TRAGEDY AT THE ROOT OF SCIENCE
1. some questions
This paper attempts to cast some new light on the question of art’s relation to
knowledge. The pedagogical (e.g. Brophy, 1998, pp. 201-243), epistemological
(e.g. Carter 2005), and even economic (e.g. Haseman and Jaaniste, 2008, pp. 2326) significance of art’s contribution to knowledge has been much discussed
over the last decade. One of the key sticking points, as far as higher degree
research goes, has been the question of whether i) an artwork conveys
knowledge in its own right, or ii) whether one needs an exegetical supplement to
convey the knowledge the work betokens, which might include the knowledge
that arose in the process of the work’s production (e.g. Vellar 2003; Fletcher and
Mann, Eds. 2004).i I confess that I am not a fan of either of these positions: that
there’s knowledge in the work for all to see; that there’s knowledge to be
extracted from the work for all to see. What both positions foreclose is the
possibility that work in the arts might be less concerned with the construction of
knowledge than the framing of questions. I’m going to argue just this. The thing
that modern art — the sort of art capitalist societies produceii — has to offer the
research process is not a knowledge report, but rather an opportunity for the
work’s reader or viewer to construct one. Art takes the form of a research
question.
I’ve said I want to shed new light on the question of art’s contribution to
knowledge but actually the position I’ve just tabled is a very old one. What I
really want to do is brush off an old lamp and light it. I’m referring to Aristotle’s
Poetics (Aristotle 1995; 1997), a text which has received surprisingly little airing
in this debate. We forget to our peril the similarity between Aristotle’s situation
and our own. For Aristotle was labouring in the shadow of Plato’s extraordinarily
powerful repudiation of art’s status as knowledge (e.g. Plato 1925). The answer
Aristotle constructed in response to his master is embodied in the Poetics
(Halliwell 1997, p.1). What’s striking about Aristotle’s answer is that it has
nothing to do with treating an artwork as a knowledge report, whether explicitly,
implicitly or otherwise, nor does it have anything to do with any ‘practice-led’
knowledge an artist might discover in the process of trying to communicate his
or her ideas through the resistant material form of the work (pace Carter 2005,
pp. 1-15). To the contrary, it’s all about how the work generates inquiry and
investigation in others. It’s all about art’s status as research question, its
tendency to confound its audience and thus instil in them a desire to make sense
of just what has been so confounding. It creates scientists of us.
In what follows, I’ll set forth something of Aristotle’s theory of the classical art of
Greek tragedy, the art form which he believes most embodies the function of
precipitating inquiry in others. I’ll show how Aristotle conceived of the matter in
relation to the 4th century BC stage, and I’ll argue for the relevance of his views to
the sort of art we ourselves produce in our function as contemporary artists /
researchers.
1
But before I do any of that historical or theoretical work, I want to bring to your
mind just what it is that we’re arguing over. I don’t want this to become, as we
Australians say, a dry argument. To this end, I’m going to flick through the pages
of ART NOW vol.2 (Grosenick 2008) and ART NOW vol.3 (Holzwarth, 2008), both
of which were published by Taschen in 2008. Where possible I’ll include web
links to these images, or to alternate versions of them. I’ll flick through a few
other catalogues and websites that concern artists represented in these two
volumes too. Forget about Aristotle for the moment, forget about inquiry and
forget about knowledge. This is what people are producing right now:iii
Blind Richard Attenborough (Black Eyes), Blind John Hurt (White Eyes), Blind
Carol Lonely (White Eyes) and Blind Talullah Bankhead (Silver Eyes) comprise
four works from Douglas Gordon’s 2004 series 100 Blind Stars. Each features a
publicity still of a 40s or 50s Hollywood star, though the eyes have been excised
and replaced with mirrored black or white paper (Grosenick, 2008, p.107).
http://www.pedesign.co.uk/work/ngs/douglasgordon/highlights_4.html
Jonathan Hernandez’ Estado Vacioso (2007) is a panel of 48 photos, cut from
newspapers, of contemporary politicians, athletes, a conductor and various other
iconographic figures. From each photo Hernandez has excised a perfect circle.
This excision appears as a ball in the hands, hovering around the head, or
spinning on the pointing finger of Perez Musharraf, Mahmoud Ahmadinajad,
Tony Blair, a basketballer photographed from behind, an impassioned Colin
Powell at the UN. The translation is ‘Vacant State’ (Holzwarth, 2008, p.234).
http://www.taschen.com/lookinside/04431/index.htm
[enter ‘234’ in the bottom menu]
For the Love of God (2007), by Damien Hirst, is a platinum cast, with real human
teeth, of a human skull covered with 8601 flawless diamonds (Holzwarth, 2008,
p.249).
