SELF, MIND AND CONTEMPORARY ART THEORY:
IMPLICATIONS FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF ARTISTS AND ART
EDUCATORS

A Thesis

Presented to

the Faculty of the Art Education Division

Nova Scotia College of Art and Design

in Partial Fulfillment

of the Requirements for the Degree

Master of Arts in Art Education

•

Richard Mueller
April, 1992

 Accepted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

MASTER OF ARTS IN ART EDUCATION

We hereby approve the thesis presented by Richard Mueller.

~~-, Associate Professor, Art Education Division
Thesis Advisor

David York, Associate-Professor, Art Education Division

Dr. Cyntlli~r, Associate Professor, Art Education Division

 ABSTRACT

This thesis aims to open a discussion of the impact of contemporary art theory and
criticism upon art instruction at the secondary and post-secondary levels.

In an

overview of the historical development of rationalism in relation to the notion of an
autonomous instrumental self, an interpretation is offered of how mind has come to
be understood to operate in two fundamentally distinct modes, the rational and the
intuitive.

It is suggested that we are losing faith in human instrumentality and the

imaginative powers of this instrumental self.

Chapter One provides a broad historical context out of which these perceptions
have emerged. Tensions are traced between imagination/intuition and reason from
Platonic sources through to the Enlightenment, where rationalism assumed a
dominant role in all aspects of human social and intellectual development. The
emergence of Romanticism in the nineteenth century is described and it is argued
that while Romanticism reconfirmed distinctions between rational and intuitive
operations of mind, it privileged intuition as a unique mode of awareness between
the self, nature, and external events of the world.

Both the rationality of the

Enlightenment and the Romantic imagination represent the fundamental
epistemological authorities out of which modernism emerged.

Knowledge, certified

by the efficacy of language and science, formed the foundation upon which the
modern agenda was constructed.

Chapter One concludes with a discussion of the

Avant-Garde and its subvertive/constructive role in providing modernism with the
stream of new forms necessary to maintaining its progressive thrust.

 In its examination of contemporary art theory, Chapter Two begins with a discussion
of the parallel goals of rationalism and formalism in modernist art and the
concurrent check of the avant-garde. It is suggested that high modernism, in
disparaging the everyday in preference of formal experimentation, rationalized its
increasing lack of content by assuming transcendent significance. The essential
ro1e of the instrumental expressive self in the construction of meaning is defended
and art-making is described as a distinct mechanism in that process.

Describing

the increased skepticism toward universal knowledge, the discussion in Chapter
Two centres upon the necessity for clarification of the notion of Truth and our
attitudes toward it. It is argued in Chapter Three that certainty, as expressed
through belief in knowledge, must be redefined as an act of faith in a fluid field of
changing information. This shift in attitude toward Truth is argued as central to the
post/modern paradigm and its impact upon the readings of all forms of
representation, including art.

Because these insights have emerged primarily from my personal experience as a
working artist and not from traditional academic research, Chapter Four attempts to
ground this discussion in an account of my studio practice.

Based upon a

transcript of an interview with me conducted by artist Christine-Ross Hopper, I
elaborate upon comments in the interview as they relate to issues in this thesis.
The chapter concludes by referencing an exhibition of my work in support of this
thesis at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art and Design in
December 1991.

The final chapter attempts to bring together my experience as a researcher and as
an educator at the post-secondary level. Accepting the dynamic that operates

ii

 between rational and intuitive modes of awareness, I outline an educational model
in which contemporary art operates as the principle means for opening the closed
systems of rationalized meaning.

I argue for a system of open debate that must

originate in a more rigorously informed critical awareness of the mechanisms of
representation and, most essentially, in a program that encourages students to
work through strategies that are grounded in the unique contexts constituted by
their own self.

iii

 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I extend a very special thanks to my thesis advisor Dr. Nick Webb for his persistent
encouragement throughout this mid-life adventure.

I also thank my thesis

committee: Dr. Cynthia Taylor, Prof. David York, and Dr. Harold Pearse. All have
become highly respected teachers, friends, and colleagues.

Finally I thank my wife

Bea, my most dependable and cherished supporter, whose mastery over temper
and technology saved my ass.

iv

 TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Chapter
1

HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR CONTEMPORARY ART AND CRITICISM .......... 1

A Context for Two Aspects of Mind .............................. .-. ......... ....... 1
Pre-Enlightenment: The Form of Certainty .......... ... ............ ..... ... .. .. 2
The Enlightenment: Intellect vs. Feeling ........................................ 7
Romanticism: The Primacy of a Feeling Autonomous Self............. 9
Modernism: An Uncomfortable Synthesis ..................................... 12
The Avant-Garde: The Subversion of Certainty ............................ 18

2

THE CONTEMPORARY: ART AS AN INSTRUMENT OF MEANING ................. 24

Emerging Skepticism .................................................................... 25

3

SELF, MEANING AND THE POWER OF THE SYMBOLIC ............................... 31

Belief, Faith, and Certainty ........................................................... 41
Two Modes of Instrumentation in the Modem Paradigm
and the Post-Modem Challenge .................................................... 44

4

PERSONAL STATEMENTS .............................................................................. 45

Annotated Discussion of My Work with
Christine Ross Hopper ................................................................. 45
Truth and Other Fictions; Exhibition Statement ........................... 67

Illustrations .................................................................................. 70

5

EDUCATION ..................................................................................................... 72

A Curriculum of Strategy and Debate .......................................... 72

V

 TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE

Chapter
5

EDUCATION (Cont'd.)

Ralph Smith's Curriculum Model ................................................. 78
The Art Impulse and Three Streams of Art Training .................... 81
Subjective-Expressive ..................................................... 82
Process-Productive ......................................................... 84
Reflective-Analytic ........................................................... 87
Proposed Program of Study ....................................................... 89
CONCLUSION ................................................................................................ 97

BIBLIOGRAPHY .................................................................................... 100

vi

 PREFACE

My experiences with making art have frequently led me to question the nature of
art-making as a practice. After completing six years of continuous art training, it
occurred to me that art instruction, in appropriating traditional and current
conventions, either focussed on the development of mimetic skills through
formalized drill, or encouraged a random search for direction in a non-structured
survey of expression, media, and techniques.

Exercises were assigned and

assumed relevant to a fixed, but undefined, order that existed somewhere "out
there". Most often, students entered art school with vague notions of making art.
The essential skills were mastered with varying degrees of success. Variations of
approach, within the parameters of a problem, were considered indicative of a
developing personal style, but often little attention was given to the corresponding
thought (or lack of it).

The message was, that given a basic repertoire of techniques, anything was
permissible in the quest for original and novel forms. Art-making had, by then,
seen the impact of Dada, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimalism, and
Conceptualism; each, rich in its own rhetoric and unquestionably modern, yet
contextually disjointed.

My response was to feel somewhat lost. I realized the properties and limitations of
the various "schools", and had effectively worked my way out of having any
particular subject matter. I could draw, paint and sculpt from a model, but it all
seemed somewhat repetitious and futile and lacking in any personally relevant
meaning. Once formal class exercises were behind me, I became bored with

vii

 Expressionism, and was seduced by the intellectual play of Conceptualism. My
ideas were racing, but the learned techniques and conventions provided no
personal program. I had no strategy for grounding the work in my own experience where it had been prior to my being "art educated".

Interested in perception and the way in which we understand the world, I found
myself looking for some way to devise an imagery expressive of my own ideas.
Conceptualism seemed locked into dry academicism, as abstraction grew
increasingly mannered.

Each had evolved a contemporary and relevant

vocabulary, but while one enshrined the primacy of materials and process, the other
renounced it. Abstraction, in its focus on surface and medium, compromised
content. Conceptualism, appropriating various natural or contrived systems,
sacrificed spontaneous dialogue between concept and object. One satisfied my
need for intellectual input, and the other encouraged me to re-think the role of the
object in art.

Neither provided the necessary parameters of enquiry that would

allow me to begin simply with my personal encounter with the world; that stream of
instants in which I came into direct contact with the immediate experience of actual
events. Throughout the thesis, I make reference ·to the actual and the immediate.
I am referring to the experience that each of us shares with the world through the
immediate vehicle of perception.

Every other form of knowing is a delayed

reflection, occurring after-the-fact and distanced from the actual by its own
interpretive system. This paper argues for strategies of instruction that place
students in touch with their own perceptions as the source of art that is relevant to
the ever-fluid transformations of the actual.

Historical works and conventions serve

only as points on a constellation of human experience.

It is the unique function of

the making process to plot encounters with the actual. Only the individual self, not

viii

 societies, experiences that encounter directly. Along with science, philosophy, and
other formal enquiries, those artworks that succeed in plotting the actual, form the
constellations of our conceptions of reality.

Because post-modem theory often

discredits original forms of representation, this paper argues for the retention of a
clear notion of self as a fundamental and autonomous instrument of unique insight
into the nature of the unmediated encounter with the actual. Art-making, as the
most immediate and formally unencumbered medium between self and world, acts
most appropriately as the vehicle for reflecting upon these encounters.

Much of what influences current studio practice in the training of artists and the
production of works of art, remains grounded in Enlightenment principles that
evolved into Romanticist and Modernist models. Within our century, a steady
stream of critical positions have surfaced to challenge the assumptions of
modernism. These challenges are significant to studio practice and teaching in the
way that they question the essential notions of art-making, authorship, object, and
the subject/viewer in relationship to the world at large. Directly and implicitly, an
active response to these queries is called for in the production of art. As a working
artist, it has been interesting to investigate the implications that these issues have
for the preparation of young artists; for their task of locating themselves and their
work within the debate, and for formulating personal programs that are meaningful
both to themselves and the immediate social contexts within which they operate.

It is often contended that the modernist model of understanding is the instrument of
a philosophically and politically biased social model. The extension of the debate
into the socio-political arena, challenges aimed at prevailing historical models, and
the impacts of new technologies on communications media, have very definite

ix

 implications for the form of contemporary and future art making and education
within an increasingly complex pluralistic society.

The distillation and generalization of contemporary thought, has been necessary in
order to achieve a reasonable degree of focus within the thesis format.
References to the post-modem are not intended to imply a singular point of view, .
but to provide a working term for what I believe to be a significant shift from the
modernist paradigm. The shifts which occur between descriptive and perspectival
voices speak to the complexity of this subject and the attempt to condense the
sources and arguments to a form consistent with the required scale of this thesis.
The arguments presented herein are believed sufficient to open a serious enquiry
into contemporary art theory and its implications for the training of artists.

X

 CHAPTER 1

HISTORICAL CONTEXT FOR CONTEMPORARY ART AND CRITICISM

A Context for Two Aspects of Mind

Within the Western tradition, mind has come to be understood as operating in two
fundamentally distinct modes, the rational and the intuitive.

Traceable to the

Platonic tradition, this polarity became most apparent during the eighteenth century,
within the philosophical tradition known as the Enlightenment. The intuitive mode,
associated with the notion of an autonomous conscious "self', is considered closer
to nature, tacit and coloured by feeling.

Primarily experiential, intuition is more

direct and unencumbered by intermediary systems of thought. General in nature,
open to the totality of experience, it is difficult to express the intuited in precise
terms.

Imagery and metaphorical language are required.

Conversely the rational mode is associated with systems of reasoned analysis.
Through reductive strategies, normative principles are construed that reflect
physical experience. The primary means of expression - literal language - tends
toward closed systems of knowledge.
These models of mind are understood to operate in tension with one another; the
intuitive, subverting the efficacy of rational analysis, and the rational inhibiting direct
experience.

Each mode continues to fund its own historical system of beliefs.

Since the Enlightenment, and the increased dependence upon scientific method, a
hierarchical relationship has developed between the two modes, with rationality

1

 understood as the higher, more privileged mode. Moreover, intuition itself, as an
aspect of subjectivity, has increasingly been subjected to the scrutiny of rational
analysis. The subject, or self, has become the object of intense study.

It is

primarily through the constructs of rational reflection that we have come to know
ourselves as individuals within a society of selves.
Nonetheless, there has persisted a counter-response to rationalism, originating in
eighteenth century Romanticism, which defends a privileged intuitive affinity
between the self and nature. This fundamental debate about the mechanisms of
knowing, resonates deeply within the modern agenda.

Underlying it are

assumptions about knowledge that are now being challenged through serious
enquiry into all systems of symbolic representation.

Pre-Enlightenment: The Form of Certainty

The attitudes surrounding the distinct separation of world into object and shadow,
real and imagined, are ancient, reaching deep into human history. With Plato, the
polarization between reason and the imaginative realm of feeling and intuition
became firmly established in the western philosophical tradition.

In the Protagoras,

Plato associates imagination, the "art of making", with the Promethean gift of stolen
fire.

Creativity, for Plato, was the unique privilege of the divine. In the hands of mortals
it served to obscure the truth.

Plato associates creativity, the mimetic urge, with

destructive forces, devoid of reason and countering the principles of rationality.

2

It

 is only through this divine order of being, the rational order of Zeus, that the
imaginative disorder of Prometheus is contained.

Representation, imitation in language and the arts, was believed to lead humanity
astray. The material world, the product of the "divine demiurge or craftsman", is
merely the shadow of the transcendental order of Ideas. Images, representations
of the imagination, lead us away from Truth.

Plato, in The Republic, Book II,

constructs a "Divided Line" between reasoned knowledge, divine truth, and the
falsity of human imagination.

This assumed then, an essential conformity to a transcendental ideal, which
became located during the early Christian era within the dogma and ritual of the
religious state - which itself contained the parallel polarities of the sacred and the
secular.

The roots of con.flict lay with the elevation of human reasoning faculties to the
status of the divine. Through reason, which Plato equated with goodness, humanity
acquired hope for access to the ideas of the divine.

However, reason ultimately

presumes freedom from the stale constraints of historical convention, escaping
them only through the expansive and experimental functions of imagination. The
constraints of the church/state were inevitably challenged by the full emergence of
secularism and rationalism in the seventeenth century.

Descartes provided the

philosophic underpinnings. The Platonic assumption of Truth, knowable through
the faculties of reason, remained firmly entrenched at the birth of the western
modern tradition.

3

 For centuries before the modem period, formal considerations in art were as directly
concerned with the physical properties of space, form, or mass as they were
supportive of subject matter. Content, the meaning of a work of art, was strictly
encoded within convention-based imagery. A direct symbolic correlation existed
between formal properties, image and meaning, and operated within the particulars
of political-religious context. All elements strove toward a high degree of symbolic
specificity. Allegory, as a device for content, has been used extensively throughout
.the history of western art.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, emblem

books were used, in which symbolic images were accompanied by explanatory text.
These served artists and the public as source books for iconographic conventions.
Through the various formal conventions of symbolism and allegory, a tradition
evolved around an assumed specificity of image. The audience knew what the
imagery signified through common conventions operating within the work.

The

individual was simply one of a collective audience and responded to an external
fixed meaning. The modern notion of a distinct interpretive self had yet to emerge.

Behind the work there existed limited opportunity for subjective interpretation
beyond the subtle variations of prescribed content in relationship to expressive
variations in the form.

It was not until the Renaissance that formal and

expressionistic strategies were deliberately explored.

It became evident that the

effects of formal elements upon the viewer's emotional response could be shaped
through colour, composition, distortion, and paint handling.

Breaking from the rigid

iconographic models of medieval art, the Renaissance artist demonstrated that an
expressive aspect of meaning existed beyond literal and stylized conventions.
was most clearly evidenced by Titian, whose early works were constructed with
careful attention to the structural conventions and literal devices of the early

4

This

 Renaissance.

His later works became gradually more expressive, not merely

through heightened dramatization, but in formal organization, colour, and paint
handling (e.g., Christ Crowned with Thoms, 1570).

