A Disposition to Look

Against the Hedonistic, Historical, and Conceptual Modes of "seeing" "art"

An old essay that has been mouldering in the depths of my Google Drive. Too academic in style, but perhaps still worth airing out.

I

People see quickly today, so they paint so you can see it quickly. How often do you go into a museum and you see paintings that…your eye just bounces off. Anybody can go out and put down pretty colors, or smear around, or use a T-square. It’s become attenuated finally, without the crudeness, guts, rawness, whatever you want to call it, when you really have to grapple with a subject. I think what da Vinci wrote – that painting is a thing for the mind – is still true.

Philip Guston, 1980

Guston’s statement is ambiguous. On a first read, Guston seems to mean that paintings with pretty colors smeared around, that address themselves to the eye merely, are not actually paintings at all. Paintings are things for the mind, so these “paintings” that are seen quickly cannot be true paintings. This enthymeme’s conclusion is compelling, especially to artists who want to distinguish their work from the constant and seemingly meaningless onslaught of rapidly produced images that characterizes contemporary life. But if we articulate the enthymeme’s suppressed premise—that mental things cannot be seen quickly—the enthymeme’s conclusion—that paintings seen quickly aren’t actually paintings—doesn’t necessarily follow, because it becomes clear that how a painting is seen is not up to the painting itself but involves a viewer. It is in relation to the viewer’s mind that the painting can be realized as a mental thing—and therefore, as a painting—at all painting’s failure to be a painting may well be the viewer’s, not the painting’s, fault. By suppressing the viewer's role in not merely seeing but in realizing the work, Guston takes the quality of being-seen-quickly to be a property of the painting, locating it in the work itself, rather than in the mind of the viewer, condemning the work rather than the disposition with which the viewer apprehends it.

Having made Guston’s two premises explicit, we can see an alternative conclusion, a second reading of the same statement. Paintings are mental things; mental things cannot be seen quickly; so, paintings cannot be seen quickly. The problem is no longer wholly located in the painting but in how the viewer looks at it, for a viewer who sees quickly cannot see even the most coherently painted canvas as a painting. In this second reading, Guston’s statement quoted at the start of this essay no longer appears as an attempt to distinguish between true Painting and “painting”-so-called, but an acknowledgment of the viewer’s role in realizing a painted object as a painting. In order to realize something as a painting, we, as viewers, must learn to see it slowly—in a word, to look—with our mind, not merely with our eyes. I take this conclusion of the second reading of Guston’s statement as my occasion to propose a disposition toward paintings that approaches them, and artworks generally, as things for the mind, but not merely of the mind; a disposition that trusts each individual work to contain within itself its own evaluative standard, which can be discovered by looking. We, who are predisposed to see quickly, can acquire a disposition to see slowly—that is, rather than merely accepting what we like as art and dismissing what we don’t as not-art, we can learn to look at particular works of art and See them for what they are.

A disposition is a framework through which one sees something as a thing, a frame of mind that informs one’s perceptions and assembles them into the thing one sees to be. What parts of something are seen to be significant—indeed, which parts are seen at all and what qualities those parts have—are determined by one’s disposition. Taking a thing’s form to be the structure of relationships between parts, one’s disposition toward a work thus informs what precisely that work is. What I call a disposition draws from what Hans Sedlmayr calls an “artistic attitude” and what Arthur Danto believes to follow from an “artistic identification.”¹ Both Sedlmayr and Danto distinguish between the object and the artwork. For an object to become an artwork it must be conceived as an artwork by someone. This way of conceiving is what Sedlmayr calls an attitude, Danto calls an identification, and I will call a disposition.² The specific attitude, identification, or disposition we take plays a role in producing the artwork we see.³ Different dispositions toward the same object produce different works of art, so whether we can see the same artwork—and therefore share and discuss it—depends on whether we have adopted a similar disposition toward the art object.

It will be useful to consider some examples of different dispositions. First, because the disposition I want to propose will be more intelligible in light of others, and, second, because until we see dispositions as possibilities and not necessities, we are at risk of remaining blind to our predispositions. There are three dispositions, each with its own ends and attractions, that we will be better for having gotten out of our way: what I will call the hedonistic disposition, the historical disposition, and the conceptual disposition. Each of these dispositions, because it selects and emphasizes different parts of an object, creates different artworks from the same object.