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x25f5k_damien-hirst-50m-diamondskull_news
Santiago Sierra’s 10 inch Line Shaved on the Heads of Two Junkies who Received a
Shot of Heroin as Payment (2000) is the photographic documentation of the
transaction referred to in the work’s title. The junkies are photographed from
behind, in tatty t-shirts, head to head so that the line will add up.
http://www.santiago-sierra.com/200011_1024.php
Marlene Dumas paints from Polaroids and newspaper photos. Her Chloriosis
(Love Sick) is a 1994 work featuring 24 sheets of paper with ink, gouache and
polymer paints. Each sheet presents a face, foreshortened to an awkward
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closeness, so much so that you can’t work out if the subject is naked or clothed.
The features range from anaemic to enraptured (Dumas, 2008, pp.100-101).
http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=37856
Visitors entering the Guggenheim Museum of Modern Art, to visit Cai GuoQiang’s retrospective I Want to Believe in 2008, were met in the precipitous
white foyer by an installation of nine new automobiles cascading in a chain from
the ceiling. Sequenced multi-channel light tubes projected in all directions from
each vehicle, pulsating on and off as if to register the impact. (Holzwarth, 2008,
p.85).
http://pastexhibitions.guggenheim.org/cai/cai.html
A detail of an untitled installation by Robert Gober features the body of a gaunt
Jesus, in crucifixion (2005). He has no head. The customary wound appears
incised below his right breast. It is curiously free of blood. His loin cloth is neat
and unrevealing. Where his nipples would be, Gober has installed two gushing
streams of water, which fountain from Christ’s breasts and into the surrounding
space (Grosenick, 2008, p.103).
http://www.matthewmarks.com/index.php?n=1&a=141&i=841
[click on image for close-up]
Couple was painted in oils over 2003-4 by Cecily Brown. At 228.4 x 203.2 cms,
this massive canvas is at once an abstraction of a forest of greenery and silver
trees, and a figuration of the couple within it. One appears naked, the other
seems to be in red. Each embraces an indeterminacy (Grosenick, 2008, p.43).
http://www.mfa.org/exhibitions/sub.asp?key=15&subkey=2591
Tim Noble and Sue Webster’s Puny Undernourished Kid & Girlfriend from Hell
(2004) is a work in neon, in two parts, The puny undernourished kid looks like a
cartoon version of Noble, with love and hate tattoos on the knuckles, up and
down arrows on the arms, and the following slogans over the rest of his body:
victim, so what?, sod off, stupid cunt, wanker, fuck up, nasty man, piss off. The
girlfriend from hell has take my tits, cunt face, dick, G-B-H, fuck everything and
angry bitch (Grosenick, 2008, p.220).
http://www.saatchigallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/noble_webster_puny_undernourished_kid.htm
http://www.saatchigallery.co.uk/artists/artpages/noble_webster_girlfriend_from_hell.htm
Glen Brown’s Sex (2003) is an oil portrait of a man in ruff. The background is
totally black. He looks like a Rembrandt, though his face has the elliptical
3
dissymmetry of an El Greco saint on the way up. His face is in varying tones of
congealed blue (Grosenick, 2008, p.47).
http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Artwork_Detail.asp?G=&gid=414&which=&Vi
ewArtistBy=&aid=3162&wid=423887347&source=artist&rta=http://www.artn
et.com
Deepak Chopra is 2 metres high and 8 metres long. A 2003 oil on canvas by
Richard Phillips, the painting is based on the relaxation entrepreneur’s own
advertising portraits, only here are seven of him, lined up head to head and
caught on the angle, each an identical images of openness and success
(Grosenick, 2008, p.252).
http://www.artnet.com/artwork/423780359/140527/deepak-chopra.html
From October 2003 to March 2004, the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern became
the site of Olafur Eliasson’s The Weather Project. A spherical arrangement of
mono-frequency lamps was installed just below the ceiling, which itself was
covered in foil to mirror everything below. A haze machine and the impossibly
yellow-red glow of the sphere above flooded the Hall like a ‘giant mock solarium’
(Grosenick, 2008, p.86). Documentation shows viewers become participants as
they lie on their backs on the floor of the hall and appear reflected in the ceiling
above.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dFOphuPqMo
2. the plot of Oedipus Rex
These are the sort of artworks contemporary capitalist societies produce. How
could they possibly relate to Aristotle’s poetics? How, given that almost nothing
of what I’ve just described or shown to you would have been imaginable when
Aristotle was writing in the 4th century BC? Classical art simply wasn’t produced
this way. Well, that’s not entirely true. I’m going to argue that Aristotle’s Poetics
offers the most cogent theory we have for just what is going on in works like
these, not to mention modern poetry, high-art cinema, theatre, dance and so on.
Specifically, it has most to tell us about how such works implicate the emotions
of their viewers to engender shock, wonder and — at length — knowledge. Such
works do so by taking the form of a question, a question addressed to their
respective audiences. What the artist learnt in the process of producing any one
of them is comparatively irrelevant. Their most significant epistemological
function is to induce those who encounter them to think.
