Lonergan and Sontag on Art

A Study of Aesthetic Conversion

A Schema You Know

• Naïve realism• Idealism• Critical Realism (“to the left of idealism”)

A Confusing Passage

• “the validation of the artistic idea is the artistic deed” (Insight 208).

Conversion as an Answer?

1. Analogues for the Counter-Positionsa. Naïve realism as the ossified mimetic theoryb. Idealism as the slide into Camp

2. Possible Unpackings of Meaning3. An Example of Conversion?

COUNTERPOSITIONS

AOTNR Art 1/2

The earliest theory of art, that of the Greek philosophers, proposed that art was mimesis, imitation of reality…Aristotle’s arguments in defense of art do not really challenge Plato’s view that all art is an elaborate trompe l’oeil, and therefore a lie, but…lie or no, art has a certain value according to Aristotle because it is a form of therapy (Sontag).

AOTNR Art 2/2

When you go out to paint, try to forget what objects you have before you—a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you, the exact color and shape, until it gives your own naïve impression of the scene before you (Monet).

Idealism 0

In order to approach the spiritual in art, one employs reality as little as possible…This explains logically why primary forms are employed. Since these forms are abstract, an abstract art comes into being (Mondrian).

Flight from Realism 1/2

Even in modern times, when most artists and critics have discarded the theory of art as representation of an outer reality in favor of the theory of art as subjective expression, the main feature of the mimetic theory persists. Whether we conceive of the work of art on the model of a picture (art as a picture of reality) or on the model of a statement (art as the statement of the artist), content still comes first (Sontag).

Flight from Realism 2/2

Duchamp’s Fountain Modern Theatre

Sontag on Camp 1/2

Defined• sees everything in quotation marks…

To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role. It is the farthest extension, in sensibility, of the metaphor of life as theater

• Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the ‘off,’ of things-being-what-they-are-not

• The essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration. And Camp is esoteric—something of a private code

Examplars• Stag movies seen without

lust• the haunting androgynous

vacancy behind the perfect beauty of Greta Garbo

Sontag on Camp 2/2

Greta Garbo in lieu of Stag The Pit of the Stomach• strongly drawn to Camp,

and almost as strongly offended by it

• One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that ‘sincerity’ is not enough. Sincerity can be a simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness

• To emphasize style is to slight content

THE AESTHETIC PATTERN

Art as Insight 1/3

If you see a color, you do not see non-being, but a being; but the being that you see, you see not under the formality of being, but under the formality of color; for being…is not found by taking a look with one’s eyes but by making a rational judgment…Again, vision of a color is true, since between color and vision there is that correspondence in which truth essentially consists. But this correspondence is not discerned by the eyes, since formally truth is found only in the intellect’s act of judging (Lonergan).

Art as Insight 2/3

• The fact that for a long time Cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing. I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me. This does not mean that the English language does not exist (Picasso)

• To see is itself a creative operation, requiring an effort (Matisse)

Art as Insight 3/3

Stripe Painting Sontag• “art is the discovery of what

is necessary—of that and nothing more”

• “What is needed is more attention to form in art…One of the difficulties is that our idea of form is spatial”

Deed as Validation 1/3

• “the validation of the artistic idea is the artistic deed” (Insight 208)

• art “seeks to mean, to convey, to impart…through a participation, and in some fashion a reenactment of the artist’s inspiration and intention” (Insight 208)

Deed as Validation 2/3

Painting isn’t just the visual thing that reaches your retina—it’s what is behind it and in it…I paint this way because I can keep putting more things in it—drama, anger, pain, love,…my ideas about space. Through your eyes it again becomes an emotion or an idea. It doesn’t matter if it is different from mine as long as it comes from the painting which has its own integrity and intensity (de Kooning).

Deed as Validation 3/3

A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of a philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. The artist and the writer, then, are working without rules in order to formulate the rules of what will have been done (Lyotard).

POSTMODERNISM: A NEW HOPE

Theory 1/3

Avante-Garde on the Run Steadfast in Hope

Theory 2/3

Theory 3/3

• Situated in an imaginative world• Continually aware of itself as performance• Unavailability for re-presentation

Practice: Gatz

The Play The Times“Gatz” is the least literally interactive…it does not seek to destroy physically the wall between audience and actors, as “Sleep” and “Donkey” do. Yet for me “Gatz” was the most transporting, traveling to an ineffable place that theater is not expected to inhabit: the corridor between written words and a reader’s perception of them.