Written by Martha Gane
This summer I went on a trip that art history enthusiasts everywhere dream of; four weeks in Italy. Punctuated by the cheapest Aperol Spritzes those Italian cities had to offer, I spent my days touring some of the most impressive churches and art galleries in the world. One of which was the Accademia gallery in Florence which houses the Michelangelo's staggering David. This impressive feat of artistic skill is undeniable. Stood next to the work, one experiences an overwhelming sense of awe.
The aesthetic endurance of this statue and of many others I saw is clear. The fact that to this day they are collectively seen as impressive works of art led me to wonder: at what point does the block of marble become art?
Michealangelo is reputed to have spent the period he was working on David in almost complete solitude, sleeping sporadically and barely eating as he carefully chiseled away at his masterpiece. Despite the statue’s well known enormous size (17ft tall!), it is sculpted from one single block of marble. Was it the first blow to this block that transformed it from boulder to artwork? Or was it some point in the middle of the process when Michealangelo’s vision began to take form?
The obvious answer seems to be: upon completion – at the declaration of the artist, the arbiter of form and rhetoric. Since it is the artists vision, surely it is up to them to have the final say. Indeed, in the 70s George Dickie proposed a similar idea called Institutional Art Theory. He argued that an object can be considered art upon it’s acceptance by the ‘artworld’ or by artistic institutions: artists, critics, curators. This seems a strong assumption of power for the artist or institution, able to call the shot on when an object’s very nature changes. It gives well financed cultural complexes of the world, like the Accademia, ultimate authority. By retaining, maintaining, and displaying David within their collection, they decide that the block of marble is considered ‘art’.
But could it go deeper than this? In becoming art has the very nature of the marble changed? These are questions that could be answered by examining the idea of Aesthetic Dualism. As the name suggests this is an idea that the very nature of artwork is made up of two distinct properties. On the one hand the material nature of the art, and the other hand a less tangible quality. There have been different suggestions for what these two qualities look like in different versions of Aesthetic Dualism. I’ll focus on the ideas put forward by Arthur Danto.
Dickie’s Institutional Art Theory was influenced by Danto, however he took the idea further arguing that an object does not just become art in name but in nature. Take the famous example of Duchamp’s Fountain, a simple urinal the artist found on the street and decided to exhibit. According to Dickie and his Institutional Art Theory the urinal’s identity as a piece of art, and not just a toilet, was established simply by Duchamps deciding it so. The support of the institution exhibiting it alongside the word of the artist have the power to dictate its new nature. In all obvious respects, Duchamp’s Fountain is just a urinal. It lacks the presumed credentials of art. However, Dickie points out that it has gone through a change through the mechanism of context—the gallery.
Danto makes a more extreme reinterpretation of the artistic process. He argues that the urinal makes a complete transfiguration when becoming art. It is not just the artist’s declaration that has changed its identity but on a deeper level it has ontologically gained new properties in this process. Danto lays out that when we encounter the artwork, we are not encountering a urinal but instead something which happens to be perceptually indistinguishable from a urinal.
Pretty dramatic stuff. So, what does this mean for our sculpture? Danto seems to be suggesting that the marble has gone from possessing one property, of its physical material, to two properties within its nature. This secondary gained property is something inherent to the nature of art. I would argue that in order to gain this new property there also needs to be a level of intentionality from the artist. But working out what these properties look like or consist of is something Danto leaves us to guess at.
He argues that Michealangelo’s David is not identical to the marble from which it is carved, nor does it consist of this marble. Instead, the marble was transfigured into the world of art. A piece of marble that has naturally occurred in the exact formation of Michealangelo’s sculpture can still not be considered identical because it hasn’t gone through this transformation. In the process of becoming a piece of art the object has fundamentally gained new properties. Hence the use of the word ‘transfiguration’, for Danto the object has not been just transformed or changed but become a new thing altogether.
Danto labels this Aesthetic Dualism on the basis of a dualistic interaction between distinct body and soul. Discussing David, we can say that the physical property of the marble is like the body while the intangible element it possesses as a sculpture is the soul. Here though it is the relation between that of a sculpture and the shaped material it is made from. In this case it’s obvious how the marble has gone through a physical change, so it makes sense to say that it has gained new properties now. It has form, shape etc. all those things which mean that when we look at it, we no longer just marble—we also seem intention.
But these aren’t the new properties Danto refers to. His properties are far more abstract, residing in the ‘soul’ element of his dualism. If this is one half of arts dual nature, the other must be its physical form. This means translating his theory to non-physical art seems hard. Indeed, the argument seems to rest in the assumption that all works of art are material objects. This is clearly not true, what about books and music – these can exist even without a physical element. Danto points out though that it is because of this dualism that art can still exist even non-physically. If you were to burn all the copies of pride and prejudice in the world, we would still not destroy the work of art, the story would remain.
Indeed, critics who focus on the material nature of Danto’s argument are missing the point. He doesn’t make a case for the idea that all artworks are identical to their physical object. He points out that because of a dual nature what makes something ‘art’ transcends above its physical manifestation. Consider Pride and Prejudice, if all the copies of it were destroyed the story would only remain as long as we continue to tell it. Without this oral form of storytelling, it would cease to exist as a piece of art.
Ultimately this highlights the importance of the active physical element in art. I would argue that Aesthetic Dualism allows us to make a case for considering the process of creating an art work as a manifest part of the art work itself. Michealangelo’s conscious decision to chip the marble into a certain form contributes to the transfiguration. Indeed, the transition from ideation to production is its own form of transfiguration. The intentionality behind this work distinguishes it from that of the identical block of marble. This physical process is part of the dualism within the nature of art, and perhaps the intangible element that Danto leaves unanswered.
Comments