Seeing Fictions in Film: the Epistemology of Movies by Wilson

Book Reviews Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021

wilson, george m. Seeing Fictions in Film: The Episte- stantly with the narrational and dramatic devices of mology of Movies. Oxford University Press, 2011, Hollywood melodrama in order to highlight the na- viii + 220 pp., $45.00 cloth. ture of the genre itself. In Chapter 9, Wilson argues that the Coen brothers’ film The Man Who Wasn’t There is no doubt that this is a difficult book. The There (2001) modulates the objectivity of its narra- question is whether Seeing Fictions in Film has to be tion according to the shifts in the protagonist’s rela- so difficult and whether working through its argu- tion to others. Even though these final chapters do ments is worth the reader’s effort. Happily, the an- not explicitly address imagined seeing and the status swer to these questions is a definitive yes. In its com- of narration, they demonstrate that close interpreta- plexity and subtlety, the book reveals just what is at tive work is essential to understanding how movies stake in the recent debate about cinematic narration. tell stories. The reader is informed of all the points of confusion Returning to the book’s central thesis, the Imag- and misdirection in this debate. She is then asked ined Seeing Thesis’s (IST) precise specification is to focus on what is really important and consider crucial in the face of preexisting skepticism about a controversial but richly suggestive view about the the role of imagined seeing in fiction film engage- imaginative grounds and distinctive means of cine- ment. First, Wilson rejects the “face-to-face” version matic narration. Many of the components of this view of IST, the version on which “viewers imagine see- are familiar from Wilson’s earlier work, particularly ing segments of the fictional world from a position from a series of fascinating articles appearing be- face-to-face with the segments in question,” on the tween 1997 and 2007. But the book-length treatment grounds that we are never or rarely meant to imag- serves to reveal the continuity of Wilson’s thinking ine being at a vantage point inside a fiction (p. 78). while providing greater stress, elaboration, context, The question is then whether we can make sense of and new responses to recent objections. imagining seeing from an “unoccupied perspective.” The central thesis of Seeing Fictions in Film can Wilson thinks that we can: on the “mediated version” besummedupasfollows.Infictionfilm,thestan- of IST, we imagine seeing depicted fictional events dard function of the image track is to prescribe what indirectly, through “transparently derived” images, viewers imagine seeing in the fiction. In performing and so without being involved in or even present at this function, the image track constitutes a (fictional) fictional events. Of course, for the mediated version narration of the story, a kind of visual narration dis- of IST to be a version of IST at all requires accep- tinctive to cinema (pp. 9–10). There are, of course, tance of the controversial thesis, famously defended as Wilson regularly acknowledges, a parallel set of by Kendall Walton, that certain kinds of images are claims to be made about the sound track in fiction transparent such that we can see through them. Just films. But his focus is on defending the claim that as controversial is Wilson’s further commitment to “imagined seeing” is the “primitive basis” for cine- the indeterminacy of our means of access to the vi- matic narration. The first seeds of the defense are sual narration: we are not meant to imagine anything planted in the book’s introduction, and, in the next about how we came to be viewing a transparent visual seven chapters, we follow its complicated and fecund record of fictional events. growth. Chapters 8 and 9 are then devoted to film in- Wilson’s appeal to fictional indeterminacy in re- terpretation. In Chapter 8, Wilson considers the last sponse to worries about the absurd implications of three films that Josef von Sternberg made with Mar- imagined seeing is familiar from some of his earlier lene Dietrich. Through close structural and thematic work. As before, in Seeing Fictions in Film the appeal analysis, Wilson demonstrates how the films play con- rests on a comparison between literary and cinematic

The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 70:4 Fall 2012 c 2012 The American Society for Aesthetics 394 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism narration: just as it remains fictionally indeterminate of IST. Given his commitment to IST, Wilson’s inter- how we came to be reading Lemuel Gulliver’s travel est in narrators is limited to the question of whether log, so it remains fictionally indeterminate how we the style of narration in particular films engenders came to be seeing Charles Foster Kane alone on something more than a “minimal” narrating agency. his deathbed. Once the general plausibility of nar- Returning to the explanatory power of IST, Wilson rational indeterminacy in fiction film has been estab- argues that the mediated version is positively recom- lished, the book introduces a new analogy. This one is mended over the face-to-face version by its allowing between radio plays and fiction films, and it is used to us to mark the differences in our experience of the support the further claim that, in the case of movies, diegetic and nondiegetic visual qualities of a movie

indeterminacy sets in specifically between imagined shot. In addition, two important differences between Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 seeing and imagining being at a vantage point inside kinds of epistemic access to a movie narrative need the fiction (pp. 82–84). The new argument turns on explaining with IST: the difference between know- the claim that, in response to radio plays, we imagine ing something happens in a movie because we “see” hearing fictional sounds in rough spatial relation to it happen versus knowing something happens in the one another, but without imagining being in the space movie that is not shown, on the basis of reasonable of those sounds. Wilson carefully and colorfully elab- inference; and the difference between knowing that orates this claim to bring out its intuitiveness. Unfor- what we “see” in the movie is really happening in the tunately, however, its implications for the cinematic story world versus only in the mind of a character, as case remain unclear: important differences between a dream or hallucination. movies and radio plays may make an imagined van- These phenomenal and epistemic differences are tage point more likely in the former case than in richly illustrated and carefully specified by Wilson. If the latter. For instance, it is unclear whether Wilson we can make sense of the notion of mediated imag- has the means to explain an important difference in ined seeing, the case for its explanatory power is our movie experience between seeing the contents compelling. But can we make sense of this notion? of a shot with a fixed frame and seeing the contents Leaving aside the question of whether seeing can of a shot with a moving frame. The most straight- ever be mediated, there is still a question of what forward explanation of the experienced difference makes a certain kind of imaginative experience, had would surely appeal to whether we are prescribed to in response to what we see, itself a kind of seeing. imagine seeing from a fixed or from a moving van- Wilson describes the relevant sense of imagined see- tage point. But to explain this difference, it seems ing as an imaginative impression as if one is seeing difficult to avoid appealing to a prescription to imag- what is depicted in a fiction film, a kind of impression ine something about our vantage point. distinct from hallucination, from mistaken visual im- Clearly, more needs to be said about the precise pressions of other kinds, and from inner visualization role of fictional indeterminacy in our imaginative (pp. 72–74). But the distinction between imagined experience of a film’s visual narration. But Wilson seeing and other kinds of nonveridical seeing is not would be the first to admit as much: throughout See- entirely clear. The sense in which we see a werewolf ing Fictions in Film, he makes clear that his aim is to in a movie is easily distinguishable from the sense in show that the right version of IST can stand up against which we deliberately conjure up a werewolf in the the initial charges of absurdity and confusion. Once mind’s eye. But it is not so easily distinguishable from IST has been given a fighting chance, we can con- other forms of passive and unintended visualization, sider its explanatory power. And only then is it even like the kind potentially involved in amodal percep- worth considering the issue that has tended to dom- tion whereby we represent occluded parts of per- inate the current debate, that is, whether narrative ceived objects. Furthermore, there is a question about fiction films have implicit visual narrators. Chapter the precise nature of the relation between veridical 6ofSeeing Fictions in Film takes up this issue, but seeing (our actually seeing a visual representation of not in the usual way. Early on in the chapter, Wilson the werewolf) and imagined seeing. renders trivial the question of the ubiquity of implicit This relation could simply be causal: imagined see- visual narrators in light of a commitment to films hav- ing is prompted by actually seeing a visual represen- ing, as part of their fictions, a visual narration, or a tation. But it could also be an intentional relation: we fictional showing of depicted events. The so-called imagine of our act of seeing the image that it is an act Fictional Showing Hypothesis (FSH) falls out of IST of seeing what is in the image. The second possibility insofar as there is a “fairly simple and direct concep- is central to Walton’s influential account of pictorial tual connection” between “seeing something” when experience, and we have already felt Walton’s influ- one’s attention is directed to it and “being shown” ence in Seeing Fictions in Film: remember the medi- the thing in one’s sight (p. 55). There is thus little ated IST rests on an assumption of the transparency point worrying about the ubiquity of cinematic nar- of recorded images. But if Wilson were to assume an rators until one has given a defense (or repudiation) intentional relation between seeing and imagining Book Reviews 395 seeing, the complex nature of cinematic representa- ible essences or hidden natures that make them the tion forces on him a particularly unwieldy version of things that they are, and its application to understand- the Waltonian account of pictorial experience. When ing pleasure. Our tendency to essentialist thinking is my movie experience is one of both “seeing” an actor the result of our evolutionary history and affects our and “seeing” the character he portrays, I would have thinking and behavior in ways both good and bad, to imagine of my act of seeing the image that it is an apparent and hidden. In particular, he argues, this act of seeing the actor and imagine of my imagined tendency plays a central role in determining what we act of seeing the actor that it is an act of seeing the like and why. character. Our capacity for pleasure is rooted in our evolu-

How can we know whether our imaginative en- tionary history and biology, and pleasures have been Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 gagement with a movie’s image track has this com- linked by natural selection to things that are (or were plex, recursive structure? In Seeing Fictions in Film, in the Pleistocene) good for us. Our developmental Wilson admits to being deeply puzzled about “the trajectories reflect this, as do other aspects of our psy- methodological status of the basic issues” in the de- chology. Therefore, universal themes can be found in bate about cinematic narration (p. 121). He cannot what pleases us, regardless of our cultural heritage. see how to settle the facts of the phenomenology of But variations abound, arising through cultural and our imaginative experience: a priori or conceptual individual differences that make differences in belief. considerations are insufficient, as is introspection, “Painting is a cultural invention, but the love of art is and experimental strategies are likely to be question- not. Societies have different stories, but stories share begging (p. 121). This admission on Wilson’s part is certain plots. Tastes in food and sex differ—but not refreshing but also unsettling. It may leave the reader by all that much” (p. 7). Pleasure is exquisitely sensi- unsure what to take away from Seeing Fictions in Film tive to our beliefs about things, such that our beliefs and whether the issues that Wilson so compellingly about the origins, history, or associations of an ob- presents are worth continued philosophical investi- ject strongly affect our reactions to it. Bloom spends gation. One thing is clear, however. If the investiga- the rest of the book using these ideas to explain how tion is to continue, it must do so only in light of the pleasure works across different domains, from sex to distinctions drawn and cautions issued in Seeing Fic- food to art and imagination. tions in Film. And it must carefully balance analysis Bloom begins by arguing that essentialist think- of general narrational forms and analysis of specific ing is a human universal and can be seen early on in films’ narrational strategies. The model for this kind child development. As Bloom uses it, ‘essentialism’ of balance is of course Seeing Fictions in Film itself. describes a way of thinking about things, not a meta- physical claim. In other words, Bloom is interested in the evidence for and effects of essentialist thinking, KATHERINE THOMSON-JONES not in whether or not essences exist. His claim is that Department of Philosophy much of our thinking, consciously or unconsciously, Oberlin College involves the idea that objects, animals, and people have invisible natures or essences that make them bloom, paul. How Pleasure Works: The New Science what they are. We apply essentialist thinking to both of Why We Like What We Like.NewYork:W.W. kinds of things and particulars. For example, when Norton, 2010, 280 pp., $26.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. we judge that something is a tiger, we assume that it is not its appearance or behavior that determines this Paul Bloom’s How Pleasure Works: The New Sci- (painting stripes on a lion does not make it a tiger), ence of Why We Like What We Like is an entertain- but its underlying essence or deeper nature. Like- ing, wide-reaching, and fast-paced examination of the wise, what makes Damai (one of two female tigers at peculiar and everyday aspects of human pleasures. the National Zoo) the tiger that she is, and distinct Aimed at general audiences, the book focuses on from Soyono (the other female tiger), is her essence. what science, in particular social, developmental, and Bloom’s writing is most engaging when he is dis- evolutionary psychology, can tell us about our plea- cussing his own field of developmental psychology, sures. Along the way, Bloom engages with philosoph- and he draws on his own and others’ research of- ical ideas, enough to spark connections for knowl- ten throughout the book. To support the claim that edgeable readers, but not enough to divert from a essentialist thinking emerges early in childhood and broad and entertaining view of pleasure as a product affects how we think about other people, animals, of the peculiarities of our psychology and evolution- and objects, he discusses one study that asked chil- ary history. dren to consider when a transformed animal (a tiger The main argument of the book is a defense of wearing a lion suit, for example) changed categories psychological essentialism, the claim that human be- (ceased to be a tiger and became a lion), and chil- ings believe that and behave as if things have invis- dren could only be persuaded of a change in category 396 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism if they were told that a transformation occurred on essences” (p. 49). In many cases, Bloom notes, it is the inside; even very young children thought that actually aliefs that are involved, not full-blown be- changes in appearance or surface features were not liefs. ‘Alief’ is a term coined by Bloom’s colleague sufficient for category change. Children are essential- Tamar Gendler to refer to more primitive versions of ists about a lot of artifacts and properties and tend to beliefs that are responsive to how things seem, not assume that the name of a category picks out deeper, how things are. Pleasure is sensitive to aliefs even more stable, properties. For example, Bloom tells of when we work hard to counter them with more ra- a four-year-old who, in describing a classmate, said, tional beliefs. For example, people are reluctant to “Gabriel didn’t just hurt me! He hurt other kids, too! eat chocolate that is shaped like feces, or drink water

