I traveled to the center of Australia with the hope that I could step deeper into understanding why I have such a powerful attraction to aboriginal art. For 15 years I have been studying these works, often only in reproduction, and my attachment has only deepened with time. While in Alice Springs, I must have looked at several thousand paintings. Sitting with some of the aboriginal artists, I was convinced that they are feeling and seeing the world in a way that is completely different than me. Their boundaries are different: It feels as if they carry the land inside them. Not the image of the land, the land.
I was struggling with the language to describe this significant difference when I fell onto an extraordinary book–Metonymy in Contemporary Art, by Denise Green. Green is an artist, an Australian, and a cerebral thinker who has articulated some of my own questions about the aboriginal world view as it relates to the context of art making.
Here is how she describes her own work:
Denise Green introduces the concept of metomymic thinking, as developed by the late poet and linguist, A. K. Ramanujan, one that is often different from what is present in Western art critical writing. In Ramanujan’s formulation of metonymic thinking, the human and natural worlds are intrinsically related to one another as are the transcendent and mundane worlds. Metonymic thinking in contemporary art implies that one must take into account the inner world of the artist. When artists create metonymically there is a fusion between an inner state of mind and outer material world.
In her book, Green takes on the likes of Clement Greenberg and Walter Benjamin. Both have argued against subjectivity in painting, and Green asserts that the hegemony of their viewpoints in western art criticism has inhibited a deeper understanding of painting. She wants to open up the possibility of viewing contemporary art from a more “global and pluralistic perspective.”
There is much to explore here, and I’m still assembling these ideas into a meaningful relationship for my own understanding. But Green’s book has been a huge step forward in penetrating issues that have been floating around in my consciousness for several years.
I have a lot more to explore on this topic. So more later.
Note: To see some images from my own collection of aboriginal art, go to my Slow Painters blog. They are tagged under the category, “Aboriginal Artists.”
Welcome back, Deborah!
This is a valuable post. You bring on your question about whether or not subjectivity is a valid place from which “art” can be approached from. And why should it not? Is not the subjective point of view which stimulates curiosity, the desire to learn and the desire to make “things” (ideas included) and to share them with others?
Thank you for the recommended book. I will be very busy next winter:-)
The whole concept of subjectivity needs to be restructured in Green’s paradigm of metonymy. Part of what she’s proposing is that the narrowcast nature of our Western cartesian thinking has greatly limited our ability to experience a much broader and deeper encounter with art. We have drawn the line for subjectivity so tight that there is very little wiggle room. Other cultures do not recognize that inhibiting dichotomy.
Yes it is a specifically western phenomenon, or this is a problem in the core of western philosophy… In feminist philosophy (and post-colonial thinking) questioning this is one of the central issues. I grapple with it myself, because in art history the subjective is still a little dirty. You are supposed to strive for “objectivity”, because how can subjectivity and relatvity lead us to one truth (then the question is, is there only one truth?)… but this is of course an on going struggle within the discipline. As a researcher I’m looking for a balance…
Jenny,
I think you would find this book very interesting, and you can download the complete article I reference in today’s posting on Ramanujan entitled “Is there an Indian way of thinking?” This essay went a long way in helping me put this into a useful framework. (Ramanujan is also an amazing poet, so he has many facets as do you.)
The evolution of philosophy has taught us that we are IN the world. Our thoughts and thought processes are IN the world. Thought itself is one of the ways that we “prehend” the world to use Whitehead’s term. Ratiocination is a form of feeling or prehension. It actively reaches out to the world to “touch” it. In this sense, the distinction between subjective and objective is blurred to say the least.
But we must recognize that thought per se is a structured or rule-based form of feeling. The efficacy of those rules and structures cannot be minimized. They are essential to most of the things that make our life possible. Tossing them out is like climbing a ladder and then cutting out the rungs beneath you as you ascend.
The idea of balance comes in when we compare this to the manifold of experience and feeling without predefined rules and structure. Here we “feel” the world in a different way… a more primordial and possibly direct way. We draw out of the world the structure or lack of structure that we find. We do not impose structure as Kant might suggest we do. That is the realm where the artist has reigned supreme throughout history.