Mannerism too, capitalized on the expressive potential of established Renaissance
conventions. We sense different properties in a Pontormo Madonna and child, in
which stylized anatomical exaggeration heightens the emotional effect, than we
would from the same subject matter painted a century earlier (Hauser, 1951).
Anticipating the investigative spirit of the Enlightenment, artists experimented
vigorously between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, further exploring the
potential of medium and form. Two distinct qualities of representation emerged: the
formal and the expressive.

Formal orders were derived from the rational scrutiny of structural relationships
observed in, or imposed upon, nature. These were cumulative and consistent with
rational orders operating within the classical tradition and notions of the external.
The formulation of formal principles evolved into a kind of skeletal syntax within
which expressive and thematic elements of the work were played out.
properties were less definable and less constrained.

Expressive

Significantly, expression

assumed both an expressive author and an interpretive receiver.

Meaning, no

longer entrenched in the certainties of the conventional or external, was opened to
speculation. Meaning became relative to the particulars of context and the position
of a subjective autonomous viewer. These attitudes toward form and expression in
art paralleled the philosophical division of mind into rational and subjective modes
of knowing, auspiciously providing the model for an emerging notion of an
autonomous expressive self. This new notion of self depended upon that property

5

 of mind we now understand as imagination.

Expression assumes a unique

imaginative personal response to the world, one that operates independent of
convention. It engages the imagination in a revelatory process of discovery, and
acknowledges an implicit privileged intimacy with the real. These formal and
expressive investigations have persisted, heightening the tension between rational
and intuitive thought.

Concurrent with the experiments of artists was a growing trend toward analysis
throughout the disciplines. Art theory, non-existent in the earlier periods, arose in
the sixteenth century, rooted in the representation of text1, historical accounts, and
the depiction of exemplary forms (Burgin, 1986). Vasari's On Technique (1960) is
an early example of historical-critical writing that subsequently had a significant
impact on interpretation and future production standards.

It was during the Renaissance that the arts adopted goals common to those of the
other disciplines: the progressive translation of structural relationships into formal
principles of representation (various perspectival, lighting, and compositional
devices). The theoretical components of any system will inevitably direct its
agenda and ultimately its form.

Reductionist in nature, the formalist agenda in art

became increasingly consistent with the ubiquitous methods of rational analysis,
with normative classifications and a goal of fundamental principles that were
supportive of a unified, universal, theory of knowledge.

Distinct from philosophy

and science, however, the arts now fully adopted a fundamental affirmation of an
autonomous and imaginative self.

1 The interpretative act between a subject and the work.

6

 The Enlightenment: Intellect vs. Feeling

With the affirmation of reason and the emergence of the conscious autonomous
self, the Enlightenment transformed the relationship between the individual and the
world.

The notion of self shifted from one in which the individual was defined in

terms of a subordinate relationship to God and state, to an ideal in which the
individual participates in the discovery of universal principles, relative to a unique
and subjective perspective, through a rigorously objective process of deductive
reasoning.

In art, the role of the viewer shifted from the passive to the active

through the development of an interpretive relationship between the viewer and the
work.

Descartes' pronouncement "I think, therefore I am", confirmed not only the

self-conscious individual being, but the primacy of human consciousness in the
construction and validation of that being.

In polarizing human experience into the

res extensa, the realm of matter and knowledge, and the res cogitans, the
subjective realm of the imagination; feelings, impressions, and sensibilities,
Descartes articulated the essential tension between both aspects of mind that
resonates still in all fields of human enquiry. The product of the cogito, the
imagined, was understood, by Descartes, however, as a mere copy of an objective
presence, rather than as an original unique creation in itself. Commenting upon
Descartes' attitude, Croce states in his Aesthetic,

The French philosopher abhorred imagination, the
outcome, according to him, of the agitation of the
animal spirits; and though not utterly condemning
poetry, he allowed it to exist only in so far as it was
guided by intellect, ... The mathematical spirit
fostered by Descartes forbade all possibility of a
serious consideration of poetry and art. (Croce, 1956,
p. 204)

7

 For Descartes, as in the Platonic model, imagination was thought to be in conflict
with the certainty of logic, obscuring "eternal truth" (Spinoza, 1901).

Science and logic became the primary instruments in the formulation of knowledge,
and thus truth.

Humanity came to believe in the capacity of intellect to penetrate,

and ultimately construct, a reality reflective of universal principles, exposing the
source of the shadows on the wall of Plato's cave.

Formulations of the real were

confirmed and unified through scientific logic and its principal medium, literal
language.

In generalizing the particular, rationality functioned "to create unity out

of plurality and to reduce manyness to oneness" (Taylor on Kant, 1986, p. 5).

This

is in fact, a principal post-modem criticism of the modernist objective of a singular
pure formal system.

These simple "conceits" of the Enlightenment fueled the passions of the Romantic
movement, and in tum, the modernists. They continue to provoke skepticism in
current critical thought. Assumptions about the nature of rational thought, the
world, and truth, evolved into a linear-historical model of the ideal, a model
consistent with the syntactical forms of logic and the language through which it was
constructed.

Strings of isolated facts informed an evolving history of knowledge

that, together, ultimately aspired to a true and pure representation of the world and
humanity's progress toward that utopian end.

The notion of knowledge as the progressive cumulative effect of learning, was
evident as early as the twelfth century in a simile credited to Bernard of Chartres.
He likened contemporary societies to dwarfs perched upon the shoulders of a giant;

8

 seeing further, not through any superior wisdom of their own, but by virtue of the
fact that the foundational learnings of antiquity provide the substructure for new
insights. Matei Calinescu (1977) cites this attitude as the root of a tenacious
reverence toward the wisdom of antiquity that persisted, essentially unchallenged,
until the early Romantic period.

Romanticism: The Primacy of a Feeling Autonomous Self

While reason was considered the primary means to furthering the development of
classical knowledge, a new appreciation for things current appeared with
Romanticism. The subjective, considered elusive to the structures of logic, became
associated with common sense and the everyday. Stendahl, writing in the early
nineteenth century, is cited by Calinescu as the first European writer to describe
himself a romantic, representing a keen awareness of contemporary life with the
recognition of modernity in its immediate popular sense. Calinescu quotes
Stendahl:

Romanticism is the art of presenting to the peoples
literary works which, in view of the present-day state of
their customs and beliefs, affords them the utmost
possible pleasure. Classicism, on the contrary,
presents them with the literature that used to give the
utmost pleasure to their great-grandfathers.
(Calinescu, 1977, p. 39)

Calinescu suggests that this early scorn for the classical is the beginnings of a basic
breakup of traditional aesthetic authority.

He cites Baudelaire's position that

aesthetic tradition is "nothing but the expression of a variety of successive

9

 modernities" (Calinescu, 1977, p. 49). Masterworks can be useful in the study of
"general method" (Calinescu, 1977, p. 49), but they contain nothing that will help
the contemporary artist discern what Baudelaire refers to as nle caractere de la
beaute presente" (beauty of the present) (Calinescu, 1977, p.49).

An artist needs creative imagination to give expression to modernity,

... a forgetful immersion in the 'now', the real source
of 'all our originality ... (Calinescu, 1977, p. 49)

Taken as models, the masterpieces of the past can only hinder the imaginative
search for modernity.

Calinescu argues that it is the fundamental link between creative imagination and
the immediate that liberated popular culture from the classical tradition.

Separated from tradition (in the sense of a body of
works and procedures to be imitated), artistic creation
becomes an adventure and a drama in which the artist
has no ally except his imagination. (Calinescu, 1977,
p. 50)

The split between classical and popular knowledge, and the ranking of mind into a
hierarchy of rational and imaginative processes, could be seen to have created the
field for an impassioned Romantic response. This clash of positions is evidenced
in the writings of such figures as John Locke and William Butler Yeats.

Locke's

position, central to the development of scientific logic, was one of complete disdain
for the irrational influences of imagination upon the rational pursuits of the scientific

10

 ideal. So strong were Locke's concerns that he cautioned parents in his Thoughts
Concerning Education, to suppress what he referred to as any signs of a "fanciful
vein" in their children. Yeats, responding to this, in his poem Fragments, equated
Locke's rationalism with the devastation of the Industrial Revolution, which he
dramatized as the second "fall".

Locke sank into a swoon
the garden died
God took the spinning-jenny
out of his side

Against the tyrannies of industrialism, science, and technology, the virtues of
individual freedom and self-expression were extolled by the romantics as being
purer, closer to nature.

Distinguishing between the constraints of rationalism,

grounded in classical knowledge and popular culture which occurs through the free
encounter with the immediate, Romanticism confirmed the correlation between the
everyday and the imaginative self.

Inherent in this alliance between imagination

and the immediate, is the validation of the popular.

It was really only with Kant and the German Idealists in
the late eighteenth and nineteenth century, that the
productive imagination became, as it were, officially
recognized by mainstream Western thought. Kant,
Fichte and Schelling released imagination from its long
philosophical imprisonment. (Kearney, 1988, p. 155256)
While reason assumed the structuring of all phenomena, the arts assumed a
privileged identification with nature through intuition and imagination.

Romanticism

proclaimed a unique "enduring self' (Sypher, 1962, p. 32), which remained constant
despite the effects of temporal change. Through perception, assumed to be prior

11

 to the distancing effects of cultural conditioning, the self comprehended itself, over
time, within the natural world. The subjective self became acknowledged as an
essential, if difficult, imaginative partner in the formulation of universal principles.
However, ultimately, the impact of rationalism was so great that subjectivity itself
succumbed to introspective reasoned analysis.
With the fragmentation of unified religion and the development of metaphysics in
the 18th century, three spheres of enquiry gradually took on autonomy: science,
morality, and art (Habermas, pp. 8-9). These allowed for the institutionalization
and professionalization of each specialized area of pursuit; the cognitiveinstrumental, the moral-practical, and the aesthetic-expressive. And so we arrive,
sometime around the early nineteenth century at what Jurgen Habermas refers to
as the "modernist project".

Modernism: An Uncomfortable Synthesis

In his essay "Modernity - An Incomplete Project", Habermas (1983) stipulates the
programs for science, art, and morality as separate spheres of enquiry.

Each

sphere possesses its own inner logic, and contributes to the "release of the
cognitive potentials" unique to its domain.

In the visual arts, primary focus was

placed on the exploration of aesthetic principles associated with the creative
process, the work, and the viewer's response. Art, which gives form to the
subjective, henceforth acted in accord with analytical methods in its own search foruniversal principles of formal visual orders. Though eighteenth century
romanticism freed the artist from the conventional constraints of classicism and

12

 tradition, it imposed its own strictures of creative and expressive authenticity.
Centering around the notion of the unique enduring self, it established the
expressionistic foundations of modernism (Burgin, 1986). The work of art came to
be understood by the modernist to operate in two essential ways: formally, in
relation to the rationalized principles of exemplary forms, and subjectively,
engaging the imaginative expressive capacities of the artist and the imaginative
interpretive capacities of subject. Analytic formalism, with its closed systems of
meaning, came to operate in tension with the open subjective/expressive properties
of the work.

It could be argued that in effect, modernism embraced the dialectic

between the rational and the intuitive, attempting to construct out of imagination
and intuited insights, formal principles that were supportive of a fixed and knowable
universal field.

As rational enquiry and an increasingly autonomous view of self displaced the
authority of the church, metaphysical enquiry into the transcendental gained more
credence in philosophy. In the arts, imagination (the creative/intuitive faculty of
mind) became aligned with a transcendent aesthetic, often associated with
spirituality. Through a gradual isolation from issues of the everyday, modernism
located itself within the rarified ideals of high formalism, to become shrouded in the
truth of stylistic conventions.

Fundamental to Habermas' description is the belief in a progressive development of
ideas that propels knowledge toward a condition of all-knowing. We might observe
that inherent in this is a notion of progress which occurs by the hand of human
intervention.

Knowledge, in disclosing the underlying mysteries of the unknown,

provides mastery over the natural world.

Beneath the surface of physical events

13

 exist identifiable primary structures of meaning representative of the underlying
natural order. Those structures are perceptible through intuition expressible
through each of Habermas' three spheres; science, morality, and art.

Greenberg, in discussing the tendency toward abstraction in Cezanne's work, goes
so far as to suggest that the "truth of nature and the truth,

O(

success, of art were

held not only to accord with, but to enhance one another" (Greenberg, 1961, p.
171). Greenberg notes that in early modernism, there is a literal preoccupation
with optical and kinetic responses to colour, form, and space in nature while the
abstraction of high modernism concerns itself with responses to nature other than
optical.

He describes the more recent perception of space and form portrayed in

abstract painting and sculpture, as essentially fluid, operating in an "uninterrupted
continuum that connects instead of separating things ... more intelligible to sight
than to touch ... space as that which joins instead of separating ... space as a
total object," (1961, p. 173). This rationale exemplifies modernism's fundamental
confidence in the validity of abstract representation. Separated from the Romantic
emphasis on a subjective, empirical, intimacy with nature, the modernist view
increasingly validated the real, through the constructs of abstract knowledge.
Modernism believes in its own productions, and believes them to enhance the forms
of nature in all the aspects of its program.

This tendency, originating in scientific propositions, gathered momentum throughout
the various disciplines, but particularly within the human sciences.

Psychoanalytic

theory, for example, has had profound effects upon the ways in which we
understand ourselves through its principles of the id, the unconscious, the ego, and
the super ego.

Economics and socio-political theories have shaped the way we

14

 define ourselves in relation to others; responsibilities of the individual and the state,
and the programs for sustaining desired effects. While the social sciences
postulate principles of individual and group behavior, modernist art strives to identify
formal principles descriptive of the properties contributing to universal aesthetic
experience.

These insights were considered visually expressible through the unique perceptual
sensibilities and the productive capacity of the artist. John Dewey, in Art as
Experience (1934), describes clearly the notion of the artist as creative genius

ascribed to in modernism.

An artist, in comparison with his fellows, is one who is
not only especially gifted in powers of execution but in
unusual sensitivity to the qualities of things. (Dewey,
1964, p. 163)

The kinds of quality that Dewey speaks of, are for the Modernist, accessible to a
discerning audience through the work.

It is the function of the artist-genius to

express these abstract orders through the proper handling of materials and the
formal organization of visual elements within the work. The explicitly enlightened,
but implicitly intuitive, response of the subject to the manifestations of these ideal
forms, is believed to influence proportionately the degree of aesthetic response.
Within this paradigm, we develop an appreciation for the beautiful through learning,
but also through a special sensibility shared with that of the artist. The assumption
that there are, in fact, knowable and universal aesthetic orders made manifest
through the gifted insights of the artist, is central to the modernist position, and its
evolving lexicon of formal principles.

15

 As high modernism strove toward formal purity, it moved further away from content.
It might be said that meaning in a work of art became understood through aesthetic
experience. Such experience was removed from the everyday and existed
mysteriously within the purely formal properties of the work, as a direct expression
of feeling.

Suzanne Langer refers to the work of art as being complete in itself,

with "no meaning beyond its own presence" (Langer, 1953, p. 297).

Significance, no longer entrenched in every-day experience, became located in the
rather specialized skill of formal interpretation. Viewers, untrained in an
increasingly sophisticated language, found no direct relationship to events in their
personal lives. Art became the product of the gifted seer and the property of an
informed and privileged elite with access to not only the formal language of art
making, but to the rational mechanisms of representation and interpretation. John
Dewey speaks of the" ... lazy, idle ... " uninformed viewer.

