Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-To-Reel Collection on the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969

MALE 1 Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the fourth in the series of lectures presented by the Guggenheim Museum on the general subject of the future of art. This evening’s speaker is Ms. Annette Michelson, who was born in New York City, studied the history of art at Columbia University, and studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. During a period of residence in Paris in the late ’50s and early ’60s, she was art editor and critic of the Paris Herald Tribune, as well as Paris editor and correspondent for Arts Magazine and Art International. At present, she is contributing [00:01:00] editor of Artforum, and teaches the aesthetics of cinema at the Graduate School of the Arts of New York University. She is currently working on a study of the aesthetics and ideology of chance, as well as a further study on the aesthetics of cinema. She will speak to us tonight on art and the structuralist perspective. Ms. Michelson. (applause)

ANNETTE MICHELSON [00:02:00] Years ago, when I was a student, I happened to see an entry in a bookseller’s catalog for an edition of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of Aesthetic Judgment, which was described in that entry as beautiful and illustrative. That entry caught my fancy, teased the imagination, and it intrigued me, really, to the point that I eventually made the trip down to Fourth Avenue to have a look at that beautiful and illustrative edition. Actually, I would say that the notion of such an edition produced a kind of mental cramp, and I spent a few days, before taking the subway down, trying to relax [00:03:00] that cramp, speculating and imagining what the style and order of those illustrations could be.

That kind of tension recurred again quite recently. When reading through some of Eisenstein’s theoretical writings on the aesthetics of film, I came across the mention of a project for a film version of Marx’s Capital. History has deprived us of that film version, the history of Marxism in fact. That man does not live who can say that he has seen the movie, though he’s not read the book. But if that film were to exist, what would it be like? How do you film Capital? There is a sense in which the history of the realist novel, [00:04:00] of the nineteenth century particularly, illustrates certain chapters — dramatizes them, rather. That is to say, the chapter on the horrors of the working day, admirably dramatized in Zola, in Dickens. And I suppose that the theater of Brecht does constitute the most prominent, and probably the most exact, exemplification of certain aspects of Marxist analysis, I think most particularly of the distancing or alienation effect, which is a kind of aesthetic strategy which is very directly Marxist-inspired.

But an illustrated edition of the Critiques — what could that be? How, for example, [00:05:00] do you think about the order of the figures? I remember my speculations — and they were really more kind of musing — tended to center around motions and images of geometric form, those which are described, by Plato, in the Philebus as being the truest, and therefore the most beautiful. Now, I will read you a short passage in which he describes them. “What I mean, says Socrates, what the argument points to, is something straight or round, and the surfaces and solders which a lathe or a carpenter’s ruling square produces from the straight and round, I wonder if you understand. Things of that sort, I maintain, are beautiful not like most things, in a relative sense. They are always beautiful, in their very nature, and they offer pleasures peculiar to themselves, quite unlike others. They have [00:06:00] that purity which makes for truth. They are philosophical.”

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969

Now, Plato, of course, had never conceived the notion of those philosophical things or geometrical forms as constituting the very substance, the very vocabulary, of art itself. And out of pure plastics, that ultimate variant of aesthetic idealism was unknown to him. But it was known to me, and I enjoyed them, imagining an illustrated edition of the Critiques as a kind of series of icons of the rational, and though that cramp was not quite relaxed by thoughts of [late Mondrian?] and Kandinsky, I do remember that my imaginings were tinted by them. [00:07:00] I tended to imagine this edition as illustrated by something like this composition of 1927 of Mondrian, or perhaps by Kandinsky, such as this, of 1923. I knew that I actually imagined these two distinguished disciples of Madame Blavatsky as being iconographers of reason and the rational.

Well, I was wrong, of course, because when I dropped down to Fourth Avenue and opened those volumes, this is what I saw. I should have known. Of course I should have known that the [00:08:00] illustrations of that edition consisted of one frontispiece, a portrait of old Kant. I should have known, but I didn’t, and it now crossed me that I probably didn’t want to, because the imagining involved a kind of game. It involved, as well, a very primitive exercise, a rather naive one, in some theory or in semiology. In any case, the notion of an illustrated edition of Critiques seems to have stayed or slumbered on in me until much later, when, opening a volume of works of Claude Levi-Strauss, I came upon a number of quotes which seemed to me much closer approximations than that engraving of the philosopher himself.