Walter Pater exemplifies a hedonistic disposition. For Pater, the end of art—indeed, the end of life (for him there is no distinction) and the experiences that compose it, whether experiences of paintings, people, philosophical texts, or gemstones—is pleasure; that special pleasure impressed on an individual by a special object. His is a hedonistic disposition grounded in a radical relativism, in which an individual’s experience is but a succession of impressions, which “burn and are extinguished with our consciousness of them,” each one “the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world.” There is no knowable objective world, only impressions of pleasure and pain; no unified self, merely occult chemical and physical responses to stimuli; no way to meet, to share experience, only echoes and impressions of others. The advantage of this disposition is obvious: pleasure is experienced as a good. However, it is deficient because the artwork is generally seen as merely a stimulus for one’s subjective reactions and associations. There is no objective structure, no work for us to agree or disagree about, no world for us to share. One is predisposed to accept works that confirm their taste and to dismiss those that don’t, thereby, in quickness of judgment, assimilating particular works into the classes of works which in the past elicited either positive or negative responses.

Another common disposition is historical, as exemplified by art historian Ernst Kitzinger, for whom a work of art is a particular instance within a general evolution of artistic forms during a historical period. In characterizing the stylistic development of early Christian imagery as a self-moving, dialectical progression that swings between the abstract and the representational, the two-dimensional and the three-dimensional, the surface-accepting and the surface-denying, he subsumes the particularities of artworks under a dominating formal evolution. Individual artworks are reduced to examples of the opposing terms in the dialectical progression, examples of their synthesis, or are dismissed as irrelevant outliers so as not to mar the idea of history’s form. For one disposed to see art in this manner, the work is an artifact of a process that is of interest only insofar as it exemplifies a historical fact. The particulars of an individual work must be suppressed so that the general form of history may be seen clearly. This disposition is appealing not only because it is satisfying to order the chaos of history into an elegant form, but because a historical understanding of art’s development is familiar to viewers and makers of art today. However, its paucity lies in its tendency to look away from the particularities of what is before one’s eyes—namely, the artwork—and to turn instead to some narrative that explains it. The shortcoming of a historical disposition is much like that of a hedonistic disposition insofar as it glosses over what is one of the virtues of artworks: their particularity.

The last of the dispositions I will survey is conceptual, which is not as common as the other two, but is worth noting since it has been central in debates about the nature of art since the 1960s. Artist and theorist Joseph Kosuth, for whom art is its conceptual meaning, exemplifies this disposition. Applying what he understands to be the implications of philosophy’s discovery of its own limits in the 19th century and the resulting limitation of its scope to the truth or falsity of analytic propositions, Kosuth approaches art as a kind of analytic proposition presented within the context of art as a comment on art with the end of adding new propositions to be included in the definition of art. A work of art is a definition of art; a concept, not an object, which is merely the physical residue of the artist’s conceptual investigation. This disposition is attractive to those of us with ascetic inclinations, who dream of freedom from material limitations, who wish art were not subject to the fetishization and materialism of fashion, supply and demand—but its shortcoming is clear. In making art a concept, a proposition that is of the mind, one begins to wonder whether such an art, purified of its material particularities and reduced to a proposition about itself, satisfies any real need.⁴

All three of the surveyed dispositions have their advantages, but they all suffer from the same shortcoming—a shortcoming that, as a painter and a viewer, I find misses the point of making or looking at art entirely: the particularity of a work itself. If art is simply for pleasure, let AI, which can make novel visual stimuli more quickly and better than we can dream of, replace artists. If art is merely of historical interest, let us simply read books, watch documentaries, or listen to podcasts about art’s history. If art is merely a concept, let us think instead. In contrast to these impoverished dispositions, I propose an alternative that I will call a formal analytical disposition, which strives to determine the disposition according to which the individual work itself is disposed to be seen. This disposition assumes that each artwork has a disposition proper to it; that there are as many dispositions as there are works. To assume a formal analytical disposition is to inquire into a work conceived as a self-intelligible whole with a structure composed of parts, the qualities of and relationships between which must be discovered in the inquiry. Nothing but the artwork’s wholeness is given, and even the limits of its particular whole can’t be known beforehand.⁵ In contrast to the three dispositions above, the end of a formal analytical disposition is not to feel the effect of pleasure (though a pleasure special to the particular artwork itself is often coincident), nor to subsume it under historical narratives (though, once looked at and seen formal analytically, it is possible to draw historical relations between works); and especially not to extract a conceptual articulation of the work that can exist in one’s mind and discard its particular form (though through mental effort one can arrive at an articulation of the work—this, however, is not the work itself.) The end of assuming a formal analytical disposition is to look at a work by inquiring into the self-intelligible whole that it is with the end of better Seeing its particular structure—of Seeing a new thing, of taking a new disposition, of discovering a new possibility.

