Meditation on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art

Meditations On A Hobby Horse past Eastward. H. Gombrich, Phaidon, London 1963: East. H. Gombrich is a remarkable art historian who has increasingly concerned himself with the reciprocal relationships betwixt fine art and perception. Or more precisely, he is interested in what happens when we look at pictures and how our eyes and minds are set up to work by objects which are mental and sensuous amalgams in their own right. This has led him, in his famous "Art and Illusion," to discuss such matters equally the theory of representation, the psychological conditions of sight, and the nature of visual communication. I of the major theses of that book was that "expression" in fine art is always the outcome of an unvoiced covenant between artist and beholder, an agreement within a common background that certain forms speak or stand for qualities of reality, thought or emotion, but that the agreement tends to change or be reassociated by experiences outside individual control. (Such every bit the passage of time, and differences of societies.)

Thus, while admitting that he does not know what boogie-woogie is, Gombrich supposes that Mondrian'south staccato, busy "Broadway Boogie-Woogie," contrasting so much with his austerely structured early works, can give the impression of a gay pop trip the light fantastic toe. But when he then juxtaposes the Mondrian with Severini's Futurist, wildly swooshing "Dynamic Hieroglyphics of the Bal Tabarin," might non the Dutch painting be more similar the First Brandenburg Concerto? Conversely, i may not make such connections when they are not solicited: "whatever pencil drawing of an apple tree," he says, when speaking of two well known conventions, "looks most different the existent thing, but we do non find the gray tone of the medium expressive of gloom."

Actually, this concluding statement comes from his new book, "Meditations on a Hobby Equus caballus," and information technology is no accident that information technology fits into his earlier line of enquiry. For the present piece of work is a collection of essays, reviews and lectures that pre- and post date "Art and Illusion," and are part of a continuing, and more than intense because concentrated, interrogation of the Gombrichian theme. The championship essay stresses the collaborational aspect of prototype making and receiving, and the creative role of the spectator, especially in those works where, as he says, there are layers of "suggestive veiling," e.g. Rembrandt. Overall, the accent has shifted from explanations of art historical modify to the individual reactions of the spectator, and, as a effect, information technology internalizes and withal multiplies issues quite challengingly.

From the viewpoint simply of their content, I applaud the relevance of these essays (especially to the criticism of modernistic fine art), but wince at their last implications. If only because they volition inevitably sharpen terminology and force an awareness of the mutability of the esthetic experience, their example is therapeutic. More than than that, they drive home the importance of contexts as the critical chemical element in judging, and sometimes even, in apprehending works of art. All this they accomplish with a witty and limpid style, swimming with occasionally scholarly, but always graphic illustrations. On the other hand, Gombrich'south method of word is frequently simplistic, and his points obvious, however unexpected his interdisciplinary perspective. Often, in fact, the latter is a mere smokescreen for platitudes. If the penciled apple furnished a surprising observation, the Mondrian-Severini dissimilarity said aught new. All through the book there runs a most delicate borderline, frequently transgressed, between illumination of the mechanics by which we see, and reiteration of the well-known fact that vision is variable.

One necessary, and topical chore, nonetheless, Gombrich dispatches with groovy aplomb: the destruction of the expressionist theory in interpreting art. That is, the idea that in that location are set up correspondences between formal elements—colors, brushstrokes etc.—and psychological responses, which artists such as Kandinsky invented to legitimize their fine art, can no longer be taken equally viable (although this hardly invalidates their accomplishment). Already known is the fact that a work does not "limited" what the artist feels at the moment; that art cannot guarantee the manual of any specific feeling through any specific form—each is too disparately readable—should now be every bit obvious. The myth, say, that a certain kind of agitated brushstroke connotes spontaneity has been exploded by Rauschenberg; the notion that stable patterns imply a tranquil mental land is denied by Kenneth Noland, or dozens of other young painters. Contemporary art makes a laughingstock out of such traditional equivalences.