He’s a hurter! Right, Mom? He’s a hurter!” (p. 17). out of a clean, never used bedpan, even if they know Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 Bloom explains that essences can be viewed as im- that the shape or vessel does not affect the substance mutable parts of an object or can be acquired and lost they would consume. over time. Immutable, permanent essences Bloom Bloom also has interesting things to say when he calls ‘category essences.’ For instance, what makes travels farther from core evolutionary concerns like Soyono both a tiger and a unique tiger is an im- food and sex to consider the pleasures of imagination, mutable, permanent essence (a “category essence”). art, and performance. As with preferences about food Bottled water just tastes better than tap water (we and sexual partners, our reactions to art are colored think) because we (perhaps unconsciously) imag- by our beliefs about their essences. In the case of art, ine that there is some internal structural difference. these essentialist beliefs usually revolve around the But some aspects of essence are transferable (“life- origin or history of the artwork. As with a bottle of force essence”). George Clooney’s category essence wine with a $100 price sticker on it, a “Vermeer” is is what makes him a human being and the special simply perceived as better than a “van Meegeren,” individual that he is. His unique life-force essence is and valued accordingly, even if the latter is a faithful something that might rub off onto his sweater, mak- copy of the first. Forgeries, even exact duplicates, of ing his sweater a very valuable item indeed to an ap- famous works are not valued as much as the originals, preciating fan, but this essence might be weakened and learning that a performance or work of art is by a or lost if the sweater were cleaned. great artist changes how we perceive it. Why should Life-force essences can be negative too. Bloom this be, unless we are reacting to something other points out that, while a fan might pay hundreds of than its formal properties, to the perceived history of dollars for Clooney’s worn, unwashed sweater, no the object, its essence? What we believe about the amount of cleaning might persuade you to wear Jef- creation and history of a work of art directly affects frey Dahmer’s old sweater. The notion of an essence how much pleasure we get from it. is fairly elastic. It sometimes refers to the perceived Bloom ranges beyond essentialism to discuss some history of an object and sometimes to its imagined other features of artworks that affect our preferences, internal structure. “What they have in common,” such as our familiarity with it (the “mere exposure Bloom argues, “is that they are invisible, they can effect”), and findings from experimental aesthetics determine what an object is, and they can matter a about complexity of patterns or preferences for con- great deal” (p. 21). sonant over dissonant sounds in music. His discussion The central argument of the book is that our be- of the role of more formal aspects of the works them- liefs about essences can help explain a wide range of selves (“low level properties”) feels relatively brief, our preferences and pleasures. The chapter on gus- however. It seems that Bloom thinks that these prop- tatory pleasures, for example, takes an unexpected erties do not play a significant role in explaining our tour into cannibalism before discussing how our be- preferences or that the research is simply too sparse liefs about the nature, origins, invisible structure, or or speculative. Bloom does make clear that he is not purity of foods affect our pleasure in eating it (or claiming that essentialism explains everything about whether we will eat it at all). Why cannibalism? Be- aesthetic pleasure and preference. cause many cannibalistic traditions seem to involve Bloom comes back to essentialism in consider- the idea that by eating another person’s flesh, one can ing the larger question of why we value paintings appropriate that person’s essence (“you are what you and other artworks at all. He hypothesizes that we eat”). More mundane examples include studies that evolved to take pleasure in art (and other highly spe- show that the price of a bottle of wine affects the cialized performances, such as sports) because art- perception of the quality of the wine, even among works are highly informative virtuoso displays. “Dis- experts, and that children prefer apples and milk that plays of cleverness, discipline, strength, speed, and come from McDonald’s. so on capture our interest because they reveal rel- Bloom’s point “isn’t that sensation plays no role evant properties of an individual” (p. 136). Artists, in experience. It is rather that sensation is always likewise, exhibit these qualities and are rare and at- colored by our beliefs, including our beliefs about tractive individuals. Original, authentic works of art Book Reviews 397 have special histories because they came into being Toronto Press, 1995) as follows: “we are still left through a unique creative process and are expres- asking whether a philosophical consideration of the sions of rare and genuine talent. The essentialist dance is likely, in the foreseeable future, to blos- theory, then, helps explain why we value original som on the boughs of any considerable thicket in the works and authentic performances as well as the groves of academe” (p. 454). It is in Graham McFee’s artists and athletes who give rise to them. latest book, The Philosophical Aesthetics of Dance: It also suggests that we care about the intentions Identity, Performance and Understanding (hereafter, of the artist. “Accidental” or “found” art, or anything PAD), that the future of dance aesthetics has arrived. that is not the result of a deliberate intention to create McFee’s recent monograph firmly (and finally) dis-

art, is not as highly valued. Bloom and Gelman tested pels any lingering anxieties contemporary aestheti- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 this on three-year-olds, showing them a blob of paint cians may have inherited from Sparshott’s guarded on a canvas and, in one condition, describing it as the remarks about the academic prospects for the philos- result of a child accidentally spilling his paint, and, in ophy of dance. the other condition, as painted on purpose by a child McFee, like Sparshott, is one of a handful of who was intending to create a painting of a blob. They philosophers who is regarded internationally as a found that, as predicted, most children described only dance expert. His previous works on the subject, the deliberately intended blob as “a painting.” Too, which include Understanding Dance (New York: they found that children relied on what they know Routledge, 1992), The Concept of Dance Educa- about a drawing’s history (what the artist intended to tion (New York: Routledge, 1994; revised edition draw) in naming a picture. If a scribble is intended to Pageantry Press, 2004), and an impressive array of be a spoon (because the artist was looking at a spoon articles, are widely touted as “required reading” for when she drew it), then children label it a spoon. An anyone with a theoretical interest in the art(s) of identical scribble created by a perceived intention to movement. All of his many well-received analyses draw a fork gets labeled a fork. Such findings are used of dance both demonstrate his deep respect for, and to support the claim that for most people, at least, understanding of, the idiosyncrasies of theater dance intentions and histories matter and make a difference practice and reveal the value of exploring it in a philo- in what objects we find pleasurable. sophically rigorous way. But despite their virtues, Bloom’s book makes a good case for the claim McFee’s earlier writings were only an intellectual that our pleasures and preferences can be strongly “warm-up” for the highly nuanced and complex study influenced by our beliefs about objects and their his- that is PAD, which is his most significant contribution tories or creators. This essentialist approach makes to the philosophy of dance to date. sense of some of the quirks and puzzles about plea- Although it is advertised (on the back matter of sure: our preferences for originals over copies, our the hard copy) as a stand-alone primer for “the inter- interest in the purity or authenticity of food, sexual ested general reader as well as for the postgraduate partners, and performances, a willingness to spend student,” PAD is best understood as an extension of thousands of dollars on an ordinary tape measure McFee’s previous writing on dance art and as a com- that was once owned by John F. Kennedy. It also panion to his recent monograph on aesthetic theory, brings together fascinating research on children’s de- Artistic Judgment (New York: Springer, 2011). It is veloping beliefs about categories, art, and fictional also of a piece with the conceptual frameworks he characters. Bloom’s extension of his theory to plea- adopts and defends in his books that are not dance sure in art and music, while explaining some proper- oriented (such as Free Will [McGill University Press, ties of our aesthetic preferences very well, pays less 2000]; Sports, Rules, and Values [New York: Rout- attention to other factors such as the roles of formal ledge, 2004]; and Ethics, Knowledge, and Truth in properties of the artworks themselves, which may Sports Research [New York: Routledge, 2010]). As leave some readers wanting more. a result, to dive into PAD without the benefit of fa- miliarity with his other works is to appreciate only a LAURA SIZER portion of what it has to offer. McFee’s latest mono- School of Cognitive Science graph is a comprehensive analytic treatment of dance Hampshire College art that is read most fruitfully in light of experience with a number of discrete things: dance art practice; mcfee, graham. The Philosophical Aesthetics of philosophy, in general; philosophical aesthetics; and Dance: Identity, Performance and Understand- McFee’s previous writings. It is for precisely this rea- ing. Alton, Hampshire, UK: Dance Books, 2011, son that PAD reflects the kind of “academic blos- xviii + 342 pp., $34.95 paper. soming” of dance theory that would set Sparshott’s mind at ease. Francis Sparshott concludes his influential magnum The key philosophical merit of PAD is that it is a opus A Measured Pace: Toward a Philosophical Un- patient, but never unduly pedantic, text; McFee cov- derstanding of the Arts of Dance (University of ers too much conceptual terrain to become bogged 398 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism down in useless repetition or pointless nitpicking. seeing the dancer as an artistic “craft-master” rather The book is divided into four major sections, each than an “art-maker.” Part 3 also includes a timely of which focuses on a particular aspect of dance art chapter in which McFee reviews carefully, and re- practice. In Part 1, McFee takes up the subject of sponds critically to, the pervasive danceworld view “Dances as Performables.” Here he addresses the that dancers are endowed with a special capacity question of how to understand the metaphysical char- for “kinesthetic sensitivity” in virtue of which they acter of works of dance art and extends, in a helpful are able to perceive properties of dance art perfor- way, his well-known thesis of notationality, accord- mances that are not typically recognized by lay au- ing to which we should see the artistic creations of dience members. Here McFee contributes positively