.. .'appreciation' will be a mixture of scraps of learning
with conformity to norms and conventional admiration
and with a confused, ... emotional excitation.
(Dewey, 1934, p. 166)
Critical awareness, through rational analysis, became instrumental to the
appreciation and assessment of contemporary works. This condition was not

unique to art. Science, also shifted to a focus on principles not readily observed in
the events of everyday life. As symbolic signs become increasingly abstracted and
rationalized in all aspects of our lives, systems of interpretation become
indispensable not only to comprehension, but to further constructions.

Learning

has become a necessary prerequisite to the construction, comprehension, and
interpretation of most meaningful systems, including art.

16

 The polarized tension between rational and intuitive thought, manifest in
modernism, is exemplified in a lecture given to the Arts Club of Chicago by Jean
Dubuffet in 1951. Dubuffet challenged the condescension of western culture
toward "so called primitive cultures", anticipating a trend toward greater
understanding of the "values of savagery"; instinct, passion, mood, violence,
madness.

Extolling the direct spiritual "similitude" between primitive societies and

nature, he goes on to criticize the growing distance between modern society and
the natural world .

Western man believes that the things he thinks exist
outside exactly in the same way he thinks of them ...
The shape of the world is the same shape as his
reason. (Sypher, 1962, p. 172)
Modernism argued a notion of symbolic form, in which transcendental meaning was
attached intrinsically to the symbolic object itself.

Its material body was the medium of an absolute
spiritual truth, one perceived by direct intuition rather
than by any laborious process of critical analysis.
(Burgin, 1986, p. 156)

It has been largely this notion of the direct perceptive powers of intuition to discern
truth, that has buttressed the modernist belief in the ultimate certainty of knowledge.
Modernism, for Dubuffet, has confused the shape of the world with the shape of
human perceptions.

17

 But we might acknowledge that perceptions do not operate exclusive of rational
constructs and other symbolic modes of representation.

Our growing dependence

upon abstracted systems and technology has become increasingly apparent, and
exemplifies the extent to which we commit our belief to these.

Underlying this

confidence, there has persisted a strain of disbelief manifested in the disruptive
skepticism of the avant-garde.

Eventually, pure abstraction, the exemplary model,

became trapped within the transcendental narratives constructed in support of itself.
And for some it was seen to spin its wheels in a fury of what could be viewed as
manneristic self-indulgence.

The Avant-Garde: The Subversion of Certainty

Operating throughout the modern period, the avant-garde presents a paradoxical
subtext that may be read to both conflict with, and conform to, the modernist
agenda. Generally, it may be considered as a productive mechanism operating
outside of, but employed extensively within, the modernist program.

Matei

Calinescu ( 1977) isolates it as a counter-part, an "antistyle", running in opposition to
the constructive optimism of the modem, but fundamentally dependent upon the
modern agenda.

The avant-garde borrows practically all its elements
from the modern tradition, but at the same time blows
them up, exaggerates them, and places them in the
most unexpected contexts ... it would have been
hardly conceivable in the absence of a distinct ~nd
fully developed consciousness of modernity, ... such
an acknowledgement does not warrant the confusion
of modernism with the avant-garde. (Calinsecu,
1977, p. 96-97)

18

 But, as Calinescu points out, without the progressive-constructive thrust of
modernism, there can essentially be no notion of being at the leading edge.
Calinescu's "antistyle" suggests some interesting connections between the avantgarde and the post-modem that support this thesis.

Calinescu makes reference to what he calls "the two avant-gardes": the political and
the artistic.

Each of these assumed a primarily subversive role within its own

domain, but depended upon a fundamental trust in the regenerative capacities of
the systems being subverted. The political avant garde rejected the workerexploitive nineteenth century industrial/market systems, preferring the more utopian
visions of Marxism. This application of the term gradually gave way as its
metaphorical counterpart in the arts took hold; that advanced guard of art
relentlessly in pursuit of the new.

The artistic avant-garde rejected the stylistic restrictions of the tradition-based
conventions associated with academic and popular tastes, and the increasing
authority of the rationalist agenda.

By the second decade of our century, avant-garde, as
an artistic concept, had become comprehensive
enough to designate not one or the other, but a// the
new schools whose aesthetic programs were defined,
by and large, by their rejection of the past and by the
cult of the new. (Calinsecu, 1977, p. 117)
The avant-garde was in fact an essentially modem phenomenon, born of a
historical perspective that allowed art to contemplate critically itself and its past
(Poggioli, 1968, p. 14).

19

 What may be referred to as two principal aspects of the avant-garde, the
subversive, and the constructive/progressive, reflect its fundamental functions both

outside and within the modernist project.

The association of the avant-garde with subversive activity began in France with the
alignment of art with the political goals of the 1848 revolution. Art was conceived
of as a means for social agitation. Calinescu refers to Balzac's notion of a
subversive political avant-garde

that would blow up all the existing social structures
and make a new and better world possible ...
(Calinescu, 1977, p. 109)

Quoting Mikhail Bakunin, Calinescu cites the Russian anarchist's axiom, "To destroy
is to create", as seminal to the subversive actions of the avant-garde.

Novelty and

progress, essential to modernist ambitions, could be achieved only through the
"destruction of tradition ... " (Calinescu, 1977, p. 117), the subversion of
convention.

The second function, the constructive/progressive, developed from the
metaphorical etymology of the term "avant-garde"; the advanced guard. Once this
military notion of an advanced guard was translated to the arts, it was understood
as representing the leading edge of ideas in a forward push toward the ideal.
Supportive of the modernist quest for a progressive-expansive body of truth, the
avant-garde assumed the responsibility for maintaining a leading edge of new
knowledge.

Ideally associated with the new or novel, the modernist notion of the

20

 gifted creative genius grew out of Romanticism's concept of the privileged
relationship existing between the intuitive and nature. The strong element of
individualism in the early 19th century political notions of the avant-garde appealed
to the individualist image of the romantics - art for art's sake. Common to both the
political utopian goals and modernism was a basic faith in the transcendent
salvation of the new; the new always provided hope for liberation from the inequities
of the imperfect past. The triumph of the current over the traditional is evident in
this quote from Victor Hugo's Les Miserables (1862) cited by Calinescu:

The encyclopedists led by Diderot, the physiocrats, led
by Turgot, the philosophers, led by Voltaire, and the
utopists, led by Rousseau - these are the four sacred
legions. They are the four avant-gardes of mankind
as it marches toward the four cardinal points of
progress - Diderot toward the beautiful, Turgot toward
the useful, Voltaire toward truth, Rousseau toward
justice. (Calinsecu, 1977, p. 108)
We can now piece together a composite picture of an avant-garde artist as one who
is disassociated from the popular culture, with an anarchistic distrust for tradition in
whatever form; a gifted seer whose intimate relationship to nature privileges him
(because we can't dismiss the ultimate privilege of gender) over the ordinary
person, with a distaste for all things common, and a primary respect for the novel,
the current, the new.

Ironically, as much as modernism depended upon the challenges of the avantgarde for renewal in support of progress, it required the foundational authority of a
constructive rational tradition in service to an evolving knowledge of the truth. This
tension between the thrust of constant renewal and conventionalized formal
principles necessary to the rational is indicative of the paradoxical relationship

21

 between the subversive and constructive motives operating between the avantgarde and modernism. The effect of Dada's challenge to art as a mere condition of
context, did not result in the demise of painting or high art.

Instead, we might

observe that it generated further investigations of content and meaning in
surrealism and experimentation with form in abstraction.

Each investigation, as it

was absorbed into the formal dialogue and was then processed into convention,
informed modernism's progressive thrust.

But what of the essential modernist notions of art and artist? Fundamental to
modernist theory has been the notion of an evolving creative knowing autonomous
self, relative to new manifestations of one dynamic universal order.

But what

precisely does the "new" imply in modernist art? If we consi~er the relationship
between intuitive and rational knowledge to be one of opposing tension, we
ultimately assume that each, on some level, subverts the effects of the other. The
notion of the avant-garde in art depends upon the subversive act, challenging the
conventions of rationally based formal systems through pre-rational constructs that
propose alternative forms. The disruptive effect of skepticism, and the resulting
tendency toward further enquiry, become the essential means for generating new
forms of insight, much as pure research in science explores the edges of
conventional scientific boundaries.

Indeed, we have come to expect the arts to

challenge and shock in their newness.

It is in this capacity that the avant-garde

has served modernism's dependence upon novelty, for accumulating knowledge of
the universal.

Each original insight discloses an essential and novel aspect of the

real.

22

 In affirming the primacy of the original in art, modernism cast the artist into the role
of creator, builder, producer. Gifted with intuitive insight, the modernist artist is
thought to reveal truths, transcendent of logical discourse, through original forms
manifest in the work of art. The viewer's experience of these occurs intuitively,
through an aesthetic response to implicit manifestations of the universal. Aesthetic
experience, despite all attempts to rationally deconstruct it, inhabits the space
between intuition and conscious awareness.

It is through criticism that the intuited

notion and the aesthetic response are brought under the reflective scrutiny of
rational analysis.

23

 CHAPTER2

THE CONTEMPORARY: ART AS AN INSTRUMENT OF MEANING

I prefer to define the avant-garde in terms of opposition
and rupture. While most writers, artists, and thinkers
believe they belong to their time, the revolutionary
playwright feels he is running counter to his time . ...
An avant-garde man is like an enemy inside a city he is
bent on destroying, against which he rebels; for like any
system of government, an established form of
expression is also a form of oppression. The avantgarde man is the opponent of an existing system.
(Ionesco, 1964, p. 119)

The subversive spirit of the avant-garde, which originates in the basic distrust of
existing constructs of meaning, persists in the skepticism of the post-modern.

Unlike

the "avant-garde man", the post-modern person is skeptical of all systems of
meaning, denying the validity of representational forms; challenging all
manifestations of the symbolic as constructs, serving the interests of power.
Ionesco's opposition to all existing systems is illustrative of the current distrust for the
representations through which we define the world and ourselves. It is not that the
emperor wears no clothes, it is that the clothes are all that we may know. There is
no one wearing them.

In the post-modern, the subversive spirit has been validated ,

not through its ambitions toward the novel, but in its relentless undermining and
distrust for all systems of truth.

24

 Emerging Skepticism

With increased secularism, contemporary society becomes increasingly dependent
upon rationally constructed systems of meaning and belief. The analytic impulse
thrives in a variety of forms, gathering momentum over the past fifty years, as notions .
of self, society, and symbolic systems of representation have come under its
pervasive scrutiny.

Art continues to be seen as the agent of subjective expression, while the objects,
processes, and sources of that expression are subject to regular and meticulous
criticism.

Current critical theory is generally insistent upon defending expression in

rational terms, arguing for relevant social content beyond merely formal or stylistic
concerns.

Despite modernism's claim that art functions distinct from purely rational

pursuits, its dependence upon rationally based systems of style and critical theory,
have ultimately affected both the form and content of art.

Initially, the critical debate in modernism centred upon the exploration and
development of formal principles and a corresponding vocabulary. The scientific
method, as a system of hypotheses and proofs, demonstrated an effective model
through which principles could be identified. Theories of colour constancy, optical
mixing, and simultaneous contrast had a profound impact upon impressionist works.
The rational analysis of form in space and time directly influenced the experiments of
cubism. Aspirations for conceptualized forms in constructivism and ideal forms in
neo-plasticism provide evidence for the growing effects of rationalist methods on
painting and sculpture in this century.

Modernism's preoccupation with formalized

expression provided the raw material for considerable critical response. Abstract

25

 and expressionist works, to a very large extent, could be seen to be directly
responsive to the growing critical, language based, discourse; a discourse in which
the subject of the work was located, less in its literal or representational attributes,
than in interpretive hypotheses outside of the work proper.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, interest within the various
disciplines centred primarily upon the human subject or notions of a conscious
feeling self within the physical world and the relationship of the individual to emerging
social and political institutions.

Referring to events in this period, Simon Watney, in

his essay "Making Strange", points to a small group of Russian Futurists, which
included Vladimir Tatlin and Alexander Rodchenko, and their philosophical position
which renounced pure aestheticism for the utilitarian and common.

Differing from

the European modernists who strove to develop principles of idealized aesthetic
expression, the Russian Futurists linked art to immediate experience and to the
everyday. Watney cites the Russian Futurist Manifesto of 1912 as arguing that
Russian Futurism, unlike the aesthetic "dogmatism" of European Modernism, was
"spurring on this (human) psyche to the maximum possible degree of creative
elasticity, to a break with all canons and with any·belief in absolute values." Watney
continues,

Art could thus be redefined as a particular mode of
production rather than as a fetishized duplication of .
bourgeois values, seen to be placed, as Art, beyond all
question. (p. 162)

Both groups operated under the assumption that there existed an ideal, utopian state
of being.

But while the Europeans invested in an aesthetic ideal, the Futurists,

26

 skeptical of what they referred to as the "false consciousness" of social conditioning,
sought to purge art and language of all that distorted or obscured the direct
experience of life. "Art was not simply to reflect life: it was to be reactive within and
upon it." (Watney, 1982, p. 157-163) This dialectic, we might observe, remarkably
parallels issues central to the current debate between modernist and post modernist
theory; with one proposing aesthetic representations of the ideal, and the other
insisting upon the grounding of art within the realm of the everyday and the socially
aware.

Each position worked to accommodate evolving conceptions of the self and other;
the autonomous, conscious, feeling self and the institutions through which it engaged
society. While psychoanalytic theory explored deeper notions of self, socio-political
theory explored effective systems of social analysis and restructuring. Associations
arose within each of these fields of inquiry.

Psychoanalytic research, with Freudian

theory as its benchmark, presumed a free unique self, imaginative and constitutive,
yet vulnerable to social forces.

Social theory, after the devastating psychic and

social effects of World War One, located hope for a better future in one of two
political camps: the free society, within which self-actualization served the common
good, or the collective society in which the suppression of self-interest protected the
good of the group. It became apparent that mechanisms for the formulation and
dissemination of meaning were increasingly located within the particulars of
ideological stance and the conditioning effects of each system. These systems,
each consciously authored, depended upon a fundamental rationalized authority for
their ongoing effectiveness and regular verification.

27

 The profound alienation following the first World War, and the commonly
acknowledged mysteries of the unconscious, haunted the certainties and optimism of
the Modernist project.

Freud's analysis of the unconscious had a profound influence

on the artistic forms of Surrealism and Dada.

Surrealism adopted the symbolic

mechanisms of the unconscious. Appropriating psychoanalytic techniques for
revealing the unconscious, Surrealism employed Freudian methods of free
association and dislocated imagery as devices for reducing the constraints of
consciousness upon the unconscious mind. Through automatism, and the
juxtaposition of unrelated imagery, the surrealists encouraged imaginative
experimentation beyond the conventional and into the realm of the irrational and the
unknown.

Dadaism, rooted in literature, rejected established systems of art-making,

taking an anti-rational, anti-aesthetic position against the artifact-centred art of the
period. Arbitrariness took precedence over aesthetic considerations, reflecting
further the general disillusionment following the war.

Dadaism succeeded in posing

significant questions about the nature of the art object and the preoccupations with
the purely aesthetic.

Ushering in the skepticism so prevalent in the last quarter of

this century, Dada established a serious counter-position to the certainties of
formalism in the avant garde.

Further investigations into the human psyche in late modernism initiated an interest in
the processes of art production and artistic experience. Abstraction and
experimental forms encouraged questions about the expressive nature of materials
and technique.

Rooted in the spirituality of Kandinsky's abstract paintings and

Surrealism's stress on unconscious imagery, Abstract Expressionism sought
spontaneous expression of the artist's intuitive response to materials, -in the
phenomenological act of creating a work of art.