Unfortunately, Gombrich has not arrived at his healthy skepticism by looking at electric current art, only by resort to information theory and behavioral science. Unwittingly upwardly-to-date, his objection to Expressionist theories such equally Malraux's, or by extension Harold Rosenberg'south, is not simply that they are a form of self-project into the given object, merely that they ignore the trouble of structure. Leaving aside the fact that such a highly structured artist as Seurat subscribed to a form of Expressionist theory, leaving bated Gombrich's own aversion to formalist criticism, what still remains is his relentless desire to uncover creative intention. And this intention is revealed but by a method which weighs alternatives accruing to that coded structure, the work of art—a thing which at present has every resemblance to a logical puzzle. After exposing much fruitful dubiety, "Meditations on a Hobby Horse" reveals credulity exactly by its faith in such a method. Throughout various pictures, the author will choice his fashion betwixt the expected and the unexpected, the conventional and the break with convention, and will allow these aspects to be arranged in liberal, if non radical combinations. But he will e'er opt for a critical organisation in which these oscillations or signals of "meaning" tin be comprehended as choices within a known pattern. This may be the voice of Anglo-Saxon empiricism, of the epistemology of such as Karl Popper, triumphing over the Hegelian or Crocean arroyo to fine art, merely it does not thereby convince by its perceptual accuracy, nor will even art history bear much of information technology out.

Nothing can be more incriminating on this count than the chapter called "The Vogue of Abstruse Art." For an historian like Gombrich to accept used such a title is as scandalous as a author of the late seventeenth century who could have spoken of the vogue of Baroque art: there is a difference between a passing fad and an established concept. His statement is that "experiments" like Abstract-Expressionism abandon even the minimum kind of formal restraint (or contextualism), which let intelligibility, that a situation in which limitless freedom is possible can only produce piffling, chance effects. To what extent nosotros can achieve the totally unexpected (which he decries) I don't know, nor care, but it should exist obvious by now how restrictive Abstract Expressionism was. Far from being random and "irresponsible," it embodied a highly compressed new species of order. Gombrich's, like his colleague Edgar Wind's, unwillingness to penetrate this club perchance springs from a belated urge for security. Certainly information technology arises from rationalistic prejudices. Always disturbed by the disability of abstract art to communicate something human to him as a person (at best information technology is decorative or pleasing), he must needs explicate this by abstraction's supposed absence of cues to pregnant. Had he followed or participated more intimately in the sensibility of mod art, he would take discovered, non merely that imaginative response rather than scientistic deciphering was more than appropriate to its criticism, simply he might have understood the historical bases, that is, the missing signals of the fine art of his fourth dimension.

Much more important is the question of what precisely artistic "significant" is to Gombrich. And so astute in debunking the pretensions of moral judgments to esthetic truth, and then concerned with outlining the limitations of psychoanalysis every bit a guide to content, so aware of the artifices of learning, Gombrich leaves i non a leg to stand on in coming to terms with works of art. Or perhaps likewise many. Indeed, he gives provisional credence to whatever one of these activities when it suits his purpose, every bit in his unintentionally funny assay of the origin of "chewy" Cubist grade as a masked need for oral gratification (insofar every bit art tin metaphorically provide information technology) reacting confronting the marmoreal fashion of Bouguereau. What disturbs me is the limitless sophistication and erudition that facetiously expands itself in preference to coming to any decision near a painting or a sculpture. I am trying hard not to be absolutist or anti-intellectual, merely this book swarms with examples of what works of fine art (or parts of them) may signify in certain circumstances, but contains no illustration of what any single work of art or creative person means to E. H. Gombrich. It can be argued that such was not the point of a book concerned with proposing a methodology rather than engaging in "appreciation." Unfortunately, this does not salve even his most particular insights from slipping into a burdensome abstraction. In the end, he is so critical about critical method,—all possibilities of interpretation are hedged or covered, and hence weakened—that he can never become a critic. These essays, then, reveal a spectacular immobilization, or, if you volition, a form of enlightenment which can requite no greater status to art than that of an elegant fiction. Do a multitude of signals add up to "intention?". When, in whatever separate case, is "intention" relevant every bit a disquisitional instrument, and when not? We never actually learn. At one point he says: "we must not confuse response with understanding, expression with communication." Unless he, or any writer risks the discomfort of personally encountering a new work, he volition never feel a certain invaluable pleasure, nor avoid or ever clarify this defoliation. It is a specially modern dilemma.

—Max Kozloff

BOOKS RECEIVED

INDIAN ART IN Heart AMERICA, by Frederick J. Dockstader. New York Graphic Society, 1964. 221 pages, illus., $25.00.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF Mod Architecture, edited by Wolfgang Pehnt. Abrams, New York, 1964. Illus., 336 pages.

PICASSO, by Han J. Jaffe. Abrams, New York, 1964. 160 pages, illus.

TOMB SCULPTURE, by Erwin Panofsky. Abrams, New York, 1964. 318 pages, illus.

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Source: https://www.artforum.com/print/196502/meditations-on-a-hobby-horse-37694

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