choreographers as the ontological kin of other “per- to the current debate about the relationship between Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 formable artworks” (such as musical compositions artistic understanding and scientific investigation by and plays) given that it is in principle possible to cap- exposing a number of “Achilles’ heels” in arguments ture the typal constraints of any dancework in some about art appreciation that rely on work done by kind of “adequate” score. This is the most dense and contemporary scientists. conceptually rich part of the book because it includes In Part 4, “The Narrative of Dance History,” McFee’s thoughtful responses to a wide range of cri- McFee turns a new tack and investigates the distinc- tiques that have been made of earlier versions of his tive “stories” that bind together, and make possible, thesis of notationality. In answering his critics, McFee our experiences of dance as art. He begins by asking sets out clearly how his ontological thesis, according how best to understand and appreciate the efforts to which danceworks are types that can be repeatedly of so-called dance reconstructors, those who create tokened in performance, is related to his preferred live performances that aim to recapture “lost” dance- account of dancework identity and clarifies how this works in a vivid way that can be both intellectually metaphysical picture is conceptually entwined with productive and aesthetically gratifying for contem- his epistemic account of the conditions under which porary audiences. McFee’s remarks in this chapter we correctly identify two performances as instances are important in two ways. They set the stage for of “the same dance.” In addition, McFee profitably any future philosophical treatment of this particular distinguishes his thesis of notationality from what danceworld enterprise (which is rarely mentioned by some might take to be its (unduly close!) theoretical philosophers of dance). And they highlight the de- cousin: Nelson Goodman’s view that dance is an al- gree to which it is necessary to have access to a lographic art form, that is, one whose works can, and “usable history” in order to understand, and make must, be fully capturable in a suitable notation. informed judgments about, artworks in all genres. In Part 2 of PAD, entitled “Making Artworks,” McFee’s reflections on reconstruction lead immedi- McFee turns his attention to choreographers. Here ately to an extended discussion of dance appreciation he begins by addressing the long-standing question of in which he articulates and defends the view that ap- how best to understand the role of authorial intention propriate judgments about dance art should be un- with respect to artwork creation and meaning and derstood in terms of an “ideal critic,” where this is defends a version of hypothetical intentionalism re- (roughly) a person familiar with the historically im- sponsive both to standard problems with “extreme” portant works that reflect the categories within which views about interpretation and to potential weak- a particular dance art performance was designed to nesses inherent in the theoretical “middle ground” be experienced and evaluated. occupied by moderate actual intentionalists. While In what many readers might countenance as a sur- the first moves in his analysis of the dancemaker en- prising choice, McFee closes PAD by addressing the gage topics of general interest to aestheticians, the topic that was the likely subject of Chapter 1: the def- second half of this section raises a number of new inition of dance. In light of his arguments about the dance-art-related questions. How should we under- relevance (but mutability) of dance history, he urges stand the role of improvisation in the composition of that what is involved in understanding dance can be danceworks? Is it conceptually coherent to speak of articulated profitably only in terms of danceworld works of dance art that are wholly improvised? And narratives and their concomitant categories (as these how can the pervasive use of improvisation in both would be mobilized by the “ideal (dance art) critic”). the dance studio and on stage be compatible with the We do not, he claims, improve our perception, appre- thesis of notationality? ciation, or philosophical understanding of works of The content of Part 2, while not as fully developed dance art by attempting to provide necessary and suf- as that of Part 1, leads seamlessly to the third part ficient conditions that aim to exceptionlessly distin- of the book (“The Dancer’s Share”), in which McFee guish dancing from other kinds of moving, nor do we examines the special role of the dance performer and make progress by trying to draw an unimpeachable attempts to characterize in a faithful way his or her theoretical line between dance art and other artistic contribution to works of dance art, which involves performances that feature the moving human body. Book Reviews 399

The final chapter of the book, therefore, high- RENEE M. CONROY lights a number of themes that lie at the heart Department of English and Philosophy of PAD: McFee’s commitment to contextualism in Purdue University Calumet all art-related matters, his allegiance to cognitivism with respect to understanding art, and his dedica- izenberg, oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the tion to the idea that artistic judgments are objec- Ground of Social Life. Princeton University Press, tive. While these may appear to be in tension with 2011, ix + 234 pp., $65.00 cloth, $27.95 paper. one another, McFee’s protracted analysis of dance art in terms of identity, performance, and under- Being Numerous is a major work, and in the short

standing reveals how each may be part of a co- time since its publication it has become essential Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 herent theoretical story that improves our concep- reading in any area of literary studies concerned with tual grasp of dance, enhances our practical ability twentieth-century American poetry. Among much to appreciate it, and makes clear what is at stake in else, it offers a fine lesson on how to read poetry our interactions with, and discussions about, art, in philosophically without reducing poetry to sagacious general. sound bites, and so it shows the reader how to avoid As a person with a serious interest in both the phi- the most natural yet risible tendency one has when losophy of dance and aesthetic theory, my favorite attempting to write grandly about the intellectual thing about this book is that it often left me intel- aspirations of poetry. Being Numerous is not with- lectually dissatisfied despite its carefully crafted ar- out problems, but it is always insightful, exciting, and guments. One of the monograph’s strengths is that it original. It even makes one love the Language poets continually invites the reader to challenge McFee’s a little. bold claims only to discover that it is more difficult The trick Izenberg tries to pull off in Being Numer- to defend the “easy” or “intuitive” or even “fairly- ous has both philosophical and critical dimensions. well-thought-out” position than one might have an- In critical terms, Izenberg wishes to recast our under- ticipated. I expect that a number of McFee’s key standing of the basic division of poetic labor in the claims will spark sustained and impassioned debate twentieth century. The prevailing view, so canonical among philosophers of dance: for example, his view that it now goes more or less unquestioned, is that that danceworks are durable, determinate types that twentieth-century poetry should be divided into two can be preserved in text; his recommendation that strains, and that the difference between them is fun- we should stop referring to dancers as performing damentally a matter of the kind of artistic project a “artists”; and his suggestion that no unified account poet takes up. There is the traditionalist strain that of dancework reconstruction is theoretically possi- struggles to find a way to inherit our poetic past in our ble. But the fact that PAD cannot help but incite culturally challenged present. And there is the avant- lively conversation within the community of aestheti- garde strain that wishes to undermine the past and cians interested in dance is exactly why it is an im- reconstitute poetry more or less entirely. Against this, portant book, since it comes at a time when dance Izenberg makes the improbable but fascinating claim philosophy is sorely in need of the theoretical “jolt” that the division should be recast in terms of guiding that only a new collection of well-crafted ideas can philosophical projects and not, or not just, competing provide. Without a book like PAD, dance aesthetics urges to receive or reject our poetic past. The philo- might truly be in danger of failing to “blossom on the sophical project essentially concerns not the nature of boughs of any considerable thicket in the groves of poetry but of persons, and Izenberg understands this academe.” in terms of a poet’s particular manner of exploring In summary: for readers who are conceptually pre- what it means to be a human burdened with concerns pared for it, PAD is a treasure trove of insightful of sociality (hence the title). and challenging thoughts about how best to conceive Izenberg sees poetry “in the general sense” as “not of dance art and the distinctive roles of those who so much the expression of the imagination as a reve- collaborate to make it possible. The book reaffirms lation that imagination is the fundamental and value- McFee’s reputation as one of the Western world’s bearing aspect of our nature,” a poetic imagination foremost thinkers about dance and presents his most that strives to “reveal, exemplify or make manifest fully developed theory of dance art, while also ad- a potential or ‘power’ that minimally distinguishes vancing a number of new and important theses that what a person is” (p. 17). The poets Izenberg explores current philosophers interested in dance cannot ig- are united by a common desire to abandon the idea nore in their future work. PAD is, in short, the “blos- of poems as pure, or mere, aesthetic objects and to soming” of dance aesthetics. And all who have an recast poetry “as an occasion for reestablishing or interest in dance are fortunate that Sparshott’s “fore- revealing the most basic unit of social life and for seeable future” is now. securing the fundamental object of moral regard,” 400 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism the person being, of course, this fundamental object lence of Other Minds,” is perhaps the best of the (p. 2). In this respect, Izenberg adds a new strain to bunch, and it explores the figure of Robinson Crusoe the old taxonomy: the poet of personhood. But like in Oppen’s masterpiece, “Of Being Numerous.” Any all radical critical moves, it ultimately undermines the philosopher who has read Ludwig Wittgenstein on classificatory schema it attempts to complicate by re- private language or thought about Stanley Cavell on vealing that poets once divided by it in fact share a claims to community will find this to be the most ex- poetic project, and so the old divisions no longer seem citing literary application in print of a set of concerns to do much explanatory work. Indeed, the “lineage” that rarely leaves academic philosophy. Chapter 3, Izenberg explores links W. B. Yeats to Louis Zukof- “The Justice of My Feelings for Frank O’Hara,” is

sky, which is no small feat and should suffice to give about just what you would think, and it shows that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 a sense of the sweeping reclassifications Izenberg’s one of the apparently least philosophical American theory makes possible. poets, a poet of the “I do this, I do that” variety, turns The philosophical dimension of Izenberg’s trick out to be something close to the poet of personhood is less implausible than it seems at first blush. If it par excellence (p. 37). Izenberg finds in O’Hara an ex- strikes one as dubious that Language poets would emplary attempt to engage the imagination of poetry be interested in defining people and identifying the “in the general sense,” and he argues that O’Hara’s grounds of social life (they do, after all, refuse to cataloging of his likes and dislikes, interests and bore- make sense), recall that much poetry that is recog- doms, affections and disgusts shows us how a person nizably romantic is in one way or another concerned can so much as begin to appear, in this way minimally with the self and its experience of the world. Just distinguishing what a person is. Chapter 4, “Language add to poetic romanticism a dash of characteristic and Collective Life,” looks at Leningrad,thecol- forms of twentieth-century disappointment with cul- laboratively produced Language poem, and it uses ture, politics, and selves and it becomes easy to see this to make good on the promise to clarify the idea how the conceptual unruliness and linguistic chaos of poetry as having the power to create community, of much modernist and postmodern poetry can set even to identify “the most basic unit of social life” the stage not for avoiding the human but in fact for (pp. 1–2). The fifth and final chapter, “We Are Read- articulating a “new humanism” (p. 4). It is a “new” ing,” offers a case study of what happens when we humanism in the sense that it charges a poet with the read poems together, as a community, and it issues a task of rebuilding, more or less from the ground up, plea to see the sort of shared frameworks of thought our sense of what a person is, of how poems can create and feeling this activity engenders as grounding a communities around them, and of the sort of linguis- conception of collective or “we-intentions” that are tic and imaginative liberation required for all of this. crucial for human relationships and the growth of Plug Adorno in here and one can see why many of social life. these modern poets must be so “difficult” when going I do not have a criticism so much as an expression about their poetic business. I simplify Izenberg’s ar- of slight incomprehension. There is no doubt that po- guments here, but this should be enough to convince ems of even the most difficult sort offer an occasion one that his claims on behalf of the philosophical for shared experience, that they can be the product preoccupations of twentieth-century poetry are not of collective, hence communal, efforts, and that even much of a stretch and that, while revisionary, they the most exhilarating avant-garde oddities can cast still allow us to acknowledge modes of inheritance. a kind of light on selves and persons, certainly in re- The introduction, “Persons, Poetry, Personhood,” spect to the likely psychological profiles of those who is in many respects the most rewarding and signif- create and appreciate them. But it initially strikes one icant part of the book. It develops the critical and as hyperbole to claim that the poets explored in this philosophical claims the subsequent chapters expand book are attempting to identify what a person mini- upon by going on to attend to the particular, in this mally is, to bring to light the basic unit of social life,or case very close encounters with poets or poetic move- “to secure the ground of identity; not just of how to do ments that bring to earth the heady claims Izenberg things with a person, but how to know that a person makes on behalf of twentieth-century poetry in the is there at all” (p. 39). The worry is that if one enlists introduction. Chapter 1, “White Thin Bone: Yeatsian so literally and directly the language of long-standing Personhood,” offers a fresh account of Yeats’s con- philosophical investigations to describe a radical po- cerns with sociality (the Irish state, in this case), with etic project, then one inevitably will risk cloaking the privileged role poetry could play in an ideal aes- even the avant-garde in a new kind of traditionalism, thetic education, and with various ways of thinking but now just a philosophical instead of poetic one. about what a person is (Yeats felt the pull of both Moreover, it inevitably sets up the expectation that radically particular or individualist conceptions and these questions will be answered and, of course, they abstractly Platonic conceptions). The second chap- never are, at least not in philosophical terms, and so ter, “Oppen’s Silence, Crusoe’s Silence, and the Si- one feels slightly frustrated at having one’s interest in Book Reviews 401 hearing answers to long-standing philosophical prob- Cavell and Gilles Deleuze). His ambition is to suggest lems enticed in the first place. But perhaps this misses a new way of thinking about how a philosophically the point, since a poet’s response to a philosophical invested approach to cinema can, given the right film question will naturally be a poetic and not a philo- texts, recognize what he calls “a distinctive kind of sophical response: it will come in the form of a poetic ‘cinematic thinking’” (p. 5). In his introduction, Sin- rather than philosophical solution. Izenberg’s book nerbrink poses the question, why did philosophy go strikes me as showing (by example) as well as one to the movies? His answer is a serious overview of the can what a poetic solution to a great philosophical major philosophers, mostly analytic–cognitivist, but problem might look like. But I found myself wonder- also continental, who have participated in the recent