28

Interpretive concerns shifted from

 the academics of Nee-Impressionism and late Cubism, to spiritual concerns in the
highly formalized abstraction of the Neo-plasticists, the Suprematists (Mondrian and
Malevich), and the conspicuous expressiveness of Abstract Expressionism in the
forties and fifties.

Ultimately, abstraction itself evolved its own set of conventions

which centred around the work, as an independent referent of higher truths.
Meaning, divorced from the literal and the everyday, became situated solely within
the work of art.

Formal principles grew largely dependent upon interpretive theories

that strove to inform the uninitiated and to elevate the ideas behind the work to the
status of fundamental truths. Abstraction became deeply entrenched in the rhetoric
of Modernist transcendental ambitions.

In response to the maturation of formalism and Abstract Expressionism in the
nineteen forties and fifties, Conceptualism concentrated upon the exploration of
content exclusive of the art object.

Disregarding formalist conventions, it began to

investigate systems of meaning. Content became analogous with the
conceptualized systems of meaning that operated so convincingly in philosophy, the
physical and the human sciences, and popular culture. Subject matter was clinically
laid open to the diverse scrutiny of contemporary cultural discourse, and ranged from
the socio-political to the popular. Meaning, the discourse of knowledge, was
challenged in, and through, its own forms; language and analytic method. One
challenge remained - to undermine the ultimate modernist ambition of a progressive
development toward a unified system of knowledge and truth.

The subversive thrust initiated by the Romantics in the late eighteenth century,
persisting in the spirit of the avant-garde and central to an emerging post-modern
doctrine, has challenged the stature of rational certainty. Art has gradually become

29

 less about the formulation of transcendent truth than the critical exploration of
alternative means of conception and expression beyond the conditioned response.
Post-modem theory emerges as an instrument for the investigation of meanings
beyond the closed systems of socially sanctioned rationales.

30

 CHAPTER3

SELF, MEANING, AND THE POWER OF THE SYMBOLIC

Underlying the post-modem critique of rationally based systems of representation
and meaning, is a dependence upon the rational method and the denial of an
instrumental self. For presumably, it is only through analytic methods that we may
deconstruct the systems of meaning that constitute the post-modem self; a
conditioned construct ultimately lacking instrumentality.

But can we dismiss entirely

the self as active in the construction of meaning?

Behind the formal limitations of any system of meaning, there has existed a
motivating factor that senses those limits, and therefore must at least perceive of
some quality of meaning beyond the limits of the system. This motivating factor has,
in the past, manifested itself in Romanticism as that which insisted upon a privileged
self in relation to nature. It manifested itself in Modernism as the transcendent
motive, and concurrently in the avant-garde as the subversive agent against the
conventions of formalism. And it appears again in the post-modem denial of human
agency in all systems of meaning. What motivates these insights if not an extrarational state of awareness? The loss of belief in representation does not preclude
its purposefulness. The self, as the primary motivating agent of will, for the
purposes of this argument, is assumed to be the intuitive-perceptive state of
awareness that directs human enquiry and expression.

Contemporary art-making, despite its dependence upon rational methods, continues
to employ intuitive insight and self-expression extensively, even in its methods of

31

 parody and detached analysis.

Rationality can never entirely disengage itself from

its essential dependence upon perception, and its grounding in intuition and the
expressive urge. Art, through intuition, bodily instinct, and perception, has
increasingly come to represent our essential link to the physical world. As such it is
closer to the actual, unmediated event.

Language, however, relies upon the already

distanced formulations of conscious thought.

Separated from the actual by time and

space, we are dependent upon both perception and consciousness, and their
respective instruments of representation, art and language, as mediators between
ourselves and a multiplicity of actual events, each occurring within its own time and
space. The expressive could be understood as the agent, or voice, of the singular
self within a context of plurality. Art-making, as an instrument of meaning, operates
between perception and consciousness and functions as a primary operation
between the self and the immediate context. As a constructive process, it resides in
perception and both precedes, and is influenced by, the constructions of cognitive
awareness.

Perceptions are those responses that arise directly from encounters

with the actual. They are sense-related and, though shaped by culture, are the most
closely associated with the subjective.

Language occurs after the perceptual

encounter, and in giving name to the insights of perception, places that encounter
within syntactical and grammatical structures; thus locating it meaningfully within the
general constructs of the social order.

Language serves to conceptualize the raw

materials of the experiential, within the rational constraints of its structure. Art
explores the expressive formulation of the immediate/actual prior to, and beyond, the
bounds of language. Though culturally conditioned, like all representational forms,
art is located in perceptive/intuitive experience.

Because of this, it performs the

critical role of mapping the subjective response.

Being closest to the actual, it

persistently requires expression in a fluid medium, and resists the stasis of

32

 conventional forms. This is distinct from the modernist notion of the original or the
new. It is instead, a fluid polyvalence of significance. As such, it expands upon
meaning not through original form, but through revised understanding of the actual
as it is experienced within the contexts of the immediate event.
The arts, in what may be construed as a complementary response to rationalism and
its instruments, science and technology, are immersed in the subjective.

In discus_sing the mechanisms of meaning in contemporary art, it becomes necessary
to examine the range of symbolic elements that operate within its various forms.
The range of artistic forms that have occurred over the past century is extraordinarily
broad. The inherent ambiguity of abstract imagery encouraged investigations into
open, multi-leveled, systems of meaning. The visual arts have appropriated such
diverse forms as sound, movement, language, lens media, and computer based
images and information. This cross-media diversity has had profound effects upon
the formal principles which we assumed to be so distinctly related to each of the
media. The hybridization which is now occurring allows for a much broader range of
investigation into the intricacies of symbolic representation and interpretation.
Despite the complexities of this hybridization, it should be possible to identify some
fundamental properties of the artistic impulse by asking what it is that we have
learned about the functions of art-making in the past. Are there any properties that
have persisted? If so, what purposes have they served?

As discussed earlier in this paper, the Enlightenment signaled profound changes in
the relationship between the individual and the state during the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. The emergence of an empowered constructive self challenged
the hegemonic powers of the aristocratic monopoly over symbolic systems of

33

 meaning. The traditional control over the symbolic exercised by the church and the
aristocracy was destabilized during the Renaissance when systems of mimetic
production (perspective, copies, the camera obscura, and the printing press) were
developed to produce art for a growing, wealthy merchant class.

More images were

made available to a wider audience. Art came into service of ideological change by
providing visible evidence of the new equality.

Semiologist Jean Baudrillard cites the shift of power over the control of signs from an
aristocratic elite to the newly empowered merchant classes in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, as having fundamental impact upon the "proliferation of signs
on demand" (Baudrillard, 1983, pp. 84-85).

It is in the nineteenth century that

Baudrillard places the emergence of modernization; the uprooting of all that had
been grounded in the old power base and its regrounding in the interests of the
market.

Images, signs, religion, family, regional/national identities, all came to serve

the creation of new needs, and the constant demand for further production, and
consumption.

Power over the sign was transferred first from the aristocracy, then to

a growing middle class, and finally to the political-economic system which all meaning
served. This is a system derived from and dependent upon rationally determined
norms through what Foucault refers to as the production of manageable subjects
(Foucault, 1980, p. 79).

Foucault traces the rationalization of the subject to the

mechanisms of power that include not only institutions, but the human sciences
which regulate and control the behavior of individuals through the accumulation of
knowledge about them.

We might observe that underlying current art criticism is the notion that art has a
significantly more complex epistemological and socio-political role beyond

34

 aestheticized, personal, or cultural representation. Art-making, embodying the
conflict between rational and subjective aspects of mind, now appears to function as
the primary mechanism in the formulation of further awarenesses. The modernist
pursuit of a distilled formalism denied content relevant to an expansive notion of a
dynamically constructed reality; one in which the self and meaning are defined within
the parameters of the everyday living culture. Current concerns often centre on the
reinstatement of art in the representation of the everyday.

It expresses this not

solely through specialized media ascribed as "visual", but through the amalgamation
of all agents of expression, the specialized and the popular. The everyday,
generally believed to be synonymous with popular culture, has become exemplary of
the here and now, the actual.

Popular culture provides the indicators through which

infinitely complex systems of rationality and power are manifested. Without critical
insight into the deeper implications of popular modes of representation and meaning,
we again fall victim to the obfuscations of idealized rational constructions.

Roland Barthes, in his essay "The Third Meaning", (1977) differentiates between
three levels of meaning: communication, the obvious, and the obtuse.
Communication refers to that level which is informational, everything that is directly

learnable from the visual components of an image, such as colour or place.

Obvious

meaning refers to the commonly held system of symbols that operate within an image

or sign, like the significance attached to the breaking of bread. Obtuse meaning
carries a large degree of ambiguity, "a signifier without a signified" (1977, p. 61).

It is

reliant upon personal interpretation and associations unique to the individual.

Barthes' categories of meaning are comparable to investigations into literal and
figurative signification made by Carl Hausman. In Metaphor and Reality, Hausman

35

 (1988) describes the figurative or metaphoric, as the transcendent meaning that
occurs when commonly coded signifiers are uncommonly juxtaposed. It is the
juxtapositioning of unlike, but significant, elements that generates a metaphorical
response.

Love is the last light spoken.
or
The morning is flying on the wings of his age. (Thomas, 1957,
pp. 144 & 152)

Unlike obtuse meaning, confined to the personal or obscure, metaphor generates
common understandings, generally unprecedented in that form; it formulates insights
beyond the restraints of previously encoded meanings. Confronted with an
ambiguous relationship between signifiers, the individual constructs or identifies
another meaning which transcends the literal.

New meaning is grasped by virtue of

the authority of a shared subjectivity, experienced through a common language.
The presence of "oppositions among terms" (Hausman, 1988, p. 66), creates
ambiguous relationships between the two meaning units which results in an internal
tension. The greater this tension, suggests Hausman, the richer the diversity of
consequent meanings derived from the metaphor will be. We might conclude then,
that the impulse toward metaphor and that of art-making, both serve as expansive
mechanisms of thought, deconstructing the constraints of conventional signification
by challenging assumptions and broadening and reopening events to accommodate
the ever-changing dynamics of context.

36

 The constitution of meaning could then be distinguishable as operating through four
interdependent levels or mechanisms: Communication, the Obvious, the Obtuse,
and the Metaphoric. Though it is clear that the first two mechanisms, communication
and the obvious, operate within works of art, they do so at a less significant level
than do the obtuse and metaphoric mechanisms.

Current post-modem debate challenges the autonomy of an intuitive self in relation to
a definable real. We may surmise that consciousness is seen to be the
manifestation of the existing symbolic order, with all modes of symbolic expression
exemplifying the agenda of a particular ideology, and serving the interests of its elite.
The modernist utopian hope that humanity will achieve a state of universal
enlightenment is dismissed by a theory which insists upon the grounding of all
experience in the everyday, the here and now. These insights deny the autonomy of
the self, focusing more upon social structures and the systems of belief through
which they operate upon us. Social conditioning is seen to be total, and the political
ramifications of this are central to the post-modem agenda. Current movements,
serving the interests of various minorities, lobby aggressively for political recognition
and economic equity from larger socially sanctioned or privileged majorities. Many
post-modem artists have come to adopt a subversive attitude toward these issues, as
the source of content in their work, because they are so immediately topical and
personally relevant.

The inclination in modem art-making to disrupt the complacency of conventional
thought, was embodied in the avant garde, and presaged the notion of
deconstruction. What has been lost is the essential trust in the certainty of an
underlying fabric of truth. The infinitesimal temporal gap between the actual and the

37

 reflected is, for consciousness, an enormous divide between the perceived and the
represented.

Those representations, so often mistaken for the actual, have been

usurped by whatever system they serve as instruments of power and control.
Through an awareness of the relationship between information and power, we have
become increasingly skeptical of all knowledge and ultimately of truth itself.

It is this

dilemma, this essential doubt, that indicates a major shift from the secure certainty
central to the modem paradigm.

While our attitudes toward truth have fundamentally changed, we persist, as a living
culture, in acting upon the fundamental assumptions of the Enlightenment and
Modernist projects.

But, as we become increasingly skeptical of both intuited and

rationally derived truths, we become evermore dependent upon rational methods of
analysis as both critical and generative mechanisms for representing the constructs
of reality.

Recent investigations into semiotics by Barthes, de Certeau, Burgin,

Merleau-Ponty and others, share a basic distrust of all instruments of representation.
It may be said that post-modem criticism challenges the validity of all principles and
conventions of symbolic representation.

It would argue that to subscribe to any

system is to restrict our experience of the world within the constraints of a single
fabricated construction of a single universal order. No one system can fully illuminate
our place in a dynamic pluralist society. The post-modem poses a rational pluralism,
one in which we must accommodate diversity, ironically, through rationally
determined systems of social response.

We believe in, and act upon, systems of

abstraction; abstractions of abstractions. As de Certeau comments, we have
become the very subjects of language, the instruments of abstraction, defined by
rational systems of belief that compel us to operate exclusively through their

38

 mechanisms under the assumption that they "speak in the name of the real" (de
Certeau, 1984, p. 136).

The debate appears less centred on issues of form than it is on semiotic
interpretation. Ultimately, emphasis is placed not upon the art activity or its objects,
but on their cultural relevance and the critical language around which we have
constructed the very phenomenon of art.

It is by examining the general properties of

signification, and the relationship between language and art, that we can, perhaps,
achieve not simply a more meaningful production of art objects, but a deeper
appreciation of art as an essential aspect of mind.

If we assume that signification is fixed to the sign/object, the scope of content
remains limited to the literal, or at best to simplistic symbolic analogies. On the other
hand, if we understand the object to be a catalyst for meaning, dependent upon the
interaction of the viewer, the parameters ~f meaning become more opaque.

Formal

components, as well as sign, symbol, and material each contribute overtly to a work's
becoming in the mind(s) of the viewer.

construction.

The viewer is understood as complicit in its

Meaning is brought to the work rather than derived exclusively from

properties inherent in it. The artist must be sensitive to the ramifications of overly
explicit imagery, respecting the essential role of ambiguity within each work, while
avoiding the unintelligible. It is in this interaction between artist, work, and viewer,
that we bring language to bear upon the construction of meaning in the work of art.

Language requires the user to participate in the construction of meaning through a
general knowledge of both syntax and signification. Words, as individual units of
assigned meaning, are arranged in a variety of syntactical configurations that only

39

 achieve their collective significance through the knowledge-based interaction of a
reader/listener.

Meaning is achieved through a reciprocal interpretive process of

association and cross-referencing. The correspondent specificity between word,
sign, and meaning, often associated with literal language, is rarely, if ever, present in
complex discourse or figurative language, when we consider the vast range of
subjective experience that each viewer brings to this interpretive process.

It is the assumption of a representable singular reality, idealized in modernism, that
post-modern theory denies.

Derrida would argue that representations speak only of

themselves. What we "know" is located within the form in which it is represented,
and therefore fixed within the inevitable limitations peculiar to that form.

He argues:

reading ... cannot legitimately transgress the text
toward something other than it, toward the referent (a
reality that is metaphysical, historical,
psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signifier outside
the text whose content could take place, could have
taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the
sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing
in general. . . . There is nothing outside of the text.
(Rorty, 1989, p. 96)

Derrida restricts meaning to the form itself. When we discuss the form, we discuss
representation and its relationship to other representations, not to the real. To
mistake either artwork or text for what they represent, would be, for Derrida, to
equate the real with mere constructs or representations.

It is the systematic critical

analysis of knowledge, the deconstruction of assumptions, that forms the core of
Derrida's position (Rorty, 1989, pp. 95-98).

