The Brooklyn Rail

The Irving Sandler Essay Series
Edited by Alexander Nagel

This essay series, generously supported by an anonymous donor, is named in honor of the art historian and critic Irving Sandler, whose broad spirit was epitomized in the question he would ask, with searching eyes, whenever he met someone or saw someone again: what are you thinking about? A space apart from the press of current events, the Sandler Essay invites artists and writers to reflect on what matters to them now, whether it is current or not, giving a chance for an “oblique contemporary” to come in view.

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Although a man marry he can never be only a husband. Besides being a money-making device and the one man that one woman can sleep with in legal purity without sin he may even be as well some other woman’s very personification of her abstract idea [of] sin, while to his employees he is nothing but their “Boss,” to his children only their “Father,” and to himself certainly something more complex.

—Louise Norton, “Buddha of the Bathroom”

Norton’s statement comes toward the start of the only sustained contemporary defense of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), the urinal submitted to the Society of Independent Artists exhibition in New York in April of 1917 as one of Duchamp’s new readymade sculptures, and just as quickly expelled. Norton’s words, almost certainly written with Duchamp’s approval, get at the heart of new insights the readymades offer into the very notion of art at stake in the Western tradition.

Artwork after artwork in Duchamp’s current survey at the Museum of Modern Art in New York expands the scope of what counts as “art” to include such things, most famously, as a urinal, a bicycle wheel, and a bottle rack, but also such non-things as a betting scheme for roulette, the fact of cross-dressing, and the shock effects of violent pornography. But rather than reading Duchamp’s expansion of art’s scope as a brilliantly radical and distinctly modern move, as most critics have, I think it spotlights a flexibility that’s been at the heart of Western art for some five centuries. Like Norton’s “man” who is husband, lover, boss, and father, depending on the changing functions he serves for others, so Duchamp’s “artworks” are only that, only “artworks,” at certain moments in their possible lives.

Six decades after Norton offered up her thoughts, they found an echo in a dictum from the philosopher Nelson Goodman: “The real question is not ‘What objects are (permanently) works of art?’ but ‘When is an object a work of art?’ ”¹ (My emphasis on that “when,” which I’ll keep coming back to in this essay.) Duchamp’s expanded practice has often been seen as an answer to Goodman’s question: “Whenever I, the artist, decide it is.” I think the recent writings of Alva Noë, a philosopher at the University of California, Berkeley, can help us cope with the vast range of art suggested in Duchamp’s practice—and, as I’ll suggest, in the entire post-Renaissance history of Western art—without having to resort to a definition that depends on the arbitrary will of the artist. (Or of the audience, in the definition offered by the “institutional theory of art” and often attributed to George Dickie—and sometimes to Duchamp.)

With (accidental) echoes of Norton’s functionalism, Noë argues that an object is an artwork “not as a result of its origins, or thanks to its intrinsic properties, or even thanks to its mere effects on us … but only thanks to what it lets us do.”² Against the anything-goes aesthetics normally imputed to Duchamp, Noë says that, when working as an artwork (and note once again that Goodmanian “when”), an object lets us “do” one particular thing: we can use it “to obscure or make problematic everything that needs ordinarily to be in place for there to be anything like straightforward recognition, comprehension, or perception.”³ Rather than solving or even addressing some particular problem (of self-expression, of ethics, of theology) or offering some distinct and definable experience (of beauty, of emotion, of form and color), when an object is functioning as art it puts all of those on the table, never choosing one of them above the others but asking us to imagine that it might provide any number of readings or solutions or effects. Noë says that, when encountering a work that qualifies as art—and we’ll get to the criteria for that in a minute—“you are bound to ask, ‘What is this?’ And crucially, when we are dealing with art, although there are many answers we can give to this question, there is no one answer that we can take for granted at the outset.”⁴

One art lover might imagine the object deserves attention for the visual pleasure it provides because of its “beauty.” Another might suggest that what matters is in fact the object’s skill at mimicking the look of things in the world, or at expressing its maker’s deepest feelings. Others might say that the object’s most important virtue lies in how it raises questions about what ought to count as art, or in how it opens a window into ancient religion.

But when an object is functioning as a work of art, what matters is not that it offers up any one of those single virtues, but that it affords us the chance to ask the open-ended question that got the whole process started: “What kind of thing is this, and what might I ask it to do for me?”