Here’s one. It is a diagram showing and comparing kinship systems of certain primitive [00:09:00] tribes with kinship systems of a social group in the Caucasus. I’ll show you another. It is a kind of charting of the themes of the Oedipus legend. And why, wherein, can these be said to constitute better icons of reason, or the rational? Because, quite simply, as Levi-Strauss himself would recognize, they represent, or figure, an attempt, initiated by Kant, and implemented now by analytic methods proper to structuralist anthropology, to extend our knowledge of reality as knowable, which is to say the manner in which the human mind organizes its experience and world. There are [00:10:00] figures, if you’d like, of a step forward in the expiration of the dynamics or the functioning of the mind, and consequently towards an ultimate intelligibility of our universe. These diagrams, then, figure, or refer to, an undertaking as ambitious and as impressive as anyone could propose. The manner in which that enterprise is articulated and performed is something to which we will return.

For the moment, however, we will listen, if you’d like, to the articulations of its aims as they have informed a life work, a project, covering enormous range of empirical observation, and grounded in linguistic theory. A kind of epistemology formulated on the basis of a study of kinship systems in the tribes we call primitive, on myth, on custom, on [00:11:00] usages, on legend, on ritual. “The destination,” Levi-Strauss says, “is the building, based on ethnographic experience, of an inventory of our mental contours, a reduction of seemingly arbitrary data to an order. Vocation of that level, on which necessity, eminent in the illusions of freedom, is revealed. Beneath the superficial randomness and incoherence and diversity, which marriage regulations would seem to present, we brought out, in our study of basic kinship structures, a few simple principles. Through their application, various complex set of customs and usages, at first seemingly absurd and generally judged as such, were assembled into a meaningful system.”

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969

The anthropologist, unlike the philosopher, does not feel he must address himself to the conditions governing his own thought processes, [00:12:00] or to the science of his own society and historical period. He does not work with a view to extending his local conclusions to standards whose universality can only be hypothetical and potential. Although preoccupied by the same problems, he adopts a procedure which constitutes a kind of double inversion of the philosophers. The hypothesis of universal suppositions is rejected in favor of an empirical observation, collective ones, whose properties are somehow solidified, rendered visible through innumerable concrete systems of representations.” Those representations are the myths, the customs, the rituals, et cetera, to which I referred before. And since, for the anthropologist, it is always a matter of a given social origin, particular culture, a region and historical period, these systems represent the entire [00:13:00] range of possibilities within a given type, he chooses expressly those which seem to differ most sharply, in the hope that the principle used to translate them into tongues which are his own will uncover a network of fundamental common constraints. This involves a supreme form of gymnastics, in which the exercise of reflection, pushed to its upmost objective limits, which of course have been surveyed, measured, and inventoried through research in the field, bring out each muscle and joint of a skeleton, thereby exposing the ligaments of a general anatomic structure. That supreme form of gymnastics in which the exercise of reflection is pushed to its upmost objective limits, when practiced by Levi- Strauss, [00:14:00] whether in writing or simply before a blackboard in the classroom, has an extraordinary elegance. To follow a structuralist analysis of myth and custom is to see, emerging before you, a kind of logic which seems almost miraculous in its emergence. It has, or at least it had for me, as I followed it when a student in Paris, very, very much the quality of seeing a photograph emerge from the submission of [paper to an emotion?]. Something which is only describable in terms of a certain kind of intellectual magic. The important thing is, for the anthropologist, that the human mind reveal a structure that is progressively intelligible.

We [00:15:00] have affirmed ourselves, says Levi-Strauss, to transcend the opposition between the physical and the mental by placing our investigations on the terrain of the linguistic sign. Indeed, when used in even those small numbers, they lend themselves to rigorously arranged combinations, which can translate the entire diversity of felt experience, even to its subtlest nuances. And indeed, it is the business of structuralist analysis to reveal the extraordinary propensity of the human mind to organize, through symbolic sign systems, its experience of the world. Structuralism, then, for Levi-Strauss, inherits the aims of rationalism, its methods, its metaphors as well, its stunts of objectivity, and of observational, empirical research. Taking [00:16:00] his cue from his master Rousseau, this structuralist anthropologist believes that when we wish to study man, we must stay close to home. But to study man, we must look away, ahead, abroad, further into the distance. We must, if we wish to discover the basic properties common to things, begin by observing the differences between them. The anthropologist departs, then, from a context of his own culture, to rediscover it in rebound through observation of foreign cultures. He departs, as well, from a culture which evolves in history to a culture bent upon preserving, as the highly ritualized pre-literate cultures do, its identity from transformation through time. It is such for the order within and beneath the apparent irrationality of social organization. He follows the nineteenth century’s movement from belief [00:17:00] in transcendent causes to belief in imminent ones. His acknowledged masters, then, are Freud and Marx, concerned, like himself, with the logic of the imminent. Concerned, however, with neither