But more on that later. For the moment, let’s focus on the Poetics’ classical
relevance. I’m going to recount the plot of a play you might have seen:
Oedipus is the King of Thebes. A plague has befallen his city. He sends an
emissary to the God Apollo to inquire what he must do. The message from
Apollo’s temple at Delphi is imperative: there is ‘an unclean thing’ on Theban
soil: the plague will not cease till a killer is removed from the land (Sophocles,
4
1947, p.34). The person who killed Oedipus’ predecessor, Laius, must be found
out and banished.
Teiresias is summoned and his advice sought. Teiresias simply wants to leave.
‘Ask me / no more. It is useless. I will tell you nothing.’ (p.35) Oedipus, who had
warmly welcomed the blind man, becomes angry at these ‘insults to the state’
and peremptorily accuses Teiresias of having been involved in the murder. The
prophet hurls the accusation back at Oedipus: ‘I say that the killer you are
seeking is yourself’. The attacks and counter-attacks continue till Oedipus,
catching something Teiresias has said, falteringly replies
OEDIPUS: What’s that? My parents? Who then . . . gave me birth?
TEIRESIAS: This day brings you your birth; and brings you death.
(p.38)
Oedipus casts the prophet out and now begins wildly accusing his brother-in-law
of having bribed Teiresias to name him as the killer. The Chorus, and then
Oedipus’ wife Jocasta intervene.
Oedipus will unravel the plot, and learn what happened to Laius. Only — ‘my
wife, what you have said troubles me’ — Jocasta’s tale of Laius’ murder at a
crossroads, with four of his servants, begins to plant seeds in his mind (p.46). He
starts to recall a similar incident from his past: obstructed by an old man and his
entourage on the road to Thebes, and in a rage, Oedipus killed them all. The king
begins to worry that the ban he has pronounced upon Laius’ killer might well
apply to himself.
At this point, a messenger arrives from Corinth, the land of Oedipus’ father
Polybus and his mother Merope. Polybus is dead. The news instantly brings relief
to Oedipus who has long laboured under the curse he received from Apollo’s
oracle at Delphi: that he would kill his father and marry his mother. It was for
this reason that Oedipus, while still a young man, fled Corinth, only to arrive at
Thebes, win Jocasta in marriage and thus become king.
Only the news is not totally comforting. His father may well be dead, Oedipus
tells Jocasta, but while his mother Merope lives he is still not safe from the curse.
The Corinthian messenger overhears Oedipus say this. Aristotle regards the
exchange that follows as the properly tragic moment of the play:
MESSENGER: Was that the fear that has banished you all this while?
OEDIPUS: Yes. I was determined not to kill my father.
MESSENGER: Then let me rid you of this other fear.
I came to do you good.
(p.53)
5
The messenger now tells Oedipus that he need not worry about returning to
Corinth. His mother Merope is not his mother. Nor was Polybus his father. ‘You
were given to him — by me’ (p.53). The messenger explains that he in turn was
given Oedipus by a shepherd from Thebes, a former servant of King Laius’.
OEDIPUS: Is he alive?
And could I see him?
MESSENGER: Your people here should know.
The chorus reply that the shepherd is the same servant who has already been
sent for, the sole survivor of Laius’ entourage when he was killed. Jocasta begins
to beseech Oedipus to cease his inquiries. She leaves the stage and kills herself.
Oedipus is about to learn that his mother instructed a shepherd to leave him to
die on Mount Cithaeron.
Oedipus blinds himself with the golden brooches which fastened Jocasta’s dress.
On his return to the stage the chorus tell him that he should have killed himself
too.
3. Aristotle
Aristotle sees Sophocles’ Oedipus as one of the prime examples of ‘the pleasure
peculiar to tragedy’ (1997, p.97). He cites it accordingly. The Oedipus shares with
Euripides’ Iphigenia in Tauris in receiving more references in the Poetics than
any other play. As such, it constitutes a privileged point of entry into the Poetics,
Aristotle’s notoriously difficult, beguiling and fragmentary theorisation of the
intellectual and emotional impacts of tragic drama. I’m going to address
Aristotle’s general argument about art and knowledge by way of these specific
references. I’ll attempt, in due course, to show the relevance of that general
argument to our present debate, up to and including how we might theorise the
epistemological properties of the contemporary works displayed above.
The bulk of these10 references to the Oedipus occur over chapters 11 to 15,
which concern tragic ‘plot-structure’ and the way reversal (
[peripeteia] in the Greek) and recognition are structured into it. The first
reference is to the scene I’ve just recounted, the messenger scene at the end of
the play:
Peripeteia is a [sudden] change [over] of what is being done to the
opposite in the way we have said, and — as we have [also just] said —
according to likelihood and necessity; as for example in the Oedipus, the
[messenger] who has come to cheer Oedipus and free him of his fear
about his mother, by disclosing who he is [actually] does just the opposite.