II

I will demonstrate a formal analytical disposition by looking at Philip Guston’s Ancient Wall from 1976. But to adequately see the advantages of looking at this painting with this disposition, it will be worth seeing the shortcomings of others who were disposed to see it differently and how they manage to miss the painting, if not entirely, then significantly.

First, Hilton Kramer’s negative review of Guston’s 1970 show at the Marlborough Gallery in New York, the show in which, after nearly two decades of working abstractly, Guston showed thirty-three large, explicitly figurative canvases painted in a cartoonish style, reportedly shocking a segment of the art scene. Kramer approached the work with a hedonistic disposition that expected pleasure, hence his disdain for these works that defied his expectations. The vehemence of his review expresses that he felt duped, jilted, even wronged when the paintings caused not pleasure but, by frustrating his expectations, pain. In the review, titled “A Mandarin Pretending to Be A Stumblebum,” Kramer doesn’t mention a single painting from the show but instead spends his words on personal insults, calling Guston names and accusing him of mannerisms. The closest Kramer comes to describing the work that caused him such offense is his claim that Guston was, in “offering us his new style of cartoon anecdotage,” “appealing to a taste for something funky, clumsy and demotic,” which, according to Kramer, “is asking too much.” Now, we know it is possible to overcome one’s predispositions,⁶ but the hedonistic disposition, inasmuch as it holds no standard beyond the pleasure of the observer, has no reason to be exchanged for another view of the work when the work asks to be seen in a different way.

In contrast to Kramer, critic Roberta Smith, in her review of the 1976 exhibition at David McKee Gallery in which Ancient Wall was first shown, has a positive response to the paintings. But, though her pleasure in the paintings is expressed throughout, she concludes that “when you take Guston’s career as a whole, the new Gustons aren’t the betrayal they may at first seem: they’re a surprisingly consistent summation.” Her disposition toward the body of Guston’s work is historical. She sees his oeuvre as a formally consistent arc of development. She draws relations between the depictions of certain recurring things and modes of paint application over time so as to understand his paintings into a neat narrative arc; or rather, to impose a neat narrative arc on his paintings, lumping paintings into periods based on the traits they share while ignoring the traits that differentiate them. We finish the article with a nice story about how Guston’s abandonment of abstraction in the 1960s was misconstrued as a betrayal of painting when it was actually consistent with his entire painting career, but without knowing why that narrative, or the paintings it subsumes, are of any importance to us. Smith’s review of the exhibition suggests that there is no reason to go to the gallery to actually look at the paintings in person: their significance lies not in looking at them individually, but in their achievement of a synthesis of interests across the career of an elderly painter nearing its end.

In contrast to Smith, and most other writers on Guston whose interests seem to lie in reconciling his “return to figuration” in the 60s with his abstract paintings from the 50s, Bryan Wolf approaches Ancient Wall with a conceptual disposition in his article “Between the Lines: Philip Guston, the Holocaust and ‘Bad Painting’.” To his credit, Wolf does begin by noticing the painting’s particularities. However, in a bizarre chain of associations that reveals his interest to be not in Ancient Wall itself but in a conceptualization of the painting aligned with his own interests, Wolf ultimately extracts a concept from the work foreign to it. Ancient Wall, he claims, is a painting not about painting, but about writing. Wolf’s interest in textuality (itself an abstract noun that points to the concept of text) disfigures the painting to the point where one might suspect he never saw the painting before using it as the occasion to write about a concept unconnected to it: one of the shoe soles (I haven’t been able to identify which from his description) is conceived as a book; things with “qualities of hiddenness… hint at the thematics of writing” (though what connects hiddenness in the painting with writing is inapparent, especially since there are no words in the painting aside from Guston’s signature, which Wolf doesn’t mention); even the legs hanging over the wall begin to “resemble some strange hieroglyphic” that transforms the brick wall into a writing pad (a strange hieroglyphic, indeed—so strange it would have never occurred to me to think of the legs in relation to hieroglyphics). By virtue of simply describing Ancient Wall, Wolf comes closer than Kramer and Smith to seeing the painting before him, but, in abstracting away from the description to a more general conception, he too stops looking. When we look—really look—at Ancient Wall, with a disposition oriented toward seeing the painting as it is, we see just how far short these three views of it fall. The only way to see how much there is to see in a work is to look, and not quickly.

