Towards an Ontology of Art

Art is that which is arranged. The artistic quality of a thing lies in the way in which it is put together—the order of objects, the arrangement of its shapes, the choice of its colors and sizes, its placement in space. Everything, then, can be art. All art objects exist on a scale from the pragmatic to the aesthetic. The pragmatic arrangement is devised for a practical purpose, to achieve a function, usually in the realm of the physical or the economic. The aesthetic arrangement is devised simply to be perceived, usually in a way that is pleasurable (the issue of “aesthetic pleasure” is too big for this already hubristic blog post). It may have functions in the realm of the social or the political, but these are merely the results of the perceptive pleasure it evokes. The main difference in whether something is considered art or not is exactly that, the way it is considered.

Let us consider a sign on a shopping mall storefront. Let us say that it reads, “Joe’s Hardware.” Now consider the sign in the front of the store as an art object. Its pragmatic purpose is to dictate to spectators (mall shoppers) the identity of the store and, hopefully, indicate what is inside. All that is necessary, then, is for the sign, which let us say is in a black-and-white block-letter sans serif font, to hang in a perfect horizontal above the entrance to the store. This would be an art object that is wholly pragmatic. Mall shoppers don’t think too much about the arrangement of the pieces of the sign (except, perhaps, “how dull,” but that’s because most storefronts are no longer wholly pragmatic), but the pragmatic goal of the object is achieved. Shoppers now know what’s inside the store.

Now let us consider the exact same sign, with the same boring font reading “Joe’s Hardware,” in the middle of a museum. Suddenly and almost magically, the sign has become a wholly aesthetic object. It has no pragmatic purpose anymore. Instead, it exists to be perceived. Its very presence in the museum tells us as much. Whether the sign should be more floridly decorated is a matter for critical taste but is not relevant to the sign’s existence as object.

But that’s easy. Let’s go back to the mall, and let’s change up the sign. Let’s say it it still reads, “Joe’s Hardware,” but let’s say it is now a 3-dimensional entity composed of letters and a hammer. Let us say that, by a feat of mechanical engineering, probably by a technician from the Disney store, the sign is animated, so that one of the letters continually slips from its position on the sign and is continually nailed back up by a hammer. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that it’s pretty rather than tacky. Now not only do mall shoppers know what is inside the store, but they find themselves standing and looking at the sign long after the pragmatic information it is designed to convey has been processed. One shopper, distracted momentarily from her noisy children, exclaims, “That’s a work of art!” What she means, of course, is not that the sign has ceased to serve a function, but merely that it has moved along the art object spectrum closer to the aesthetic. It is both pragmatic and aesthetic, and wholly neither. The fact that it is pretty only helps its case as an aesthetic object, because the sign does not pragmatically need to be pretty to convey the message that there are tools inside the store.

Of course, the pretty 3-dimensional “Joe’s Hardware” sign probably has the added benefit of bringing more people into the store, and the makers of the sign probably expected this when they spent the money to create it. But this is a secondary effect. The shoppers wooed by the new sign are not coming into the store simply because there are tools inside. They are also entering because they enjoyed perceiving the sign, and they want to see if there is more pleasure to be found within. They might buy a hammer while they’re at it.

So, everything is art, because everything is arranged, but some things are more aesthetic than others, which are more pragmatic. The ontological journey from arrangement to art does not necessitate a consciousness behind the arranging, but of course it always evokes one in the popular imagination. That is why even natural objects may be considered “art.” Though every tree or mountain has a slew of pragmatic functions that necessitate the arrangement of its parts—and scientists have devoted their careers to explaining every single aspect of the natural object in terms of its pragmatic function—we cannot help, at times, simply enjoying the perception of the object, the arrangement of shapes and colors and sizes. And so we say something like “God”—or if we prefer “Nature”—“is an artist!” And we are right, except arguably for the God part.

