On a painting at my old job
What is in an ugly painting?
So far, it seems like I am setting a very bad precedence for the length of these essays. I really only want them to be around 1500 words, but this one ended up almost twice as long. I made my upload schedule so that I could easily spend one or two weeks not worrying about these essays and still comfortably get them done. Last month required me to do that, but when it came time to write this, I came down with another horrible case of the flu. So this is late and cobbled together from a few different notes. I want to attempt to make some of my intuitions about art explicit, and to systematize them in a philosophical vocabulary that I am familiar with, namely process philosophy. Not only do I believe that this will lead to some interesting philosophical discussions down the line, but also that it is a good fit for how people who are skilled in talking about art (or aesthetic experience in general) actually do so. My aim is not to do what they do, but to approach it like a philosopher, to try to put to theory what is going on “under the hood”. If you want to read a piece of writing by the kind of person that I am describing here, I recommend this one by a friend of mine, who has inspired me to write this essay.
In the conference room at my old job, there hung a painting approximately two meters by one meter in size. I do not know the name of it, for it was purchased by the company as a show of neighborly good-will, since the artist’s studio was next door, and we could hear each other working through the wired-shut doors that separated our workspaces. As far as I could tell, it was acrylic on a painted white canvas. The subject of the image consisted of paint in vibrant colors, which had been dripped or sprayed onto the surface of the canvas, eschewing pictorial representation in something like the style of a Jackson Pollock painting. Just like a Pollock, it is clear that the aesthetic value of the painting is to be found in the materiality of the paint and the playful dynamism of the way it was applied, not despite its lack of a conventional representative motif but precisely because of this lack. The painting was a frequent object of derision during lunch-time. None of my co-workers had much of any experience critiquing art, so their remarks mainly centered around how crude or garish it looked (even my child could have done that). Nevertheless, the person giving the critique would often themself follow it up by saying that they probably just don’t understand art, that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, and that if there is some good reason why their child could not have painted something of equal value, then they will probably never understand it.
Such a scene should be familiar to anyone whose daily life plays out in a corporate setting. And what you are likely to find in many companies are exactly such artworks: not traditionally representational, dynamic, and colorful. I think that this to some extent carries over to the kind of photography, which has a focus on fine details in architecture or the natural world, that you also often see in large prints in such settings. But why do companies tend to gravitate towards art with such a focus on this specific kind of materiality? A lot of abstract expressionist artworks try to present emotions that are often quite violent or troubling, and, although not explicit in the pieces themselves, were often part of broader attempts to create alternative kinds of living, where people could act and create freely and communally apart from capitalist needs. Corporations seem to not only be unaffected by this ingression of emotional force, but to require it.
In the philosophy of art, we almost exclusively focus on the criteria of success for producing something with aesthetic value, but the structural approach offered by process philosophy lets us get clear on these by looking at cases of aesthetic failure. I believe that the painting at my old job is such a case, and that we can see a specific structure in it, namely what Graham Harman has developed as the concepts of undermining, overmining, and duomining. For him, all of these concepts refer to modes of reduction, informally “downward”, “upward”, and both “downward” and “upward” at the same time, respectively. Harman started the movement of Object-Oriented Ontology, which is very interesting and closely related to process philosophy - which is why I will not spend too much space on it now. Harman uses these concepts to describe how we neglect the existence of objects by making it out as the simple aggregate of its parts, as the spurious ground of a network of effects in a system, or by connecting the lower level constituents with the systemic effects, and thus glossing over it entirely. These can be given a formulation in process ontological terms, and thereby be shifted to describe how the dynamic structure of the encounter with an artwork fails to function.
Naïve and process aesthetics
Process aesthetics broadly takes two different fields and treat them as two sides of the same coin. These are philosophical aesthetics, which is the study of the experience of beauty, and philosophy of art, which is the study of the production and function of art. Process aesthetics can to a large degree lump these together, since artworks and perceptual experience are both kinds of processes. In particular, it is the interaction between the artwork and the subject that is the principal concern, and process aesthetics can study this as a pure event with a characteristic structure. The aims of both fields thus blend together around the question “how is beauty produced?” The interaction between (human made) art and a (human) subject is thus a special case of this question, although its centrality can be challenged on both sides of the interaction: the artificiality of art only matters insofar as it is understood as such, and the possibility of non-human perception is a standard feature of process philosophy. The language of process thought is mereology, the formal study of the part-whole or composition relation. There are different variants of this, and for reasons I can’t be arsed to get into here, the preferred version is a non-classical one, where we ditch transitivity. This means that, if C is part of B and B is part of A, we are not necessarily allowed to infer that C is part of A. This allows us to model the multiple realizability of processes, i.e. that one and the same process can come about in distinctly different ways. By using this language about experience, we are saying that the different parts of experiences stand in a compositional relation to each other, meaning that some form the parts of others, which could not exist if it was not for their parts. I am taking experience in a loose sense here, meaning both sense-perception, as well as reflections induced by the encounter and the linguistically mediated associations that this brings about. For the process philosopher, these can all be considered sense-events brought about by the meeting with the artwork.
I want to lay out what I take to be the standard view of aesthetic meaning. This is in no way based on any empirical evidence or established theory of high repute, but instead just on the vibes that I have picked up talking to random people about art. Such is the privilege of the unpaid blogger. It works according to two principles: Transitive compositionality and definite stratification. Transitive compositionality is the idea that the meaning of an artwork is built up like a layer cake, that there are fairly simple impressions at the bottom, such as colors and shapes, and that, in the style of a middle school book report, these can then be analyzed as composing recognizable objects. We can then infer the relations between these objects, and from the structure of these relations interpret themes and a message from the artwork as a whole, working our way up from the smallest parts, which are all disparate, to one grand, collected sense that stands as the definitive meaning of the piece. The transitive part means that, as we move up in steps from the smaller to the more collected, we are still giving meaning to the smallest bits of the artwork, so that both the medial relations as well as the higher-order themes are taken to be the meanings of the smallest parts.