Ancient Wall. 1976. Oil on canvas, 203.2 x 237.8 cm / 80 x 93 5/8.

III

If asked to describe Ancient Wall as we first see it, we would probably respond with a verbal identification of the types of things we recognize in the painting, something like: the painting depicts a scene with a mound of shoes, their soles nailed on, piled in front of a red brick wall, over which dangle hairy legs, all under a pitch black sky. At first glance we identify the depicted things as specific instances of general types: shoes, nails, shoe soles, bricks. But, if we continue to look, the inadequacy of that description becomes clear: the particulars are too particular to be so easily subsumed under general concepts. Of the things we identified to be shoe soles, some are elliptical, some rectangular, some opaque, some transparent, many seem closer to horseshoes, one looks a lot like the back of a canvas, some are connected to red stalks—bloody limbs?—sprouting from a pool of black—perhaps a shadow?—while others appear to be stacked, one seems to levitate. What we see is much more ambiguous than it first appeared.

The ambiguity of the things depicted arises from a painterly vocabulary, of which the dash-like brushstroke made by a quarter-inch flat brush is the smallest unit, and by a limited palette of colors, primarily red, black, and white, that is employed separately and so mixed to make a spectrum of pinks and grays. The dashes, when placed end to end, form a ragged line and, when made with a large brush, are the swathes of thick paint that compose the sky. In some instances, the ragged line functions as a contour that transforms a swathe of paint into an identifiable thing; in other instances, that same ragged line is simply a painted line that doesn’t bound an identifiable thing, despite appearing formally indistinguishable from the lines that do. In these latter cases, the line is an instance of terms from this painterly vocabulary applied without depictive function: paint functioning abstractly as paint in contrast to functioning depictively as a painted instance of an identifiable concept. A single mark can function in two exclusive ways: the painterly vocabulary is ambiguous.

The ambiguity of Guston’s painterly vocabulary, in which the same brushstroke can function in contradictory ways, suggests a way of approaching Ancient Wall as a whole, which, as I will presently show, is itself a painting that can be seen in two ways: a single painting that contains within it two paintings. As described before, the painting at first—what I will call the first painting—is seen as a scene with a pile of shoes in the foreground, which fills the bottom half of the canvas, in front of a brick wall with legs dangling over it in the background, which, with the black sky, fill the top half of the canvas. But upon looking longer, the less the painting seems to fit that description. One becomes aware that the relation of particular instance to general concept is problematic, because, although we do see the depictions of particular things as instances of general concepts, the particular things are so particular that they resist assimilation into a general class. Questions arise: How is it that we group diverse things together into types? How do we assimilate different things and distinguish similar things? What is the relation between these depicted things? Between horseshoes, shoe soles, shoes, feet, legs, and knees?

A second way to read the painting—the second painting—snaps into view. A mental view. To see this second painting, we must have already identified depictions in the first painting as particular instances of these concepts—horseshoe, shoe sole, shoe, foot, leg, knee. Then we can relate them, reorganizing them in light of their potential unity: in relation to a body, a leg is continuous with a foot that is sometimes in a shoe with a sole. With this unity in mind, we can reconnect the shoe soles in the foreground to the legs dangling over the wall by mentally flipping the bottom half of the canvas. Reorganized in the mind, the bottom half of the canvas can be seen as a view of the scene from another position, from underneath the legs hanging over the wall, as if the viewer could enter the scene in the first painting, lay on the ground with their head touching the brick wall to look up at the shoe soles of the shod feet connected to the dangling legs.