The crafty reader will have surmised by now that the very term “arrangement” could be rephrased as “form,” and it follows naturally that if art is that which is arranged, therefore art is that which has form. This argument plays itself out in the course of theatrical history. The theatre has outrun many of the qualities that were once seen to define itself—story, narrative, character, the proscenium—but it has yet to outrun form. Even the postdramatic theatre is arranged. Even improvisation, even Happenings, are arranged—they are arranged on the spot, but they have form nonetheless.

To that playwright colleague of mine who once asked, seemingly rhetorically, “isn’t having a good story all that you really need to have a good play?” The answer is no! Story is an available tool for arranging, but it is not the thing itself. It is not art. Art is in the form.

A Cartoon Illustrating the Necessity of Formalism

(since I can’t draw, I’ll have to write it out as a playscript)

FRAME ONE: “CONTENT”
(A mother and a child are in a park. The child has misbehaved. Perhaps he has thrown all of his orange juice onto the grass. The child has a history of throwing orange juice onto the grass, and the mother has told him many times not to do it again. The last time it happened, she said she would yell at him if it happened again. Now she has to follow through)

MOTHER: (in a calm voice) What did I say? Did I say I would yell at you if you did that again? Well I am yelling at you. I am yelling at you right now. Don’t ever do that again. Do you like it when I yell at you? I am yelling at you, and you deserve it.

FRAME TWO: “FORM AND CONTENT”
(same scenario as Frame One)
MOTHER: (shouting at the top of her lungs and pointing her finger at the child) WHAT DID I SAY? DID I SAY I WOULD YELL AT YOU IF YOU DID THAT AGAIN? WELL I AM YELLING AT YOU. I AM YELLING AT YOU RIGHT NOW. DON’T EVER DO THAT AGAIN. DO YOU LIKE IT WHEN I YELL AT YOU? I AM YELLING AT YOU, AND YOU DESERVE IT!

FRAME THREE: “FORM”
(same scenario as Frames One and Two)
MOTHER (shouting at the top of her lungs and pointing her finger at the child): AND SO EVEN THOUGH WE FACE THE DIFFICULTIES OF TODAY AND TOMORROW, I STILL HAVE A DREAM! IT IS A DREAM DEEPLY ROOTED IN THE AMERICAN DREAM. I HAVE A DREAM THAT ONE DAY THIS NATION WILL RISE UP AND LIVE OUT THE TRUE MEANING OF ITS CREED: "WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, THAT ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!

Epilogue: The child in the second and third frames does not repeat the same transgression the following day. The child in the first frame, however, does.

A bonus question for the reader: If you replace “child” with “dog” in these three scenarios (and orange juice with feces, let’s say), in which frame(s) will the dog learn not to repeat the transgression? Why?

Towards a Formula for the French Avant-Garde

Wagner + France = Symbolism

+ World War I + Jarry = Dada

+ Freud = Surrealism

+ psycho-religious catharsis = Artaud

+ World War II + Well-Made Play = Ionesco/Absurd

I think this is very clever. :)

Upon listening to "Rose's Turn" for the umpteenth time

The musical theatre is Aristotelian!

All musicals are about being recognized and known!

Every female character in musical theatre wants to be beautiful!

“Rose’s Turn” is the apex of the musical theatre form and also the beginning of the anti-musical. “Rose’s Turn” negates the principles of theatrical fantasy that ground the musical itself. Just as there are no more songs in Gypsy after “Rose’s Turn,” so the musical can never be pure again after Gypsy. The form begins its nose-dive into the theatricalism and anti-theater of the 1960s and 1970s. Eventually what was once a thriving form became a style that has then bred anti-musical-theatre-style musicals (Urinetown, Spamalot, The Producers, Bat Boy—how much more decadent can one get?).

And so, yes, the musical theatre began to die when Ethel Merman sang “Rose’s Turn,” and now it is dead, in the sense that it is no longer vital. But that does not mean that music in the theatre is dead. Nor does it mean that the musical theatre will not have many heirs, certain characteristics of which are already being suggested in concert-plays like Striking 12 and Passing Strange and in the through-sung theatre operas of See What I Wanna See, Rent, and most promisingly, Caroline, or Change.