40

 Belief, Faith, and Certainty

Though we may challenge this process as essentially negative, the limitations of
representational form, described in recent semiological studies (Barthes, De Certeau,
Lacan), suggest that we carefully scrutinize those systems of meaning in which we
have so ·unfailingly believed. We cannot locate, or contain, metaphysical notions or
that which occurs outside of time and context in a fixed spatio-temporal form.

We

may only represent these symbolically through language, science, or art. Time and
change are of the actual, outside the bounds of certainty and knowledge. The
moment that we attempt closure in knowledge, removing it from context and time, we
discredit it and open it to disbelief.

Belief, in western culture, is assumed to be inextricably linked to knowledge of truth.
We believe something because we are certain, convinced that it is true.

Faith, on

the other hand, suggests the possibility of doubt, of uncertainty. We may not
necessarily believe something, but we may act upon it in faith.

This fundamental

confirmation of uncertainty has profound implications for what we are experiencing as
the post-modem, for it presents us with an essential paradox. We must learn to act
on faith, as though we are certain, toward what we know to be inevitably located in
the limited symbolic discourse of the subjective, the ideological, and the contextual.
Belief, then, could be said to be grounded in certainty, while faith is grounded in
doubt.

To believe in the fictions of representation is to be duped.

Rather, we can only

consider them critically, deconstructively, and act on them in faith.
an open vigilance.

Faith presumes

Belief, in accepting ideas as closed, limits opportunities to

41

 engage the actual.

If we persist in acting upon assumptions that are products of

other assumptions, we must ultimately discover that these truths are inevitably false.
Depending upon the data of a broken sextant, lured uncritically by the sirens of
representation, we may find ourselves lost.

Because the viewer and the image each operate within particular times and contexts,
certain layers of ambiguity result. The attention of critical analysis shifts from a priori
formal properties, to temporal-cultural causal factors.

Forms of representation may

be seen to be as impermanent as the ideas they represent. Ambiguity creates a
shift in the perception of the work of art from an allusion to truth to one of contrived
fiction.

With the devaluation of formalism, or any other system, to one among many

conventionalized symbolic systems, formal representation relinquishes its unique
authority. Thus, within the post-modem sensibility, all forms are assumed
appropriated, unoriginal, and understood as parody.

In addition to serving as a

distancing device, placing the viewer clearly outside of the work, a victim of the
system at play, the parodic act is essentially skeptical at its base.

It alienates the

viewer, the self, by denying it all authority in the construction of meaning. The
underlying premise that content and form are mere fabrications, undermines the
possibility of any real significance, including the instrumentality of the viewer. The
irony of this position is that while assuming all formal systems to ultimately be social
contrivances, parody encourages the viewer to persist in seeing this system, the
parodic, as aloof and inevitably correct.

Much current opinion (de Certeau, Buren, Foucault) argues that the very notion of an
autonomous enduring self is a delusion that inhibits our ability to dispel the fictions of
societal conditioning. The post-modem self, seen as victim to the formative powers

42

 of contemporary media, is defined through the instruments and systems of rationality.
The human sciences {psychology, sociology, anthropology, political science and
economics), that have proliferated over the past two centuries, have constructed
increasingly abstracted notions of who we are, and how we operate in the world.
Post-modem theory directs its critical gaze onto these constructions of self and world
through art and language as the primary mechanisms of meaning.

It is this common

function of word and image that has become central to contemporary art-making.
Awareness of both systems, one rationally based, the other grounded in the intuitive
imagination, has become fundamentally essential in the training of contemporary
artists.

The chart below attempts to illustrate the tensions existing between the two streams
of the modernist paradigm and the essential conflict between modernism and current
critical attitudes. As an expanded account, based upon Charles Taylor's discussion
of notions of the self (1989, p. 419), the chart presents a comparative format for the
evolving notions of the instrumental self from the Enlightenment to the present.
Though the points of disagreement seem infinitely disparate, the final two points
suggest an opening for a new conception of an instrumental constructive self.
Derrida ascribes a subversive role for the self which exposes the fictions of social
conditioning. Foucault suggests a constructive self which freely defines its place in
the eternal flux of shifting signs. Each perspective ultimately confirms the essential
hope for an actively instrumental autonomous self, and in so doing confirm the
fundamental transformative power of the human will.

43

 TWO MODES OF INSTRUMENTATION IN THE MODERN PARADIGM
ROMANTIC EXPRESSIVE
(Romanticist)

DISENGAGED REASON
(Enlightenment)

- Creative imagination
- Symbolic expressive work
provides access to truth
- as independent agent
- Self has privileged
access to nature
- Aesthetidtranscendent
properties of art
- Autonomous/ongoing self
- Figurative/poetic principal
instrument
- Ideal form embodies
the· universal
- Primary importance of
intuition/feeling
- Culture acts as a
constraint to the natural self

-

Rationality
Logical language
Objective posturing
Methodical
Skeptical toward
unsubstantiated
knowledge
- Certitude through reason
- Autonomous objectifiable
self controllable
through self-knowledge
- Distrust for
intuition/feeling
accumulative knowledge
- Normative

ISSUES OF CURRENT DEBATE

- Challenges the rational instrumental claims for truth (Derrida)
- Challenges the expressive-imaginative claims for a privileged self
- Claims all language to be instrument of the empowered social system (de
Certeau, Foucault)
- Self is shaped entirely by the instruments of privileged rational systems
(Foucault)
- Aesthetic categories are modernist constructs serving to mystify
what are essentially bourgeois motives of commodification
- There is no affirmation only flux-continuous change (Derrida)
- Assumes a complete unaligned or encumbered freedom
- There is no power in subjectivity other than to subvert
socially sanctioned beliefs (Derrida)
- An ideal of an aesthetic construction of self as a work or art;
a self-related freedom. (Foucault)

44

 CHAPTER4
PERSONAL STATEMENTS

Annotated discussion of my work with Christine
Ross Hopper in September, 1991.

The following interview between Christine Ross
Hopper and myself is included here to provide an
account of my personal approach to artmaking. This
thesis has evolved out of the questions and responses
that operate behind the working process. The
interview and the accompanying marginal notes will
hopefully locate the larger theoretical issues of the
thesis within one artist's practice of making and
thinking art.

C.R.H.: You talked about process in
your catalogue (Beaverbrook Exhibition,
1989), and what you seemed to be
saying was that the works are becoming
as you go and then you read them
afterwards.

45

 R.M.:

It's

never

just

an

inspired

moment, it's an experience of full mind;
the manipulation of materials in an
expressive/reflective discourse.

I don't

think it's something so magical.

C.R.H.: No, I actually relate to it,
because I feel I'm coming to grips with
the different ways the surface can relay
what you want it to say . . .

R.M.:

The

informed

interesting thing
self

awareness

is that
shapes

understanding and experience in ways
outside the normalizing strictures of
social conditioning.

At some point before I finished art
school I realized that the artifact alone,
the object, wasn't what it was about for
me.

I was one of those people who

could let my works pile up, and get
damaged, and I never felt any terrible
sense of loss about that.

46

 C.R.H.: It was all in the becoming,
rather than when it's there.

R.M.: Yes, very much so.

It's more to

That level of reflection is one of the
more

gratifying

aspects

do with what happens between myself

working

and the work.

of a work of art as well.

process,

and

of

the

contributes

inwnensely to the viewer's experience

So in that sense I've

Critical

analysis and, ultimately, sign theory

always carried around a certain amount

are essential aspects of art training as

of guilt about it being a very selfish kind

As art assumes a more
well.
analytical, socially conscious role, the
ability

of activity.

I must admit that I don't

to

discern

both
art
interpretation is

have that sense any longer ...

the

impact

of

various systems of meaning upon
production
essential,

and
and

suggests that due to the variety of
personal

and

cultural

frameworks

through which a work is experienced,

C.R.H.: Anyway isn't it important to let

it is never actually closed.
As an
artist, this insight has a significant

people understand that there are ways

effect upon the choices that are made
during the production of a work.

of existing in the world that consist of
this ongoing inquiry?

After all, you're

still trying to define the world you are in.

R.M.: Nevertheless, I think it's behind a

lot of artists' decisions to succumb to
commercial interests.

We're all under

so much pressure to attach some kind

. . . trying to define a world that is
defining ME.

of pragmatic significance to everything
we do.

R.M.: When I think of my work as I think
other people might think of my work,

47

 seeing it as a logical progression, and
when I look over the past fifteen years, I
see that I did this very minimalist type of
stuff. It appears to be minimalist but it's
not; it simply happens that there's not a
lot of imagery there.

And then I look at

the work I've done in the last year, or
the last five years, and there seems to
be a changing of styles.

But my work

has never been about developing a
style, I only think of "style" as it serves
content.

C.R.H.:

I'm

thinking

of

your

little

sculptures, when I first saw that your
work became three dimensional, and
the new wall pieces that we're looking
at now. I see familiarities in the use of
materials, metal and punctured metal.
And there's a tie-in with some of your
earlier drawings and the wire that took
on dimensional form in some of the
earlier sculptures; and, in a way, I
thought when I saw your pieces about
the boxes there was a flatness again.

48

 R.M.: Oh! O.K. because I see it myself,

Commodification
quantifiable

but I'm always surprised when others

for

allows
As

assessment.

that

which is measurable and, in

our

we

understand

a

best

society,

efforts at control, strive to regulate

see it.

and nonnalize, not simply nature, but
ourselves as well.

The devices at

work within this fiction are dangerous,
to the extent that we are unaware of
them as devices; we too often see
these as truths.
Normalization serves to equalize, but
at the great expense of idiosyncrasy.
To a very large extent, it is the arts, as
instruments of the imaginative
autonomous self, that work to
destabilize the normative
rationalization of society as a whole.
The insights that this affords are not
those of the specialized universals of
modernism, but more appropriately,
insights into the strategic apparati of
contemporary cultural conditioning;
the all-pervasive devices of
rationality. These insights are gained
most effectively through the rigorous
scrutiny of the systems themselves,
because they are so complexly

entangled in a fluid social fabric. If
art-making is to be an effective
instrument of critical scrutiny, art
institutions must meet the needs for
informed analysis through a more
rigorous integration of academic and
studio coursework.

49

 C.R.H.:

The

perforated

use

metal:

of

metal

and

what connotations

does that have for you?

In the new

work, specifically.

R.M.: The stuff that I'm working on now
has

a

lot

occurrence:

to

do

things

other things

and

with

layers

operating
being

of

behind

understood

through transparencies. The perforated
metal

allows

a

certain

degree

of

transparence to deny the substance of
the form. It's less about mass than it is
about layers.

With a solid piece of

metal you stop at the surface; but
perforated steel opens the form. I think
there's

an

assumption

with

solid

material that there's nothing within it, it's
closed - it's about mass as opposed to
transparency.

50

 These works play with a variety of

The fact that all knowledge aspires to
certainty, but is inevitably speculative

issues

but

the

principle

ordering

fascinates me as an idea.

My interest

in current theory, termed generally as

elements, the formal structuring, grow

•post~em•,

centres

around this notion.

out of language and syntax.

particularly

Nothing is

comprehensible in isolation.
No
thought is complete, or opaque, in
itself.

We understand the world

determined
a variety of
screens or lenses that colour and

through

C.R.H.: It has to do with your current
readings in post-modernism and other

culturally

systems of signage;

issues?

our perceptions of it and
This
underlying
uncertainty seems to me to be
responsible for the fundamental
paradox
of
the
post-modern

R.M.: Actually less with that, than with

condition;
we understand the
essential fiction of ·Truth", yet must

my interest generally in language as an

contend with our need to believe in it.
We must maintain faith in what is

shape

ourselves.

increasingly significant form.

It is

fundamentally uncertain.

interesting how syntax, structure, and
the

interaction

association,

of

and

operate structurally.

words

through

metaphor

actually

I thought it would

be interesting to use that structure
formally in an art work.
So at the most literal level you could
see this (indicating an art work) as a
sentence.

C.R.H.: So there's a narrative in a
sense.

51

To let the image develop out of
linguistic operations.

 R.M.: There's a narrative. It's not a left
to right progression, because I decided
that would carry it too far and I didn't
want it to be illustrative, I simply wanted
that to be a starting point.

So in its

most abstract sense, I'm using linguistic
form to determine visual relationships.

Within

that

system

that

we

call

language, are an enormous number of
operations;

we

have

left/right

literalness, or we can also begin to think
about how certain elements interact.
For instance, you can
sentence:

"The

introduce a

elephant,

having

trampled through the jungle, discovered
that there was a spear in his behind."

"His behind" refers back to the elephant
at the beginning of the sentence, so
there's really no kind of linearity in it
except that we've brought linearity to
the written form.

52

 C.R.H.: So we don't know until we get
to the end of it what we're going to
make of it anyway.

Meaning exists outside the actual
words.
The words are in linear
arrangement
because
they
are
components which must operate in
time and space. The components are
reconstituted
in
the
mind
reformulate concepts. Art works

R.M.: Yes, but what we make of it is
also multi-dimensional as opposed to

reconstitute/re-express
experience.
Content/meaning is actually very fluid,
because infonnation can only operate
in dialogue and dialogue assumes
formulation

linear because although we have to
deal with the words in their physical
line-up on the page in a left/right way,
actually when we take a word, each
word has a vast world of symbolic
references and associations attached to
it, and they are suddenly all up for
grabs

within

the

context

of

the

sentence. They intermix in a way that's
very much like what happens in a
painting or work of art.

In part, it's that kind of analogy between
artmaking and language that I'm trying
to play with.

C.R.H.: I have just done a series that is
based on Rilke's Duino Elegies and I
found

that

I really

related

to

the

53

to

and

reformulation.

Increasingly, in our culture, we
experience the world not directly, but
through layers of rationally processed
events; abstractions of abstractions.
Those are the experiences that art
now strives to penetrate.

 particular translation that I happened
upon.

But I've since seen different

translations

and

it's

amazing

how

there's a different sense, and some
qualities are missing due to different
juxtapositions of images.

R. M.: That awareness to an artist is

absolutely critical because what it does
is it says that it's foolish to think that
you create a work that has any kind of
fixed meaning or symbolic significance
when,

in - fact,

it's really

absolutely

dependent upon the viewer and it's only
in the viewer's interaction with the work
that the work continues.

So it's never just me that's making the
work, it's this moment between us; and
every moment between the work and
whoever looks at the work from then on.

54

 C.R.H.: But sometimes understanding a
work really does rely on some form of

The artist/author is merely the human
It is the
intention behind the work.
viewer's awareness of artistic intent
that stimulates the art response.

verbal description or interpretation.

As

Duchamp made very clear, the
properties apparent in an object are

R.M.: I think criticism is much about

that.

no more significant than the context in
which we place it. By labeling it art,
we frame the work in the context of
intended meaning. The "genius" of
producing a work of art has as much
to do with what is not present (the
"yet to be thought") as with what is.

C.R.H.: How do you give the viewer a
clue to this piece (indicating one of the
works in the studio)?

R.M.: I use titles.

I'm always careful

with them, but the way I use a title
would be the same way that I used that
screw over there: my decision about a
title is no less significant than this screw
or this rivet, because it's just one more
formal component.

The language is

That is, the language of the title and of
critical analysis are instrumental in

just another aspect of the piece.

the

evolution

symbolic form.

The working title in my mind when I'm
working on this piece here is Love
Story.

Incidentally, all of these are

titled Fictions.

55

of the

work

as

a

 C.R.H.:

You said you read it like a

narrative, but there has to be a way into
it. I felt drawn to the central piece as a
way in.

R.M.:

If there's

anything

that's

an

access point, it would be this little
plastic cupid.

It's this idea of transparency that
I'm working with; and this (indicating
steel mesh) is just another form of grid,
really.