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969 the dynamics of individual psychology nor clear structure, but with human thought in its most general aspects, he must locate the threshold of a human, the level upon which man, passing from nature into culture, becomes man. He discovers it not in the manufacture of artifacts, as exemplified in the traditional idea of Homo faber, but in the constitution from communication of the social group, in the structure and of experience to exchange, governed by rule and articulated through signs. The [00:18:00] rule involves the particular, the relative, as against nature, which involves the universal. Where the rule is, therefore, we find culture. Where the universal is, there we find nature.

Looking, then, for the primary, or if you like, the ultimate fusion of nature and culture, one finds it in that rule, which is universal throughout all cultures, the prohibition of incest, variously defined and articulated, but according always the preeminence of the social over the natural, the collective over the individual, of organization and order over the rule of the arbitrary. Rules governing kinship and marriage, which is to say rules governing the prohibition of incest, guarantee exogamy. They institute exchange through a [00:19:00] system of structural institutions. They constitute in themselves the emergence of culture as a system of exchange. It is, then, as one might have expected, on the terrain of sexuality that the threshold between the two orders is necessarily located. The prohibition of one man’s access to a woman means her simultaneous accessibility to another man. The rule centers, then — and this is important to understand — not upon the fact of prohibition itself, but above all, it guarantees exchange, as do all rules and conventions. If women serve as the center and origin of exchange, that is because, while not in themselves signs of social value, they are, rather, natural stimulants, and stimulants of that one basic instinct whose satisfaction can be postponed. Only instinct, [00:20:00] therefore, for which, in the act of exchange and through the apperception of reciprocity, the transformation, the basic transformation from stimulant to sign, can take place, thereby defining, for a fundamental mechanism, a passage or transition from nature to culture in the development of an institution. Kinship systems reveal their structural nature in that they constitute a system of positions, whose structure alone remains constant. Within them, individual elements can shift or change respective positions, provided that relations between them are respected. The taboo on incest, then, is not biologically functional, as previous anthropological, psychological, and historical theory and tradition had assured us. It simply ensures the inevitability of exchange as such. [00:21:00]

Now, the prohibitions governing language are universal as language itself. They are as universal as kinship system. And though we know considerably more about their origins than about those of kinship systems, structuralism suggests that by following the comparison as far as possible, we may hope to penetrate the meaning of all institutions. Exogamy and language have parallel, and essentially positive functions. The establishment of bonds between men which permit biological organization to be transcended by social organization. From this point of view, exogamy and language perform the same basic function: communication with others, and integration with a group. Considering, then, the link between language, on the one hand, and relations between sexes on the other, Levi-Strauss [00:22:00] is led to see relations as one modality of communication which also includes language. Considering the prohibitions or rules governing the abuse of language, and grouped as such with the prohibition of incest, he says — and it is a kind of pivotal thought — “What can this mean, except that women themselves are treated as signs, which we abuse when we do not accord them the function reserved for signs,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969 which is to be communicated.” Kinship systems, then, are a kind of language.

If I have dwelt upon this fusion of nature and culture through social institutions seen as symbolic structures, symbolic sign structures, and guaranteeing communication, it is because I wish to convey the importance [00:23:00] of the linguistic model, the radical manner of its application in structuralist thinking in analysis, and ultimately to examine its consequences for art and aesthetics. It is this radical quality of the application of the linguistic model which distinguishes Levi-Strauss’s effort to illuminate the mechanisms of thought while addressing his research to the primitive, pre-literate society, those which apply their energy, unlike ours, to maintaining the maximum stability of their symbolic systems and institutions, rejecting the process of perpetual transformation within history, and conserving, in ritual, myth, art, language, and custom, the stability of these exchange systems as institutions. Through the radical application of a linguistic model, [00:24:00] language is exchanged. There is, if you like, a certain replacement of the pan- sexuality of Freudian analysis by the pan-linguistic quality of structuralist analysis.

For this adoption of language as model of symbolic systems, Levi-Strauss is indebted to the methods and to the achievements of structural linguistics inaugurated by the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, and to that of a generation of revolutionary critics, aestheticians, and linguists of Russia, of the Prague and Copenhagen circles, and most particularly to the work of Roman Jakobson, one of the principle animators of this tradition in its peregrinations, moving from east to west and back again within our century.

