Art Considered Aesthetically

Mike, over on ToP, has a couple pieces in a row that are worth a looksee (the linked piece, and the one that precedes it).

In it, he laments that Art is now considered largely in terms of the politics which surround the piece. Who was the artist, which marginalized groups, if any, does the artist belong to, which unsavory billionaire funded the work, and so on. Now, he's not wrong here, this is a limited way of looking at Art, and it's fairly modern, and it often kind of ignores the actual, you know, Art. Which is all very irritating.

Let us, as usual, back up.

Art, in the Olden Dayes, often straight up told stories. There are entire genres of Art that depict a series of scenes, that literally relate some sequence of events. The painting, etching, or photograph (Rejlander's "Two Ways of Life" for example), was a literal narrative, a telling of a story. Embedded in that, as often as not, is politics. These stories are rarely about Bobby's trip to the bakery; they're founding myths, moral tales, religious tracts. They take a position, and expound it.

Later, other Art may not have taken the form of literal narratives, but it was heavily coded. The prince's sword represented one thing, his hat another, and the ring a third thing. Not everyone could read the coding, but the people who couldn't were irrelevant. The intended audience could absolutely read the painting just fine.

Maybe not all art was like this, but at any rate it was perfectly normal for a piece of art to be like this.

Mid-nineteenth century is still trundling along to a good degree as photography gets started. We see these same notions getting pulled out of the closet to be re-used in the Victorian era. See also Pictorialism.

Even as photography branched out from there, we still see a lot of what we might broadly consider politics popping up. People's dress, manner, and background continued to reveal and to comment. Lewis Hine's pictures of child labor were pretty political. Should we consider them, judge them, without consideration of the political surroundings? We could, but if we conceive of them stripped of that context, they become something quite different and something quite lesser.

Now, I don't know what Mike would have to say to those photos. Possibly he would say that the politics is encoded inside the artwork itself, and that makes it OK. He does seem to be hewing to the "Art should stand on its own" school of thought. However he would stand, the truth is that the politics are not entirely containing in the pictures. The marks are there in the frame, but they refer to the world that surrounded the making of the picture. A painting that tells the story of Genesis is meaningless if you don't know the bible. Lewis Hine's photos are meaningless if you don't know that child labor was a thing. Minamata, without its text, is a bunch of snapshots of Japanese people and one truly sublime picture of someone getting a bath.

The politics of a piece of Art do not go away simply because you know them by heart.

I suspect Mike of wanting to treat art purely from an aesthetic perspective. He doesn't want to know about the politics, and he thinks they ought not matter.

I've learned not to care too much if the painting was made to become a tipped-in plate in a children's book or a paeon to the glory of the Medicis or if its creator was in such agonies that he cut off his ear.

Mike's claim to actually approach Art this way is absurd on the face of it. He knows perfectly well who Lorenzo de'Medici was, and what Lewis Hine was about. He cannot set these things aside. The fact that he can and does approach, say, the Caponigros' photos, which appear to be more or less bereft of politics, does not mean that he can set the history of child labor aside for Hine. He cannot. There is a reason Mike cites Medici instead of some nameless schlub from the same era who also had enough scratch to pay a painter.

This purely aesthetic approach to Art strikes me as very modern, and it is especially appealing to camera enthusiasts.

It is, I think, right about the time the Modernists arose that photography as a discipline, or at any rate a major branch of it, simply jettisoned meaning. There's a lot of stuff going on. We have Hartmann's plea for straight photography, which is orthogonal to politics and meaning, but does kind of crap on the Pictorialist parade of technique. Pictorialism's methods were all bound up with meaning, so there was I think a tendency toward dumping baby, bathwater, and everything else all at once. Along with fuzzy pictures and clumsily posed models, we can observe a reaction against allegory and symbolism.

Social commentary pops up, which can be shot straight but eschews allegory in favor of a gritty reality (Paul Strand, Lewis Hine), which is inherently political as noted. In parallel a new kind of Fine Art arose, drawing on some sort of mishmash of ideas like Impressionism, Expressionism, and Realism. Weston is trying to find the soul of some root or vegetable. Adams is trying to express his feelings about a mountain. A lot of lesser people are struggling just to make attractive pictures.

Modernists are, essentially, privileged. They can afford to just wander around taking pictures of diftwood and green peppers, because they live in an affluent society, and their hobby is relatively cheap and easy. They don't need to flatter people with their Art, they can take time from the portraiture storefront for "personal work" and so on. And so there is no need to shovel a bunch of politics into everything. They can afford to make things that are purely pretty.

In this modern era we have a more or less endless parade of people who are traveling great distances and going to a great deal of trouble mainly so they can test the image quality of their current setup. These are the natural heirs of the Modernists, what after all is more Modernist than the idea that more pixels and more dynamic range is somehow the ultimate expression of Art?

My biggest problem with Mike's position is not that he's personally dismissive of externalities surrounding pieces of Art, but that he's taking pretty clearly the stance that nobody else should consider these things either. We ought, all of us, evaluate a photograph purely on what's inside the frame. This strikes me as profoundly limiting.

Of course we should consider what is inside the frame. Perhaps we ought even to start there. But from there, why stop? If you like the thing, if it interests you, why should you limit your understanding of the thing to the contents of the frame?

More particularly, what on earth is a critic (or, really, anyone who wishes to play critic for even so limited an audience as themselves, which really amounts to taking a real interest in a piece) to do, if the edges of the frame stand as impenetrable walls? How tedious!

The most ironic point here is that while photographers tend to be very fond of the "Art should stand on its own!" school, most photographers are in fact terrible at examining the frame carefully. They glance at it, form a brief opinion, inspect a couple of details, and move on with their lives. Mike, while better than many, does not really get a pass here.

Coming up shortly, I will talk about another commentator who takes almost the opposite tack.