(1997, p. 87)
6
So Aristotle fleshes out a distinction he has just made between simple tragic
plots, which feature a ‘change in fortune’ for the protagonist, and complex plots,
like that of the Oedipus. Complex plots have two other factors, in addition to the
‘change in fortune’. The first is peripeteia or sudden reversal, where a character
performs an action intended to do good, for example, only immediately to find it
result in disaster, as here. The second feature is recognition, ‘a change from notknowing to knowing’ one’s tragic fate (p.87). We’ve just seen how Oedipus
recognises his fate, following upon the reversal cited above. Aristotle’s second
reference to the play draws attention to this: ‘the finest recognition is when it
happens at the same time as the peripeteia as in the Oedipus’ (p.87). A third
reference immediately follows, in which Aristotle adds that this very
combination of reversal and recognition is what produces the customary
emotions of pity and fear in an audience. Which is to say, this combination of
reversal on the one hand, and recognition of one’s catastrophe on the other, is
what engenders the ‘pleasure peculiar to tragedy.’
Tragic pleasure is not, Aristotle will proceed to tell us, just a response to
indiscriminate suffering. Nor can it be elicited through masks and costumes,
though they may serve to elicit an inferior sort of ‘shock’ (p.99). As for the sort of
plot that splits its cast into ‘the good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’, and apportions
appropriate fates to them, that’s more akin to comedy, and the distinct regime of
pleasure it affords. None of the above concern what is essential: the tragic
character’s structure of expectations, the way they are suddenly disrupted, and
discovered to be wrong. It is all, in effect, about the subversion of the tragic
hero’s knowledge.
The easiest way to flesh out this thesis — that Aristotle believes tragic pleasure
is about the subversion of the hero’s knowledge — is to ask, of scenes like the
one singled out above, just what does the tragic hero recognise as he comes to
grief? What does Oedipus recognise, as a result of the messenger’s ‘good news’?
It is not merely a catastrophic fate. Specifically, it’s a catastrophic fate he did not
expect. What the tragic hero comes to recognise is a catastrophe that his
knowledge and awareness of the world did not equip him to grasp. It might have.
That one might well have worked it out is essential:
The best recognition of all is the one [that comes about] from the events
themselves, when the shock of surprise arises from likely circumstances,
as in Sophocles Oedipus Rex, and in the Iphigeneia – naturally she wanted
to send the message. For recognitions of this kind are the only ones [that
work] without invented signs and amulets. Second [to these] are the ones
[drawn] from inference.
(p.91)
There are two things to note in this passage which comes from the list Aristotle
gives in chapter 16 of the various types of recognitions tragedies can feature.
Recognitions involving ‘invented signs and amulets’ would be, for instance, the
sort of recognition that occurs on sighting another’s birthmark — which tells you
who you’re sleeping with. Recognitions involving logical inference can be
7
witnessed every night on CSI, NCIS and virtually any other television detective
show, where an investigator’s capacity to put two and two together serves the
thoroughly comic end of separating criminal from law abiding normal people like
the police. The main thing to note here, however, is Aristotle’s qualification of the
idea that the hero’s fate should involve a sudden unexpected reversal, as
seemingly good news turns to bad. This is true, but it’s not the sum total of what
he’s saying. Not only should such reversals be unexpected. The catastrophes they
betoken should be likely. That is to say, a tragic play needs to be plotted in such a
fashion that the hero’s unravelling is entirely plausible. The messenger needs to
have a real motivation for coming with this particular news at this time, and even
more than that, it needs to be plausible for Oedipus to have killed his father and
slept with his mother. The catastrophe cannot come from nowhere, it needs to be
built into the very structure — albeit unbeknownst to him — of the hero’s world.
I want to hone in on the relentless logic of the tragic universe for it really is
integral to everything Aristotle is saying. It receives an even more precise
formulation in chapter nine, where we read that tragedy concerns itself with
events that are
terrifying and pitiful, and […] events are especially [so] when they happen
unexpectedly and [yet] out of [inner] logic — for that way they will be
more wonderful than [if they happened] all by themselves or […] by
chance.
(p.85)
‘[O]ut of [inner] logic’: tragic catastrophe does not come from divine whim, nor is
it a matter of chance as so many of our own personal catastrophes — i.e. car
accidents — in fact are. To the contrary, it could have been expected. The issue is,
I repeat, one of knowledge, or rather intellectual blind spots. It’s about the things
one might well have known, but didn’t. In short, it’s about reality.
It’s in this light that we have to understand Aristotle’s famous reference to the
‘tragic flaw’ in chapter 13. The ideal tragic hero, Aristotle writes, is the one
who comes upon disaster not through wickedness or depravity but
because of some mistake — [one] of those men of great reputation and
prosperity like Oedipus.
(p.95)
This is George Whalley’s translation. Whalley offers ‘mistake’ as translation for
the Greek αμαρτια [hamartia]:
who comes upon disaster not through wickedness or depravity but
because of some αμαρτια — [one] of those men of great reputation and
prosperity like Oedipus.