Saussure’s conception of linguistics as part of a new, more general science of semiology was inspired [00:25:00] by Émile Durkheim’s emphasis on the necessity for the study of signs considered within social context. The linguistic system, or code, he saw as preexistent to the individual act of speech or message, and therefore requiring logical priority. Communication was understood as operating on the basis of a double articulation, code and message, a language and speech. For Saussure, the arbitrariness of the individual sign, what he termed its unmotivated character, was fundamental.

As for Levi-Strauss, the actual character of the sign of the institution has less importance than its relationship within the system of institutions to others. The importance, for Saussure, of the function of a sign lies primarily in its differences [00:26:00] from others in the same system. Structural linguistics, as conceived by Saussure, was a parallel, rather somewhat extended and somewhat amplified and qualified, by the work of the American philosopher Charles Pierce, his contemporary, who not only extended but gave a number of supplementary nuances to the very notion of the sign, defining several different kinds of qualities.

For those of you who are familiar with the elementary notions of linguistics or sign theory, I must apologize for the elementary quality of these observations. For those of you who are not familiar with it, I suppose I must apologize for the slightly didactic quality of the next three minutes to follow. [00:27:00]

But basically, schematically, there are, that is to say, three kinds of signs: icon, index, and symbol. Now, anything is an icon of anything else, insofar as it is like that thing and used as a sign of it. An icon is a sign which would possess the character which renders its significance,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969 even though its object had no existence. This is a detail of a portrait of Elisabeth of Austria by Francois Clouet. It is a likeness. It is related to its object by the quality of likeness to its object. The images that we call likenesses, such as Kant’s portrait or this, are icons. And since the existence of the object [00:28:00] or referent does not really determine iconicity, one might say that an image representing real toads and imaginary gardens would be an icon as well. Here is that kind of icon. The allegorical quality of the icon, the fact that it is a reference, if you’d like, to something which doesn’t exist, does not destroy its qualities as an icon. It simply establishes it as an icon of a somewhat lower degree. A diagram is also an icon, in that it represents relations of parts in one thing, by analogous relations between its own parts. This diagram of the kinship system is also an icon. Degrees of iconicity higher and lower exist, and could say that the clearer portrait had a very high [00:29:00] degree of iconicity, as compared, let us say, to this diagram of kinship system.

The second types of signs, an index, one must begin by saying that it is a sign which would lose the character which makes it a sign if its object were removed. But it would not lose that character if there were no one around to interpret it. Such, for instance — and I use Pierce’s own definitions and examples — is a piece of mold with a bullet hole in it. It’s a sign of a shot. Without the shot, there would have been no hole, but there is a hole there, whether anyone has the sense to attribute it to a shot or not. A weather-cock is an index of the direction of the wind, so that there’s a real, or if you like, an existential, connection between them. Other examples would be footprints in the sand, a rap on the door. Things which tell us to pay attention are [00:30:00] indices. Jakobson suggests that medical symptoms are indices, and that symptomatology is the study of indexical signs. Now, photograph and cinematic image present a particular problem, because they would seem to involve iconic resemblance to objects they represent, as indeed they do. This is a still from an early film of [Freyard?]. It is, therefore, seemingly highly iconic. But the resemblance of photographs to their objects, or reference, is due to their being produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond, point by point, to nature. In that aspect, then, they have a kind of physical bond with their [00:31:00] reference. They belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection. They are, in a sense, indices. Overlappings, as well as degrees, of course, exist. The symbol is the conventional sign: a word, a sentence, a book.

It is the third class of signs which has the force of law. It is a kind of regularity of the indefinite future, and it is linked neither in terms of likeness to its object, like the icon, nor physically with its object, like the index. It is connected with its object by virtue of the idea of a symbolizing mind, without which no such connection would exist. It is closest to Saussure’s notion of a sign as arbitrary. The word is the supreme symbolic sign. I’ll ask you to [00:32:00] skip the next slide, please. Skip this slide. Thank you.