Nor, incidentally, does it mean that great musicals do not continue to be written that employ the same forms and impulses as the musical. Legally Blonde and Wicked are two of the most commercially successful examples. Grey Gardens and Light in the Piazza two of the most critically successful. There also continue to be great well-made plays, great melodramas, and even great neoclassical dramas. This does not mean negate the fact that these forms are dead.

To throw a wrench into the works, imagine being a musical theater queen in 1959, ten years before Stonewall, and seeing “Rose’s Turn” for the first time. Consider how that experience is harder and harder to recapture as openly gay men are assimilated into normative society. The reasons for a form to die are cultural as much as they are aesthetic.

I do not have time to develop these thoughts. But perhaps I could write a dissertation on anti-theatricality in the musical theatre. It could include a theory chapter on the form, function, and phenomenon of musical theatre. Then a chapter on Kander and Ebb and Bob Fosse. Then a chapter on Sondheim. Then a chapter on musical theater since the 1980s and the “death” of the musical theatre. Then an epilogue that is a manifesto for new forms.

Now that’s an idea!

Pure Form in (of?) the Theatre

One of the great things about graduate school is that it is very possible to be discussing the same question from two different angles in two different (but related) classes simultaneously. One of these fortunate collisions took place for me this when I read both Joseph Chaikin’s The Presence of the Actor and Ignacy Witkiewicz’s “On a New Type of Play,” the former articulating the principles of the performance group The Open Theatre, the latter articulating the basic principles of the Witkiewicz’s imagined Theatre of Pure Form. The question both try to answer is—what is the “pure form” of the theater?

For Witkiewicz, the question is a frustrating one, doomed from the start, because theater is inherently a bastard art, lacking basic materials for formalism. He describes the problem as follows: “pure performance in time is possible only in the world of sounds, a theater without characters who act, no matter how outrageously and improbably, is inconceivable; simply because theater is a composite art, and does not have its own intrinsic, homogenous elements, like the pure arts: Painting and Music.” All we can do, he seems to argue, is to approach pure formalism as best we can, like a Zen “impossible task” that makes us stronger and better for the trying.

But hindsight reveals that Witkiewicz’s problem was staring him in the face. “A theater without characters who act” is indeed impossible, and that is why Joe Chaikin, in his search for the essence of theater, landed on the actor’s presence, the space between the actor and the audience, and the sounds and gestures that the actor makes as the essential building blocks of all theater. In other words, the space between the actor and the audience is the pure form that Witkiewicz, in his effort to unite the theatre with the formalism and Cubisms of music and visual art, could not find.

It is telling that Witkiewicz called his art a “Theatre of Pure Form.” The name suggests that there may yet be a theatre “of” something other than “pure form.” Chaikin, on the other hand, may be said to seek the Pure Form of the Theatre, or a form of which the theatre can be no other.

It just so happens that I am also reading Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre concurrent with both these performance theorists. Lehmann, in his neo-Hegelian glory, suggests a development in theatremaking from a text-based dramatic theatre to a formalist postdramatic theatre. Witkiewicz and Chaikin place themselves nicely on a continuum that leads ultimately to Kantor and Wilson. Indeed, Witkiewicz’s theatre of pure form begins as text, as a written play that is staged by actors and a director. Chaikin’s theatre, on the other hand, begins with the actor, out of whom sound, movement, and text are all generated as co-equal parts in the artistic whole. Purity, therefore, is within his reach as it is not, and never could be, within Witkiewicz’s.

Audience=Dumb? A Thought Experiment

Here is a description of a performance event, O.A.P. by performance artist Ursula Martinez, from the introduction to Hans-Thies Lehmann’s Postdramatic Theatre:

“O.A.P.… investigated her [Ursula’s] own fear of growing old while also exploring gender as performance… In a memorable scene, ‘old Ursula’ donned high heels and make-up and turned to the audience asking whether anybody would like to kiss her. During the embarrassed silence that followed, we were left to decide whether it was just the distance to the performer on stage or the image of old people as non-sexual beings that prevented us from volunteering to kiss her.”

