Is there a theory of art that can be applied with equal success across “schools,” mediums, and historical periods? Or do these all require their own critical approaches? One can go further and ask whether specific elements found in artworks across these boundaries require individual interpretive techniques. Textual content, for example, which began to appear as an integral part of visual arts in the twentieth century, must be accounted for in some way: in the ways that it adds to the meaning, impact, and aesthetic experience created by a work of art. Painting, photography, film, installations, graffiti, and conceptual art all use written scripts to provide an additional layer of significance, on top of the purely visual.
This content can be attended to more or less effectively by different schools of criticism. The following paper considers five works of art and five art theorists. The artists – Picabia, Kollwitz, Lichtenstein, Kruger, and Banksy – represent, for the most part, different mediums and schools. What they share, at least in the works considered, is a use of text as an integral part of their respective works. The theorists – Tzara, Collingwood, Shapiro, Jameson, and Read – also come from different times and schools of thought, but share an interest in developing aesthetic theories to interpret works of art. Ultimately, it will be argued that those theorists who take the broadest and least dogmatic approaches to defining what art is, how it creates meaning, and how it relates to text are able to most effectively contextualize and interpret the greatest range of works.
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Tristan Tzara was to a large extent responsible for spreading the ideas of the Dada movement in Europe, which developed towards in the end of the First World War in Zurich. Tzara, a poet and performance artist, became a kind of spokesperson for the movement, and, as Hofmann writes, “took on the role of a prophet by bombarding French and Italian artists and writers with letters about Dada activities.” He edited an art and literature review titled, simply, Dada, and produced five issues between 1917 and 1919. The most important expression of the movement’s ideals is probably Tzara’s “Dada Manifesto,” which appeared in the third issue of Dada (Hofmann).
In his manifesto, Tzara proclaims that “DADA DOES NOT MEAN ANYTHING” (Tzara 76). It is not for or against anything either, and thus is a kind of “anti-manifesto,” as Tzara affirms when he writes “in principle I am against manifestos, as I am against principles” (76). If anything, Tzara and Dadaism are against grand theories of art and attempts at interpretation of the academic sort. They desire to create an art of such nonsense that it is impervious to all prior and future attempts at understanding it. They recognize that “Every spectator is a plotter, if he tries to explain a word (to know!) From his padded refuge of serpentine complications, he allows his instincts to be manipulated” (Tzara 76).
In many ways, R. G. Collingwood’s aesthetic theories go against trends of the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Feminist and postmodern approaches have done much to criticize long-standing divisions between fine art on one side and craft, popular arts, and entertainment on the other. Modernist critics tended to relegate the latter to something subsidiary, of lesser aesthetic value, and Collingwood also takes this approach in his 1938 work The Principles of Art. Art, for him, is a kind of pure expression of emotion that cannot be reduced to anything that has an end other than itself, such as functional crafts or entertainment. This approach does not deal well with art that is intended to convey a message, that is political in nature, that is intentionally nonsensical (e.g. Dada), or that presents itself in the guise of craft (e.g. Pop Art). For this reason, Collingwood fails to adequately incorporate many of the things that we would unquestionably accept to be some form of art today.
In Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson lays out a theory of postmodernism as being part of a new stage of capitalism. Jameson is a Marxist at heart – though an unconventional one who often veers into other critical approaches to history and culture (Kellner) – and his analysis of cultural products utilizes Marxism to provide a comprehensive framework that incorporates not just class, but gender, race, symbol, myth and other elements into a “social totality” (Jameson 272).
Read attempts to “read” art as theory, rather than something that is only fully revealed through theory. The process of a work playing itself out in interaction with a viewer reveals the work as doing something actively, rather than passively being evaluated. Read uses Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigation as an example because of his “non-theoretical approach to aesthetics, and his emphasis on the importance of not thinking but looking” (Read). Film, in Read’s view, engages an audience in a “therapeutic process of dialogue,” in a way similar to Wittgenstein’s thought experiments. They can both draw the reader into the web of an unreliable narrator, with whom the reader must work with to escape. As Read and Hutchinson argue, “It is a web which Wittgenstein wants you to fall into and wants you to then struggle free from entanglement therein.”
While Read uses complex films like Memento, the approach could be applied to other mediums, though perhaps with more difficulty. One can certainly make an argument for narrative elements of two-dimensional visual arts, perhaps installation art would be the better example to take. The viewer, in Read’s conception is in a process of conversation with a work as they explore it or move through it. In many ways Barbara Kruger’s 1991 installation at Mary Boone Gallery is a similar kind of “web” that entraps the audience, forcing them to engage with both image and text in a process of immersion. Approaching such a work with a theoretical methodology and attempting to contain the experience within that theory, out of the experiential context, leads to a faulty understanding.
