. He died for you. So what are you going to do to demonstrate he did not die in vain? Allons enfants de la patrie!
2003