Turning, then, from historical immediacy, from his own cultural context, the structural anthropologist addresses himself with a kind of lucidity, which is that of a scientist, informed with a kind of guilt, to the studies of those societies which his own Western culture had begun, in the sixteenth century, to despoil. He brings to that enterprise the fruits of scientific method. His openness toward the beyond is, in a way, dependent on his acceptance of himself as rooted in a culture of rationality, of historical progress, as he seeks to discover, through analysis of the ritualistic stability [00:33:00] of previous cultures, something of himself, to scan its mythology

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969 for the roots of his own logic or logicality. Like Rousseau, Levi-Strauss bears within him that nostalgia born of estrangement and sense of affinity, which Panofsky describes as the very essence of the Renaissance. Like a man of the Renaissance, he directs his intellectual heritage — the rationalism of Kant, Rousseau, Marx, Freud — toward the conquest of knowledge, the dissipation of mystery through the observation of mysteries. Linguistic method implements the study of social institutions as systems or structures, their nature depending, then, not upon the nature of the individual signs which composed them, but the relationships which organized these signs into meaningful systems. Structural analysis is the study of those [00:34:00] relationships as they seem to recur within very widely divergent societies.

We may say, then, structuralism, placing itself under the auspices of linguistic method of the sign, adopts a point of view particularly familiar to us, a view of the human mind as possessed by the demon of order. In doing so, it describes its subject and method in a way analogous to those of artistic creation and of art criticism. If it is indeed the relating or ordering of these differences into that of a structure which confers interest or value upon signs, we understand the full force of Roman Jakobson’s affirmation, when, quoting Brecht, he says, “I believe not in things, but in relationship between things.” Within this perspective, [00:35:00] there is a sense in which classes of objects, or institutions within a given culture, become contemporaneous. If, in structuralist analysis, whether linguistic or anthropological, the analysis of structures of widely different cultures establishes the existence of common constraints, that is because structuralist analysis places an emphasis on what we term the synchronic aspect of systems upon their manner of arrangement, a relationship of parts within the structure, as against the diachronic, the succession of events or elements in time. Now, [Retra?] was, I think, the first to call attention to that hypertrophy of historical consciousness which characterized the nineteenth century. If linguistics and semiology are tending, in our century, to replace history as a dominant discipline, [00:36:00] then, of course, we must expect a certain malaise, a certain discomfort, as reaction to that shift of intellectual perspective. And we get it, of course. When structuralism claims the primacy of the synchronic over the diachronic, pointing out that history is an abstraction, the positing of a dynamics which cannot, in fact, be directly deduced from a succession of forms, systems, or structures, it is directing our attention to the necessity of structural analysis of those forms and systems. That claim strikes at the heart of a culture, the sensibility, and the whole system of presuppositions rooted in the historical consciousness which we inherit from the nineteenth century. It strikes at the heart of the last towering philosophical system, that of Hegel and his posterity.

And in France, of course, the Marxist [00:37:00] left has responded with a cry of alarm, Sartre reproaching Levi-Strauss with attempting to replace the moving picture with a magic lantern slide. My own observation, at a recent conference of art historians and historically oriented critics and scholars, was of the extraordinary vividness with which this opposition was reversed, how deeply, though unconsciously, the synchronic perspective is sensed as threatening to the aims, the methods, and traditions of historical scholarship. That clash now ends by revealing itself in most fields of discourse, and if it is to be resolved, it can be so only, I should think, on the basis of an acceptance of a certain kind of complementarity of approach, rather like that involved in physics, simultaneous admission at one point of both a wave and a corpuscular theory of light. [00:38:00]

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969

Now, if I have chosen to limit this evening’s discussion of the structuralist perspective to a discussion of the work and thought of Levi-Strauss, and the implications of his work for art, that is because it is he who has sought to radicalize and extend structuralist activity and analysis, thereby extending its problems in the exercise of a supremely ambitious enterprise, and with a power, an elegance, and intellectual tact almost incomparable in our era. To confront that perspective in his terms, however, is immediately to confront the most deeply problematic and troubling aspects of structuralism in regard to the claims, the nature, and facts of modern and Modernist art. Here, then, is an initial statement on the art of our age. It is buried, by the way, in a footnote on page 43 [00:39:00] of La Pensée Sauvage, a major theoretical work whose title is miserably translated into English as “savage thought,” and would be more correctly, though perhaps not quite adequately, translated as “thought in the raw” or “thought in the wild.” Though buried in that footnote, the tone of this statement tends to rise, in a later work, to the surface, and it begins to inform this consideration of almost all forms of contemporary art, extending particularly to a view of contemporary music both serial and concrete.

He says, in that footnote, “One could describe non-figurative painting in terms of two characteristics. The first, which it shares with easel painting, consists in a total rejection of a contingency of destination. It’s not made for particular use.” This, of course, in (inaudible) distinction to the art of primitive [00:40:00] society, or the art of Renaissance.

