In his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, Arthur C. Danto describes an art exhibition in which some eight identical red square canvases are displayed, each being a different "kind" of representation. One, for example, purports to show the Red Sea after it has closed over the Egyptians as they pursued the Israelites, while another is a depiction of the center of the Kremlin, and another is a Minimalist geometric painting, while yet another is merely a canvas grounded in red lead by the master Giorgione, etc.
Danto asks what makes them works of art--or more exactly, what makes us understand them as works of art. He goes on to reject the so-called Institutional Theory, which claims that anything brought within the precinct of the world of art is an art work. Duchamp made a urinal into a work of art, and by the same mechanism anything displayed as a work of art in the setting under which we recognize works of art becomes one.
Danto is dissatisfied with this definition of a work of art and proposes another means to comprehend art, which is that a work of art is "about" something, it refers to something not itself.
I offer a counter example: What is the difference between a police crime-scene photograph and a photograph by, say, Diane Arbus of a crime scene? Both depict the disarray and artifacts of the place where a crime was committed. Both, presumably, are a bit gritty, a bit austere, alienated, aloof.
Before I consider the answer, let us redescribe the two photographs. The first, taken by a police photographer, in all likelihood will be shot with available light, or if that is not sufficient, with an electronic flash unit fixed to the hand-held camera. The objects in the photo will not be repositioned, but rather the photographer will move about to get clearer pictures.
In a similar vein, Arbus's crime photo will be shot in black and white; but only after the police photographer and crime scene analysts have finished their work and left. Or maybe not. Maybe Arbus used one of her sideways looking cameras and "sneaked" pictures of the stressed out people working over the room.
But before we go on, let us imagine several more representations of the same crime scene. One is a series of three photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe, which he set up in his own studio after he saw Arbus's pictrues from the actual scene. Against a flat backdrop, he has arranged the important and salient items, viz., the bed and bedsheets all pulled aside, the sidetable with the half-finished whiskey, a stubbed-out cigarette, a man's pajama top, a dogeared novel, and a crucifix over the headboard. In Mapplethorpe's pictures, he has set up studio lights and used colored gels to allow him to recreate the mood of the cheap apartment, and he has discarded all of the truly inessential elements like the bottlecap on the sidetable, a piece of dental floss on the pillow (which he has moved to the right about a foot), and a cheap ballpoint pen.
When George Segal saw Mapplethorpe's photos, he constructed a tableau of the same scene. By the time he completed his sculpture, the trial has occurred, and so he had access to the information about the two men who lived there and their lovers' quarrel, and how one person died. Segal chose to show one of the figures standing over the dead body draped over the edge of the bed, and taking a cue from some colorful remarks by the defendant in his disputed confession, he painted the standing plaster figure green and the corpse a cinnamon brown on a very dark navy blue bed. The rest of the tableau was painted flat black (he left out the lamp on the side table)
Are these four portrayals works of art? What do these have in common? What not?
Danto would argue that they are all art because they are all "about" the crime. The ways in which they convey their "about"-ness differ, it is true, but they all are not the crime in themselves, but only representations of it.
We must readily acknowledge that Mapplethorpe's and Segal's efforts are the most clearly artistic representations. Most of us would say that Arbus's pictures are also art, but probably the police photographer's pictures are not.
Why?
All four are tangible, physical objects that are said to represent something besides themselves. All four exhibit "aesthetic properties," at least to the extent that any representation does. It is easier to see these properties in the tableau and studio photographs, and by the habit of regarding photographs as aesthetic creations, we readily accept Arbus's as art. Most of us would only grudgingly agree that the crime-scene photographs are aesthetic items, because we accept the premise that the overriding value is contained in their documentary transcription of the sights of that night, not in the quality of their presentation.