ing whether all the philosophical stage setting might flourishing of the philosophy of film. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 in certain crucial respects occlude rather than clarify The book is clearly structured. Part 1, “The our ability to see what these poets contribute to our Analytic–Cognitivist Turn,” contains three chapters possibilities of thinking about a person and the need tracing the reemergence of the philosophy of film in for social life. Ultimately, the reader is both dazzled the wake of the critique of Grand Theory led ini- and a bit nonplussed by the philosophical richness of tially by Bordwell and Carroll. Grand Theory was Izenberg’s approach (but mostly dazzled). Perhaps the name given by Bordwell and Carroll to the this is the problem: the introduction is brilliant, sub- dominant theoretical paradigm embraced by film stantive, and one of the best I have seen in any piece studies in the last decades of the twentieth cen- of academic writing. However, it inevitably forces the tury, an amalgam of structuralist, poststructuralist, book to climax before it reaches its natural conclu- Freudian–Lacanian, and Marxist–Althusserian film sion, and here the premature release registers as a theories. Part of what Bordwell and Carroll accom- mild philosophical disappointment. plished was to retrieve the study of film as a proper Being Numerous is an ambitious book, and in parts object of philosophical attention. The first section it is almost deliriously intelligent. Even if one is not also reviews the renewed philosophical interest in completely convinced by some of its claims about questions concerning the ontology of film and the the philosophical concerns that underwrite modern question of just what constitutes film narrative as poetic projects, one cannot help but marvel at the opposed to, say, literary narrative. Part 2, “From coming together of critical and philosophical talent. Cognitivism to Film-Philosophy,” traces the develop- The book is a must-read for those with a serious in- ment of the possibility of conceiving of such a thing terest in twentieth-century poetry, and it should be as “film-philosophy”: a distinctively cinematic philo- of great interest to anyone who wishes to see how the sophical discourse, exemplified here by the works parties to the ancient quarrel might be reconciled. of Deleuze and Cavell. Part 2 concludes with an in- vestigation of the recently hotly debated question whether (at least some) films can actually do philos- JOHN GIBSON ophy. Sinnerbrink defends the idea that there really Department of Philosophy is something philosophical that (some) films can do: University of Louisville this is what he calls “cinematic thinking.” He devel- ops his position in Part 3, where in separate chapters sinnerbrink, robert. New Philosophies of Film: he discusses David Lynch’s Inland Empire (2006), Thinking Images. New York: Continuum, 2011, Lars von Trier’s Antichrist (2009), and Terence 247 pp., $100.00 cloth, $29.95 paper. Malick’s The New World (2005). Finally, the terrific appendix gives direction to those interested in find- As someone who has been part of the philosophy ing related readings, filmographies, and websites. and/as/of film movement since the heady days of the Sinnerbrink is in complete control of the ma- David Bordwell–Noel¨ Carroll critique of Grand The- terial he discusses. He knows the film-philosophy ory in the late 1980s, I want to recommend Robert literature. He knows it from the early days of the Sinnerbrink’s new book to all philosophers of film analytic tradition (Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolph as well as to philosophers interested in film. It is the Arnheim, Alexander Sesonske, Francis Sparshott) best overview of the debate available, and absolutely to very recently published works (including Carroll, up to date. It would serve well as either a primary or Amy Coplan, Dan Flory, Gaut, and Katherine secondary text in many philosophy of film courses, in- Thomson-Jones). He discusses with insight the work cluding graduate courses. Sinnerbrink offers a superb of more philosophers of film than I have ever seen review of what he quite rightly calls “the philosophies assembled in one place. And he knows the cinematic of film.” He is interested in both cognitivist–analytic examples he uses both for illustrative purposes models in the philosophy of film (Carroll, Bordwell, and as test cases in their own right. The number of Gregory Currie, Berys Gaut, and many more) and concrete examples Sinnerbrink introduces into his other styles of philosophy of film (notably Stanley examination of film-philosophy is impressive both 402 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism for its breadth and for his selection and description understand the idea of an implied author as opposed of telling details. The book’s filmography runs five to an implied narrator? The chapter concludes with pages and includes, to name just some of his exam- discussions of the use of diegetic versus implied nar- ples, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950), Pier rators in All About Eve, Pasolini’s The Canterbury Paolo Pasolini’s The Canterbury Tales (1972), Pedro Tales, and Spike Jonze’s and Charlie Kaufmann’s Almodovar’s´ All About My Mother (1999), Lynch’s Adaptation (2002). Mulholland Drive (2001), Christopher Nolan’s Me- A major part of Chapter 4 is devoted to the ques- mento (2000), and Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a tion of identification—a subject that has vexed me Marriage (1973). A recurring theme is Sinnerbrink’s for years. There is a great line from an early scene in

commitment to the idea that a proper understanding Ice Age: The Meltdown (Carlos Saldanha, 2006) that Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 of film-philosophy requires more than a cognitivist captures my frustration. Manny the mammoth has or emotivist position, but a perspective that adds a just told a story to the little creatures who attend Syd focus on the aesthetics of particular films, especially the sloth’s daycare. Manny’s story ends with, “And their narrative structures, their particular film styles, they all lived happily ever after.” After a pause, one their representation of characters, and their use of of the daycare tots objects, saying that the story is (or disregard of) generic conventions. not “relatable,” and other little ones chime in. What To give a sense of what Sinnerbrink is doing in this anecdote captures, and what Sinnerbrink nicely this book, I speak in somewhat more detail about describes, is the need to sort out a “commonsense” four issues: questions of philosophical approaches to understanding of “identification,” put bluntly, relata- film narrative (Chapter 3); the examination of both bility, from something more philosophically robust. the “commonsense” notion of identification and the Many philosophers of film have criticized the very more philosophically developed versions recently idea of character identification. Some, by contrast, on offer, including notions of character engagement have tried to offer a defense of the idea. Sinnerbrink (from Chapter 4); the very idea of film as philosophy surveys Carroll, Gaut, Kendall Walton, Currie, and (from Chapter 6); and finally,Sinnerbrink’s argument Carl Plantinga, as well as both Murray Smith and that The New World should be construed philo- Greg Smith. The strengths of what Carroll has called sophically as an example of cinematic romanticism “criterial prefocusing” are considered, but Murray (Chapter 9). Smith’s tripartite breakdown of the idea of identifica- After reviewing recent approaches to the ques- tion (which involves recognition, alignment, and alle- tion of the ontology of film in Chapter 2, Sinnerbrink giance) is offered as a welcome development. Adding turns, in Chapter 3, to consider “the differences be- to Murray Smith’s point is Greg Smith’s notion that tween literary and cinematic narrative, the signifi- the aesthetics of particular films evoke a mood, rather cance of plot, story and style, the problem of cine- than just an erotetic pathway to be followed. Sinner- matic authorship, and the vexed question of whether brink’s preference in this general debate seems to be films have narrators” (pp. 45–46). The key figures with the two Smiths. As he says, speaking of Greg here are Bordwell and Carroll, and Sinnerbrink’s Smith’s contribution, “Emotion is elicited and com- question is whether their approach to these ques- municated aesthetically as well as cognitively” (p. 86). tions is too intellectualizing. The concern is that the The example of the shower murder sequence from Bordwell–Carroll model seems to depend on the idea Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) illustrates the im- that viewers engage with narrative films by assuming portance of aesthetically constructed mood over and that a film narrative poses and then answers a se- above mere erotetic involvement with Marion Crane ries of questions, leaving the viewer’s satisfaction to at the Bates Motel. depend upon the degree to which she either antic- Sinnerbrink’s examination of the idea of film as ipates the right answer or experiences the thrill or philosophy briefly reviews his previous discussion of frustration of surprise when her guess turns out to be Cavell and Deleuze, but turns to consider Thomas wrong. The review of Bordwell’s use of the key con- Wartenberg, Stephen Mulhall, Paisley Livingston, cepts used by the Russian formalists (the distinction and Aaron Smuts, among others. Sinnerbrink contex- they draw between story-fabula and plot-syuzhet) is tualizes the question whether films actually do phi- clearly presented. Carroll’s “erotetic narrative” pro- losophy or can at best merely illustrate philosophical posal is examined. The discussion of narrative struc- themes by asking us to rethink the hierarchical rela- ture is followed by the thorny question of whether tionship often assumed to exist between philosophy films can be said to have authors. If we can find a sat- (the dominant discourse) and film, or for that matter, isfactory way to identify a film author (whether indi- art in general (p. 117). Mulhall, in his analysis of the vidual or collaborative), should we also ask whether Alien quartet, famously defended the bold position narrative films have narrators? Given the manifest that films can philosophize, and did so with refer- differences between, say, literature and film, what ence to popular Hollywood genre films. Wartenberg, would constitute a filmic narrator? How should we too, defends the idea that films can do philosophy, Book Reviews 403 and like Mulhall typically discusses Hollywood has discussed, producing a compelling interpretation films, sometimes classics (Modern Times [Charlie of Malick’s masterpiece. Chaplin, 1936], Citizen Kane [Orson Welles, 1941], Whether or not all philosophers of film will ulti- The Third Man [Carol Reed, 1949]) and some- mately agree that films can (or cannot) do philosophy times lesser-known Hollywood films. Sinnerbrink is not likely to be answered soon. In the meantime, pays close attention to Livingston’s challenges to the Sinnerbrink’s excellent overview of this timely ques- bold position. As Livingston argues, the problem with tion deserves attention, and his concluding chapters, the bold position is twofold. Only a human agent can which combine philosophical interrogation with so- philosophize, so attributing the attribute of philoso- phisticated understanding of the films in question,