The other connotation that I'm

working with is containment, I'm working
with caged/bounded images.

Each element plays against the other
and there's an ambiguity that's a part of
it as well.

In reflecting on my work, I

search for broad associations. It retains
this element of ambiguity.

The title itself suggests a certain kind of
sweetness that the hardness of the
piece is at odds with. These are ironies
I like to build into the work.

In these

56

 works, the form, the style, will evolve
out of the fiction itself because these
are not about style.

C.R.H.: You are going towards using
certain materials.

Now suddenly you

have introduced a new material, felt.
Why? What is this carrying for you?

R.M.: Softness.

I wanted to bring

softness into this piece.

Style itself operates so strongly as
sign, that it actually functions as a
formal element within the work;
significant only to the extent that it is
supportive of my general enquiry and
the intentions behind the work. This
is quite clear in the work of Gerhardt
Richter, for example, whose precise

The title will probably be extended into
This is No

copies of photographs or abstract
images treat style as subject matter.
Cliff Eyland's obsessive exploration of

Ordinary Movie. There's a relationship

stylistic elements has given an
enormous encyclopaedic range to his

between this image (a row of people

hundreds of works despite their tiny
format (see 1,000 Years of Painting

other works; it's called

wearing protective goggles, sitting in
lawn chairs all facing one direction) and

exhibit, 1992.)

In the training of

artists, the learning of a survey of
stylistic

strategies

valuable

tool

for

becomes
analysis,

a
and

broadens the expressive range and

the title that I feel is very strong, and I
want to work with it further in other
ways.

C.R.H.: I'm having some difficulty at this
point comprehending the title and what

57

layers of meaning in an artists' work.

 I'm seeing,

and fully understanding

what you are doing.

R.M.: It's an extension of the same
issue; language as form, and what I'm
bringing into it are references that are
layered. So there's the element of this
audience, this group of people.

And

there's a history to the image that you
would have to know I guess, and I'm
leaving that unanswered for the viewer.
It is derived from a U.S. military photo of
officers

witnessing

the

first

atomic

explosion.

C.R.H.:

Amazing.

nonchalance!

With

Horrifying

such
in

its

innocence.

R.M.: And that's the reference This is
No Ordinary Movie, with the idea that
we see things as movies; we see our
lives as movies in a bizarre kind of way.

So that's a layer of meaning I'm trying
to keep; and it's all behind these layers

58

 of history. We see everything in layers,
we experience nothing in isolation.

These are the first works that I think I
can

say

are

"true" works.

They

synthesize these issues in a way that
I've not been able to do before in such
a satisfying way. It feels infinitely rich to
me, which

is interesting and really

exciting.

C.R.H.: What are these? (indicating
other works)

Well,

they're

not

immediately accessible at all; you have
to work a lot harder, spend more time
with them.

R.M.: Yes, I think they're more cerebral
really.

C.R.H.: But they are beautiful, too.

R.M.: Yes, I hope so.

C.R.H.: You want that to be there?

59

 R.M.: I do.

I want my work to be, not

'beautiful' in a precious sense, but I
want them to have a certain sense of
craft, an elegance of intensity.

C.R.H.: I think 'beautiful' is an o.k. word
to use, but I guess it's really sort of in
the eye of the beholder. One tends to
think it has a sentimental connotation,
but I don't mean it like that at all.

R.M.: It does tend to make me a bit
nervous.

C.R.H.: It's funny to see the flame
reduced to a kind of ornament.

In the

other work, the flames were almost
running

away,

and

now

it's

really

contained.

R.M.: It was hard to get them to read
behind

the

mesh

without

this

exaggerated or stylized treatment.
wanted that sense of it being stylized.

60

Aesthetic qualities seduce the viewer
into a work as well as create a
heightened sense of authority.

 It's a flame, but it's a second generation
representation of a flame.

Here's one more I'll show you (referring
to Syntax: Firebox, 1991 ).

The boxes became a geometry that
used in that idealized sense that
spoke

of

earlier.

So

what

they

represent isn't important in the literal
sense, as much as what they begin to
represent in the allegorical sense.
treat them in a way that they become
more ambiguous as objects.

In a way they're about painting, and
about paintings being seen through
something.

So it's as though we're

distanced from

painting,

in a way.

There's this glass barrier between us
and the painting.

We put things

between us and everything, and the
fact that I'm making an artwork about an
artwork I thought was interesting.

61

 C.R.H.:

There

a

self-consciousness

about the activity.

R.M.: And then the barrier, the caging,
and building.

R.M.:

That

uncertainty

is

really

important. They should always be just
a few steps ahead of resolve.
C.R.H.:

So

while

I'm

looking,

I'm

building a fiction about it?

R.M.: That's right and I create a fiction
around it, and so will anyone else who
comes to it.
is:

isn't

And the point behind that

that

what

it's

all

about

ultimately? We are all fictionalizing.

C.R.H.: So I can spend time with any
part of this and start telling myself
stories about it. I can explore it.

. C.R.H.: Are you satisfied with the scale
of these pieces?

62

 R.M.: I want to do composite pieces that
would become like a wall of these.

This understanding of speculative

R.M.: Exactly, that kind of thing, where

thought first occurred to me fifteen
years ago when I was living in a

the references become a little more

remote area of Cape Breton, Nova

complex,

Scotia. I would often take a walk in a
favorite stretch of spruce woods near

and

spaced

so

that the

my home. The trees were very tall,

fragments begin to relate.

envision it

and the lower branches had fallen to
provide a clear view ahead, with a

as being a wall full.

dense ceiling of branches above. At
one point, there was an opening in the
canopy that allowed the clear bright
sunlight to fill a perfect square of
silver moss-covered stones arranged
on the ground. The square pile of
stones and the square opening in the
trees were unquestionably the result
of human intention. Each time I took
this walk, I found ilTVllense pleasure in
speculating about the meaning of the
square of stones. I considered a
variety of possibilities from cabin
foundation to ancient spiritual site. It
was the intention behind it that
intrigued me, but I was quite content
with the uncertainty. It is this quality
that I seek in my work.
Eventually I learned from an old man
that lived nearby that it was simply the
remains of a field-stone·pile that the
original settlers had arranged so
meticulously. The land had once
been a hayfield, and had long ago
gone back to forest.

63

 As an artist, I do not simply make
things. Over a long period of making
and contemplating I have assembled
around my making, an intellectual
context, a super-structure of meaning
shaped by all of the private and public
events comprising my experience and
As
the reflections upon them.
absolutely nothing in life occurs
independent of external effect, the
same may be assumed of the things,
and the ideas out of which they
emerge and through which they are
'"read'". The layers of effect and their
impact upon production ground the
work in what might be considered
'"real'" experience.

It might therefore

be considered as representative, to
some degree, of a common '"reality".
For a very long time, I thought that
art-making perhaps grew from some
deep-seated need for control; not a
psychotic need for power, but the
very human need for a sense of order
within one·s immediate space. As a
child, I began making art because the
circumstances of my childhood left
me alone quite frequently.
By the
time I was twelve, making art on the
kitchen table became a fairly frequent
routine.

My father had died a year

earlier, and my mother was forced to
work to support the two of us. This
left me alone with some fairly hefty
issues to come to terms with, not the
Artleast of which was loneliness.
making became my escape; a very
private way of examining the world
and my responses to it.
In some
inexplicable way, it became an integral
part of the way I investigated ideas
and my most deeply seated feelings. I
read a lot, and thought even more.
I remember my first visit to the
Albright-Knox Gallery, a gallery in
Buffalo, N.Y. with a remarkable
collection of twentieth century art. It
was a field trip with my art teacher
who was a painter from New York, and
she had the good sense to allow us to
travel the gallery unescorted after we
had completed the tour

64

 I backtracked to find my favorite work,
Robert Motherwell's Spanish Elegy
There was a bench placed

#35.

directly in front of the painting and I
remember sitting there in complete
awe of this enormous canvas of black
shapes with its richly worked field of
colours.

The title had no significance

for me, and I was not the least
concerned that the imagery was pure
abstraction, but unknowingly, at that
time,

made

a

choice

about

the

direction of my own life. I'm not even
sure what moved me about it, but
twenty years later at Motherwell's
Retrospective at the Guggenheim, I
came upon "my" painting and felt this
wonderful

response

again.

What

moved me was not what I would call
an aesthetic response, but a strong
confirmation of my own love for the
making of things as a manifestation of
thought. I recognized in Motherwell's
work an intensity of "intellectual"
intent that I felt in my own art making.
It

is

representative

preformulated

intellect,

of

a
in

total
which

specificity of meaning is not an issue.
It

is

a

level

of

awareness

that

encompasses, and excludes, all of the
classifications of mind that western
rationalism has fabricated.

That

intent awareness has shown itself to
me many times since in the work of
other people, some of whom happen
to be artists, that express through
whatever form, a conmitment that
combines passion and intelligence.
The form becomes simply that, a form
in which we instinctively comprehend
the intensity of some other being's
presence.

In some instances it is

expressed in artifacts, in others in

It rarely speaks to us

simple action.

all, nor is it necessary that it does.
realize

that

dangerously

this
with

transcendentalism,

I

resonates
modernist

but what

I am

trying to identify is that level of
awareness that predates attempts at
formulation.

Whatever it may be, it

need not necessarily be named to
exist.

65

 In fact, if deconstructive process
shows us anything, it makes quite
clear
that
rationality,
and
its
instrunental language, is highly
ineffective at enlightening us. Most
significantly, rationality most often
serves to close unless we redirect it
toward itself.

This I believe is how it

now serves art through criticism, and
operates in a wider capacity through

social criticism in general.

66

 Truth and Other Fictions ...

The following text is the statement for my exhibition in support of this thesis. The
exhibition was shown at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, Nova Scotia College of Art
and Design, Halifax, Nova Scotia in December 1991.

This recent work examines the ways in which meanings originate through formal,
referential, and contextual relationships operating between my studio practice, the
object, and the viewing experience. The formal structure is derived from the syntax
of written language, in which the position of meaning-laden words permits literal,
figurative, and subjective readings of the text.

Each written word or concept carries

with it a world of associations that "fire" or resonate off one-another, in a variety of
ways.

In these constructions, materials, title, imagery, and methods of handling

interact as mechanisms of meaning. Treating the visual and verbal as formally
analogous broadened the parameters of the work and allowed me to explore
devices of language within a visual discourse.

It is interesting to consider the

extent to which the artist/author may actually construct meaning in a work and the
range of strategies employed in that practice.

The transition from inkling to formal construct occurs in my work through a kind of
dialectic of practice in which conceptions, images, and forms are played against
materials and intuition. Various configurations are tested against the original
notion and its permutations, exploring potential cross-layers of reference and
meaning. The object, in a sense, becomes the innocent location of this operation,
and in itself, is not representative of any particular content.

67

 Generally, literal intentions serve some closed notion of meaning or narrative,
ultimately, with ambitions to certitude.

In my own work the gesture which the work

represents, strives to provide a potentially significant field within which the viewer
may relate meanings appropriate to the particulars of self and context. As a work
moves toward closure, I struggle to reopen it, to disrupt any tendencies toward
resolution. Works that persist in tension between the ambiguous/subjective and
rational resolve retain a discordant energy. This tension between rational closure
and the open intuitive gesture has evolved in my work as a metaphor for the
fundamental paradox existing between the worlds of self and other. Attempts at
closure, at certitude, at universal Truth, remain rooted in a set of assumptions,
frozen in a static moment; a context of particular certainties expressed through,
essentially arbitrary, symbolic relationships.

68

 The following two pages contain photographs of four of the works from the support
exhibition for this thesis at the Anna Leonowens Gallery, in December of 1991.
The title for the exhibition was "This is no Ordinary Movie ... ". The specifications for
each work are as follows:

Figure A: Madness Became the Rule of the People, S'x 6', oil on metal and
plywood, steel studs, moss, and cast lead figures, 1991

Figure B: Red Construct #1, 23"x 23", oil on metal and plywood, 1991

Figure C: Syntax/Firebox, 6"x3"x43", oil on wood and metal, glass, and moss
1991

Figure D: Syntax/Love Story, B"x 3"x 57'', oil on wood, metal, glass, and straw,
1991

69

 Figure B.

 '.

..
. -

~

Figure C.

Figure D.

.

-;~-

.

~..

1:;.;::-~~:-::~::·~·--· . .·.·:.::~--~~:·--f
.,,.

"'"

 CHAPTER 5
EDUCATION
A Curriculum of Strategy and Debate

... enlightenment is man's release from his selfincurred tutelage. Tutelage is man's inability to make
use of his understanding without direction from
another. Self-incurred is this tutelage when its cause
lies not in lack of reason but in lack of resolution and
courage to use it without direction from another.
(Kant, 1965, p. 3)

Art education, as it has evolved over the past two centuries, has generally run
parallel to the Enlightenment, the Romantic, and Modernist models presented
earlier in this paper. Tensions between the individual and the world, subject and
object, knower and known, have been the underlying energy that fueled a learning
process centred on formal principles and self-expression, intent upon constructing a
unified system of knowledge and studio practice. This need for stability, stasis,
reflects the underlying need for control and closure inherent in modernism. Current
investigations in seminology now consistently suggest that systems of general
knowledge are as fluid and varied as the time and events they seek to rationalize.
Truth, traditionally the currency of education, is now routinely devalued through the
persistent, audacious and skeptical scrutiny of post-modem analysis.

Inquiry and

rational analysis, rather than serving solely as instruments of belief and power,
increasingly support the ongoing subversion of certainty in the interest of
constructing dynamic, immediately relevant systems of thought and action.
Responsive to temporal contexts, pedagogical methods must increasingly operate

72

 within a model of informed speculative debate that is sensitive to ever-shifting
codes of meaning.

No longer simply the accumulation of knowledge or studio skills, education in the
arts must focus upon developing strategies for analysis .and communication,
through which ideas may be challenged and reformulated.

Such training must

encompass the dynamic critical analysis of all culturally determined representational
systems, and the temporal-subjective contexts within which each individual student
operates.

Most importantly, it must encourage the development of personal

strategies of expression through which students may investigate the interaction
between a multitude of past and present conceptions of art-making, self, and
society.

There is a distinction between art making and art education that should be seriously
considered before any significant agenda for "post-modem art education" can be
further articulated. Art-making emerges out of the interaction between self and the
actual. Art education aspires to identify the parameters of that process and
orchestrate the opportunity for its practice.

Over the past two hundred years art-

making has come to be as much about the posing of questions - a method of formal
enquiry, as it has become a system constitutive of representational and expressive
forms.

With the demise of authoritative symbolic systems, art educators are left

with the question of what to teach.

When we attempt to teach particular skills of

expression and representation, we too often confuse studio practice for content.
Students are often given either a program patterned after formalist principles, or
some vaguely expressed criteria through which they are to presume that "good" art
occurs.

In response to the instructor's approval, students veer to the right, a

73

 disapproving shrug generally results in a stall, which is followed by a series of
disoriented start-ups until the instructor's approving response occurs again.

In a

knowledge-based field of study this conditioning approach may be effective.

But

within the varied contexts of art-making, it tends to assume an authority that inhibits
the student's primary goal: that of personally developing effective strategies for
expression grounded in the immediacy of their own being.

Presuming that, as

educators, we can assist with this, we may accomplish something of real value to
the student and our immediate culture. Our tendency has been to assume that
ideas emerge intuitively, primarily from the work. What this paper suggests is that
both modes of mind, intuition/imagination and reasoned strategies, collaboratively
inform the work through process. To place emphasis on teaching formal principles,
material handling, and the focussed development of new forms, is to disregard the
need for relevant intelligently expressive content in. art. The rapid evolution of
meaning in a society as complex as ours demands deeper insight into the
instruments of that meaning.