The translator of Lehman’s book, Karen Jürs-Munby, uses this moment as an example of how performance can “destabilize the spectator’s construction of identity and the ‘other.’” The example, however, depends on a certain idea of spectatorship as a willful surrender of agency, that being in the audience means being unwilling to invade the world of the performer, and therefore to act in a meaningful way. Now, for sure, there is an awful long history of this theory of spectatorship proving itself in practice—the exceptions are so rare they are history making (the riot it provoked in the theater is one of the reasons A Doll’s House is so famous today). And many dramatists have used this theory to exploit the spectator as a metaphor for the kind of obsequious, politically dormant populace most susceptible to totalitarian dominance (Information for Foreigners one of the more obvious examples, Cabaret one of the more commercial).

BUT, I can’t help but think, when reading about this moment in O.A.P., what would happen if an audience member (say, me) were to have stepped up to the actress and kissed her. One can imagine such a spectator (say again, me) having read up on performance theory and understanding what Ursula was up to, and so deciding to subject the play itself to an experiment. Would Ursula have awkwardly smiled and continued the show as though the kiss hadn’t happened? Would she have walked offstage and ended the performance? One thing is certain, the basic theory of spectatorship on which her entire performance rests would have vaporized. And wouldn’t her anger and frustration have opened up new room for inquiry—for example, into the role of the performer in creating and manipulating the spectator, on the dependence of the performer on the spectator for his or her very existence.

One might argue that it is Ursula’s very intention to subvert and therefore destroy the passive spectator, and that in doing so her play is brutally anti-theatrical, aiming to undermine the very conditions of the theatrical event itself. If this argument were true, however, Ursula would celebrate a kiss from a rebel spectator like myself. My suspicion that she wouldn’t, however, speaks to my suspicion of the anti-theatrical, or at least the anti-spectatorial, impulse itself. I wonder what Lehmann will have to say on this issue as I venture into his book…

The Soggy State of Book Reviewing

Bored with my ramblings? Read a professional on a topic close to my heart: "Critical Condition" by James Wolcott.

Two Fragments

I am taking a break from writing a paper on Waiting for Godot to present two small ideas that could be expanded into book-length treatises of staggering genius:

1-Symbolist drama, considered the beginning of the modern European avant-garde, was birthed at roughly the same time as modern realist theater. Both Emile Zola’s treatises on naturalism and Maurice Maeterlinck’s essays and plays were, if not contemporaneous, within a decade or so of each other. And yet, the practitioners of every modern avant-garde movement, beginning with Symbolism, have positioned themselves in opposition to the means and premises of the realist theater. Reading such arguments today, we are not puzzled. Realism has come to so dominate our own theatrical world that we are immediately in empathy with artists like Maeterlinck in their frustration with realism and naturalism. Looked at historically, however, it is puzzling that there should be such fury over a theory of the drama (realism) that was, at the time, only in swaddling clothes (as opposed to the Romantic refutation of neo-classicism, which were nearly two centuries apart from each other in their respective geneses).

I wonder if it is time to tell a new version of dramatic history in which the avant-garde does not rise up to replace realism but in which there was a great schism in the wake of Romanticism, by which dramatic history took two separate paths: Realism and Anti-Realism (or, the Avant-Garde). These two dramaturgical paths continue to be walked on, and while they interact and in many ways inform each other, they remain parallel. The history of theater since the end of the 19th century is a dialectical struggle between Realism and Anti-Realism that has yet to be resolved. Just a thought.

2-It occurs to me that the blog, in its insistence on separating thoughts and arguments into pieces that are not expected to make a whole, marks a resurgence of the Romantic idea of the fragment, by which universal “truths” are reached by small tick-tacks rather than massive swings of the ax. Just a thought.

On Celebrity

Today a good friend of mine and I were sitting together in a coffee shop. My friend had his computer open and was buzzing around online. He turns to me and says, “Tim Burton and Helena Bonham Carter just had a baby.” And so a definition of “celebrity” occurred to me.