And the open-ended questioning inevitably triggered by art, in the very act of being art, is not there just for the pleasure this questioning admittedly brings, especially to the more talkative among us. Rather, it allows us, or compels us, to rethink and then re-rethink, ad infinitum, the world and our attitudes to its many parts. If, in its open-endedness, art causes confusion and even cognitive stress, that’s on purpose, Noë says, “so that we may reorganize ourselves in order to comprehend it”—reorganize, that is, our standard, habitual ways of thinking or being or acting, so as to achieve new insight into all of those habits we’ve fallen into, even in a field as local and parochial as picture-making and picture use.⁵

Another observation of Noë’s, which comes almost as an afterthought in his writings, is for me one of his most important claims: that the anti-habitual insights we garner when we deploy certain objects as works of art don’t arise in one person’s silent meditation on a work, but “in the setting of conversation and criticism,” as Noë puts it. “Aesthetic experience, insofar as it is a unitary phenomenon at all, is essentially a critical or discursive phenomenon—that is, it unfurls in a space of thought and talk, a space of criticism.”⁶

Noë’s insights contain the seeds of a new discursive theory of art, which would go more or less as follows. Art is at hand when an object is being deployed toward the very particular goal of triggering open-ended discourse. In a quite peculiar tradition that has flourished in the West since somewhere around 1500 CE—and in other places, at other times—objects get classified as “art” by virtue of their ability to trigger a series of discussions about what precisely we might want to do with them, or how they ought to be considered.⁷

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The term “art,” as commonly and carelessly used (even by professional art critics and historians) causes confusion and incoherence because it refers to many quite different, even incommensurate functions that something like a painting or sculpture might serve.

A Byzantine icon, for instance, might prove suited to calling down Christ’s favor, or decorating a Fifth Avenue mansion, or it might make the perfect cover for a historical novel. An African carving might be used to ward off evil spirits, or to brain someone who is trying to steal it. A portrait of Theodore Roosevelt by John Singer Sargent might help establish your blue blood, or it might sit in a vault as a nest-egg for your golden years. And all three of those objects might have one other important use that is different and independent from the ones cited so far: all three also offer that peculiarly discursive function that makes us describe them as “art.”

In some recent teaching, I’ve found it useful to speak about the varied “affordances” that an artifact offers, borrowing a term from perceptual theory that’s been influential in recent philosophy.⁸ Thus a Chippendale chair might make excellent firewood, in certain dire circumstances, and in others it might, unburnt, be perfect collateral for a loan. It might also be rather useful for sitting, as one of the chair’s “affordances”—one of the uses it offers up to humans, and maybe the central and most obvious one. Other kinds of objects—fallen logs, beach balls—might also have sitting among their affordances, even if other uses might seem far more central to their identities, most of the time. (For people with bad backs, however, a beach ball’s sit-ability might turn out to be its most important affordance.) And of course, once placed in a museum, the chair offers up the “discursive” affordance peculiar to it and other objects when we class them as “art.”

That “art” affordance, with its invitation to discourse, has become so powerful, appealing, and prestigious, at least in today’s post-industrial cultures, that artifacts like the Christian icon, the African carving, and the Sargent portrait continue to bear the title of “art” even at those moments in their lives when their affordances as ritual objects, or weapons, or investment vehicles, are the only ones in play. Through a kind of linguistic contagion, the word for the object in its affordance as discursive “art” comes to be the standard label for the object itself, regardless of what affordance its users might be attending to. Just as we’d never be tempted to confuse the word “ball,” used to describe a bouncing toy, and the “ball” that’s a baseball pitch thrown outside the strike zone, so we need to avoid confusion between “art” when it’s used, say, for investment and praying, and “art” when it’s used to trigger talk and thought.

Philosophers’ longstanding debates about art’s nature and definitions may have their roots in nothing more than an accident of nomenclature. It’s just a mistake to think that any object is inherently—even ontologically, as some claim—a “work of art.” Its status as that is entirely dependent on the use, the specifically discursive use, the object is put to. According to this model, a theory or philosophy of art thus only has to account for an object’s discursive affordance; separate theories and philosophies—of religion, of property and conflict, of economics—would be needed to fully account for that same object in its non-discursive roles.

That is, “art” picks out an object when it’s performing a specific function, the way a noun like “commodity” picks out any kind of entity at all, from potatoes to your Facebook likes, so long as it is fulfilling a market function. Or rather, it may simply be wrong to think of “art” as a noun, picking out one kind of object from among others: it ought to be thought of as a verb, an action that we take on an object, in fact on any kind of object at all. We “art” something by pulling it into an unending web of discourse. And sometimes, when we do that, we put pressure on other functions the object might serve: to the extent that an icon becomes the subject of discussion in its own right as a work of art, it is arguably being diverted from its religious function.

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In actual practice, we do use the word “art” to refer to an object when it’s not serving a discursive function: we happily say, “the patron of the altarpiece used that work of art to call down God’s favor,” or, “she put her precious art in a vault as she waited for it to appreciate in value.” So it would be safer to find a narrower label that’s exclusive to an object when it’s doing its discursive work. The capitalized term “Discursive Art” might do that job, shortened to “D.Art” for ease of use. (With a nod to Duchamp, who gave the title “Dart Object” [Objet-Dard] to an almost random, vaguely phallic scrap of plaster that he cast in bronze and declared a work of art—or of what I’m now calling D.Art.)