8
Now αμαρτια was the word used by New Testament writers to render the
Christian concept of sin, and it’s that usage of the word — a usage thoroughly
foreign to Aristotle — which has coloured many modern receptions of this
passage. So people talk of the tragic flaw as if it were a moral flaw, something
close to sin, such as Macbeth’s ambition, or his malleability. Really, the word just
means error, which is how Halliwell translates it (1995, p.71). Think of Oedipus:
he’s paranoid and abusive, but that doesn’t alter the fact that he has no intention
at all of killing his father, nor or sleeping with his mother. His failure is not a
moral one. As he puts it, now blind and old, in Oedipus at Colonus, ‘The law/
acquits me, innocent, as ignorant, / of what I did’ (p.88). Aristotle’s word
αμαρτια focuses us rather on a cognitive failure. Oedipus failed to realise what he
was doing, even though there was an inner logic to it. He simply didn’t get it.
The more you dig into Aristotle’s text, whether by way of these references to the
Oedipus or otherwise, the more you come to realise that tragedy is
overwhelmingly a question of knowledge. This knowledge takes a very particular
form: tragic characters are ignorant of things they might well have known about
their very own world. The reason they might well have known is that that world
is a thoroughly logical one. Hence Aristotle’s repeated, even obsessive,
references to the need for actions in tragedy — but not, mind, in epic or comedy
— to occur ‘according to likelihood and necessity,’ a phrase which comes up
again and again; it occurs 3 times in one sentence in chapter 15 (p.111). As
Stephen Halliwell puts it, in his close study of the Poetics, ‘intelligibility must be
preserved even at the heart of tragic instability’ (1998, p.104). Tragic heroes are
not ignorant of the supernatural or the unlikely. Or rather, if they are, it doesn’t
matter. The real danger lies in what they have failed to grasp about their own
world, the things they might have made sense of, but didn’t. The catastrophe
comes about ‘unexpectedly and [yet] out of [inner] logic.’ Tragedy aims directly
at its hero’s ignorance, an ignorance he or she might well have remedied through
science.
4. Art NOW?
I’ve suggested that the Poetics will help cast light on the slew of contemporary
artworks with which we began, and I’ve made that claim specifically in relation
to their status for knowledge. I’ll turn to that shortly.
But first, and as a way of bringing this text into the present, I want to say a little
more about the two emotions Aristotle associates with the pleasure of watching
Oedipus, and characters like him, come to grief: pity and fear. Recall our quote
from chapter 9. Tragedy concerns itself with events that are:
terrifying and pitiful […] events are especially [so] when they happen
unexpectedly and [yet] out of [inner] logic — for that way they will be
more wonderful than [if they happened] all by themselves or […] by
chance
This passage closely links the arousal of pity and terror in an audience to their
observation of the hero undergoing what is essentially an experience of cognitive
9
dissonance, a clash between whatever was within his or her structure of
expectations, and whatever exceeded them (and yet is undeniably real). But why
do we respond in this way — pity and fear — to Oedipus’ horrible recognition of
what he failed to realise? Why does it effect us when Creon, in the Antigone,
learns that he has inadvertently caused his son and wife’s death, and could well
have seen it coming too (1947, pp.155-161)? Why do we enjoy these
symptomatic moments?
One way to begin to answer is to unlock what Aristotle means by ‘pity and fear’.
Now the Poetics doesn’t offer a theory of pity, nor of fear. It simply presents them
as developed concepts. Aristotle’s Rhetoric, however, does offer such a theory. If
we draw on this text we can start to reconstruct why pity might be a natural
enough emotion to feel when witnessing tragic reversal and recognition. In
chapter 8 of book 2 of that volume Aristotle articulates the following ‘general
principle’: ‘what we fear for ourselves excites our pity when it happens to others’
(1952, p.633). We pity what we’re afraid of experiencing ourselves. We pity great
men’s misfortune, for instance, because ‘their innocence … makes their
misfortunes seem close to ourselves.’ (p.633) That is to say, we fear that a
basically nice guy should suffer horribly, because we’re basically nice guys too
and can imagine how it would feel if it happened to us. Likewise, we pity those
experiencing ‘evil coming from a source from which good ought to have come’
(p.632), we pity reversals that is, because we can imagine ourselves on the
receiving end of such thwarted blessings as well. Pity, for Aristotle, is really a
form of self-regard — what if this were me? It has strong overtones of fear as
well, which is doubtless what the conjunction ‘pity and fear’ is really getting at.
What pity is not is an altruistic, or undifferentiated response to ‘sheer human
vulnerability’ (Halliwell, 1998, p.174). Sheer human vulnerability only touches
us if we can imagine ourselves suffering in a similar way.
In short, these passages suggest that insofar as we feel pity and fear at Oedipus’
downfall, it’s because we can imagine ourselves the innocent and unrealising
sufferers of all these things we didn’t know about our world too, though we
might have. Ignorance as to who one was really sleeping with might be one
example. Really it’s the theme of failed knowledge that gets us in, those moments
where one simply does not recognise the trap one has entered and is now in. In
Halliwell’s fine summary, ‘the emotional experience of tragic poetry does not
take the spectator out of himself, but entails a deeper sense of the vulnerability
of his own place in the world’ (1998, p.183). Insofar as it concerns the limits of
knowledge, the Oedipus makes an Oedipus of all of us.