What was seen to be a mound of shoes in the first painting is seen to be a canopy of feet in the second; what was first seen as a black shadow from which the shoe soles were sprouting is now seen to be the same sky above the wall at the top of the canvas; what were seen to be bloody limbs connected to shoe soles are now seen to be the undersides of the dangling legs reflecting the red light of the brick wall. The single eye painted in profile in the bottom right corner confirms this view: disembodied, it suggests another view from a position within the painting, impossible for a physical body: a view, a position, a painting for the mind.

But not merely for the mind. To remain with the mental view from the position within Ancient Wall is to not take the disposition proper to the painting: it is too emphatically painted, too insistent on its material properties to be sublimated into a concept. It is not ambiguous but ambivalent, pulled in two directions, straining toward both the material object and toward the mental concept—as much material as it is mental, as much for the eye as for the mind. The first painting is a unified scene with fragmented body parts, in which the bottom and top halves of the canvas are respectively foreground and background—a scene with a source that could exist in the objective world; the second painting is a fragmented scene with unified body parts, in which the top and bottom halves of the canvas must be mentally reorganized so that the top is a view facing the brick wall, the bottom perpendicular to it—a scene that can only exist mentally.

Ancient Wall as a whole is neither the first nor the second painting, neither a possible depiction of an objective world nor a conceptual reorganization of space, neither depictive painting nor abstract mark-making. It is both at the same time. And to see the painting as a whole, we as viewers must assume a disposition toward the painting that can flip between both, neither conflating them nor denying one of them. If asked to formulate the painting in a sentence, we might say that it is a painting about the difficulty of uniting object and concept, matter and mind; about paint’s potential to be depictive and abstract; about the recurring desire and failure to assimilate particulars under general concepts, and the violence that results when we try. This formulation would not be wrong. But, if we have really seen Ancient Wall for what it is, we would likely feel the inadequacy of our generalization and, slipping back into the disposition it calls for, turn back to the painting to continue looking.

1. According to Sedlmayr, an object, “only possesses artistic properties when it is approached with an “artistic” attitude, and it only possesses specific artistic properties when it is seen in accordance with a specific attitude.” Similarly for Danto, a material substrate becomes a work of art only if the viewer has “mastered the is of artistic identification and so constitutes it a work of art.” Sedlmayr, Hans. “Toward a Rigorous Study of Art (1931).” In The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, edited by Christopher Wood, 144; Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 579.

2. I prefer the term “disposition” because it suggests an individual’s temperament, acknowledging how dear to us our senses of what a work of art is, while also in its definition suggesting its role in assembling one’s perception into the thing one sees: “The action of setting in order, or condition of being set in order; relative position of the parts or elements of a whole." “Disposition, n.” In OED Online. Oxford University Press.

3. For Sedlmayr “If one alters one’s approach, the properties of the work of art are altered as well, even though the object itself remains unchanged; thus, we construct the same object as a different work of art.” Likewise for Danto, “Acceptance of one identification rather than another is in effect to exchange one world for another.” “Toward a Rigorous Study of Art (1931).” In The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s, edited by Christopher Wood, 144; Danto, Arthur. “The Artworld.” The Journal of Philosophy 61, no. 19 (1964): 578.

4. To quote Wittgenstein, who Kosuth himself quotes many times, “the axis of reference of our examination must be rotated, but about the fixed point of our real need.” Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by G.E.M. Anscombe. Third Edition. Basil Blackwell Ltd, 1958.

5. One can imagine a work with limits that include an understanding of the history of art (for example, John Baldessari’s Everything Is Purged from This Painting but Art; No Ideas Have Entered This Work, 1966–68) and works that limit themselves to the edges of the canvas (for example, Edward Hopper’s A Woman in the Sun from 1961); works with limits that include the viewer’s physiological responses to visual stimuli (Wojciech Fangor’s #13 from 1964) and works don’t (Roy Lichtenstein’s White Brushstroke from 1965); works with limits that include their material substrate (Philip Guston’s Ancient Wall from 1976) and works that exclude the object (Joseph Kosuth’s Titled (Art as Idea as Idea) The Word "Definition" from 1966-68).

6. Leo Steinberg exemplifies the overcoming of his default hedonistic attitude and, what he calls, “the classical symptoms of a philestine’s reaction” to the work of Jasper Johns in “Contemporary Art and the Plight of Its Public (1962).” In Other Criteria, 3–16. Oxford University Press, 1972.