“The other, which is proper to non-figurative painting, consists in emphatical exploitation of the contingency governing execution, which is claimed as the pretext of the external occasion of the picture. Non-figurative painting adopts manners as its subjects. It claims to present a concrete representation of the formal conditions of all painting. The result is a paradox, in that non- figurative painting does not, as it believes, create works as real, or more so, than the objects of the physical world, but realist imitations of non-existent models. It is an academic school of painting in which each artist strains after the representation of a manner in which he would execute his pictures, if he happened to be painting any.”

That statement is followed by another, elsewhere, that very same year, which is [00:41:00] 1963. “Impressionism is a reactionary revolution, because the Impressionists cease to take cognizance of the semantic character of a work of art. A surface revolution, though not completely, since content is still retained as important. Impressionism’s objects are charmless and modest. Its role, by the way, was didactic. It functioned as a social guide. Its task lay in reconciling society to decline, to the disappearance of a nature which was a real quality. Impressionism continues the tendency of accidental art to possess the object through illusion, initiated in Greek sculpture and in the painting of the Renaissance. The real problem is to know if the object is signified or reconstituted in a kind of possession, or at least which is one’s aim, since the object is never really reconstituted.”

He continues, “The [00:42:00] academicism of Impressionism was one of the signified, or the object. The academicism of contemporary art is that of signifier, or manner. The academicism of language replaces an academicism of subject, because no real language is possible, since it requires a social stability and homogeneity. The abstract artist analyzes his own system of signs, dissolving and exhausting it, voiding it of its signifying function, and of the very possibility of signifying.”

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969

These statements, made a century and a year after the first Salon des Refusés, by an intellectual hero of our time, ring in my own ears, and I would assume in yours, with a certain strangeness, akin to something [00:43:00] one might call blasphemy, producing a sudden shock, compounded, of course, obviously, by an awareness of the setting in which I read them to you, and in which you listen. Which is to say, in the walls of an institution once known as the Museum of Non- Objective Art, and which has, its more recent acquisitions, built a kind of bridge back towards that surface and reactionary revolution of Impressionism. One thinks of Freud, and of Freud’s violent rejection of Expressionism, insisting that, as he put it, the concept of art resists an extension beyond the point where the quantitative proportion between unconscious material and pre-conscious elaboration, is not kept within a certain limit. Expressionism exceeds that limit. What makes these statements by Levi-Strauss possible? [00:44:00] What do they indicate about the nature of structuralism on one hand, of all art on the other? Is there real conflict? Can we localize it? Can we resolve it? If not, why not? And how, in any case, does it come about that a scientific methodology, so closely analogous to that of a modern aesthetics of form, issues in the rejection of contemporary aesthetic forms?

Well, the source of conflict would seem principally, I think even at first glance, to lie in the application of a linguistic model and the semantic function to an art such as our contemporary painting and sculpture, which resists, of course, the notion of any authority, model, referent, an emotional code or message, in a very stubborn claim for autonomy, immediacy, and absoluteness. [00:45:00] To say this is not to deny the manner in which modern art continues to rehearse certain contradictions, those mostly particularly involved in Platonic idealism, but the history of art, like history of philosophy, like the history of ideas, is a history of ambivalences. There was a crisis in our notion of the real of the object, of the real in the object as knowable, initiated in philosophy of the seventeeth century, that inhabits that movement towards abstraction, which culminates in the art of our century. That movement which rejects the notion of ideal or object preexistent to any aesthetic form, which turns from that illusionism from that space through which alone such objects could be rendered, toward the constitution of a more purely pictorial or sculptural fact. Toward the constitution, as well, of a more literary fact [00:46:00] in its literature. No appreciation of Western art can afford to ignore this, and it has certainly been a strength of American criticism in American painting, that it has consistently confronted the consequences of this development.