What of Gober’s crucifix? I described it above as follows:
A detail of an untitled installation by Robert Gober features the body of a
gaunt Jesus, in crucifixion (2005). He has no head. The customary wound
appears incised below his right breast. It is curiously free of blood. His
loin cloth is neat and unrevealing. Where his nipples would be, Gober has
installed two gushing streams of water, which fountain from Christ’s
breasts and into the surrounding space (Grosenick, 2008, p.103).
10
http://www.matthewmarks.com/index.php?n=1&a=141&i=841
[click on image for close-up])
I’m trying to make sense of the visceral reaction I have whenever I encounter
this work. It’s not disgust, that wouldn’t be true. There’s no real pity either, but
I’d say an element of fear. I’m shifting, by the way, from the Oedipus to
contemporary art, though I’m retaining Aristotle as my guide. For what these
supplementary passages from the Rhetoric on the nature of pity tell us is that our
pleasure in the Oedipus is all about being Oedipus — at least a far as ignorance
and knowledge goes. It’s all to do with imagining ourselves totally vulnerable to
what is unexpected and yet undeniably real. I’m suggesting that work like
Gober’s puts us in precisely in that position too. There’s no room for pity of
course, because we’re no longer talking about someone outside ourselves, that
Oedipus over there. Pity can now take on its true form, which is fear, or at least
an intimation of it. This was not expected and yet it’s real.
In fact, the reality of Gober’s sculpture increases the more you think of it. What I
mean is that when I start to think about this work what I realise is that I do find
an inner logic to it. For my gut reaction might be to imagine that crucifixes have
never appeared this way, but actually, that’s not quite true. The medieval
historian Carolyn Walker-Bynum has traced a veritable tradition of 12, 13th and
14th century images of Christ — I’m referring to totally orthodox imagery here,
works in churches and monasteries — which show him lactating, often so as to
suckle others. She’s backed that archive up with letter from abbots, who describe
their relation to junior monks as not just a nurturing but even a suckling one.
They refer to themselves as ‘mother’, which incidentally reflects the title of
Bynum’s collection of essays on the topic, Jesus as Mother, Studies in the
Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Walker-Bynum, 1984). As for the present, I
am reminded by Gober’s sculpture of a conversation I had with the Australian
prose-poet, Ania Walwicz. Ania’s father was a Polish army officer and she once
told me that, growing up near the barracks, around that all-male environment,
she frequently witnessed relationships of surprising tenderness and nurture
between certain of the men. I recall this sort of maternal masculinity too from my
days in an all-male secondary school — in fact I recall it even on the sports field.
In Gober’s sculpture the tap’s up on full, of course, but that doesn’t stop it
eliciting all these thoughts about an otherwise little-discussed aspect of the logic
of gender within our cultures. It reminds you of maternal masculinity, however
little you expected it.
unexpectedly and [yet] out of [inner] logic
In other words, when I look at this work it’s like the whole tragic theatre has
been pared down, all the characters stripped away to the point where nothing
remains but the audience member, their knowledge of the world and their
encounter with a work that at once defeats that knowledge and yet demands to
be recognised as real. This is the experience that Aristotle is getting at in the
precise formula above and is one of the chief reasons I stated at the start of this
lecture that Aristotle’s Poetics offers the most cogent theory we have for just
11
what is going on in works like these, not to mention modern poetry, high-art
cinema, theatre, sculpture and so on.
Let me table this as a massive historical thesis, that I submit can be tested on
each one of the works presented above. Each in it’s own way defeats the viewers’
immediate approach: it is unexpected, and yet deeper acquaintance betrays an
inner logic that might well have been recognised. That’s because these are tragic
arts. Modern art has ‘the tragic pleasure’ at its core, and Aristotle is our prime
theorist of it. That’s my thesis. Here’s some instances:
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/02/22/arts/22cai-slideshow_3.html
It is unexpected that 9 actual cars suspended in a cascading chain from the
ceiling should greet you as you enter New York’s Guggenheim Museum. And yet
there is an inner logic here, which would be something like we see this sort of
thing everyday on television and movies, or even: isn’t this what traumatic
accidents feel like, those moments of infinite slowness and suspension, when all the
world seems slowed to a single traumatic freeze frame?
https://www.tate.org.uk/servlet/ViewWork?cgroupid=999999961&workid=81
203&searchid=14567&tabview=text
It is unexpected that anyone will swap heroin for the chance to shave 10cms of
hair off two junkies’ heads. Why would you sell your body in such an absurd
way? And yet there is an inner logic here, which would concern the fact that we
sell our bodies in absurd ways every day. Think of the part-time jobs our
students do: is asking every customer would you like 3 mars bars for 2$ with
every petrol purchase really that much more meaningful? Is it really less
exploitative to engage people to perform such work? As for what we buy with the
proceeds, how sure are we that we aren’t addicted to those purchases, to our
own detriment: cigarettes, alcohol, house mortgages. Who are we calling junkies?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_the_Love_of_God
It is unexpected that we’ll die without taking at least some of this with us.