Celebrity: A condition of being by which complete strangers in an obscure coffee shop halfway around the world casually discuss the birth of your child.

Quick thought

I think Euripides's play Helen should be revived, using lots of television screens to conjure a world in which the only "reality" is imagery. Alex Eaton should do videography. Elizabeth LeCompte should direct. I should dramaturg and (also) make all the money.

From the draft of my paper on Helen:

Reading the play’s first scene, Helen’s difficult-to-stage prologue about her sorry personal history and the “lives…lost in numbers,” I can’t help imagining her watching a TV news segment or documentary on herself and the recent devastation in Ilium. Images of fire and bloodshed have become the domain of television (and film) and would signal to the audience the degree of the gods’ cruelty. I should further suggest that television screens are especially appropriate in a play about surfaces and people mistakenly believing their eyes. On the Greek stage, Euripides can only conjure the vast landscape of his play—the ashes of Ilium, Helen’s family in Sparta, the Greek ships foundering on the ocean, the cave containing Menelaus’s soldiers and the Helen hologram, the inside of Theoclymenus’s palace, the ship where the Egyptian soldiers will be deceived and murdered by Spartan trickery—through a broad web of monologues and messenger scenes. Today, these worlds could all be conjured on the flat imagery of televisions that move across the stage like an extra set of eyes. The skepticism of today’s audiences towards the media would support the link between our own world of images and Helen’s.

Help Wanted?

I just saw Help Wanted: A Personal Search for Meaningful Employment at the Start of the 21st Century, a monologue by the young performer/monologist Josh Lefkowitz. Although it was far from a masterpiece, I can’t help being reminded how much I enjoy solo performances and monologues, even though it’s a form that I really don’t understand on a theoretical or even formal level. How does it work when it works well? What separates the good from the bad? I’m convinced it’s not just the charisma of the performer, since I’ve seen strong performers give rotten solo plays (cf. All That I Will Ever Be). It’s something about the quality and depth of the storytelling. The challenge, really, is to convince the audience that your banal story about your life matters in a big way. Lefkowitz didn’t quite get there, but there was more than one part of his play that was truly moving and will probably stick with me (such as his mantra: “What Would Spalding [Gray] Do?”), and I think he has the potential to someday write a great show.

I can’t say that his piece was illuminating in regards to one of my main personal struggles right now, which is figuring out what the heck I want to do with my life (or even my immediate future). His conclusion, if he had one at all, was that we should all just keep our pens scratching no matter what happens.

Do I keep my pen scratching (no)? Do I always do what Spalding would do (which, for Lefkowitz, largely means listening to everyone’s stories and talking to as many strangers as possible)? No. Is my ego and ambition matched by my follow-through and work ethic? No. Am I writing diary entries into a blog purely because I hope someone will read my ramblings and pretend that they matter? Yes. Have I started any of my final papers yet? No.

So, that’s my entry for the day.

But I LIKE postmodernism!!

As you know, fearless and new reader, I’ve just finished the excellent book Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. An interested quality of the book is that its author, Christopher Butler, is as skeptical as he is knowledgeable about postmodernism, and he includes his own critiques of the movement alongside his explanations of it. He boils down the essence of his critique in his statement, during his last chapter, that “the best that one can say here, and I am saying it, is that postmodernists are good critical deconstructors, and terrible constructors.” In other words (and hugely oversimplified): Postmodernism does a great job of dismantling the ideas of “truth” and “reality,” but it doesn’t offer a practical exit strategy from the miasma its theories create. Butler seems to think that this inherent weakness makes it, despite its surface muscularity, an ultimately rather limp set of theoretical frameworks. Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes are great, but how do you use these philosophies to strategize political activism and change? What do you do with the problem that any critique of truth-making systems must depend on an idea of “truth” and the philosopher’s assumption that (s)he recognizes its imposters (even if everything is an imposter—I can hear Plato CHOKING in his grave). As a result of these critiques, Butler virtually gives up on postmodernism by the book’s end, and he predicts that its “enduring achievements” will take place in the arts rather than in politics or philosophy. Like Romanticism (via Wagner) for Nietzsche—the death of postmodernism is to become a style.

