EXCERPTS FROM RECENT WRITINGS

Thinking with Things / Page 2

In a brief but succinct essay, Thomas McEvilley summarized the various current definitions of art:

Formal – based on beauty of form (which does not appeal to him because it is purely aestheticizing “design”).

Content – based on the idea that art is expression and not form, (closer to what McEvilley and Arthur Danto see as “art” because it is better at including nonaesthetic art).

Designation – art is whatever people designate as art, regardless of form and content – and it keeps changing. This is a functional and sociocultural definition.

Honorific – calling something “art” is a way of designating its importance and value and has no other meaning.

Nowhere does the contemporary critic McEvilley question the value of the term “art” in either usage or scholarship.
The anthropologist Lewis Binford avoids the term “art” entirely. For him all objects are “material culture,” but he distinguishes some as “idiotechnic” and “sociotechnic” in contrast to utilitarian ones. He is implicitly accepting the idea of a definition of art based on content and function but not necessarily of form. Can one refer only to objects that have primarily an ideological or social function as art? Art there not socially and ideologically important things that are not “art”? Moreover, the Western eye often finds beauties among utilitarian objects, if their forms happen to please it. There is simply no avoiding this eye that has sorted through the world’s things and found artistic treasures hither and yon.

Suppose one were to give up the concept of art prior to the eighteenth century and consider only later Western “art,” created in the contexts of an ideology of “art” art. How does one deal with the past? We have become accustomed to referring to Byzantine icons and Egyptian statues as art – can we unlearn this and see them another way? Art appears to be a convenient universal term. And it all is “artistic,” after all, isn’t it? It has style, an aesthetic, forms, functions, and meaning. But is it art just because it uses a formal language? Cars use a formal language and we do not consider them art – although as industrial design they are slowly moving into the realm of art as well. There is, after all, a helicopter in the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Most people have an aesthetic but not necessarily a concept of art. How is it possible to talk about things without packaging them in the Western conception of art? Some way that allows for native classification as well as comparative and universalizing statements. Does the concept of art help or hinder discussion about things? Is the definition of art a false problem? It is time to take apart the neat little art-box that has confined our discourse for so long.

NOT ART

What is art not? The Bena Luluwa of the Democratic Republic of the Congo used to make wooden figures of men and women with elaborate scarification designs. Made between the 1890s and the 1920s, many of these figures are now in our museums. For the same purposes the Bena Luluwa now keep magic substances in our cigar boxes and other foreign containers. Now if these cigar boxes were made by Marcel Duchamp, we would collect them. As they are Bena Luluwa, we do not consider them art. One of the Western rules in selecting art from a non-Western or tribal context is that it should be well crafted and indicate skill and workmanship, precision of cutting, and polish. The crudeness allowable in modern and contemporary art is not allowed in primitive art. Primitive art has to be refined to be art. In primitive art crudeness is just crudeness. In modern art crudeness has meaning. You figure it out. Michael Fried concludes that non-art is that which avoids theatricality, although theatricality is hard to avoid.

At nineteenth-century potlatches, the Northwest Coast Kwakiutl people gave away beautifully made things, also now in museums. Today, they give away plastic baskets filled with dime-store pots and pans and towels. Obviously, we do not consider this appropriation of Western mass-produced goods to be art, although if a Western artist put them in a gallery installation, we very well might. Certainly a contemporary Kwakiutl artist could show them in a gallery as modern native art, although the Western buyers of native art are more likely to purchase prints with traditional designs.

Our decision of what is art is not necessarily based on its appearance or function, but rather on a complex designation given usually by the West or Asia as to what constitutes aesthetic creativity at a given level of culture or context. Tourist art is not art because it is inauthentic and made for sale to undiscriminating outside buyers. Native groups from the Inuit (Eskimo) to the Australian Aborigines have been lured to make “art” to produce cash. The Inuit sculptures have a dated 1950s–1960s look and are of little interest at the moment, relegated to the history of oddities. The large, modernistic Aboriginal acrylic paintings have become a big success recently with major exhibitions and collections. Their style, form, and medium are largely Western, but an Aboriginal “story” goes along with each. Whose “art” is it? One was offered to a New York museum as modern art. The curator rejected it as inappropriate and it was then offered to the Africa/Oceania/American (Primitive) Department of the same museum. That curator rejected it for not being traditional. The classification system of the museum could not cope with this hybrid, even though it looked like “art.”

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ESTHER PASZTORY
Lisa and Bernard Selz Professor
in Pre-Columbian Art History
and Archaeology

Department of Art History
and Archaeology
814 Schermerhorn Hall

Columbia University
in the City of New York

ep9@columbia.edu
(212) 854-5681