Painting relates to both art and life,” the artist Robert Rauschenberg said in 1961. “I try to act in that gap between the two.” The expression “the gap between art and life” was to become current in the avant-garde discourse of the sixties, when boundaries of every sort were coming under attack. “Overcoming the gap between art and life” had at once the ring of a metaphysical battle cry—like closing the gap between body and mind—and a political slogan promising to abolish privilege. For Rauschenberg, however, it more or less meant giving himself license to make art out of anything: “A pair of socks is no less suitable to make a painting than wood, nails, turpentine, oil, and fabric.”
Earlier in the century, Guillaume Apollinaire, a poet and critic in Picasso’s circle, had written that “one may paint with whatever one likes, with pipes, stamps, postcards, playing cards, candlesticks, bits of oilcloth, collars, wall paper, daily papers.” Apollinaire was speaking of collage. With the exception of pipes and candlesticks, the items in his inventory were flat and could be pasted into compositions without greatly disturbing the flatness of their surfaces. Even if Picasso or Georges Braque were to have added a real pipe or candlestick to a collage, its placement would be constrained by pictorial imperatives: The whole composition would in effect be a picture of a tabletop, the pipe or candlestick placed where an image of it would make pictorial sense, even if, as a by-product of Cubism, the forms would have been broken up and rearranged. But Rauschenberg went far beyond pictorial limits. In
Monogram, for example, he garlanded a stuffed angora goat with a used automobile tire around its stomach, creating a disturbing presence. In
Canyon, a stuffed eagle, its wings spread, is affixed to the bottom edge of a paint-smeared canvas, as if poised to fly into the surrounding emptiness. In
Octave, he brought a kind of homemade ladder from life into art by attaching it to the surface of what could have been exhibited as a painting a few years earlier, under Abstract Expressionist conventions. Rauschenberg invented the name “combines” for these unprecedented objects, which consisted, in part, of things that had their natural location in everyday life: tires, goats, eagles, ladders—each of them rich in metaphorical association. The combines, bringing life and art together the way monsters bridge the boundary between humans and animals, are good examples of unnatural wonders.
A work that particularly captured my attention was Rauschenberg’s Bed. Its label reads, “Combine Painting: oil and graphite on fabric,” which could hardly more eloquently proclaim the blindness to “life” of a museum registrar’s perception of art, since the work consists of an actual bed—sheet, pillow, and quilt fitted into a narrow vertical frame. The upper part of the bed is scribbled over in pencil (“graphite”), and the bedclothes (“fabric”) then thickly covered with dripping paint (“oil”). What engaged my interest was the fact that beds had served as a pivotal example in one of the most famous philosophical texts of all time, Book X of Plato’s Republic—one of the earliest and certainly one of the most fateful writings on art. There can be few readers who have not read The Republic, but a brief description of Plato’s argument may help explain why I found Bed so exciting as a work of art.
In Plato’s
scheme, beds are ranked into three types, with differing degrees of reality. To begin with, there are the familiar beds in which we spend a third of our lives and some of the moments that define us as human: we dream, make love, are born and die in the kinds of beds that belong to the world of everyday experience. Plato postulated another world, which contains what he designated “ideas,” from which the things of everyday experience derive their forms. In Plato’s philosophy, the idea of the Bed is eternal and inalterable: Every bed in the world of daily experience must embody the same basic form, however beds may differ in detail. There are finally the beds that appear in works of art—in vase paintings, for example, picturing persons doing the kinds of things people do in bed. Now bed builders must grasp the idea of the Bed and make their products conform to it. They possess practical knowledge of how beds have to be built, in order to support the bodies of those who use them. But artists who want to paint pictures of beds merely know how beds appear. They don’t really know anything about beds beyond how they look. Plato argued that pictures are of the same order as dreams, shadows, reflections, and illusions: not as real as the beds in bedrooms, far less real than the Idea of Bed in the realm of Ideas. Plato’s metaphysics is essentially a put-down of artists, who are meant to be seen as inferior to carpenters and even more so to philosophers, whose sphere is the realm of ideas. His is a systematic effort to trivialize and marginalize art.
The Republic is a philosophical masterpiece on which pretty much the whole of Western philosophy is based. It is a singular fact that the history of philosophy virtually begins with a text that is organized around the metaphysical suppression of works of art.