I submit that what for Aristotle was the specific province of tragic poetry has
now, in advanced capitalist societies, become the logic of high-art in general. It’s
all about what defeats our knowledge and yet demands to be recognised as real.
I’ll go even further: Aristotle’s formulation is measuring stick, by which you can
measure up most any contemporary work you can name that aspires to being
seen as real high-art, whether it be painting, installation, literature, theatre or
even tattooing. Does it offer a scenario that is at once unexpected, and yet bears
within it an inner logic, one we are compelled to recognise as real?
There is an emotional component to this as well. As Aristotle tells us, if the work
is merely unexpected, but has no other logic to it, it’s not likely to render us much
pleasure. ‘[W]eak tragedy’ leads to rapid ‘satiety’ (p.131). On the other hand, you
know you’re in the presence of something that is not merely unexpected but also
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real when it continues to create that flutter of fear and wonder, long after the
initial acquaintance with the work:
http://www.pedesign.co.uk/work/ngs/douglasgordon/highlights_7.html
These are tragic arts.
This is where we are, blinded by them.
5. A Substantial Contribution to Knowledge
terrifying and pitiful […] events are especially [so] when they happen
unexpectedly and [yet] out of [inner] logic — for that way they will be
more θαυμαστον [thaumaston] than [if they happened] all by themselves
or […] by chance
But why should this experience of our own incomprehension lead to knowledge,
to a learning? On the other hand, why shouldn’t we hold that the artworks here
surveyed do indeed bear knowledge within them, a very precise knowledge of
just what is likely to do an audience’s heads in?
We’re coming to the title of this paper, the tragedy at the root of science. Look at
the phrase I’ve left in Greek above. Whalley translates θαυμαστον, thaumaston as
‘wonderful’ but adds a note to the effect that it means something more like
‘productive of wonder’ (1997, p.84-5). Aristotle is referring to the sort of plot
that makes your head split with amazement as you try to imagine, in fear and
pity, what it would be like to be in Oedipus’ situation at the moment he finds out.
That Aristotle sees a scientific dimension to this is suggested by the gloss he
makes on wonder in the Rhetoric: ‘wondering implies the desire of learning’
(1952, p.614). The plot-structure that is ‘productive of wonder’ will also be
productive of learning. There is a simple reason for this: ‘the object of wonder is
an object of desire’ (1952, p.614). Aristotle argument is that the tragic plot taps
into the pleasure we feel in making sense. For ‘learning’, as he puts it in the
Poetics, ‘is a very great pleasure, not just to philosophers, but in exactly the same
way to any ordinary person.’ (1997, p.57). The tragic plot holds the pleasure of
making sense out as a goal to us, precisely by luring us into a world in which our
conceptual powers fail us. It inspires a research project in us. That is Aristotle’s
riposte to Plato.
It’s also, mutatits mutandis, Charles Saunders Peirce’s theory of ‘the
circumstances which render an explanation of a phenomenon desirable or
urgent’ (Peirce, 1992, p.91). Commenting that philosophers of science almost
never stop to define this crucial component of scientific method — just what is it
that calls for investigation? — Peirce adds that the ‘majority of them seem tacitly
to accept that any one fact calls for explanations as much as any other’ (p.91). His
analysis, on the other hand, makes clear that what lies at the root of science is
the experience of what was unpredicted, and yet undeniably real:
13
In order to define the circumstances under which a scientific explanation
is really needed, the best way is to ask in what way explanation subserves
the purpose of science. We shall then see what the evil situation is which
it remedies, or what the need is which it may be expected to supply. Now
what an explanation of a phenomenon does is to supply a proposition
which, if it had been known to be true before the phenomenon presented
itself, would have rendered that phenomenon predictable, if not with
certainty, at least as something very likely to occur. It thus renders that
phenomenon rational, that is, makes it a logical consequence, necessary
or probable.
(p.89)
In this statement we can already see how many worlds apart so much of science
lies from the sort of art scientific societies produce. Or rather, we can see that
contemporary art is a model of one pole of scientific process, the ‘evil’ one. For
what modern artwork might be said to render phenomena predictable? On the
other hand, a work that presents phenomena that comes at their audience
‘unexpectedly and [yet] out of [inner] logic’ clearly opens up the grounds for just
such rationalisation. That is to say, it constitutes a research question. But this is
already to suggest that we need to orient the much vaunted, and never
adequately articulated, relation between art and science around a very particular
moment in the scientific process: the originating one.
Aristotle directs us there through his discussion of the pleasure in learning,
Peirce through his discussion of science’s desire to resolve the unpredictable. In
either instance, that which comes to us ‘unexpectedly and [yet] out of [inner]
logic’ is the motor of inquiry. Peirce’s further comment that scientists have
always had difficulty naming this is intriguing, and suggests a precise point of
collaboration for scientists and university-based artist/researchers to explore in
the future. They should both explore their indebtedness to tragedy — or rather,
to give it is fuller name, trauma.