Now, this movement, directing the development of all the arts, finds its first major and explicit affirmation in literature, in a text which I personally never tire of quoting as the manifesto of Modernism, Flaubert’s celebrated letter to Louise Colet, written in January 1852, in which he says, “What I consider fine, what I should like to do, is a book about nothing, a book without external attachments of any sort, which would hold of itself through the inner strength of its style, as the earth sustains itself with no support in air. [00:47:00] A book with almost no subject, or at least an almost invisible subject, if possible.” The dissolution of the subject, in the interests of an autonomous, self-sustaining style and structure was effected through the mediating strategy of the subject redefined, a leveling of subject, the repudiation of the notion of a fine subject, which was characteristic of classical art and of romantic art. The rehabilitation of the redemption, through style, of the ordinary. Therefore, the modest quality of Impressionist landscapes. There is what I think we must call an epistemology of Modernism, a theory of

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969 knowledge sustained by and through Modernism, which questions the object [00:48:00] as it questions the word, thereby questioning the sign which links the two. Art, in questioning the sign, redefines and loosens its relation to the signified, aspiring, of course, as in a kind of movement of compensation, to the most radical and most enveloping significance of all, to that of an absolute presence. Poetry, consenting, through Mallarmé, to be poetry only, aspires as well to be what Mallarmé called the Orphic explanation of the earth, of a world meant to end in a book.

That book, unwritten, is prepared by Mallarmé’s supreme effort, a [coup d’etat?], a cast or rolling of the dice, of which, for some time now, you have seen a double page projected [00:49:00] on that screen. In this text, this work, the primacy of the word as symbolic sign is questioned at every possible point of reference by the obviously felt necessity to make meaning palpable, as it were, directly perceptible, through the recognition of the space and silence from which the word emerges, which sustains it on the page and in the ear and in the mind. The word itself, that supreme symbol, that supreme semantic sign, aspires to an immediacy of presence through the use of typographical arrangement, greater than any purely linguistic concept affords us. Henceforth, the application of a classical Saussurean linguistic model will do a certain [00:50:00] violence to advanced poetry and art alike, to their stubborn resistance to being confined to a signifying function, to their desire to redefine the possibilities of meaning through a certain playfulness, through a certain kind of speculative attitude towards a use of the sign.

Using Pierce’s definitions of icon, index, symbol, you can trace the evolution of painting from the iconic function of Renaissance perspective to the emergence of the indexical sign. That is, from the sign which resembles its object, to the sign which is bound by some physical link to the process which developed it.

That development culminates in the very highly [00:51:00] indexical painting of the ’40s and ’50s, as in the following two paintings I would like to show you. This painting by Pollock, in mixed media, 1945, in which the gestural quality of the painting organizes it into, among other things, a kind of series of trajectories of a process of its own making. The next one is a painting called Chief, by Kline, which was made in 1950. One sees a certain playful and speculative use of a sign in the work of Jasper Johns, with which I imagine many of you are familiar, in which there’s a combination of the iconic — that is, the resemblance — with the indexical, in the figured targets, [00:52:00] for example, which bear the traces, or the indices, of what we call, in more conventional terms, (inaudible). Early works by Robert Morris, involving plaster casts of hand, photograph of the artist, involve a mixture of the iconic and indexical. Works like Lichtenstein’s painting of a splash of paint involve a kind of icon — that is, a representation — of an index, the trace of the trajectory of a sign-producing brush.

But no conception of art as language can neglect the manner in which the notion of language itself requires to be somewhat refined or extended, the accent being generally on the referent, [00:53:00] or the object, but that accent being by no means the only possibility. Roman Jakobson has pointed out that there exist messages which perform only the function of establishing, prolonging, or interrupting a circuit of communication, of attracting attention or ensuring that it’s not relaxed. There is a kind of accentuation of contact which can give rise to an exchange of ritualistic formulas, entire monologues of dialogues, whose sole object is to sustain

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969 a conversation but not to further it. The effort to establish and maintain a communications circuit is, as it happens, characteristic of talking birds. We call this the phatic function of language. It’s the only one that animals share with us, that birds share with us, and it’s also the first verbal function to be acquired by children. In children, the tendency to [00:54:00] establish communication precedes the capacity to emit or to receive information-bearing messages. Certain dialogues between critics and artists actually have this quality.

There’s an instance of the phatic mode of speech which is given by Jakobson, drawing from an old Dorothy Parker story, simply a monologue between a young man and a young woman, which goes, as I remember, roughly something like this: “Well,” she said, “We’re here.” “Yes,” he said. “Well,” she said. “Yes, well,” he said. “We’re here.” And it goes on this way. The function of the conversation being to sustain itself, rather than to involve communication or exchange of messages. That, I think, is rather like the dialogue between artist and critic on some levels. [00:55:00]