Reading Butler’s criticisms, I come to an awareness of my own prejudices regarding the viability of postmodernist theory. Since my induction into Judith Butler in college, and M. Foucault since, I have found myself skeptical of ANY theory written today that does not take into account postmodernist ideas of power, language, and discourse. I see any theory that doesn’t at least acknowledge, for example, that identity is constructed in and through language, as not fully fleshed out, based on primitive ontologies that don’t hold, and therefore not to be trusted.

I think that you can’t discount the usefulness of postmodernism theory just because it hasn’t found a way out of itself yet. I maintain a foolish Hegelian faith that it can and it will, and I am skeptical of any optimistic philosophy that does not work through—rather than around—this set of ideas that I believe have changed the face of the world. Mr. Butler seems to want us to go around postmodernism to whatever its next phase is (so do fundamentalists, in an entirely different way, but are their anxieties so far apart?). I hold out hope that we can move through it.

And may I posit, tentatively, that at least one exit strategy that is 100% a product of postmodernist theory is queerness? The idea of queer identity—which really boils down to the permission to be whomever and however you want to be, and that the only label that is allowed to even begin to contain you is your name (if you choose)— is the idea that brought me into this theoretical world to begin with and will continue to hold me in its sway. Queerness, for me, is THE truly libratory product of postmodernism, the exit strategy and the hope for the future.

Cf. Belize’s vision of heaven, delivered to a dying Roy Cohn in Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika.

Anyway, clearly I only understand 20% of what I’ve read and 3% of what I’ve written, but that is what blogs are for.

Another idea: I am increasingly beginning to conceive the idea of “realism and its double”— that all (successful? valuable?) executions of dramatic realism are simultaneously dependent on at least one other dramatic model. Reading this book, I wonder if one can simultaneously argue for a “non-realism and its double,” for don’t all conceptions of anti-reality depend on an idea of reality as much as atheism depends on an idea of God?

Now here’s an interesting object, from Amazon.com. Oh ye theorists of books as objects of culture, discuss:

We're incredibly excited to announce that Amazon has purchased J.K. Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard at an auction held by Sotheby’s in London. The book of five wizarding fairy tales, referenced in the last book of the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is one of only seven handmade copies in existence. The purchase price was £1,950,000, and Ms. Rowling is donating the proceeds to The Children's Voice campaign, a charity she co-founded to help improve the lives of institutionalized children across Europe.

The Tales of Beedle the Bard is extensively illustrated and handwritten by the bard herself--all 157 pages of it. It's bound in brown Moroccan leather and embellished with five hand-chased hallmarked sterling silver ornaments and mounted moonstones.

Two Worlds, Two Couches

Today I was sitting in the Yale Bookstore in a comfy couch reading my latest book for pleasure (there are so few of these in my life as a student): Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction. I was reading about art as politics, and about critiques of postmodernist art as politically ineffectual and preaching to the converted (arguments I only partially disavow). The book, as most of my books, implicitly assumed a liberal political agenda (can postmodernism be conservative?). At this point, I came up for air and turn to my right, where I saw another man, perhaps in his 50s, reading, with as much interest and focus as I had been reading, Day of Reckoning by Patrick J. Buchanan. To add to the surreality, Christmas music was playing in the background.

If I could have been a camera and photographed the two of us reading together, I think I would have had quite the artistic object on my hands. I’m not quite sure what it all means—certainly something about irony, America, and, indeed, postmodernism. What perhaps struck me most was how each of us are living in worlds entirely separate from each other. How could I have even begun to develop a relationship with this man? What could he possibly think about the homosexual reading about feminist performance art in the chair next to him? And yet, neither of us were bothering each other, and I imagine if I had smiled at him he would have smiled back to me, and it would have been genuine for both of us.

Maybe I’ll put it in a play someday.