The earliest work under consideration is Francis Picabia’s M’Amenez-y, which roughly translates as “bring me there.” Along with the title itself, several other textual elements in the piece, all of which are puns or wordplay of some kind (“M’Amenez-y”). The title, in combination with the mechanical images, indicates a theme of transportation machinery, such as automobiles or trains. The work is work is amusing and absurdist and, as such, fits well with the Dadaist movement, with which Picabia was associated for several years. Dada art is very intentionally devoid of meaning, or at least any intentional meaning imbued in it by the artist. This makes it very difficult to use as an approach to interpreting works that fall outside of this school of artistic production. Dada, as a movement, however, does submit to a historical interpretation. It originated in a very particular place and time, in response to very particular events: Europe, the end of the First World War, and the horror and senselessness of war, respectively.
Roughly contemporaneous with Dadaism is Käthe Kollwitz, a German expressionist artist best known for the series of woodcuts and posters she produced following World War I. They carry a strong anti-war message, featuring widows, starving children, and others who suffered in the post-war period. Nie wieder Krieg (Never Again War), from 1924, features a woman with one hand over heart and the other raised in the air, apparently crying out the words Nie wieder Krieg, which was a motto of anti-war rallies of the time. The message here is quite explicit and is rendered in an expressive way that captures the feeling of a moment in time.
Pop artists incorporated elements of popular culture, graphic design, and consumerism to produce distinctive works in the 1950s and ‘60s. Roy Lichtenstein often drew on comic book imagery, as he does in Crak! Now, Mes Petits…Pour La France! Comics are a medium that, almost of necessity, combine image and text to deliver their narrative. In Lichtenstein’s piece, a rather stylish female resistance fighter from World War II firing a rifle and calls out to compatriots “Now, my friends, for France!” (Kilian). There is a certain irony in the juxtaposition of this manicured young lady leading the grim battle to resist the Nazi occupation. Lichtenstein, unlike Kollwitz and the Dadaists, has sufficient distance from the war to be cheeky about it, to reimagine it from the context of 1960s America.
The mysterious British graffiti artist Banksy is most likely the most famous person working in the medium. His brilliantly subversive pieces – which are often ephemeral in nature, being painted over or vandalized shortly after their creation – are usually political in intent and very often combine text and image. One Nation under CCTV, appearing on the side of a London building in 2008, calls attention to the culture of police surveillance that has developed in the UK in the twenty-first century.
Tzara can perhaps explain Picabia’s work, though he certainly would not want to “interpret” it, as such. The Dadaist approach, however, does not shed light on works that are not created under its auspice. In fact, members of the movement would probably against doing such a thing at all, given their suspicion of theory. To view the text that appears with the works of Kollwitz, Lichtenstein, Kruger, and Banksy as meaningless sounds or wordplay would be doing these artists a disservice, removing what is clearly the primary intent and message of their work.
Read’s approach, in which we view the work of art as “doing” philosophy itself and drawing the viewer into a dialogue, is similarly limited in scope. It could offer an interesting take on Kruger’s work, as mentioned, and perhaps Banksy too. There is a certain process involved in a work like One Nation under CCTV; it sits out “in the world,” so to speak, engaging with and being modified by an transient audience. In some ways, Banksy’s pieces evolve over time and space, and involve the viewer in a narrative similar to film. Facing the other works under consideration, however, Read’s approach is less effective, as they have fairly clear, encoded messages already. The artist is trying to express something specific to the viewer rather than engage them in a conversation. Wittgenstein’s thought experiments regarding language, meaning, and text seem overly complex for these works.
As we have seen, Collingwood’s aesthetic does not handle textual content in a piece of visual art; nor could it fully appreciate pop art or graffiti art. This leaves us with the two Marxist theorists, Schapiro and Jameson. Of the two, Jameson provides the more inclusive theory. In fact, his work could be considered a composite of many theories boiled down to their essence. Jameson’s concrete analyses of various forms of art – literature, film, visual arts, architecture, music, theatre – is proof of his ability to effectively engage with different mediums, styles, and schools, and emerge with an evaluation of their meaning and cultural significance. The historical and dialectical approaches he brings from the Marxist tradition also allows him to make sense of art as a product of a specific time and place, and to show how they often express opposition to social and political circumstances. A more conventional Marxist approach lacks the flexibility of Jameson, forced to focus on class opposition.
Jameson’s though is complex and difficult to penetrate, however, and, it might be argued, too inclusive and wide-ranging. Less ambitious approaches can very well function better in specific mediums or in respect to specific elements of art and text, but are usually lacking when it comes to a “total” interpretation. Kellner summarizes well the context in which Jameson is working:
Dialectical criticism thus involves thinking that reflects on categories and methods while carrying out concrete analyses and studies; relational and historicizing thinking that contextualizes the object of study in its historical environment; utopian thinking that compares the existing reality with possible alternatives and finds utopian hope in literature, philosophy, and other cultural texts; and totalizing, synthesizing thought that provides a systematic framework for cultural studies and a theory of history within which dialectical criticism can operate.