If we expect art to be made and understood as

relevant, art educators must acknowledge the vast range of abstract forces at play
in the shaping of our realities.

For art plays not with visual form alone, but with the

systems that both construct, represent, and interpret those realities.

Methods of representation provide strategies for the careful scrutiny of natural and
contrived phenomena which comprise our experience of ourselves and the world.
Drawing, for example, is most typically taught as a skill that aims at a product.
understand the process to be a means to a desirable end.

We

It may also be

considered as a strategy; one which sensitizes the eye and the mind to subtleties of
physical phenomena. Through the process, the student gains insights into the
physical world as well as the symbolic world of graphic representation.

74

This shift of

 emphasis from product and process to the mechanisms of significance is more than
simply a pedagogical ploy. It represents a move away from the understanding of
art as a creative productive process, to one of art as a speculative method of inquiry
into the systems of meaning as a means for expanding feeling, perception, an_
d
cognition.

It reconfirms the increasingly subtle distinctions between the actual and

the represented.

It is not that the forms themselves originate in the imagination,

but that their symbolic potential may be expanded upon through critical analysis and
process to suggest broader fields of awareness. Shifts of focus in the role of the
arts from the pre-Renaissance supportive-illustrative role, to the expressiveformulative concerns of the Renaissance, to the constructive-productive role in
Modernism, to the critical-semiotic concerns of the post-modem, strongly indicate
that contemporary art-making has much to do with the analysis and improvisational
expansion of all systems of meaning.

The teaching of art-making is not about models to be re-presented, but about
encouraging the exploration of the tacit in a search for, and the analysis of,
contextually becoming symbols for unmediated encounters with the actual. What

can be learned are strategies through which we may escape the constraints of
convention in the race to reconstruct representations of ever-elusive actual events.

Art-making occurs in a dynamic relationship between material properties and
handling, the subjective notions that inform each piece, and the objective/cultural
conditions at play within the working process. Through these, meaning is
generated and, over time, regenerated within a work.

We do not teach art-making,

we explore strategies for symbolic expression. We simply provide the opportunity
for the discovery and expression of art ideas through experience with various forms,

75

 and models for reflecting upon them.

It is misleading at any level of education in

the visual arts to assume that the products of these activities are more than the
physical manifestations of the questions and experiments arising out of the
circumstances of this dynamic process. These products provide the opportunity to
reflect upon the symbolic systems of meaning at play within that particular work.
They become the location of speculative interpretations of meaning, that are as
much in the reading as they are in the objects themselves. The same may also be
said of mature art. A work becomes significant as a result of semiotic processing
that varies from culture to culture. Our culture tends to function within a rationalproductive model and within an ideological/economic system that objectifies overall;
commodifying everything of value. The role of rationality within contemporary
production systems of meaning, including art, requires particular awarenesses and
skills of analysis not typically associated with art-making.

If contemporary art is to

remain meaningful within the context of each direct encounter with the actual, it
must be informed by more than formal-historical convention, expressionistic
handling of materials, the convenient re-presentation of popular forms, or the
obscure rhetoric of artspeak. Students of art require exposure to current ideas in
all forms in order to become sensitive to the effects. of rational constructs upon the
self and society.

Because many of these ideas are profoundly abstract and

available more often through language, the skills of analysis, interpretation, and
expression unique to language are essential.

Language, as a form, presents no

threat to art, nor does rationality. As this paper attempts to demonstrate, they
operate in distinctly different, yet complementary, ways.

But the influences of each

upon the other are now so fundamentally connected to the production of meaning,
that art-making, at any level, can no longer ignore the significance of this
relationship.

76

 Any program of education for artists assumes a system of study that supports the
value of one program over another, and grounds itself in the determination of
quality. Within modernism, excellence is readily identified and taught through
historically proven masterworks. Art educator, Ralph Smith, for example, recently
proposed a program of study which originates in the modernist premise of a
hierarchical system of knowledge and transcendent values.

His program depends

largely upon exemplary masterworks originating in, and conforming to, the
conventions supportive of a privileged western model (Smith, 1986). But what if
the entire notion of historically sanctioned masterworks is challenged, as it is in
post-modern criticism? For the post-modern, the status of any work is questionable
when the criteria for determining that status are exposed as being motivated by
ideological or economic self-interest? And are these standards not particularly
questionable when understood as operating within the idealized notions of a
transcendental modern aesthetic? Smith constructs a program out of this and
other modernist myths, that places art firmly within the domain of a dominant
ideology which happens to be in a position of power. What this suggests is that
the aesthetic is relative to cultured taste and socio:..political sanctioning; precisely
the point made by what Smith refers to as populist art theory and criticism (Smith,
1986). Any leader's attempt at defining standards of artistic quality is only as
successful as his (I use this with the appropriate irony) or her political mandate.
Should the republicans remain in the White House too long, sentimentality and
kitsch could well become aesthetic virtues.

77

 Ralph Smith's Model For An Excellence Curriculum 2

An arts requirement for an "excellence" curriculum might consist of
eleven units of study, distributed as follows.

One Unit: Introduction to the Arts
This unit introduces students to the idea of art and some of its
exemplary instances in the visual arts, music, and literature. The
emphasis is mainly on familiarization.
Two Units: History of the Arts
These units provide a chronological context within which later study
of period styles can be located. It is important that students gain
some awareness of how the arts developed simultaneously, or
unevenly as the case may be, over time. Again, the units would
stress the history of the visual arts, music, and literature.
Three Units: Period Styles In Art History
The purpose of the study of period styles is to gain an appreciation in
depth of selected masterpieces. The emphasis would be less strictly
historical than appreciative. In the visual arts choices could be made
from the usual period styles from antiquity to the present, although
some balance between early and later periods is obviously desirable.
Two Units: Studio Work
In the visual arts units of studio work in painting, sculpture, crafts,
graphic art, photography, and film making could alternate with the
study of period styles.
Two Units: Seminar on Special Topics
These seminars could study any number of aesthetic issues and
interdisciplinary problems in the arts.
One Unit: Cultural Service
This unit could be satisfied with work in community cultural
organizations or environmental groups.

2 Smith R. (1986) Excellence in Art Education. Reston: National Art Education
Association. p. 49-50.

78

 Smith's program (figure 3) outlines eleven units of study, the majority of which are in
art history and what he considers to be criticism. The model is intended for the
secondary level and aims more at art appreciation than production. A notion of
learning through exemplary models is prevalent throughout, with little consideration
for the constructive or explorative value of process.

Evident in every instance,

including studio, is the authority of the modernist model of aesthetic certainty that
links aesthetic response to the art object and the modernist epistemological
agenda.
meaning.

Nowhere is there any mention of art as an instrument of enquiry or
Nowhere is the student exposed to the dynamic social forces that are at

play in determining the meanings that he or she is expected to believe, let alone
imagine or re"create".

Webb, in his discussion of Smith's position, expresses a

similar concern for the expository tone of Smith's argument:

Smith sees no need to extend a conventional
epistemology by elaborating, for example, some
notion of feeling or imaginative knowing . ... it does
not adequately conceive of what is intellectual in art ..
. Smith does not appear to recognize artmaking as a
discrete form of inquiry, a process of mind. (Webb,
1987, p. 6)

The paradigm from which this operates, is one of certainty, not of debate.

It

indoctrinates, rather than educates, and strives for the control that only a closed
system of meaning can promise.

What concerns us as educators, in the

implication of post-modem thought, is that with the denial of certainty, comes a loss
of authority. The model presented in this paper attempts to locate that authority in
the student, in an effort to encourage the development of personal strategies of
inquiry.

79

 But what of the notion of excellence in contemporary art theory? Do we disregard
all standards of excellence or must we invent a new doctrine of the beautiful? The
challenge of post-modem thought is to live in a pluralistic melange of signs, in which
meanings are both fixed and fluid.

Indeed, the role of contemporary art is

increasingly concerned with examining the fluidity of meanings, and expressing
their effects on our notions of world. Much of this is achieved through free enquiry,
the posing of questions. The quality of a question is determined by the form
through which it is articulated and the value of the response.

How do we establish criteria for the formulation of "good" questions? If art,
operating in a fluid field of meaning, hopes to remain relevant, rather than merely
archival, restricting the form will limit the questions, which will inevitably limit the
answers. Truth may be "unknowable", but it is always occurring within the actual.
We may never know truth, but we can aspire

to it through "good" questions and

answers. Standards of excellence are ultimately linked to the relevance of answers
to the actual, and therefore can only be determined after the questions have been
posed. What we can strive for in the training of artists is the development of
informed strategies of enquiry that poignantly penetrate conditioned systems of
meaning. These require an informed critical field of study, sensitive to the
pervasive impact of signs, and the necessary skills to formulate significant works of
art that elicit answers directly relevant to the viewer and, ideally, to us all.

It is

interesting to consider the extent to which the evaluation of student art works
reflects the instructor's conception of good art. Can we assume any longer that the
student, naturally talented in the manipulation of media is necessarily the more
gifted artist?

80

 Emphasis now is on both the quality of form (the question) and the quality of insight
(the answer).

Standards for valuing are linked strongly to the appropriateness of

each work within the fluid medium of time and context. What has significance
today may be trivial tomorrow.

Impermanence is having profound effects upon

notions of skill and crafting. Quality as it refers to form, is less an issue of crafting
than one of appropriateness to concept.

Impermanence is also having deep

effects on the rigour of informed critical debate. These issues suggest
investigations that are beyond the scope of this paper, but which are ultimately
essential to the implementation of any relevant program changes.

The Art Impulse and Three Streams of Art Education

The art impulse represents the need to adapt conditioned codes of significance to
more fittingly reflect subjective responses to the actual and the immediate. Art
addresses the psychic lag between the actual and the represented. Since temporal
effects are inevitably at play upon our experience in the world, systems of
representation and education, if they are at all responsive, must necessarily be
fluid.

It is my position that developing the art impulse through art education involves three
fundamental streams: the subjective-expressive; the process-productive; and the
reflective-analytic.

Each of these areas encompasses particular sensibilities, all of

which are essential to an informed practice of art-making. This is particularly the
case at the secondary and post-secondary levels of education.

81

 Subjective-Expressive

The modernist notion of a self in a privileged position to nature and truth, has been
displaced by a conception of the self as cultural product (de Certeau, 1984).
Language, art, and all forms of representation become the instruments of
socialization through which all meaning is construed. The individual thinks, speaks,
and constructs with only the "materials" at hand, and these are provided within the
larger construct of culture.

So now what? If we accept this as a plausible model, what implications are there
for the role of an expressive self in a free society. Self-expression presumes some
degree of autonomy from external constraints.

It is arguable that the self does in

fact operate independently on the physical level. For instance, we each have
uniquely evolved genetic systems through which we develop and function within a
set of particular spatial/temporal conditions. Through various mechanisms of
preconscious awareness, events register for each of us in a distinctly different way.
Though limited to the systems of representation sanctioned by culture, there is a
generally unconscious awareness of the limitations of symbolic forms. We
understand the distinction between the actual and our representations of it. The
very nature of the representational impulse seems to lie in this realm. What we
understand is inevitably out of sync with the immediate-actual, and it is the
awareness of this inadequacy that motivates us to "regenerate" meaning to coincide
with the ever-fluid events of the actual. The post-modem position confronts the
generative claims of the modem self which strives toward transcendental
awareness, alienating culture from the everyday, transcending, and inadvertently

82

 limiting, the immediate through universal systems of knowledge.

Linking all modes

of representation to cultural conditioning, post-modernism denies all forms of
individual autonomy.

But what is the everyday, if not immediate? And through

what agent of mind do we experience it, if not through some aspect of the self?
Are we able to accept this model of a powerless self, vulnerable to the instruments
of social conditioning? Or is there a constitutive instrumental role between the self
and various systems of meaning?

Much current critical theory in the visual arts is grounded in literary criticism and
linguistic analysis.

Language, in general, and literal language in particular, is

entrenched in syntactical and grammatical structure.
by the limitations of its very form.

It is thoroughly constrained

If we look again at the diagram above, we could

say that language operates, not within or from the perceptual, but within the
conceptual and it is shaped by the logical-rational.

It is, in fact, further removed

from the actual than is art-making which more readily allows for strategies to
expand the bounds of symbolic representation. Art-making, at its most essential, is
the free exploration of representation; the reformulation of meanings within the
contexts of fluid events in the hope of grounding those meanings in the actual.

Because art is the expressive manifestation of the unique encounter between the
self and the actual, it aspires to all forms of representation. This may in part,
explain the commonalty between all of the various art forms, and the increased
sharing between the various forms.
rational structures.

Art lies both outside and within the bounds of

It responds to language, uses language, and manipulates

language from outside the constraints of its syntactical and symbolic structures.

83

It

 is about the very process of formulation, and due to this fluidity, art is able to
reformulate symbolic meaning more effectively within the immediate context.

Process-Productive

Process in art-making is not simply a matter of dexterity or technique within a
conventionalized system of meaning.
between mind and material.

In practice, it functions as a dialogue

For the purposes of this paper, let us assume mind to

be fundamentally the will to meaning. As the material takes form, the mind tests a
variety of relationships and symbolic possibilities which, in tum, suggest alterations
in the form. The technical facility with which forms are developed provides a wider
range of potential configurations, but is just as likely to restrain the development of
varied ways of working/thinking due to the constraints of convention.

As a result of the experimentation that has occurred in the arts, particularly over the
past five hundred years, a much less specialized attitude toward media has
emerged. The traditional notion of a rather specific range of acceptable media and
handling has been broadened to include even appropriated common and aesthetic
objects, and allows for routine cross-over between the arts and popular culture.

This change in attitude indicates different ideas about the notions of style and
technique, which, in modernism, were generally understood to be instrumental in
the development of form.

The modernist artist worked toward a style that was

uniquely reflective of his or her particular genius. Style was considered a

84

 signature, and originality was its most valued property. Implicit in this position is an
assumption that form is congruous to content; new forms, new meaning.

For the

modernist, meaning was located within formal and stylistic elements of the object, in
much the same way that meaning is located in literal language. There is a direct
correlation between the symbol and what it represents.

It is generally assumed

that each viewer would decode it with essentially the same result. This attitude is
reflective of the specificity or certainty attached to knowledge based systems of
meaning.

The post-modem position is one that denies specificity, the fixed relationship
between signifier and signified.

Style becomes just one more variable within a

wide array of significant expressive elements, and as such, conditioned to meaning.
The post-modem encourages the reappropriation of signs to effect parodic
readings, rearranging them, or juxtaposing them for ironic effects. This eclecticism
has little to do with aesthetic motives, but rather attempts to subvert signifiers that
present themselves with the authority of the certain.

In the post-modem, style,

technique, material, presentation, formal conventions, all derive significance from
the contexts within which they are placed.

Form is fluid.

Meaning is relative.

Both are responsive to the actual and immediate.

What are the instructional implications of this for process and studio practice?
Obviously, past notions of favoured media, such as painting or sculpture are no
longer sufficient to contend with issues that are expressed through electronic, lens,
or other popular media. For example, the use of formalist strategies, along-side
others in a work, may assume, on some level, that the work "quotes" formalism as
more than simply a stylistic element.

In this instance, the formal operates as one

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 among other signifying elements.

Parody, used extensively in post-modem works,

as a device for expanding significance, is free to draw from the whole compendium
of signifying elements, including the forms through which they are expressed.
Given this, the processes of studio practice are therefore not simply expanded to
include simply new technologies, but exploded into an enormous non-hierarchical
array of possibilities.