An earlier term like fine art, which accounted for some of the same mostly discursive objects, tended to limit what got included under it according to a hierarchy of status and power. Certain things were classed as fine art and others were not. D.Art avoids that harm, by refusing to count in any way as a “category” that has the capacity to include some objects and excludes others. Instead, Discursive Art is defined by a function that any artifact at all can provide.

Discursive Art is distinguished from a usefully broad term like “visual culture” not because one involves high objects and the other low—an oil painting versus a quilt; a Federico Fellini movie versus a Marvel movie—but because only D.Art necessarily involves taking a discursive tack on any object you choose. The relevant distinction is between, on the one hand, D.Art as a continuing inquiry into possible meanings and uses, and, on the other, an artifact’s easy absorption into one of any number of accepted functional categories within the range of quite normal uses that artifacts can perform: pleasing gods, making money, whiling away a Saturday evening.

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Audiences usually choose to use an object discursively on the basis of some hint, however subtle and social, that that option is available, and appropriate. In an example given by the philosopher Arthur C. Danto, when you hear a monologue in a theater, you give it a very different kind of attention than if it came from the lips of a friend on the street; it’s the same kind of “artistic” attention you give Warhol’s Brillo Boxes (1964) on a plinth in a museum versus in a supermarket store room. An object’s affordance as D.Art is available to us as a property that emerges from an object’s nature when coupled to its setting, when coupled to our peculiar cultural need for the discursive. But where Danto felt that the discourse involved in art (or D.Art, in my telling) was peculiarly philosophical, I’m arguing that it can take any form at all, and address any topic at all, so long as it preserves the open-endedness underlined by Noë and the cognitive value and virtues Noë finds in discourse.⁹

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A false distinction between art and non-art hasn’t only confused discussions of conceptual projects like Duchamp’s. It also looms in the many debates about when politically-themed “art” should count as “mere” propaganda, but the vexation disappears in the discursive theory: a piece is propaganda when—that word again—it is being used to effect some delimited political goal; that very same piece is art when we’re putting all its possible functions on the table, contemplating its political meanings even as we imagine that we might, at another moment, choose to attend to formal or expressive effects that leave politics quite to one side. Similar vexations can be made to disappear by recognizing the discursive potential of ceramics, or garments, or any other objects whose “art” status gets called into question, even as we recognize the non-discursive uses we can put them to.

The discourse that objects trigger might be literally that—verbal or written attempts to account for the source of their interest. Those have survived in vast numbers of texts from the last five centuries, which of course represent a miniscule fraction of all the conversations we’ve had about works of art. But such “conversations” can also consist in material responses: a series of subsequent artworks that respond to any of the range of issues and problems and contents spotted in the original work. Picasso, for example, might use an African carving as an inherently contrarian source—standing “against everything,” as he put it; a century later, a similar carving, portrayed in a painting by Kerry James Marshall, might stand for the relationship between African Americans and their centuries-old roots in Africa, as well as for how Picasso’s art fits into that scheme. And neither artist’s use of the carving has anything to do with the quite different ritual affordance the carving—not yet “art,” in the peculiarly Western, discursive, “D.Artistic” sense—might have presented to its original maker and users.

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An object doesn’t proffer all its possible affordances at every moment in its life, any more than Norton’s “man” is functioning as a lover when he’s at work, or (hopefully) as a boss in the bedroom. I believe that we can spot a particular moment when large numbers of European artifacts began to go discursive. Around 1500, paintings that had been created for ritual use in churches began, for the first time, to assume a second role, offering an invitation to open-ended discourse as they got transferred to collectors’ walls.¹⁰ Simultaneously, Renaissance paintings began to be created with such peculiar subjects and features that they could only have been intended to get viewers wondering about their meanings and functions—they were, that is, conceived and constructed from the beginning to function as D.Art.

But from those beginnings until today, every object deployed or created as D.Art has also preserved non-art affordances. Even at the moment of the birth of Western art as a discursive practice, a Renaissance altarpiece could function, and for that matter can continue to function, as a marker of its owner’s wealth and prestige, or even as a sacral appliance; a Duchamp readymade, for all its exemplary status and influence as D.Art, also functions as a decent store of wealth, the porcelain equivalent of Fort Knox gold bar. (In fact, his late, editioned urinals have come to trade for almost exactly the worth of such a bar.)

Duchamp’s Fountain, with its strange, simultaneous status as non-art and art, is not in fact uniquely and bizarrely modern, as is often claimed. Any Renaissance altarpiece has the same double nature. A urinal is used both for peeing and for art-talk; an altarpiece is used both for praying and for art-talk. Every object or action is subject to a near infinitude of uses that are not D.Artistic, but also, always, to talk and thought and another creator’s new riff.

Norton’s “man” might be husband, sinner, boss and father. But she and her friend Duchamp know that he might also count as that “something more complex” called art.