But I think today you are finding artists who seek to integrate the feeling of thought with the feeling of “nature”. They sense a connection… they “prehend” that their thoughts about things are themselves objects of both thought and feeling. They indeed ARE feelings and they are squarely within the scope of art.
Primitive artists are exciting because they are reaching out and touching the world with their thought-feelings. They have little differentiation between a realm of mind and a realm of body… a realm of concepts and a realm of sensation or emotion. They are IN the world in a way that we want to touch with our minds. I think you are feeling that my dear, lovely artist and friend.
Enough philosophizing… I am going to ride my Harley!!
Luv Ya!
Bree
As usual, you dive right into the deep end Bree. What interests me is the nature of thought-feelings, particularly in their cross-cultural manifestations. Ramanujan’s essay (see my posting for 3/23) contrasts white European and Indian viewpoints, and his distinctions have been very useful to me. As in studio time useful.
So yes, go ride your Harley, yet another valid portal into being IN the world. So good to reconnect again.
Welcome back, Deborah! You were away for a very long time.
And now that you’re back, I don’t want to shock you by sounding like Deepak Chopra, but — isn’t our awareness part of the natural world? Though the search for knowledge may well be a fall from grace, we have not quite made ourselves into aliens here. Our naturalness — especially as artists — is getting harder to find, however. And there aren’t all that many art critics urging us to reconnect with it, for, if it found its way into art, there would be much to encounter but very little to write.
It’s worth remembering that Greenberg, for one, considered himself and a few other writers the theoretical arm of the abstract expressionist movement, of which the painters were the practice. More than half a century later, we happily find ourselves caring more about the paintings than the theories that ushered them in. This must be because we are still capable of being grabbed without having been prepped.
There was a famous story of Thomas Mann’s — can’t remember the title — about a very unhappy man. All throughout his youth, he had read and studied to prepare himself for life, each encounter with art and literature so exquisite as to make him swoon with anticipation for the real life he would one day lead.
For what was the point of all that reading and looking if not to instruct one about the wonders ahead? When his student days drew to a close, he was launched into life — real life — and found it a pallid thing. “Is that all there is?” he kept asking, “Is that all there is?” His long years of study had left him with all the wrong expectations, and destroyed his instincts too.
I think of this character whenever I suspect I may be about to read something that will leave me over-prepared, usually some piece of criticism. We must be ready only to bring to art a sense of encounter — the very habit of mind culture conspires to deprive us of.
Elatia,
Your comments are very provocative to me, especially in light of Green’s construct of Ramanujan’s metonymic approach.
I had a friend who spent some time in the Outback with the aboriginals some years ago. When she explained that she was visiting from the Northern Hemisphere, they said to her, “We know about your land, that’s the land of the Jesus songline.” They clearly considered the Christian “songline” as vital and valid as their own caterpillar and snake dreamings.
When you map a culture’s ideas, concepts, and intellectual traditions into the construct of songlines–stories that are embedded in the land and that are kept alive by humans–it may be easier to see how our awarenesses and beliefs are living, breathing elements in the landscape of our existence. Perhaps the power of Green’s book for me was in recognizing how far we can drift from that naturalness of which you speak, especially in an art world so muscular in its hegemony of what is deemed legitimate, au courant and important.
thank you for all of this, Deborah. It is fascinating for me as a seeker of contemplative awareness. I am discovering how art and ecology and contemplative awareness are so intimately interwoven.
The connection between the land and one’s self/physcial body seems especially important to me. Maybe “connection” is too weak of a word. It is more than a “connection”.
Yes, it is so much more. Once again it seems that verbal language just doesn’t provide an adequate set of tools to capture what we are can sense so profoundly. Perhaps no language can accomodate that state, and it is that incompleteness that spurs the soul to find other ways to “connect”–including art, meditation, transcendence.
[…] of Western artists I admired like Jackson Pollock, Brice Marden and Joan Snyder. From an earlier post on Slow Muse: I traveled to the center of Australia with the hope that I could step deeper into […]