How do we teach everything? Do we teach everything?

What do we teach?

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 Reflective~Analytic

Reflective or analytic issues in art education have been concerned with identifying
historical trends of formal achievements in form, space, colour theory, and
composition, the curriculum content of modernist studio practice. Questions
dealing with subject matter became obscured by formalist concerns, as the works
moved closer toward formal/expressive resolve, the modernist aesthetic ideal.

The position of this paper is that art ideas emerge from the initial encounter of
maker to world, and from the interaction between the artist, the work, the viewer,
and the immediate conditional circumstances of culture acting upon them all. The
lack, in modernism, of content that responded to actual and immediate experience
resulted in works that operated only within the aesthetic sphere.

Process was

reduced to pure studio methods, removed from the realm of actual experience, and
obfuscated by language that became more intent on constructing the grand myth.

This distinction has resulted in profound changes in our conceptions of art-making,
and, inevitably, in our methods of art education.

Rather than cast as a collaborator

in the construction of original signs, art now functions largely in an interpretive
capacity. The artist and the viewer participate within the same systems of
representation, subject to the same cultural influences, and struggle to disclose
meanings that permit them to express experience that occurs outside of the
conditioning effects of socially sanctioned forms. The challenge to the artist is not
the creation of novel forms, as noted of Modernism, but the manipulation of
culturally active forms to suggest insights into the actual beyond the bounds of

87

 symbolic meaning. This is less likely to occur as the immediate production of new
meanings, than it is in the form of insights, notions or nuance. These, in turn, may
eventually prove to have impact upon the actual.

Essentially, we have been building a reality with only those components that a very
biased history has selected. To a large extent this practice may be inevitable, but
in any case, post-modern practice warns that we must not confuse that construction
for the actual.

For the art student, this has profound implications. The challenge

for instruction and learning, is to develop opportunities for analysis and debate of all
models, and confirm the ultimate responsibility and skills of reconstruction.
Reconstruction occurs not through the specifics of the elements, but through
strategies for formulating questions, and reformulating hypotheses. In
contemporary art-making, this activity increasingly occurs through strategies of
process informed by rigorous reflection.

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 Proposed ·Program of Study:

STREAM ONE: THE SUBJECTIVE-EXPRESSIVE
Extends into all areas of study; its principle goal to explore the relationship between self and
culture. Three courses required during the two year foundation program would address
issues as directly as possible.
Standards of performance are generally connected to the students' willingness to freely
explore their own feelings and motives for expression, and their ability to relate these to
larger questions. They would show evidence of interpretive skills, the ability to identify and
apply figurative and symbolic forms, and an aptitude for the formulation of meaningful
projects and the strategies for implementing them.
Foundation; Years One and Two
Readings in Historical and Classical Literature: Readings in fiction that explore expansive
devices of figurative language (allegory, metaphor, irony, etc.), and issues of critical
analysis. (6 credits)
Readings in Philosophy. Readings that examine the relationship between aesthetics and
notions of self and other. (3 credits)
Autobiographical Analysis: Studio/language related exercises exploring personal notions of
one's self and the formulation of strategies for self expression; utilizing both formally
structured and expressionistic
models. (3 credits)

STREAM TWO: THE PROCESS-PRODUCTIVE
Centres on studio based courses that centre on the mastering of technique and principles
surrounding each medium.
Though success in studio would be attached to skills of observation and rendering, equal
attention would be paid to the student's ability to identify and articulate physical relationships,
formal possibilities, and symbolic potential within the parameters of subject and medium.
Students would be expected to demonstrate a reasonable understanding of the expressive
properties of the various media, and exhibit some innovative abilities of mind and the
handling of materials.
Principles of Drawing; Light, Space, and Form: Drawing taught as a means for visual
analysis and design; basic mechanical and perspectival devices, line, tonality, etc.) (3
credits)
Drawing as an Expressive Form: The exploration of diverse drawing media and its
expressionistic potential. (3 credits)
Photography/: Introduction to studio practice in photography.

89

(3 credits)

 Proposed ·Program of Study:

Photography II: Expressive strategies for lens media (3 credits)
Colour, Space, and Form: A thorough study of colour as it relates to form and space, light,
and reproductive techniques of offset printing, xerography, and luminous media. (3 credits)
Three Dimensional Design; Form, Structure, and Space: An examination of material,
structural, and formal principles as related to sculptural technique. (2 credits)
Sculpture; Site, Object, and Installation: Exercises that explore questions of three
dimensional works. (3 credits)
Strategies of Conception and Process: Methods for identifying issues, and developing
hypothetical program strategies for implementing visual works. (2 credits)

STREAM Ill: THE REFLECTIVE-ANALYTIC
Examines historical works and the development of various critical stances. Its prime
concern is to examine the semiotics of various media and clarify contemporary critical issues
responsive to them. Strong emphasis is placed upon written and oral presentation. It is the
ultimate goal of this stream to provide students with the critical skills to define their own
programs of art-making, and articulate a solid defense.
Standards of student performance would require a demonstrated ability to rigorously express
ideas in discussion, group presentation, and written form. Ideas should relate to historical,
contemporary, and personal practice and theory. Students should demonstrate, through this
portion of the program, the ability to synthesize the components of other coursework with the
issues confronted here.

Art-making as an Instrument of Meaning I. and II.: A non-historical survey of symbolic
systems and representational devices within a variety of cultural and socio-political contexts.
(6 credits)
Contemporary Issues in Western Art-making: A survey of works of art and social issues
from the past one hundred years, and their relationship to contemporary practices in artmaking. (6 credits)
Critical Analysis: Centres on developing visual analysis and critical writing skills that derive
their content from contemporary critical stances. (Feminist, psychoanalytic, anthropological,
and ideological positions) (3 credits)

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 This program primarily addresses the issues of post secondary education in the
visual arts. The underlying principles outlined at the beginning of this chapter
suggest that these issues would have similar impact upon methods for secondary
education.

Each of the three streams developed here influence coursework

directly through content, or implicitly through a particular emphasis. This is most
typically the case with the subjective-expressive, in which focused introspection
colours much of the academic and studio coursework. Exercises vary from
traditional or modernist methods less in form perhaps, than in focus.

Objectives

emphasize the formulation, practice, and testing of personal strategies of
production, as well as developing facility with conventional skills and principles.
Production strategies address the variety of skills, and interests unique to every
student. They are not informed by formal convention, but by a growing critical
awareness of personally relevant issues and the mechanisms of symbolic
representation.

Standards of crafting should be such that they are consistent with

the significant intentions of the work. That is, they should assume a role consistent
with the desired symbolic effect. As such, they operate on a continuum between
the deliberately raw to the meticulously refined.

Dialogue is encouraged at every possible opportunity.

Language skills and

terminology should be explored and applied throughout all coursework, particularly
studio. Students are encouraged in the application of critical skills to various
systems of representation, with particular attention to issues of form and
signification. They receive instruction in the basic studio skills of colour, drawing,
and three-dimensional design with primary emphasis on heightening sensibilities
and the ability to articulate relationships between themselves, the work,· and the

91

 audience. As in current studio practice, conceptual issues are identified and
discussed as they arise in the practice, but the criteria for analysis are always
determined by the student. The instructor's role is one of an informed facilitator, not
one of authority.
Traditionally, in modernist practice, process is taught as a collection of skills and
principles, ambiguously associated with aesthetic notions of good art. Artistic
practice is presented as sacrosanct, linked to special, figurative, insights existing
outside the realm of everyday language and experience.
student will grasp this, instinctively.

The talented or gifted

Others will struggle within the literal forever,

ultimately excluded from the insights of a practicing creative elite.

Within this

model, students are left to discover their own grounding within the silent but
powerful mysteries of art-making.

If we consider carefully the lessons of current

theoretical enquiry, and re-examine this model, there are some disturbing
assumptions at play.

Contemporary art, in breaking down modernist barriers, has

been strongly motivated by the need to open art-making to common sense, and the
immediately relevant. The assumption that art is removed from the experience and
insights of the ordinary person, perpetuates the Modernist doctrine of a gifted,
creative, and educated elite.

It assumes that art ideas may only arise out of special

circumstances associated with revelatory universal principles.

Students of art are

still too often encouraged to believe in these principles, to make a life-long
commitment to them in a kind of quasi-religious act of faith or belief ..

The mysteries of art-making are often very real, as is the depth of the commitment
required.

But they are less impenetrable than Greenberg would have us believe.

Quite often they are affixed to socioeconomic and semiotic factors rather than

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 universal mysteries. To expect students to commit to these, without providing them
with the critical skills for rigorous scrutiny, is unfair and ethically questionable.

If we have opened meaning to polyvalent interpretation, then we must open our
methods of constructing meaning to the same analysis. The argument for vigilant
scrutiny of all systems has been made in many fields of inquiry. Interpretation
assumes information. If young artists are to contribute meaningfully and critically,
they need to be guided in their ability to formulate and articulate their own agendas.
They need help, not simply with studio skills, historical and contemporary models,
and mysterious assumptions, but with determining the personal strategies through
which they may ground·their work in their own immediate encounters with the world.
Instructors serve as devil's advocate, challenging through their more focused
attention to matters of form and significance.

In teaching post-secondary students in both art and architecture, it has become
apparent to me that students often comprehend the rhetoric and skills, but have
difficulty defining means for identifying and attacking the questions. Information is
generally expected to suggest some preformulated product through which process
becomes nothing more than a set of technical problems, which if mechanically well
performed, will result in the resolution of the problem or a "work of art". They have
seen the process as consisting of two steps: 1) a preconception, and 2) its product.
Art-making is not about the simple process of manufacturing. It demands an
intense encounter of mind and material in dialogue through process. What
happens in that dialogue, and how can we provide students with enriched
opportunities to practice it?

93

 The dialogue/process is very much about the ability to develop strategies
responsive to the array of question/problems that emerge during the making of a
work of art. Strategies are never easily formulated;, they are grounded in each
person's response to the world. They cannot be directly taught.

But exercises can

be designed that identify the strategic goals of the problem for the students, and
provide each of them the opportunity to develop these skills within the parameters
of their own experience~3 This primary goal of the exercise requires the student to
sufficiently distance him or her self from the object so as to reveal personal
methods of approach; encouraging him or her to articulate and assess the
effectiveness of varying methods, one's own and others. These others may be
fellow students, visiting artists, or exemplary strategies of other artists, past or
present.

An analogy, effective for introducing strategy as a way of working, is that of the
student standing before a large table. A common problem is posed, for example,
that addresses the notion of "mythically informed objects". The presentation
proceeds typically. Students are led in a discussion of myths as structures for
meaning, and how these inevitably influence symbolic imagery. Slides of historical
examples are shown with images of common objects that suggest mythical
associations.

Because symbolic systems are rarely literal, figurative representation

is then discussed. Students are asked to select an object that for them has some
potential for mystery, or significance. The object is "placed upon the table", and
students are then asked to freely assemble anything that, for them, resonates,

3 This principle is similar to the synectic approach described in Nicholas Roukes'
book, Art Synectics: Stimulating Creativity in Art, but differs in the de-emphasis of product,
and the focussed attention paid to the development of personal strategies.

94

 however obscurely, with that object. This may include materials, photographic
images, drawings, objects, poetry, scrawled notes or one-word associations, smells,
people, ideologies; absolutely anything that is associable with the original object or
any of the others that begin to assume significance as they begin to inter-relate.
Once the student has "filled the table", they are asked to make free associations
between the objects assembled and their own experience.

From this they are then

asked to make some kind of art work, that may be specified or open depending on
the abilities and experience of the student.

It again should be stressed that the

product is of secondary importance to the issues of risk and strategy. The
significance generally attached to product as the prime object of process, in
exercises, typically influences all decisions. The strategic approach attempts to
remove the weight from the product as completely as possible, and place it not
upon the processes of media, but the processes of mind.

Processes of mind

require distinctly different skills. Strategy assumes an open course, in which goals
are repeatedly redefined in response to immediate experience. It is non-linear
because it avoids preconceptions.

It is made clear that nothing should remain fixed

until it has been examined within as many contexts as the student chooses to bring
forward.

The product may never actually materialize until the student determines

that the questions have reached resolution . In these instances, the student may
-........

need help in changing strategies, or simply redefining the problem.

The following is a program outline that proposes one possible model of the three
streams. It is intended as a framework within which ideas may originate and
beyond which a program of study may emerge. It strives to provide a balance
between the rigours of both studio and academic courses in an attempt at

95

 empowering the art student with the personal focus necessary to identify and
practice his or her own art-making agenda.

96

 CONCLUSION

My position within this thesis argues for a sustained dynamic between both aspects
of mind, in which contemporary art may originate in an informed debate charged by
both rational and intuitive intentions. As instruments of an instrumental self,
intuition and imagination serve as the essential mechanisms for opening rationalist
assumptions, restrained within the closed conventions of knowledge. Through
speculative production, art formulates insights beyond the constraints of
conventional systems of belief. Art students, informed in the complexities of
symbolic systems, may critically challenge the pervasiveness of cultural constructs
and their impact on notions of self and other. Through these insig_
hts, they may
pose the appropriate questions and formulate meaningful answers. The
depreciation of imagination and the insights it generates, would constitute a
profound loss in light of the prevailing rationalization of the symbolic order.
Imagination must retain its high degree of import in the art-making process. The
intent here is to salvage those qualities of each theoretical position; to construct a
model for art-making that preserves some notion of an instrumental self, placing it in
active debate with all modes of symbolic representation: socio-political, cultural,
moral and scientific.

Art represents the principal free agent of thought available to any culture, and
provides the essential means for expanding our ideas about ourselves our
community and an ever-emerging reality.

Intellect, the language of logic, operates

within the realm of established meanings.

It determines proofs or rationales for

existing forms of thought, rather than generating new insights. It is essential to our

97

 practical well-being, but in order for ideas to take form, some mechanism of mind
that generates new insights and general notions through feeling is essential.

Both

qualities of mind are necessarily interdependent; the free, form seeking, speculative
modes of intuition, and the analytical/inferential mode of the rational. The
speculative risks taken routinely in the arts, are fundamental to dynamic thought.
Art's constraints are, and should remain, only those imposed by the limits of mind.

I argue for the recognition of the essential wholeness of mind that protects the
deconstructive and reconstructive operations of intuition and imagination. The antiintellectualism that underlies many of the assumptions behind existing programs of
study, or the uncritical adoption of unfounded rhetoric, threatens to neutralize the
effect of art ideas, accepting a trend toward popularization at the expense of
relevance and rigour.

I would like to close with Roland Barthes' parable of the Argo, and take the liberty of
deconstructing it in the spirit of Barthes' analogy. There are three essential
elements to this parable; the ship, the crew, and the journey. The ship, under
constant reconstruction by its crew, is repeatedly transformed. The parts of the
ship are continually being replaced so that the ship is always in a state of
becoming.

It continues on its unpredictable course, uncertain of when, or whether,

it will ever arrive at a destination. "Argo is an object with no other cause than its
name, and no other identity than its form" (Krauss, 1989, p. 2). Art, as an
instrument of meaning, is analogous to the Argo because it persists, ever-adapting,
through only its name.

Rosalind Krauss, in the introduction to The Originality of the

Avant Garde and Other Modernist Myths (1989), compares Barthes' parable on art
to Saussure's definition of language, as non specific, dependent upon a

98

 large set of possible alternatives or substitutions ...
assumptions keyed to vastly different vocabularies: ..
. a system of interrelated difference, ... (Krauss,
1989, p. 3)

Art, like meaning, cannot be understood historically as a singular evolving organism.
Thus, they each elude conclusive definition, and are perpetually reformulated within
the context of every moment.

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