But thinking about current art and its resistance to the semantic function, a year or two ago, or perhaps three — and it came at a time when I returned to this country and was confronted with, for the first time, its art in, well, a very present and concrete way, after an absence of some time. I was struck with the manner in which the notion of language was concerned, if you like, in critical parlance, through the notion of a formal statement. That is, a phrase very current in contemporary art criticism, and it seemed to me that it represented a vestige of precisely that conceptually [00:56:00] and linguistically oriented tradition, which modern criticism is proposing, increasingly, to abandon, actually, and accommodating itself to the intensified immediacy and autonomy of the art object. That is, while rejecting the dualism of code and message, and confronting its concern to an art which operates on a single level of articulation, criticism has nonetheless returned, in its terms, something of an older rhetoric. It is that contradiction which gave a certain pungency to John Cage’s statement, “I have nothing to say and I am saying it.” Art turns increasingly to posit formal statements that are positive, non- ambiguous, whose insistence of presence, or non-stating statement, are reinforced [00:57:00] by what we call their reductor, by what we also call non-relational character. These are works which seem to admit neither denial, debate, nor qualification. Statements of this sort we turn apodictic, statement that will brook no denial. And the ultimate statement of this kind, the ultimate apodictic statement, the height of immediacy, is reached by the work whose formal statement merely proclaims, “I am that I am.”

You see before you a Morris sculpture of 1967. The utopian ideal of the century, says Levi- Strauss, is the construction of a sign system on only [00:58:00] one level of articulation. It is, as well, of course, the dream of absolute immediacy which pervades our culture and our art. An aesthetics of absolutism replacing, in a secular age, a theology of absolute presence. It is, if you like, the reverse side of a certain idealist coin. Now, faced with that single level of articulation, the work which proclaims “I am that I am,” structuralist thinking retreats. It’s significant, by the way, that structuralism has neither been used nor challenged by French art criticism or art history. And Levi-Strauss turns, as Freud did, from Expressionism, from the critical confrontation, the critical view of illusionism in language, which is linked, if you like, [00:59:00] in what I call the theory of knowledge, or the epistemology underlying Modernism, and calls, literally — Levi- Strauss literally does call for the return of an art of imaginary landscapes in trompe l'oeil,

Guggenheim Museum Archives Reel-to-Reel collection On the Future of Art: “Art and the Structuralist Perspective” by Annette Michelson, 1969 speaking with a Rousseau-istic nostalgia of the restoration of a natural harmony to an art of delectation.

Now, I think it is really not only the inapplicability of the linguistic model, but the radical rationality, the radically rational stance rather, of structuralism which inhibits its understanding of the art of our day, and which ultimately propels it back into a kind of Rousseau-istic vision of art as delectation and escape. It is the initial assumption — and [01:00:00] it is an assumption which brings us back to the beginning of this consideration, because it is the assumption of Kant — that all concepts, even the questions posed in pure reason, reside not in experience, but in reason. Reason, it is, which engenders these ideas, it is therefore obliged to render account of their value. It is the assumption that there is a radical discontinuity between the reality of lived experience and the real as knowable that guarantees precision, objectivity, scientific accuracy. This, I think, this assumption, undermines all of that structuralist criticism with which we’ve been concerned this evening. Because the work of art is precisely [01:01:00] that object which is never simply understandable as object, observed like a foreign cultural pattern from outside in a kind of transcendental objectivity, in repudiation of the inner and the intentional activity of consciousness, it poses for us, after all, the conditions of an experience, of perception, and of apperception. It elicits, within our culture, that reflexive movement, with respect to our perceptions, which is cognitive. It informs us of the nature of consciousness itself. This is what we mean when we say, as I do say, that though art no longer means or refers, that it does have a deeply cognitive function. The structural anthropologists, then, or [01:02:00] our structural anthropologist of the evening, approaching the non-referent work, with the methodological strategies proper to his discipline, ends by treating that work, and by extension all of contemporary art, with the arrogance of a kind of linguistic colonialism, throwing an unbecoming, or an ill-becoming, mantle of the semantic over the nakedness of art’s presence. It’s a curiously paradoxical development. It is, in fact, I think, the single grave flaw in that exquisite tact and openness which characterize the ethnologist as (inaudible). The paradox does, however, have a certain logic. It implies for the structuralist, the structuralist perspective for the art of our culture is rooted in the past, in precisely the art of [01:03:00] high iconicity which is that of Renaissance perspective. You see here, in this Durer woodcut made in 1525, and entitled Draughtsman Drawing, a work which is an icon in the Pierceon sense, and which is an icon of iconicity. One has the feeling that the future of structuralism may, much more surely, more productively, lie —

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Art and the Structuralist Perspective / Annette Michelson. 1969/2/18. Reel-to-Reel collection. A0004. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York