phizing to a film without having supporting evidence are excellent examples of the sort of film interpreta- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 about the filmic author’s intentions is misguided. tion that I think philosophers of film will appreciate. Worse, the bold thesis presents us with a seemingly unfixable dilemma. If the film’s philosophical content DEBORAH KNIGHT is paraphrasable, that is, if the distinctively cinematic Department of Philosophy aspect of the expression of a film’s philosophical con- Queen’s University at Kingston tent can be cashed out in language, then it would seem that the real philosophical work is done just as well through the linguistic paraphrase as by the film, mak- zuidervaart, lambert. Art in Public: Politics, Eco- ing the film redundant. Or if the film’s philosophical nomics, and a Democratic Culture. Cambridge content is not paraphrasable, then it remains ineffa- University Press, 2011, vii + 338 pp., $28.99 paper. ble. The dilemma at the heart of the bold thesis is the reason Livingston has opted for a more modest At a time when the culture wars are at fever pitch view about film-philosophy. A firm advocate of the and the call for budget cuts and reduction of the size notion of authorial intention, Livingston is prepared of government is at an all-time high, making the case to consider whether films can “do” philosophy only for government funding of the arts may now face its in cases where there is strong evidence that the film’s most difficult challenges. Lambert Zuidervaart tack- director intended that his or her film would present les these challenges head-on in Art in Public: Politics, or reflect on philosophical issues in a way that is Economics, and a Democratic Culture, an ambitious expressed cinematically. The chapter concludes with and robust defense of government arts funding that Smuts’s reply to Livingston, suggesting that a version emphasizes the social contribution and democratic of the bold thesis can in fact be defended. I take it that potential of contemporary art in the public sphere. the discussion about whether films do philosophy or Zuidervaart’s latest is the second of two volumes. can philosophize will continue. Sinnerbrink is right The first is Artistic Truth: Aesthetics, Discourse, and to say that any answer to this question depends in Imaginative Disclosure (Cambridge University Press, large measure on what one thinks philosophy is and 2004), which draws on Theodor Adorno’s socially what one thinks art can accomplish. He concludes critical aesthetics and Jurgen Habermas’s notion of the second section of the book by suggesting that we communicative rationality to develop a theory of should overturn “the hierarchy between philosophy artistic truth. Art in Public “provides a social philo- and art” (p. 135). sophical context for the first volume’s claims about Which leads me to the chapter on The New artistic truth, and it employs those claims to develop a World. I need to mention that, unlike some film- new understanding of art’s role in civil society” (p. ix). philosophers, Sinnerbrink does not shy away from Zuidervaart has earned high praise as an Adorno focusing on what might be called works from the scholar. Both Artistic Truth and Social Philosophy “art cinema.” In this chapter, Sinnerbrink faithfully after Adorno (Cambridge University Press, 2007) describes Malick’s majesterial combination of cine- received the Symposium Book Award from the matography, character action, arcing narrative, and Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy. Read- sound track, thus capturing the film’s unique aes- ers of Art in Public will see why. Even while delving thetic beauty. He admits that the film is in many ways into the details of postcapitalist social theory and “enigmatic” and also “untimely” (p. 181). Because of critical hermeneutics of art, Zuidervaart’s prose is his interest in the aesthetics of film, Sinnerbrink fo- clear and mostly jargon-free, which will be refreshing cuses on the idea that Malick is “aesthetically mythol- to readers unaccustomed to philosophy of art and ogizing” the events presented in The New World,and aesthetics in the continental tradition. Each chapter adds that Malick could be thought to have done much begins with concisely stated aims and ends with a the same in earlier films, including Days of Heaven summary, so if one gets bogged down in the details of (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998). In this chap- economic, social, and cultural theory (as this reader ter, Sinnerbrink combines the best interpretive and sometimes did), the clarity and organization of the critical skills exemplified by the film-philosophers he text helps one get back on track with relative ease. 404 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

And as the former president of the Urban Institute is “Provocation versus Decadence,” which furthers for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the second polarity’s vision of the artist as avant- Zuidervaart has a thorough, practical understanding garde provocateur, who must be reined in by es- of the very complex issues surrounding public art and tablished government authority. What is interesting how it is funded. But let me be clear: Art in Public is about these conceptual polarities is that both camps primarily a scholarly work that is highly theoretical. rely on government to either fund and thereby pro- It is not really about particular public artworks mote free expression or use the power of the state to themselves (with some exceptions; there are a few uphold traditional values. Dismantling these polari- examples) but about the normative social, political, ties is therefore necessary, according to the author,

economic, and philosophical underpinnings that if we are to get past the culture wars and develop a Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 must be in place for contemporary art to justifiably democratic culture. receive government funding and contribute to the Chapters 2 and 3 examine a double deficit that formation of a democratic culture. This approach, these polarities also perpetuate. Chapter 2 reviews along with impressive scholarship and theoretical standard economic arguments for government arts acumen, is what sets this book apart from others funding (efficiency arguments, equity arguments, and on public art. Where most books on the subject merit arguments, respectively) and points to a cul- are written from an art-historical approach, Art in tural deficit in these arguments, whose underlying Public is a deeply philosophical work. Indeed, the assumptions are incompatible with a fully developed philosophical context Zuidervaart outlines can cause notion of culture, just because they are merely eco- one to lose sight of the content of the overall project nomic arguments. Likewise, Chapter 3 uncovers a at times. But this is a minor distraction, which I get democratic deficit in mainstream political justifica- to later; first, a brief summary. tions for government arts funding (those offered by The book is divided into three parts, “Dou- Joel Feinberg, John Rawls, and Ronald Dworkin) ble Deficit,” “Civil Society,” and “Modernism that ignore how art can contribute to a democratic Remixed.” Chapter 1, “Culture Wars,” begins with society by drawing attention to current issues in the an outline of three conceptual polarities that frame public sphere and facilitating democratic dialogue re- the current debate over government funding of the garding those issues. arts in a way that obscures a clear vision of how con- The next three chapters that make up Part 2 de- temporary art can contribute to a democratic soci- velop the notions of civic society and the concept ety. The first polarity, “Government versus Market,” of the public sphere as a way to provide philosoph- shows an opposition between advocacy of govern- ical context that paves the way for an alternative to ment funding for the arts and a hard-line endorse- the polarities discussed in Part 1. Chapter 4 reviews ment of free market capitalism regarding the role of Habermas’s notion of the public sphere as it may re- art in contemporary society. This polarity, the author late to art, analyzes Jean Cohen and Andrew Arato’s argues, perpetuates the culture wars by describing similar approach in Civil Society and Political The- the role of art in society in instrumental terms: art is ory (Cambridge University Press, 1992), points to either a public good that deserves government fund- Nancy Fraser’s Justice Interruptus (New York: Rout- ing to provide that good, or the value of art is entirely ledge, 1997) and Seyla Benhabib’s Situating the Self cashed out (literally) in terms of the invisible hand (New York: Routledge, 1992) as feminist revisions of of the marketplace. Both approaches point to a faith the notion of the public sphere, and then develops in the status quo. Those who advocate government a notion of art in the public sphere by referring to funding have confidence in a system that attracts cor- (but not entirely agreeing with) Hilde Hein’s views porate donations via institutions like the National in Public Art: Thinking Museums Differently (Lan- Endowment for the Arts, and those who endorse a ham, MD: AltaMira, 2006). Needless to say, there is free market approach have confidence in the same a lot going on in this chapter, too much for me to system that views art’s value as just another expres- fully explicate here. The level of scholarship is both sion of rational self-interest. The second polarity is impressive and can be dizzying. This chapter will ap- that between freedom and authority. Here the point peal to those more interested in the philosophical is that those on the side of government funding think details of social and political theory, but the general of art as an example of the right to free expression, point Zuidervaart makes is clear: “the arts need a whereas those in the opposition see government as form of economic organization that keeps them rela- an authority with the obligation to uphold traditional tively independent of both the economic system and values and stifle free expression through censorship the administrative state” (p. 128). when those values are not upheld. Both sides suf- Chapter 5 is even more ambitious, and further fer from an outdated, modernist view of the artist develops a notion of the civic sector that is nec- as an isolated individual who is bent on challenging essary to “generate a normative and critical the- the status quo for better or worse. The third polarity ory that supports enlightened public policies and Book Reviews 405 transformational economic strategies” (p. 130). The value, and having the freedom to do so all point to the author reviews a variety of “failure theories” (gov- democratic potential of contemporary art in public. ernment failure, contract failure, and voluntary fail- In a section called “Artistic Midwifery,” Zuidervaart ure), theories that depend on a notion of inevitable makes some of his most compelling claims: “the prac- market failure, a failure to provide the goods that the tices and qualities people learn through proper en- arts offer. Only the actions of robust civic sector arts gagement with the arts would promote the critique, organizations can provide an alternative to these the- creativity, and dialogue that nurture democratic dis- ories and contribute to a social economy that allows positions” (p. 291). This is not to say that this sort of art in public to survive. engagement in the arts necessarily will give birth to a

