The Brooklyn Rail

I’ve lately been looking with some friends at William Kentridge’s Six Drawing Lessons (2014), Tom Burr’s Torrington Project (2025), and various writings by Stanley Cavell. Two early Cavell essays that I hadn’t looked at in a long time have particularly struck me. Both explore various texts by Søren Kierkegaard, most notably The Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) and what became elements of The Book on Adler (1872), and both worry deeply at what it means to be—to speak or to be heard—as a Christian within what is already given as Christendom.

The first Cavell essay, “Existentialism and Analytical Philosophy,” eventually collected in Themes Out of School (1984), proposes ways of thinking “convention” as at once natural and imposed (as, for example, with the incest taboo, or as when Michael Fried writes of “the primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld”); the second, “Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation,” included in Must We Mean What We Say? (1969), produces the assertion that “our serious art is produced under conditions which Kierkegaard announces as those of apostleship, not those of genius.” The modern artist, Cavell says, “is pulled out of the ranks by a message which he must, on pain of loss of self, communicate.” Which is to say that the message is not in the first instance original with the artist; rather, the mark itself is originary, beheld and remarked in the same necessarily divided moment in the same equally necessary and divided space—studio, gallery, copyist’s classroom.

The two thoughts here are clearly tightly intertwined. The primordial convention that paintings are made to be beheld places the naturalness of vision at odds with itself—asking us, for example, to grasp a certain beholding amid and somehow over and against the sheer visibility of things, which is to say that such beholding requires the work’s overcoming of its seamless continuity with what we already see. The “loss of audience” that appears so characteristic of modern art would then be a condition for that art’s emergence—not something to which it seeks a solution but a concomitant of it and, almost, an aspiration. As Cavell puts it in the essay “Music Discomposed,” which follows hard upon the Kierkegaard essay in Must We Mean?, “The procedures and problems it now seems necessary to composers to employ and confront to make a work of art at all themselves insure that their work will not be comprehensible to an audience.” With this, a conversation with Fried is effectively joined, and it becomes for us now a matter of considering that dialogue anew. Take this, from “Excursus: Some Modernist Painting,” from Cavell’s The World Viewed (1971):

What does it mean to say that a painter discovers, by painting, something true of all paintings, something that everybody has always known is true of paintings generally? Is it a case of something hidden in unconsciousness becoming conscious? It is like something hidden in consciousness declaring itself. The mode is revelation. I follow Michael Fried in speaking of this fact of modernist painting as an acknowledging of its conditions. Any painting might teach you what is true of all painting. A modernist painting teaches you this by acknowledgment—which means that responding to it must itself have the form of accepting it as a painting, or rejecting it.

Can we now hear in this passage not just some more or less familiar bits of modernist criticism, but also the shafts of Kierkegaard that cut through it: certainly the word “revelation,” but also the notion of acknowledgment that demands the revelation be accepted or rejected (that is what a revelation is), as well as the closely related notion of declaring and the distinctly psychoanalytic thought that something hidden in consciousness—in, for example, its wordedness—might stand in need of declaration?

If we can, then we may want to go on by saying that every touch on a surface is, in its iterability, an instituting, although it is not immediately the institution of anything in particular. What finds its origin there is not always art; it might, for example, be something we will finish by calling “writing” or “mathematics” or “astronomy,” and which has, so to speak, no good present tense name of its own—no name outside the institutions and practices it enables and finds itself among. And it may not be anything at all, just something on the wall, uncountable, visible but unremarked and so not yet a mark—devoid of institution. The worn stone of the stair, the smudged hand on the cave wall.

What we are starting to pose here (in Torrington, in Johannesburg, on the road, or in the cave) are, I think, the fundamental terms of art as a set of practices for which medium might come to matter, but also might not.