In 1964, I noticed that actual three-dimensional beds were beginning to make their appearance in or as works of art, Rauschenberg’s
Bed being a case in point. It was exactly as if the slogan “overcoming the gap between art and life” had taken on a philosophical meaning. I began to feel that the history of art had evolved to the point that Plato’s distinction between the beds of art and the beds of life was no longer compelling. “Acting in the space between art and life” could be seen as an effort to reverse the philosophical disenfranchisement of art that was so central an item in Plato’s agenda. That, I came to think, gave the art of our time an import far in excess of a mere fresh chapter in the history of art. In overcoming the gap between art and life, artists, it seemed to me, were engaged in dismantling a kind of metaphysical prison in which philosophers had sought to confine them since ancient times. Rauschenberg and his intrepid peers were not merely beginning a new era of art history—they were at the same time beginning a new era in the philosophy of art. Plato had tried to diminish art by treating it as no better than illusion. And really, by confining painting to the making of pictures, artists had acquiesced in this assessment. Even with the invention of abstraction, art found itself struggling with the illusoriness of pictorial space. Perhaps it was with a sense of this that the critic Clement Greenberg decreed in 1960 that painting could achieve autonomy only by embracing absolute flatness. So recycling actual beds—or ladders, eagles, goats, and tires—as parts of actual works of art was an acknowledgment that art had to be redefined. And philosophers were going to have to begin all over in finding a definition of art. At the very least that definition would have to explain what made the difference between a bed that was a work of art and a bed that was an article of domestic furniture, when the same object could, as in
Bed, play either role.
The essays that compose this volume were written in the space between art and life, which has been my intellectual habitat since the 1960s, as philosopher and as art critic. As a philosopher, the “unnatural wonders” of artists since the sixties have furnished me with example after example of a kind that hardly could have been imagined in earlier periods either of the history of art or the history of the philosophy of art. The wonderful image on the cover of this book represents the task perfectly. I like to think that the manuscript it shows is an essay on the philosophical definition of art submitted to my publishers, Farrar, Straus and Giroux—perhaps my own manuscript, since it bears my title. The pages of the manuscript are transpierced with real pencils that cross the line between philosophy and life. Like the arrows that martyrize St. Sebastian and elevate him onto a higher plane, the pencils, bringing reality into thought, exemplify what the philosophy of art must aspire to. The cover of the book depicts the kind of object with which anyone who sets himself up either as critic or as philosopher of art today is going to have to deal. It shows what the book is about. The book deals with art and life together.
Most of the critical pieces here first appeared in
The Nation, whose art critic I have been for the past twenty years. There exist very few magazines that would make themselves hospitable to the philosophical exploration of art in the guise of critical reviews, all the more so in view of the urgent political matters that clamor each week for editorial comment. But as our encounter with Plato demonstrates, the philosophy of art began with the political suppression of art and, as readers of
The Republic know, with the expulsion of artists from the ideal society. Since its first issue, published on July 4, 1865,
The Nation has published art criticism, as if in the awareness that it is in the gap between art and life that the consciousness of what we are is constantly being reshaped. I am immensely privileged to have been able, like Rauschenberg, to act in that gap, to make available to the magazine’s readership what I think has been happening there and to explain the way, in my view, the unnatural wonders of artistic production may be approached.
The remaining pieces are mostly of a more explicitly philosophical nature. “Art Criticism After the End of Art” inaugurated a conference on contemporary art theory and art criticism held over the course of three days in Murcia, Spain, in December 2003. I want to thank Francisca Perez Carreno of the Philosophy Department of the University of Murcia, who, together with Miguel Hernandez-Navarro and Pedro Cruz Sanchez, of the Centro de Documentación y Estudios Avanzados de Arte Contemporánéo, organized and sponsored that extraordinary event. “The World as Warehouse: Fluxus and Philosophy” was commissioned by the Gilbert and Lila Silverman Foundation for a volume on Fluxus—that international polymorphic movement of art, music, and performance that made the closure of the gap between art and life part of the agenda and form of life of its adherents. “Painting and Politics” was presented as part of a symposium organized in celebration of David Rhodes’s twenty-fifth year as president of the School of Visual Arts in New York. “The Fly in the Fly Bottle” was delivered at the Guggenheim Museum of Art in October 2003, in a series dedicated to how critics make judgments of artistic value. “
Kalliphobia in Contemporary Art” was published as part of a symposium on aesthetic/antiaesthetic in
Art Journal, Summer 2004, at the invitation of James Meyer and Toni Ross. The essay on Jeff Koons was written at the invitation of Gunnar Kvaran, director of the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Art in Oslo, Norway, for the catalog of an exhibition of that artist. The essay “Light over Ashes” was originally published as a catalog essay in
Joshua Neustein: Light on the Ashes, Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, 1961. “Domestic Tranquility” appeared as an addendum in
Joshua Neustein: Five Ash Cities, Herzliya Museum of Art, Herzliya, Israel. “Reflections on Robert Mangold’s Curled Figure and Column Paintings” was published as a catalog essay for an exhibition of the same name, Pace Wildenstein Gallery, 2003.
I am greatly indebted to Paul Elie at Farrar, Straus and Giroux for his editorial gifts and for his general enthusiasm for my writing on art. Paul came up with the title for this book, as he had for its predecessor, The Madonna of the Future. I must mention as well the help given this volume by his assistant, Kathryn Lewis. The pieces for The Nation had the benefit of two marvelous editors, Art Winslow and Adam Shatz. Finally, I once again express my profound appreciation for the spirit of enthusiasm, comedy, happiness, and love embodied in the person of my wife, Barbara Westman, a remarkable artist and the best person to share a life with that I can imagine.