APPLYING TRADINONAL ART THEORIES

by  GREGORY SNYDER

		In his essay, "Minimal Art," Richard Wollheim writes:

In a historic passage Mallarme describes the terror, the sense of Sterility, that the poet experiences when he sits down to his desk, conFronts the sheet of paper on which his poem is supposed to be composed, and no words come to him. But we might ask, why could not Mallarme, after an interval of time, have simply got up from his chair and produced the blank sheet of paper as the poem that he sat down to write? Indeed, in support of this, could one imagine anything that was More expressive of, or would beheld to exhibit more precisely the poet's feelings of inner devastation than the virginal paper?

By exAmining this problem in light of various traditional theories of art, one can see that determining whether an object is to be called art or not is as much a condition of historical perspective as it is of aesthetical perspective. Consequently, what was art to Plato, may not be even remotely considered art by Clive Bell or Leo Tolstoy. In this paper I will examine, through the traditional aesthetic theories of Plato, Aristotle, Tolstoy, Bell and R.G. Collingwood whether Stephane Mallarme's blank paper is, or is not, art.
    Plato, who offers us the oldest known aesthetic theory, touching on the subject both in his Republic and in his brief dialogue, Ion, would not think very highly of Mallarme's 'poem'. But then, he did not want to allow artists of any sort, or their art, into his ideal Republic. The mere fact that someone (Mallarme or not) attempts to express the poet's feelings was antithetical to everything Plato believed. In Plato's world, man's ultimate goal was the pursuit of pure reason in order to know what should be the right conduct of life.  AppeAling to emotion was to shun the intellect and move away from the rational. Despite Plato's ability to recognize the blank sheet as a poem, its self-same 'poeticness' would be damning rather than elevating. Plato would say that the person who made the paper itself better understood its virginal aspects and sterility than the poet. And both poet and paper-maker are put to shame by the ideal Form that they imitate on Earth. What they have created is not original in any Platonic respect, but is rather an imperfect copy (or, even worse, a copy of a copy) and, consequently, much farther from its essence than they would believe.
    Aristotle, in contrast, would admire Mallarme's poem. Like Plato, he saw art as an imitation of Nature, but he also saw beyond that. To Aristotle, art seeks the end that nature is striving for. It is circular, in that art imitates Nature's possibilides. It is, therefore, not a "mimicking" thing, but a "creating" thing. It takes Nature and, through the application of Thought creates Art, a thing that is greater than the combination of those two aspects. It becomes a living thing in itself (not merely a Platonic copy), and because of this, renders the work of the artist much higher in the eyes of Aristotle than in Plato. Consequently, the blank paper, being the product of Nature and Thought, represents a created, valid thing. After all, what could be more rife with Nature's possibilides (or stagnant Thought) than Mallarme's blank sheet? It is a powerful symbol of potential wasted.
    Upon application of Tolstoy's theory of art, Mallarme and Wollheim fall out of the favor that Aristotelian application had achieved. Tolstoy's theory is based on the communicability of the infectiousness of a work of art. Art sought not only to unite the common man, but also advance him morally. Under these condidons, Mallarme's poem is suspect. Though it can be argued that the blank sheet can communicate the emotional sterility of the artist to his audience and from one reader to another, it does not seem to unite us toward any greater good. Certainly, it may be infectious and sincere, and thus be art, but from Tolstoy's perspective it would be bad art since the aspects of creative impotence and sterility of do not seem to further humanity's highest goals. The poem does not keep us moving towards a common and distinctive brotherhood; a communion reflecting our highest spiritual strivings.
    Though Clive Bell's theories based on significant form were originally tendered to help incorporate post-impressionistic paintings, sculpture, etc. into the art world, a case can be made applying it to the literary arts as well. The problem at first tendered in finding a working analogue for significant form in writing, since by Bell's definition, significant form is based not on a work's representational aspects, but on inherent qualities of line, color, and space and their evocation of the heady atmosphere Bell idendfies as aesthetic emotion. We are affected by its essence as a whole, rather than by any specific detail or facet of the medium. In the literary arts, words on paper provide the context in which the art is created. The problem is that words, by their very nature, are full of the connotations and suggestiveness that Bell claims is the downfall of representational works. Mallarme would appear to have an answer for this in the fact that his blank sheet of paper is free of wordsÑfree of all the preconceived connotations one brings to each read word. The form is made significant by Mallarme's intuitive knowledge of how he is using his medium. Thus, to appreciate a blank piece of paper precludes us from needing to know how to read, or to have it translated into a language we understand. And in Bell's mind, the aesthetically aware reader could very easily be taken out of himself by this purity of the aesthetic emotion.
    Collingwood's acceptance of the blank sheet as art would, like Bell's view, be contingently based. "Proper" art to Collingwood is created by the expression rather than the description of an emotion. Consequendy, the blank poem can only be art if Mallarme had sincerely endeavored to put something down on paper. He could not have gone into the process with the pre-conceived notion that he was going to write about creative impotence, frustration, and sterility. That would be describing an emotion rather than expressing it. For the poem to be "proper" art, Mallarme must go in with an unexpressed, unidentified emotion, and through the course of his poetic endeavors realize that the blank page is exactly the expression for the emotion he is feeling. The tricky part is that the blank page is only "proper" art if Mallarme does it, not if Wollheim does it. Wollheim is merely reading to Mallarme's sense of sterility and thus has a preconceived notion of the emotion to be expressed. Strangely enough, this theory reflects back on Tolstoy, who would most likely only differ from Collingwood on this last point. He would say that both Wollheim and Mallarme could create the blank sheet of paper and call it art. It wouldn't matter whether Mallarme or Wollheirn were even feeling the sterility portrayed. What would matter is that the result, the blank paper, be an expressive object in and of itself in both the artists' eyes as well as the critics. Then it is art.
    Working through these traditional theories gives one a sense of both the cumulativeness and the singularity of the question: What is art? The usefulness of ascertaining when an object is or is not art in the historical context allows the aesthetic mind to come at the problem from a multitude of directions. It most likely will not give one a sense of just one theory being right all the time (or even most of the time), but rather let one see that each theory has its validites, and that taken together one can judge from a more knowledgeable and expansive framework that ultimately can only increase one's appreciation of the art .