In Chapter 6, the author discusses and builds upon more democratically engaged public, but the poten- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 a study of the arts and globalization by Joost Smiers tial is there. in Arts under Pressure (New York: Zed, 2003), iden- The tenth and final chapter, “Transforming Cul- tifies systemic pressures on arts organizations from tural Policy,” provides a useful summary for those globalization, and offers an example from the Urban who may have gotten lost along the way and traces Institute for Contemporary Arts that illustrates how the trajectory the book has taken from culture wars such pressures can be alleviated and further art in to democratic culture. Here Zuidervaart outlines his public’s contribution to civil society. sociocultural argument for government funding for Chapter 7 introduces the concept of relational au- the arts in an astonishingly clear and detailed for- tonomy, which is meant to provide an alternative ac- mat, complete with listed premises and conclusions count to art’s autonomy, traditionally conceived. Re- and a detailed outline and explanation of each major lational autonomy is divided into three parts: societal premise in his overall argument, a rare and refresh- autonomy, which relates art to political and economic ing feat in continental philosophy. The case is strong systems, internal autonomy, which helps distinguish and his arguments are valid, though I wonder if pol- art from other cultural institutions and identifies its icy makers will comprehend the theoretical context intrinsic worth, and interpersonal autonomy, which is enough for practical application of what Zuidervaart about the normative element of agency among mem- proposes. That will remain to be seen. Nevertheless, bers involved in the arts. While the first and third I highly recommend Art in Public to anyone inter- conceptions of autonomy that Zuidervaart explains ested in public art in general, and for anyone inter- seem both plausible and correct, I am skeptical about ested or involved in more specific discussions about his conception of the internal autonomy of art, mostly government funding of the arts, it should be required because it relies on a notion of the aesthetic as “imag- reading. inative disclosure.” To my ear, this sounds akin to the fashionable Relational Aesthetics (Les Presses du JASON SIMUS Reel,´ 2002) made popular by Nicholas Bourriaud and Department of Literature and Languages has more to do with the shared values and interpreta- Texas A & M University–Commerce tions that art has to offer than with aesthetic proper- ties of objects. Moreover, this characterization of the aesthetic does not seem necessary for Zuidervaart krauss, rosalind e. Under Blue Cup.MITPress, to develop his case for government funding of the 2011, 152 pp., 60 color illus., $24.95 cloth. arts, which is primarily based on the social value and democratic potential of art in public, not aesthetics. In 1997, Rosalind E. Krauss encountered what struck More to the point, Chapter 8 elaborates on the her as the apotheosis of “installation art” in Kassel, author’s conception of interpersonal autonomy by Germany, at Catherine David’s documenta X.Ac- emphasizing artistic authenticity and the social re- cording to Krauss’s account of this experience, the sponsibility of artists. Artistic authenticity, as staying diverse practices featured at Kassel demonstrated a true to one’s projects that sustains continued art mak- washing away of the very ground from which art is ing, and social responsibility, as the expectation that capable of giving rise to meaning. artists remain trustworthy, accountable, and respon- In 1999, Krauss suffered a near-fatal aneurysm. sive to the public contribution their projects make, Like the contemporary art featured at documenta X, must stand in a creative tension, according to the the aneurysm washed away the ground from which author, in order for art in public to flourish, facili- Krauss entered into a meaningful relation to the tate a social economy, and help build a democratic world, leaving this most voluble of critics without ei- culture. ther language or memory.These two traumatic events Chapter 9 elaborates on the notion of a demo- frame the staccato argument that comprises Krauss’s cratic culture and articulates three concepts neces- most recent book, Under Blue Cup. The antidote to sary to its development: participation, recognition, both, according to Krauss, is the recovery of memory and freedom. Participating in the arts, recognizing its and the discovery of medium, the twin devices 406 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism necessary to counter the amnesia of contemporary leaving her at sea, with no wall against which to art. push off. Under Blue Cup is a highly personal meditation Comparing a debilitating stroke to the excesses on the parallel losses that both contemporary art and of contemporary art may seem melodramatic to say subarachnoid hemorrhages entail. Krauss imagines the least, but the parallel that Krauss draws demon- the victims of both to be lost at sea with no anchor, strates something central to art criticism as such. For no ledge against which to push off. For what is lost the process by which Krauss relates relearning lan- in both cases is a specified context (the kind that guage is not unlike the critical process itself, which both medium and memory can provide) with which is grounded in an unknown: the newly encountered

meaning exclusively arises. By arguing for the ne- work of art. Our way into that work, according to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 cessity of medium specificity as the thing that limits Krauss, is enabled by the piece itself, which lays bare and enables meaning, Under Blue Cup is another in- the machinery of its own making (and hence its mean- stallment in a long list of publications that Krauss ing). As Krauss repeatedly reports, her recovery of dedicates to articulating her “conviction as a critic language was only made possible once she recovered that the abandonment of the specific medium spells some memory of herself: the scaffold of “who you the death of serious art” (Perpetual Inventory [MIT are” upon which she slowly constructed a meaningful Press, 2010], p. xiii). “If Under Blue Cup is about one world. The question of “who you are” is exactly what idea,” Krauss writes, “this [that is, the necessity of contemporary art forgoes, Krauss argues, in its “for- medium specificity] is what it is about” (p. 19). getting of how the medium undergirds the very pos- Once again, however, Krauss has challenged not sibilities of art” (pp. 2, 19, 32). Memory and medium, just contemporary art’s delusions about its ability to which are treated interchangeably throughout this jettison the ground of medium, but also modernism’s text, provide the scaffold for meaning as such, in art missteps in properly articulating the medium’s sub- as in life. stance and import. For the mediums Krauss enumer- The parallel drawn between stroke and installa- ates in this book look very different from the material tion art also demonstrates a central conviction in substrate that was Greenbergian flatness or even the Krauss’s particular pursuit of art criticism: the ne- historically bound imperatives of Friedian optical- cessity of having a personal stake in the work with ity. Rather, Krauss summons a cavalry of artists (to which you are engaged. Those stakes, the kind that, make use of her own metaphor) to slay contempo- as Stanley Cavell (a strong presence throughout this rary art’s forgetfulness not by reminding artists what book) reminds us, all works of serious art provoke, a medium is, but by inventing new ones. Those in- emerge in and as Krauss’s voice, which slips so effort- vented mediums rely not on the material conditions lessly from work to life and back again. It is this very of their support, but rather on something like the voice that acts as Krauss’s own medium specificity: Derridian concept of iterability (p. 2); they offer a the device of art criticism that she herself inhabits “rule,” in Krauss’s words, that guarantees meaning and lays bare. That support is laid bare in Under Blue for artist and viewer alike. Cup through Krauss’s constant return to the personal This is made clear in those whom Krauss has event that frames the book’s argument as a whole. It chosen to designate with the accolade “knights of is laid bare as well in her recourse to aphoristic struc- the medium”: William Kentridge, Christian Marclay, ture (the staccato of the book’s argument), which Ed Ruscha, James Coleman, Sophie Calle, Marcel never allows the reader to be lulled into the “safe Broodthaers, and Bruce Nauman, each working in harbor” (as she put it in The Optical Unconscious what Krauss would term the “post-medium condi- [MIT Press, 1994]) of history’s narrative. Like the tion.” Which is not to say that they have no medi- book itself, whose rough-woven binding, sans dust- ums, but that such a condition itself acts as a kind cover, keeps our fingers alive to the object we cra- of determining structure, delimiting their practice dle, we are never left to wonder where the author and the viewer’s relation to it. These artists’ medi- of this text really stands. From her 1972 essay “A ums include the act of erasure, sync sound, the au- View of Modernism” (first published in Artforum 11 tomobile, and the cut. Not material supports, that [September 1972]), where she publicly broke from is, but recursive structure. Not convention as such, the ranks of modernist art criticism, through the fan- but its emergence, its possibility, its necessity.And tastically personal dialogue that structures The Op- who are the dragons Krauss has appointed these tical Unconscious, and including the techniques of knights to slay? The dematerialization of art, “art personal confession and conviction that mark all the as idea as idea,” Duchamp’s displacement of Picasso, texts in between and since, Krauss’s is a voice that is deconstruction’s critique of the self, and new me- unmistakable. It is unmistakable not simply because dia, medium’s “false friend” (p. 35). All are ves- of the finality of her pronouncements and the strin- sels that serve to set meaning free, to untether the gency of her judgments, but because of the presence viewer from the sure ground of medium specificity, that Krauss’s own commitments and stakes never Book Reviews 407 fail to obtain in the descriptions she so carefully un- Duchamp is the more likely candidate, his concep- folds. Under Blue Cup demonstrates once again that tualism being the place where idea and execution Krauss’s voice has a key role to play in all of her criti- first meet a principle of minimal artistic intervention. cal efforts: it is the ground against which art’s identity The Warholian dynamic installed indelibly in Danto’s and value can take form for us, the tireless readers of thought is of course a scandal to analytic philosophy, her ever more meticulous prose. which struggles to come to terms with sensuality in general, but is ultimately the best index and hallmark of Danto’s brilliance: literally, a shining that illumi- CHRISTA NOEL ROBBINS nates dark corners where philosophy is disarmed and Chicago, Illinois

seems to have nothing to say. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 Through this line of thinking, we wind up with andina, tiziana. Arthur Danto: Philosopher of Pop. two different ways of talking about art: a traditional Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2011, 128 aesthetics rooted in aesthesis, or sensation, and a phi- pp., $53.00 cloth. losophy of art that transcends sensation to engage the art object at the level of its semantic intentions and What is the fate of the sensuous surface after promises. The first Danto leaves behind, arguing that the object ceases being representative, imitative, an object like Brillo Boxes haslesstodowithstim- figurative, or expressive and instead becomes a ulating retinal rods and cones than stepping outside philosophical commentary on creative production, the art object to ask why all supermarket items are reception, and objecthood? Is aesthetics equipped not imbued with such value. My sense is that Andina with the proper tools for commenting on art in a is not entirely satisfied with this duality and that her world where there is no longer any need to apply future work will be the first to achieve a post-Danto ratio, adequation, or correspondence to sculpture, rapprochement of these very different modes of in- painting, or performance? How can we explain quisition. For if the future is the temporal dimension differences among indiscernibles, for example, the that gives history its solidity and that makes the Ideal varying fates of Brillo Boxes that are art boxes and Chronicler an impossibility since he can only collect Brillo Boxes that are mere collections of kosher events in a box, then it is the fundamental openness of scouring pads waiting for crusty lasagna trays? These this fracture to which Andina’s work addresses itself. questions and others Italian aesthetician and scholar Demonstrating a fluidity with Danto’s work Tiziana Andina gleefully raises in Arthur Danto: in and out of aesthetics, Andina arrives at her Philosopher of Pop, a book taking as its central irrepressible surprise and puzzlement, which, all in problem the dual abandonments of aesthetics and all, is the book’s greatest strength, by first taking extensionalism by Arthur Danto as he confronts the a chronological tour of the Danto opus, examining new demands of the contemporary object. his other conformities and departures from analytic Throughout this thoughtful and lively exposition, method in order to set up his eventual leap into Pop Andina’s pointed analysis is marked by a deep sense via Warhol. In her estimation, the first surprise and of philosophical wonderment at how an analytic ultimately the foreshadowing of Danto’s love affair force of nature like Arthur C. Danto should ever with Brillo comes with Danto’s work on Nietzsche, have come to see Andy Warhol as indispensible which is Danto’s first Pop moment, as he casts his to the “subtle unbroken line” inclusive of Vasari, gaze upon this dark prince who erodes the distinction Gombrich, and Greenberg: in other words, how a between philosophy and literature and, in doing so, high-minded aesthete steeped in the painterly tra- makes contemplation and writing “popular,” things dition should find anything commendable about anyone can and should do. Nietzsche and Warhol Warhol, who in his own way makes painting unnec- work splendidly together; as the angst and anguish essary (p. 8). Andina never ceases to convey her mar- of Zarathustra eventually gives way to Warhol’s velous surprise at Danto’s gravitation to and enrap- cool epithet of choice, “Wow” (no exclamation turement by Warhol’s famous Brillo Boxes, which point), the question becomes why each of these shake him out of the rut of mimesis and consensus to responses matters to Danto, who does something which so much aesthetic theory succumbs and show truly uncharacteristic of the traditional analytic him an art-pocalyptic vision of an aesthetic object- philosopher in finding each maverick worthy of hood appropriate to a posthistorical present living examination propositionally and extensionally. well beyond its relevance. Like Nietzsche, Warhol is someone who returns an Andina is of course correct: if there is to be an exclusive process back to the world from which it was analytic philosophy of art, why should Andy Warhol first extracted, in his case humanizing artistic activ- be its inspiration and apex? And furthermore, why ity by de-professionalizing it and articulating its de- should Danto matter so profoundly outside ana- professionalization through a series of experiments lytic philosophy, where his influence has been the in multiple authorship, simulation, autopilot, and strongest? Danto’s choice is a bizarre one, and clearly absence. In messianizing Warhol as the avatar of an 408 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism end, Danto literally becomes what Andina refers to that give human existence meaning, sense, a reason quite compellingly and accurately as a philosopher to refer (p. 5). of pop, someone for whom the world never ceases to Whether one defines ‘meaning’ analytically, exis- generate philosophical puzzles, only some of which tentially, extensionally, or aesthetically, the fact re- are aesthetic in nature. In this context, “Pop” traces mains that, as ens representans, the human creature directly back to “popular,” conjuring that image of needs to represent, to fabricate, to fashion. Its se- the masses installed at the heart of modernism as mantic vehicles do so much more than transport a an urgent issue of quantity, revealing that for mod- prefabricated essence labeled “meaning” or “con- ernism, dealing with the sheer number of human tent” from inside the balloon to outside the balloon,