What kinds of statements may be said about these works? Some may say that Segal's work is "engaging" or "evocative" or maybe just "pretty." Some may say that Mapplethorpe's pictures are "compelling" or "haunting" or "profound." And some may say that Arbus's are "disturbing" or "intrusive" or "stark." Comments like these concern the responses the pictures elicit from the viewer. Some may conclude that Arbus's are the most "truthful" because they show the actual scene with little or no prettifying veneer; others may say that Mapplethorpe's are the most "truthful" because they embody the seductiveness of his photographic style to set up a severe contrast with the scene depicted and thereby dramatically increase the horror even as the photo distances us viewers; and some may say that Segal's bare tableau has stripped away all of the inessentials, discarding even those that Mapplethorpe retained, and has shown us the quintessential "truth" of the scene, the killer and the killed.
In each of these three examples, the "truth" of the representation is predicated in the manner of analogy. All three are mediated truths, so to speak. The "truth" of Arbus's pictures is the "truth" of ostensibly documentary photographs in the world of other, staged photographs. Hers are not so much staged as they are "snatched" from the scene. The presence of the photographer at the actual scene lends credence and veracity to these pictures, but the picutres themselves propound their truthfulness not by protraying the actual scene so much as by having been taken at the actual scene. Their "truth" refers to their having been made in a certain way. Mapplethorpe's have a more evident mediation. By using arbitrary lighting and arbitrary editing of surrogate items in a surrogate scene, Mapplethorpe's pictures propose a "truth" that refers only to a conclusion manifested by the dramatized staging. Segal's goes one step further and mediates the "truth" by means of sculpturally embodying what he understands to be the "essential" elements of the scene and then focuses the viewer's attention on his conclusions which he presents by means of painted colors, plaster casts, etc.
None of these three could be offered in court, as could the police photos, because they cannot claim two things: that there is a definite one-to-one correspondence between a represented item and its actual correlate and that the police photographs are offered exclusively for the corroboration of that correlation. Not even Arbus's picutres can do that (although they may in fact be able to).
Ultimately, the difference between the artistic representations and the other representation is that, for the artworks, the "truth" of their portrayals does not depend on someone else being able to verify it in every particular. We say, for example, that the fictional story in this movie or that book is "true to life" because it "captures" or "expresses" the "way things actually happen," or that it "shows the nature" of this or that relationship. Literature, and art generally, is about generality and generalized truths, whereas nonart representations are always about particularized truth. Does the crime scene photograph actually and accurately show the way the bed clothes were strewn around? Does Segal's sculpture, by contrast, show the disarray typically caused when a lover is murdered and clearly understood by the viewer?
Consider this corollary question: Is your driver's license photograph a work of art? Why do we not expect to see a portrait by Alice Neel or David Hockney on a driver's license?
The answer, I submit, is that the degree of accuracy to actual appearances is the paramount virtue of a driver's license picture, and the means of verifying its truth--to wit, to compare the photo and its owner--is its only test of goodness.
Consider this other corollary: Is a piece of driftwood in the uncanny shape of President Kennedy a work of art? For that matter, can it be submitted to the same truth criteria as the police photo? In both cases, we can answer no. But let us note that we would generally deny the driftwood status as art because we would decide that there was no intention to make it into a likeness, and so while Ripley's Believe It or Not may be intrigued by this curio, it would not be considered art because it wasn't meant to be art. Nor is it productive to test its truth as we would test the police photo, for the simple reason that we are surprised and intrigued that the forces of nature affected the wood in such an amazing way that we recognize any likeness at all. We would give great latitude when we compare features, so that we may allow the ears to be too big, and the smile crooked, and the annoying fact that all in all, it looks more like someone else but it bears a sufficient resemblance to a famous person that we prefer to marvel at that particular quantum of similarity.
Consider a further corollary: After seeing the Kennedy Driftwood likeness in a local art store, someone goes out and assembles a lot of driftwood into an abstract arrangement. This we would clearly agree is a work of art, partly by virtue of the Institutional definition, that is, the maker intended that it be art; and partly by virtue of the actual making of it into something that is not functional or otherwise useful. In this example, by the way, the piece of driftwood abstraction would not be "about" anything (at least nothing more than the fact that it is--and therefore is "about"--its own abstraction).
(c) 1996. Michael Brady