Definite stratification is in part what avoids the mereologically nihilistic reduction of higher level meaning to the mere structure of the lowest level sensible parts of the artworks, and in part what ensures the legitimacy of higher level, farther reaching, and sometimes counter-intuitive interpretive conclusions. Stratification is the separation of discursive or semiotic relations into different distinct layers, each with their own codes and territories, lying one on top of the other. I call this definite stratification because the commonly held version of such an approach to art maintains that the strata are pre-defined and clearly delineated, thus coming pre-installed with legitimacy through their (supposed) universal acceptance. We thus build meaning in stories, being careful no to mix our discourses for fear of muddying the waters. Again, this an entirely spurious construction founded on my own experiences and on how art and literature was taught to me at school. I do not claim that this is the most common view, nor that it is the most intuitive view. It is rather, like “dogmatic rationalism” or “sceptical empiricism”, a view that is meant to act as a counter point to the view that I want to present. I do think that most people, if you forced them to give an account of how art analysis works, would come up with something like it.
My view opposes these two. First, as has already been stated, I disagree that the structure of experience is transitive. The parts of experience can come about in many different ways, and they can loop and self-constitute in many strange configurations. Furthermore, I do not believe that there are definite strata of experience. We presume in our everyday lives that there are different strata, such as the personal, the biological, the social, the political, the scientific, etc. However, upon reflection we should quickly become aware of how entities from one stratum can have meaning in a completely different one. Chemicals and organisms can have political significance: Lithium, microplastics, and coronavira are all examples of such entities which are far from politically “innocent.” Likewise, social and political decisions are not confined to their own domains, but rather show themselves biochemically in individuals. Thinking with process philosophy means considering any locus of significant change as meaningfully real, and being equipped with the conceptual apparatus to describe the different kinds of processes among the multitude of entities that such an attitude ratifies. Whether something should be considered meaningful is not a case of whether it is of the correct kind, of it being of a sufficient complexity, of it being sufficiently removed from “mute and dumb matter”, or any other such desideratum apart from whether it is productive. Process philosophy proliferates the amount of entities to be considered, but it also comes with a built in modulator. Not only are most of the processes in existence not really interesting enough to spend any time on, if they don’t affect much of any change in other processes, they are in a meaningful sense less real. This is not true for all variants of process thinking, but some, such as A. N. Whitehead’s metaphysics of actual occasions, can be considered as coming with a graded notion of reality. In the realm of aesthetics, at least, I believe that this matches how we actually experience.
The duomining of corporate art
With this, we can make more precise sense of Harman’s triad of concepts in terms of process relations. If meaning is always produced in the transformation of information in an event, aesthetic failure is when no new information is produced. Reduction means that the sense of an event can be translated bit for bit into the structure of other events, so that there is nothing new in this particular event. Undermining is when a process is reduced by the processes that constitute it, overmining is when a process is reduced by the processes that it constitutes, and duomining is when a process is reduced by the relation between its constituents and what it constitutes (it seems like there is an intermediary between these, but this appearance is duomined when nothing new is produced between them). When art fails, it does so by failing to produce a novel experience, and we can describe this in these three ways. To close this essay out, I want to consider how abstract expressionist art is susceptible to failure in the context of modern, neoliberal capitalism.
Here’s a fun piece of art-history trivia: in the post-war period, most of the major artists that ended up being known as the abstract expressionists were bankrolled and promoted by the CIA! The great artistic movement of the USSR was the school of “socialist realism,” the portrayal of an idealized version of life according to Soviet party doctrine. To counter this on the global stage, works from several newer artists were bought and toured around Europe in the exhibition “Advancing American Art” by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, a covert branch of the CIA. Around the world, the CCF created magazines devoted to art criticism in opposition to the typically more soviet-friendly left-wing journals. Here is another fun history tidbit: the Danish branch of this was the journal Perspektiv, which was headed by Henning Fonsmark for a decade, after which he created the liberal-conservative weekly publication Weekendavisen, and then went on to have a career as an executive in several liberal newspapers spanning half a century, before helping to found the liberal thinktank CEPOS in 2005. What the CIA found valuable in abstract expressionism was precisely the affect of playful creativity that its most emblematic works evoke. This worked tremendously as a publicity campaign, but some of the artists resented being put to use in the propaganda machinery of the CIA - the reduction of their art to its role as a token of “cultural freedom” is a textbook case of overmining. My claim is that much of the art that is bought up by companies today suffers a similar fate.
The attempts of abstract expressionist art in corporate settings to evoke an image of a different way of life is duomined by the clash of its liberal approach to materiality and the instrumentalization that the setting imposes. The painting at my old job strove to picture a sense of free play, but it could only envisage it as the joy of pure (infantile, Battaillean) expenditure, of the liberation from any structure whatsoever (Mark Fisher criticized something similar under the moniker of neo-anarchism). However, this is not in and of itself enough to deem the painting a failure - we should not (yet) dismiss artworks on the validity of their ideas. The painting at my old job fails because it does not even succeed at evoking this simple affect, and this failure occurs due to the interaction between its lower level (material) constitution and its institutional instrumentalization. The setting of the corporate meeting room blocks any association to leisurely or playful activity. By this, I am not saying that the painting is inconsistent - many fine artworks work precisely by being inconsistent - but that it fails to be anything at all. Its constitution and its installation interfere destructively, rendering it mostly non-sensical. Consider that we do not need to refer to any intention on behalf of the artist. The failure to produce an affect is a functional failure, and, on my view, functions are both impersonal and ateleological.