beings necessitates various solutions and compro- or from one destination to another as paradigm of Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 mises, as with Nietzsche’s transvaluation of value, aesthetic transport. For these vehicles transport and or the idea that Christianity produces a slave moral- transform subjectivity, producing aesthetic subjects ity managing the masses’ supernumerariness through and inspiring them to speculate. Some, but not all, of the production of a neutralizing docility. these speculations will be systematic, as happens in Beyond the etymological path from “Pop” to analytic philosophy, and yet all will take on the prob- “popular,” there is supremely Pop’s onomatopoeia, lem of self and world in their own kind and hence be its reflection of the sound made when the interior full of meaning. of an inflated surface merges with its exterior and At times it will be important to talk about Truman distributions of air are equalized. It is precisely this Capote or Daffy Duck, as Andina masterfully second sense of “Pop” that speaks to Andina’s notion does in a discussion about how representation and of what Danto has accomplished in choosing Warhol context achieve an indissoluble synthesis I would over Duchamp, Nietzsche over Frege. Reading be- term co-aesthetic in a chapter hard at work carving tween the lines, it is clear that, yes, something has out an ontological positioning of the art object. At popped, and Andina is here to document the vio- times it will be urgent simply to glance at a map of lence of that restoration of balance and to speculate Manhattan and mark the spots where Danto’s and about what it can mean that entrenched ontologi- Warhol’s worlds coincide in a Venn diagram of urban cal distinctions have suddenly vanished. For Andina, experience. These moves are not detours: they are Danto worlds philosophy much as Warhol worlded deeply engaging responses on the part of Andina to art: for both, the world becomes the primary mate- a philosophy she finds au courant and vital. Giving rial that must be manipulated in cultural production, Brillo and its beyond “an ontological dwelling as the multiple separations entailed by professional- place,” Andina’s book refashions art as an enticing ism and its exclusivist labors dissolve. This popping set of enthymemic syllogisms radically requiring the is the shattering of an eardrum, the rupture of a ves- spectator’s participation in the game of interpreta- tigial organ, the sound of a prank or sneak attack, tion, that little y weaddtoart’sx in order to combine as when one pops a paper bag to scare someone. It sensuality with intellection, surface with motive. As recreates the world by restoring a lost unity, joining such, it is an essential volume for both Danto and what had been rent asunder, de-compartmentalizing Warhol scholars and is something I encourage any- disciplines that have been forced to communicate one who considers the wild ride that exhibition art across an abyss through distorted, disruptive shouts has endured from the Factory onward both exciting and screams. and vertiginous to read, share, blog, tweet, and of Above and beyond this worlding of thought that course talk about with a friend in real time (p. 90). places Danto closer to Wittgenstein than Russell, there is Andina’s own interest in Danto’s worlds on MICHAEL ANGELO TATA Riverside Drive, at Columbia University, and at The New York City and Los Angeles Nation: the university whose legacy he has shaped, the warm domesticity of his life with painter Bar- bara Westman, the challenge of transforming from ravenal, john b.,ed.Xu Bing: Tobacco Project, philosopher of art to art critic for a magazine with Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, 1999–2011. Richmond: an eminent liberal clientele. Andina maps Danto’s Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, 2011, 116 pp., $36.00 New York City in the role of rapt traveler arriving paper. from a foreign land to create a travelogue that is an homage, her steps through the city literally writing tsao, hsingyuan and roger t. ames,eds.Xu Bing the poem of these various worlds through the simple and Contemporary Chinese Art: Cultural and act of locomotion. “Exquisitely pop,” Danto is New Philosophical Reflections. SUNY Press, 2011, York City’s philosopher, the person through whom xxiv + 231 pp., $24.95 paper. City-ness and its sensual cacophonies become incor- porated into a larger, more comprehensive thinking “What is Buddha?” “The neigh of a horse.” This about history, art, and language, the very activities Chan Buddhism fragment is like the warm-up act Book Reviews 409 in a vaudeville show, meant to ready the audience for Song Dynasty (960–1276). Four bound copies lie in what is to come: here, the review of a book of essays gleaming wooden boxes on the floor on either end about Xu Bing’s work and the catalogue for his re- of 100 open copies lain in rows across the floor cent Tobacco Project. The point of the essays is to on a low platform. Other pages, ribbon-like, cas- demonstrate that qi cosmology and Chan Buddhism cade from the ceiling and hang, poster-like, on the inform contemporary Chinese art even as it exempli- walls. The viewer is cocooned in language, but it fies postmodernism’s view of the instability and am- turns out to be only language’s material side (sig- biguity of meaning and raises globalism’s question nifiers) signifying nothing, each character a sense- about the authenticity of cross-cultural communica- less combination of radicals from ancient scripts.

tion. There is a deep difference between the West’s Faithful to the material side of language and its dis- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 celebration of independence and individuality and semination, Book makes a mockery of words’ role the Chinese commitment to the context-dependence as bearers of meaning. It pays homage to classical and connectedness of all things. Given this, the ques- Song culture, even as it echoes post-structuralism’s tion arises as to whether the growing international foregrounding the signifier and sets its meanings presence of avant-garde Chinese art and the fact that adrift, loosed from their moorings as they are in a westerners were the first to appreciate and collect China where individual innovation and strong social this art means that it is welcome as the exotic other control vie. or that it has been colonized by the West. The authors The authors all want to show that Book from the answer with one voice: “neither.” Sky has roots in China’s religio-philosophical tradi- What does this tell us about the alleged binary op- tion in which there is no transcendent authority, no positions between China and the West and China’s distinction between reality and appearance or object classical and contemporary art? That none of the op- and subject. Book unsettles its viewers by forcing posing terms names some one consistent and self- them to wonder how meaning is made and to recog- contained thing. There are more elements of China nize that it is up to them to make something of this and the West in each other, and of classical and puzzling work. Meaning is taken to be born of view- contemporary China in each other, than the dis- ers’ experience: it is what happens to them when they turbingly simple oppositions acknowledge. More- engage the artwork on its own terms and, for the mo- over, the West’s construction of “China” is hardly ment, forget the categories with which they face the the same as China’s identification of itself, as China’s world. Their readings are productive and creative. construction of “the West” is not one with the West’s Most of the author’s titles indicate their agreement self-understanding. Nor are they static, and none is about what the viewer is to do: “Reading and Mis- adequate to the ceaseless workings of reality, messy reading,” “A Case Study in the Making of Meaning,” in its detail, glorious and corrupt, full of wonder and “A Religious Reading of Tianshu,” “Making Natural terror, that no conceptual scheme can fully capture. Languages,” and “The Art of Chan Wordplay.” The book of essays grew out of a graduate seminar The first article, by Hsingyuan Tsao, summarizes conceived by the co-editors and taught by Hsingyuan the history of art in China after 1979, reminding us Tsao. Of the seven participants, two are philosophers that at first artists had no visual language at hand and five are art historians, three Western, three Chi- other than that of the official art establishment. They nese, and one Japanese. Prominent in the book is Xu used that of the West only to strike out against the Bing’s Book from the Sky (tianshu, heavenly writing). state’s control of art. As they came to find their own Xu was born in China in 1955, his father a professor language they were already part of “the late capitalist and his mother a librarian at Beijing University. Sent portrait of the post-industrial world” (p. 28). China to the countryside in 1975 to be reeducated, he re- too is drawing capitalism’s portrait and drawing it in turned two years later to study and then teach at its own image. In the next essay, Roger Ames intro- the China Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA) in duces Chinese cosmology within which nothing is cre- Beijing. After Tiananmen Square in 1989, he moved ated ex nihilo. There is on this view no God to make to New York and a decade later received a something out of nothing and therefore no quest for MacArthur Foundation Award. In 2008 he became origins or the certainty their discovery would bring. a vice president of CAFA and now lives in New York There are only heaven, earth, and humankind that to- and Beijing. This places him in the history of China gether comprise the ceaselessly moving cosmos. And and the cultures of China and the United States, together they co-create its meaning, in situ, not ex ni- which is consistent with the Chinese view that the hilo. The effect of Book from the Sky andananswer identities of people, objects, and events are functions such as “the neigh of a horse” is to shock audiences of their past and present contexts. into realizing that the creation of meaning is their re- Book from the Sky is an artwork composed of sponsibility as objectivity and orthodoxy recede and 4,000 characters Xu carved and had printed on fine to renew them as “unique, historical, contingent, and paper and bound as it would have been in the provisional beings who struggle ... to make sense 410 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism of the nonsense” (p. 61). They are this because of acters are variously white, gray, black, turquoise, or the ceaseless flux and flow of the vital energy (qi)of red. Presenting the grasses, water, and clouds both by the cosmos. Ames says that the uniqueness and inno- their images and their names, Xu closes the distance cence of meaning of the present moment give rise to between them and refuses to let the trees, grasses, and “the authentic experience of temporality” and calls water shake loose their names. He blurs the bound- upon us to make the moment matter, which would ary between the conventional relation between word be to endow the experience of it with a quality both and object and the natural one between image and aesthetic and religious (p. 61). object. The idea of the religious is explored by Kuan- Jerome Silbergeld ends the collection with the