I want to conclude by suggesting that such rejoinders to Platoiv constitute the
grounds for a revivified theory and practice of creative research, whether at
higher degree level or beyond. We should stop claiming — in opposition to the
in-many-ways undeniable truth-claims of Cartesian science — that artwork in
and of itself, and in contrast, provides privileged access to the truth of being
(pace Heidegger, 2001). We should also abandon the ‘practice-led’ project of
treating the scaffolding (research notes, odd theories, attempts and re-attempts)
artists construct and then kick away to make their artwork as if it were more
intellectually significant than the work itself. We need to start arguing that art’s
intellectual significance lies in the learning process it seduces others into, by dint
of its capacity to frame points of ignorance, in such a way that those points
resound with a question: what was it about this that escaped my ken, and yet
demands I acknowledge its reality? How can I make sense of this?
Here is how I propose such works be assessed and judged for their contribution
to knowledge. Of the next Doctorate in Creative Arts, or the next competitive
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funding application in the Creative Arts — e.g. the next Australian Research
Council (ARC) application for government funding of a work of art posed as
research — the evaluative question should be: Does this work offer a scenario
that is at once unexpected, and yet bears within it an inner logic, one we are
compelled to recognise as real? In other words, is it likely to set off a research
process in others? If so, it should be graded highly. An even finer way to
delineate between the contribution such works have to offer knowledge would
be to ask: In addition to the above, does it generate fear and pity? These should be
the criteria the ARC adopt. This is the way we will get them to fund not simply,
and peripherally, research about the production of art, but the actual art itself.
15
Bibliography
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1952), pp. 593-679.
—, The Poetics, in Aristotle XXIII, trans. Stephen Halliwell (Loeb Classical Library:
Cambridge (Mass.), 1995), pp. 1-142.
— , The Poetics, trans. by George Whalley (Montreal: McGill-Queens University
Press, 1997).
Brophy, Kevin, Creativity: Psychoanalysis, Surrealism and Creative Writing
(Carlton: Melbourne University Press, 1998).
Carter, Paul, Material Thinking: the Theory and Practice of Creative Research
(Melbourne: Melbourne University Publishing, 2005).
Dumas, Marlene, Measuring Your Own Grave, catalogue (Los Angeles: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2008).
Fletcher, J. and Mann, A. (Eds), TEXT: The Journal of Writing and Writing Courses,
Special Issue on Illuminating the Exegesis, Website Series
Number 3 April
2004, http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue3/content.htm
Grosenick, Uta (Ed.), Art Now, Vol.2 (Cologne: Taschen, 2008).
Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics, With a New Introduction (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Haseman, Brad and Jaaniste, Luke, The Arts and Australia’s National Innovation
System 1994-2008, Chass Occasional Papers No.7 (Canberra: Council for
the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2008).
Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper Perennial,
2001).
Holzwarth, Hans Werner (Ed.), Art Now, Vol.3 (Cologne: Taschen, 2008). See the
on-line leaf-through version at
http://www.taschen.com/lookinside/04431/index.htm
Magee, Paul, ‘Is Poetry Research,’ in Text, The Journal of Writing and Writing
Courses 13:2 (October 2009).
Peirce, Charles Saunders, Reasoning and the Logic of Things, The Cambridge
Conferences Lectures of 1898, Ed. K. L. Ketner (Harvard University Press,
Cambridge (Mass), 1992).
Plato, Ion, in Plato VII, trans. W.R.M. Lamb (Loeb Classical Library: Cambridge
(Mass.), 1925).
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Sophocles, Antigone, in The Theban Plays, trans. E.F. Watling (London: Penguin,
1947), pp. 126-167.
—, Oedipus Rex in The Theban Plays, pp.25-69.
Vellar, Richard, ‘Words and Music’, unpublished paper, CIRAC Colloquium on
Creative Practice as Research, QUT, 19th September 2003.
Walker-Bynum, Caroline, Jesus as Mother, Studies in the Spirituality of the High
Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984).
Wu, Chin-Tao, ‘Biennials without borders?’ in New Left Review 57 May-June
2009, pp. 109-15.
See also the list, which is appended to Fletcher and Mann’s special issue, of
earlier contributions to the debate in Text:
http://www.textjournal.com.au/speciss/issue3/exegesis.htm
ii A brief discussion of this periodisation appears in this text at section 4. For
further comment on the need for any discussion of art’s epistemological
properties to distinguish the sort of artworks produced in capitalist societies
from those of other social orders, see further the essay at footnote 3 of Magee
2009.
iii This claim needs to be nuanced. The USA- and Euro-centricity of these two
Taschen volumes is marked. For a critique of related problems at the Kassel
Documenta and the Venice Biennale, see Chin-Tao Wu, ‘Biennials without
borders?’ in New Left Review 57 May-June 2009, pp. 109-15.
iv Peirce’s preference for Aristotle over Plato, which he poses as a preference for
impartial method over ethics, is elaborated in chapter 2 of Reasoning and the
Logic of Things (1998), pp.105-22.
i
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