Strange Tools (1)
An Asynchronous Studio Book Club Reading of Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noë.
Any residency that invites more than one artist at a time often ends up with at least one dud in the cohort. This is hard to prevent. A lot of people know how to present themselves for professional and personal evaluation, even and maybe especially if they’re sociopaths.
I once got into a conversation with one of these characters that went something like this:
Obligatory Residency Narcissist: I hear you’re an art writer.
Me: It’s true.
ORN: I’ve read a lot of art theory. My theory is that all art is a sublimation of death.
Me: Sure, why not?
I then walked off as if the conversation was finished, because as far as I was concerned, it was. There’s no proving or disproving a claim like that. People harbor them because they want entry into a discipline that doesn’t include them, even if, technically, they’re making art.
I reacted similarly, though probably unfairly, to the claim by Alva Noë in Strange Tools that art is evolutionarily downstream from breastfeeding.
Western art abounds with depictions of the nursing mother. The display of the Mother and Child is central to Christian religious thinking, so this isn’t surprising. But it may be that pictures of the suckling infant are important to us for reasons that go beyond our interest in the life of Jesus. Breastfeeding, after all, is basic to our mammalian biology; it is also, for the vast majority of us, our first opportunity for nurturing love. In fact, or so at least I propose, breastfeeding is also a key to understanding the very nature of art; the fact that pictures of nursing mothers are so common may point to one of art’s abiding features: art is always concerned with itself.
If you have to point to a single cause for the origin and ultimate purpose of art, this is more promising than it being a sublimation of death. But it depends likewise on some generously broad propositions: Human breastfeeding is so inefficient that its main purpose may be communication, communication is a technology, art is a technology, and all these things help us organize ourselves in one way or another. Again, sure, why not? So far, at page 48, it’s all neither here nor there as far as making art is concerned.
There is something more to a later suggestion about first- and second-order creative activity. You have painting, say, and then critical activity and various kinds of metacognition about painting. These end up mutually influencing each other. The example of the way dancing and choreography are separate activities, but not entirely distinguishable ones, entailed an interesting discussion. It takes a protracted analysis of baseball before we get to any specific artists, regarding the point that it’s at the second order of activity in which artists can ask whether the conventions of the genre are enabling or have become limiting.
Just as Thomas Mann turned from language to narrative, some painters either stopped making pictures altogether (Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, Robert Irwin) or deployed naturalism (that is to say a concern with effective depiction) in totally new ways (Gerhard Richter, David Hockney, Lucian Freud, for example).
My point is a simple one… picture makers who are artists put picture making itself, or vision itself, in the frame for inspection. If pictures are the result, then they are pictures that don’t only show you something but also invite you to wonder what you could possibly see in or with thanks to a picture.
Noë is trying to avoid using a term like “picture-ness” to describe this quality. The verbosity is the price of writing like a regular human being about phenomenology. It’s either ramble or resort to Sartre’s “being for-itself” and Heidegger’s Dasein and similar coinages. I feel a little bad for the author in that regard—you can almost hear plain language creaking under the strain of the topic.
Noë assures the reader that full demonstrations of numerous claims floated without argument are coming in later chapters. Once again, I reply, sure, why not?
Dissident Muse Journal is the blog of Dissident Muse, a publishing and exhibition project by Franklin Einspruch. Content at DMJ is free, but paid subscribers keep it coming. They also have access to Dissident Muse Salons, discounts in the print shop, and Friend on the Road consultations. Please consider becoming one yourself, and thank you for reading.
Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature by Alva Noë. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.
The current exhibition in the Dissident Museum is David Curcio: The Point of the Needle.
"Human breastfeeding is so inefficient that its main purpose may be communication"
Um, come again? While breastfeeding is almost certainly "not" key to understanding art, it "is" central to the survival of every mammal on the planet. It's "inefficient" only when modern industrialized societies favor smaller families and mothers that work away from the home.
For hundreds of thousands of years breastfeeding would have been such a common and ubiquitous activity that even the most indifferent male hunter in the tribe would have had a thorough understanding about how to hold an infant so they properly latch. In contrast, a modern girl might easily never see it happen for her entire childhood. For millennia both girls and boys would have been around it constantly, and as girls got older they would have had sisters and friends to guide and assist if they had any problems.
In any case, breastfeeding is the reason why we (you, me and the daft theoretician you met) are here right now, if not so much recently, certainly historically. Babies are unable to receive nutrients any other way for many months; bottles and formula being blips in the timeline of humanity. Still for all that, though it is central to life, it's pretty obviously not central to the impulse to create art.