Hung Chen, who distinguishes, with Dewey, the ex- work of four contemporary Chinese artists who in- Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 clusiveness of religion as a set of dogma from the habit a space between China and the West, the classi- inclusiveness of the religious experience. A religious cal tradition and the modern or postmodern present, experience is one compatible with qi cosmology ac- and the like. There are places that are neither China cording to which everything is made of varying kinds nor West, but it has been supposed that none can be and portions of qi and is intrinsically connected with both. Yet the art of the four is both in that it is “not (inclusive of) everything else. Playfulness, “the incar- just Chinese, but not not Chinese” (p. 195). We do not nation of imagination ...and the most essential form say of van Gogh’s art, for example, that it is “not just of adding meaning,” is best suited to give meaning to western but not not western” because of the influence the prima facie meaningless flow of energy (p. 86). on him of Japanese woodcuts. In his case there was The power of Book is that it invites such playfulness. no displacement, as Chinese artists in the West suf- This article and one by April Liu on Chan word- fer, nor the cultural upheaval of the artworld today play further detail myriad ways the work of Xu and evidenced by a 2012 exhibition at the New Museum his peers refers to and rings changes on the cosmology in New York in which there are thirty-four artists (or laid out by Ames. These changes are inevitable given groups) in their twenties or thirties with only seven the degree to which China now interacts with the from the United States or Europe. Like Xu Bing, West and the international artworld. Liu is at her best they “recognize the myth of a stable monocultural in discussing the living word, one in which “meaning past and express performatively the alternate reality is conveyed through direct experience rather than of their destabilized intercultural trajectory” (p. 178). linguistic means” (p. 124). A living word is one not The authors are right that the artists are not mediated by dead words, those defined in opposi- copying the West in their rigorous questioning of tion to other words or by some connection with what the meaning of languages, verbal, natural, and so- transcends them (forms, concepts), and produces a cial. Nonetheless, the artists are doing what post- state of mind free of binary oppositions. The Chan structuralists did, with this difference. The post- Buddhist says meaning is silent, to be communicated structuralist said to look not at what a word does through showing, not saying. mean (meanings having been laid down in the cor- Natural languages, broadly construed, are the sub- ridors of power) but at what, within the system to ject of Richard Vinograd’s contribution. He takes which it belongs, it could mean. The Chinese instead them to offer the promise of a universal code, which look to what a work or word evokes in them when certain works of contemporary Chinese art thwart they have emptied it of familiar meanings or taken by denaturing the language. The kinds he identifies it out of familiar contexts. Whereas post-structural are four: native as opposed to artificial or machine skepticism was a part of the antiestablishment mood languages; signs believed to be of divine origin, such of the West in the 1960s and 1970s, the Chinese skep- as the trigrams of the Book of Changes; legible signs ticism is a result of the dizzying changes China has in the natural world; embodied texts, such as tattoos undergone since 1978 and the intercultural trajectory, and genetic codes. His article is rich with examples, inevitably destabilizing, followed by many, artists and mostly of work by Xu Bing, with seventeen or so ex- nonartists alike, in the nonwestern world. amples. Here are but two: in Helsinki-Himalaya Ex- All the authors but Vinograd and Silbergeld were change (2000), a landscape is drawn with ink on paper connected with the seminar taught by Mr. Tsao at the using Chinese characters instead of images for what University of British Columbia, which no doubt ac- would be in the landscape, “tree,” “grove,” “stone.” counts for the repetitiveness and narrow focus of the The character “tree” is used to produce the image seminar-connected contributors in making the point of a tree, for example. In Reading Landscape: After that there is a connection between Chinese cosmol- Yuan Jian (2001), a copy of a painting by Yuan Jian ogy and language-based art. So narrow is the focus (Qing Dynasty, 1644–1912) is hung on the wall while that the article by Kazuko Kamedo-Madar, a study on the floor in front of it, and climbing up the wall of a work by Xu that explores the “transmission of along its sides, are carved characters for elements in meanings” across the languages of China, Japan, and it like “grass,” “water,” “cloud.” Clusters of the char- Korea, loses the Western reader through its allusions Book Reviews 411 to the histories of these languages (p. 147). More- other two in Shanghai (2004) and Virginia (2011). over, it does not make good on its promise to focus The latter was mounted at the suggestion of a trustee on “the transformability of languages in the com- of the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Carolyn Hsu- puter and digital age” (p. 147). These considerations Balcer, whose family has ties to the tobacco industry aside, the book is welcome for showing the Western in China. So too does Virginia have strong ties to reader the traces of the Chinese classical in its con- tobacco. A visitor said in 1690 of the then British temporary art and for its two invaluable appendices: commonwealth that there “Tobacco swallows up all an eleven-page bibliography and a fourteen-page list other Things” (p. 57). Each exhibition built on the of important events between 1979 and 2005 in China one before with new site-specific works and some

and Taiwan. works made anew. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 Apiece with contemporary Chinese artists’ em- Though tobacco is the medium, little there is on phasis on language’s material side is their interest in view that is innocent of words, images, or numbers. material things. The artist Zhang Huan makes sculp- The exhibited works show this to be consistent with tures of large Buddha parts from remnants he found the post-structural view that everything is saturated in Tibet of bronze Buddha statues destroyed in the with language and the ancient Chinese view that Cultural Revolution. Xu Bing makes a work out of things are defined by their contexts, causal, histor- dust from the explosion of the Twin Towers in New ical, commercial. A telling juxtaposition was the dis- York on 9/11. He writes in the dust spread out on play of columns of numbers marking the profits of the floor, “As there is nothing from the first/ Where the British American Tobacco Company’s steps from does the dust itself collect?” Written by a seventh- the vitrine holding the hospital charts of Xu Bing’s century Chan patriarch, Huineng, these lines follow: father, who died of lung cancer in 1964. Slides of “There is no Bhodi tree/ Nor stand of mirror bright.” these charts were projected on the walls of a Duke The four lines were written in reply to “Body is the Homestead building formerly used to sort and store Bhodi (wisdom) tree/ Mind is like a bright mirror- tobacco leaves. This many cigarettes made and sold; stand/ Take care to wipe it continually/ And allow no that many people sickened and died. Tobacco’s near dust to cling.” The reply is that there is no body, no equal measures of pleasure and pain. One of two mind, no independently existing thing. notable exhibits with images is Traveling Down the This is art whose subject is material history and River, in which a very long uncut burning cigarette is whose material, the result of the rampages of the Red laid out on a reproduction of a twelfth-century scroll, Guard and the destruction of the Twin Towers, and Along the River During the Qingming Festival.Fireis subject are one. So too is tobacco the material and burning along (the image of) a river, marring (a copy subject of Tobacco Project: Duke/Shanghai/Virginia, of) an iconic work of classical art in its course, and 1999–2011, but now the subject is not an event, but marking time. a culture and a history rich in contradiction and as Another is A Window Facing Pudong,inwhich wide as the world. In Durham, North Carolina, to lec- ink-drawn images of the old Bund in Shanghai are ture at Duke University, Xu Bing noticed the smell on the walls around the window through which the of tobacco in the air and was led to discover the con- Pudong district of today is seen. Image and real thing nections among the tobacco magnate James Duke are in such dialogue that their difference virtually (1856–1925), Duke University, which owes its exis- disappears. Past and present seem so close as to tence to a trust fund he created, and the cigarette make apt the news Xu Bing heard on the eve of production factory that the British American To- his Shanghai visit that a brand of the Duke-begun bacco Company, a joint venture with the Dukes, set British American Tobacco Company will open the up in Shanghai in 1905. The factory was built af- world’s second largest tobacco production complex ter a cigarette-rolling machine was invented in 1881 in Ji’an. As in 1905, there will be a huge financial and and James Duke saw the size of China’s population. technological investment in return for cheap Chinese Tobacco has been among the most profitable foreign labor and a huge market. businesses in China; no surprise since one-third of the In another image-work in Shanghai, 660,000 world’s tobacco is processed and consumed there. cigarettes were placed on the floor in the shape and Drawn to the “refinement of the materials” when pattern of a tiger skin, using the white of the cigarettes he visited a tobacco factory, he decided to limit him- crossed by stripes of the gold filter tips. Called Honor self to them and create a project based on tobacco and Splendor in Shanghai, but 1st Class in Virginia, (p. 63). Because, he said, “the conception of an art- where the tiger skin was represented with 500,000 work usually begins with a sense for one’s material, cigarettes. Here the ferocious tiger, whose role in the most rational relationship that exists between an China is like the lion’s in the West, is represented as artist and his or her work. I wanted to use tobacco as a rug to be walked over, violated as the iconic twelfth- my primary creative medium” (p. 64). What emerged century painting was by having the cigarette burn its is a trilogy: a first exhibition at Duke (2000), the way down its river. But it is words that abound on 412 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism tobacco leaves, cigarettes, and the paraphernalia of tion of language, seeing tobacco as a wide-reaching their packaging in Tobacco Project. Tobacco Book, system of signs embodied in things, in practices, and the Virginia version (three by four feet), is made in behaviors; the other by an Amherst historian, Ed- of dried leaves and rubber stamped with a passage ward Melillo, that begins with the first account of from A True Discourse on the Present State of Vir- Amerindian tobacco use from a report of a slaving ginia (1615). The Duke version (seven by four feet) expedition to the Americas in 1565. Two are on the was stamped with words from Big Business in China: Shanghai exhibition, one by its curator, Wu Hung, Sino-Foreign Rivalry in the Cigarette Industry from and the other by a Columbia University humanities 1890–1930 (1980). Tobacco beetles were put into the professor, Lydia Liu. Illustrations of forty-five items

vitrine with it; what they did not eat was burned in in the Virginia exhibition are worth the price of the Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jaac/article/70/4/393/5980300 by guest on 24 September 2021 a bonfire when the exhibit closed. The same-sized book. Shanghai version was stamped with a Chinese trans- The last is by Xu Bing, who sees the result of his in- lation of words from the same book. No beetles were terest in tobacco as “something enormous and grow- put to feed on it. ing, located between history and sociology,” in which There were numerous small items. Matches art is used to explore social issues that in turn inject printed with lines from Frost’s Fire and Ice, “Some say themselves into art (p. 67). He ends by saying: “And the world will end in fire,” a box of twelve cigarettes sometimes that’s the way art arises and that’s what stamped with lines in English from Mao’s Little Red it leads to: the sensitivity of certain people toward Book, accordion books made of the heavier gold pa- a certain object causing the artistic methods of the pers at the end of filter cigarettes with Tang poems past to change while also bringing forth new ones” in English typed on them. And so on. Two other (p. 67). This puts art in a context far broader than word-works are Reel Book and Backbone. The first that of Western art, but it makes of art an explo- is made from a roll of thousands of yards of slightly ration of the social role of a material thing, not an more than an inch wide uncut cigarette paper printed, intervention or a call to action as the art discussed for the Duke exhibition, with lines from The Dukes in Wang Chunchen’s Art Intervenes in Society (re- of Durham. The paper was wound around a spool, viewed in JAAC) is. The relevant difference is no put on a wooden reel, and threaded to a crank. Like doubt that Xu Bing has lived in New York since 1989 a Chinese hand scroll, it is rolled up when not be- and Wang Chunchen, a curator at CAFA, lives in ing read. Backbone is a book made of about a hun- Beijing. dred historical tobacco stencils of brand names de- The books under review speak to each other only signed to appear on boxes and crates of cigarettes. indirectly. The essays in Xu Bing and Contemporary Xu asked a writer friend, Rene Balcer, to compose Chinese Art transform ancient cosmology and a poem using only the brand names. Balcer created contemporary art by looking at each through the an ode to the African American women who did the other’s lens and using the art to tell the ancient’s backbreaking work of tobacco processing whose first tale: meanings are not ready-made, and so viewers lines, composed of the names of five brands, are “OH must play with words (post-structuralism) and free MY BLACK SATIN DEW DROP/ OH MY BLACK such associations as they make from conventional SWAN QUEEN OF THE EAST” (p. 26). rules (Freud). The conceptual differences between Xu Bing was drawn to tobacco, this member of China and the West are deep, their metaphysics the nightshade (Solanaceae) family with its seventy alien,buttheartworksaretellingthesametalewith species that he first met through its odor, only when the relevant difference, seen in Tobacco Project,that he learned its history and encountered it in its re- the art of the Chinese avant-garde shows more imag- fined form in the tobacco factory. He began with ination and empathy with the human adventure than already processed tobacco and put it in larger and its counterpart in the West does. There is reason to larger causal, historical, and commercial contexts. believe, however, that the more the members of one The Project itself, spread out over three cities and sev- group perform the experiment of imagining them- eral venues in Durham and Shanghai, is spread over selves members of the other, the more their moral works that are verbal and visual, serious and funny. imaginations will grow and the art will have done its Its catalogue, published by the Virginia Museum of job. Fine Arts, has two articles on the Virginia exhibition, one by a VMFA curator, John Ravenal, that begins MARY BITTNER WISEMAN with reference to Book from the Sky and reads the Department of Philosophy Tobacco Project as a continuation of the interroga- Graduate Center, City University of New York