What Truth Can be Found There? On Modern Art
Three Women by Kazimir Malevich
One of the gripes I’ve often heard about modernist painting is that it’s elitist. That the hostility to the audience I talked about in the last installment of this essay prevents it from being accessible to anyone but the most highly educated and elite viewers. If it provides a deep and moving experience to only a few and closes out the better part of humanity, then what’s the point? But if there is some grounding principle for the hostility to the audience, a principle based in a refusal to engage in seductive or manipulative practices, is it possible that the problem is less with the art and more with the education of its viewers? There’s no question that looking at a modernist painting takes work. But could it be worth it? Could it be worth training minds to do, and worth refusing ourselves the easy excuse that to look at the works is too difficult?
I want to spend some time in this section digging a bit more deeply into the particular difficulties of looking at modernist painting, following the train of thought begun in the first two installments of this essay—that this isn’t new, but part of an ethos of painting deeply embedded in the history of western culture—and to use this as an occasion to wonder about what it means for it to take work to look at a picture and what could be gained by such an enterprise.
In his A History of Education in Antiquity, H. I. Marrou argues that the changing political landscape of the Greek polis strongly influenced the genesis of western philosophy and education. The shift from a militarily strong aristocracy to democracy meant that there was a greater political, economic, and social need to convince people not by force but through persuasion. It was this need that created a market for the Sophists, teachers who trained their students how to speak well in order to convince a crowd to vote for their cause. According to Marrou, it was the Sophists who did the most to transform Greece into an educated society, to convert Greek citizens into lettered men (because, sadly, education did not extend to women), doing more than any other group, even the philosophers. Marrou’s argument came as a surprise to me. I had learned about the Sophists in Philosophy 101 as the easy targets in Plato’s dialogues and had quickly dismissed them. It wasn’t until I read Marrou’s History that I began to understand why the early philosophers were so concerned to differentiate themselves from the Sophists or how radically different their approach to the world—to knowing, to truth, to persuasion—was.
As you can imagine, the ability to use words to shape the direction of society, to sway crowds of people and motivate them to take action, created a white-hot market for verbal tools that could move mountains. And, as you can also imagine, there were some who were unscrupulous, who would use and teach others how to use words to do whatever they wanted. Who would sell their services to the highest bidder. Manipulate crowds. Convince a jury. Protect the unjust. And, in general, “make the lesser cause appear the greater.” But all of this attention that was suddenly thrust upon language and the power it possessed also gave birth to a different kind of virtue. According to Marrou, this virtue evolved in two distinct ways. On the one hand, there were the philosophers, led by Plato, for whom Socrates was the origin-figure and first martyr. On the other, there were the Sophists, the best representative of whom was Isocrates, a noble soul who taught that the verbal arts ought to be used only for the good.
Isocrates
For Isocrates, education in virtue was inseparable from education in words, but he knew and was willing to use all of the tricks of the trade to achieve the best ends. For him, it was up to the speaker to discern the greater cause and then to use the full power of the rhetorical arts to achieve it. But the philosophers took a different path, acknowledging only that use of words through which the good made itself apparent. The philosophers wanted words to disappear before the truth, to find a language in which the words were a transparent window into the heart of reality. Here’s Plato writing as Socrates presenting his method of defense to the jury who is about to try him for corrupting the youth:
I was especially astonished at one of their many misrepresentations; I mean when they told you that you must be careful not to let me deceive you—the implication being that I am a skillful speaker—unless, of course, by a skillful speaker they mean one who speaks the truth. . . . [F]rom me you shall hear the whole truth—not, I can assure you, gentlemen, in flowery language like theirs, decked out with fine words and phrases. No, what you will hear will be a straightforward speech in the first words that occur to me, confident as I am in the justice of my cause. . . . (Apology 17b-c)
Socrates
The critical idea here is that it isn’t the words doing the convincing, but the truth that is made visible of its own account, even in spite of the words, which, we might surmise, are made rougher even than is necessary in order that the truth they convey might shine more brightly. We see in Socrates’ prolegomena another acknowledgment of a necessary hostility in the way an argument is presented to the audience, a hostility employed in order to preserve the possibility that the language can transmit the truth with which it is entrusted without danger of manipulation or seduction. And we’d do well to attend to the way that Socrates proceeds with his case. He doesn’t make a long speech, honed and shaped to secure assent to his position at the end of it. Instead, he asks a series of questions, and demands answers from his interlocutors. He elicits claims from them and checks for their assent to his inferences at each step along the way.
This is the genius of the Socratic, and the philosophical, method. It’s the polar opposite of a communications strategy. It doesn’t try to persuade. It does not attempt to achieve an agenda through a series of subtle, imperceptible nudges corralling the listener into agreeing with one position or another. It gives the listener a job to do. Questions to answer. Inferences to agree to or to refuse. Its job is to reveal to the listener what he does believe, or what he must believe if he is to be consistent. So that at the end of the argument, it isn’t Socrates who has convinced his listener of the truth of the claim being made, but the truth of the claim itself as acknowledged by the person talking with Socrates.
A lot has changed in the millennia that stand between us and Socrates at his trial, but that idea, that the truth could be its own argument and that words could serve only to facilitate its appearance, has been one of the deepest and richest wellsprings for what has become the western tradition.
Madonna of the Rosary by Carravagio
My sense for what is special about the western tradition is motivated in part by my revulsion toward an argument Dave Hickey makes in his book Enter the Dragon. He begins with an analysis of Madonna of the Rosary by Caravaggio, maintaining that it is a great painting because it does a good job of selling a message. A religious message in this case, a message Caravaggio sold on behalf of the church, who paid him handsomely for his efforts. Caravaggio, Hickey argues, made the Rosary beautiful. He sold the Rosary to the people, and they loved it because he made the Rosary beautiful. It became part of the social fabric because it was beautiful. That’s what art does, Hickey argues. That’s why beauty is so important.
I hated the argument. I hated that art could do that. Though I knew, instantly, that he was right. Art could do that. It could make anything beautiful. And people will love what art makes beautiful. The corollary Hickey follows with is striking: Robert Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio does the same thing that Caravaggio did with the Rosary with sadomasochistic homosexual sex. He made it beautiful. He sold it to the people, and they loved it because it was beautiful. It became part of the social fabric, because it was beautiful. Hickey’s argument is tightly conceived here: by citing an example of beauty used to sell the Rosary and one used to sell homosexuality, two embodiments of mutually exclusive ethical values, he implies that beauty is essentially amoral, since the good intentions or moral uprightness of the artist having nothing to do with the power of the art.
Munch Robert Maplethorpe
Placed in the context of Marrou’s argument about the development of classical education, Hickey’s position is ultimately Isocratean: he loves Mapplethorpe, perhaps even more than Caravaggio, because he believes in the social ends of Mapplethorpe’s work. For Hickey, Mapplethorpe not only effectively uses the full force of persuasion to make something beautiful but what he makes beautiful is also something noble and worthy.
But in my own understanding, which has been deepened by Marrou’s framework, I know it is possible to see another way: the philosophical way. A way to a visual language that cannot be used unscrupulously. A way to a kind of visual expression in which I believe what I see in a picture because it is true, and not because the picture has convinced me. A way to a visual language in which the painting is itself “transparent,” in which the canvas becomes a window opening onto the really real, held in view by the painting but ultimately seen and known by the viewer. By me. The truth, reality, whatever you want to call it, reaching through the painting to me. So that I can see it. Not so that I am convinced by the painting to choose this side or that, but that I side with the truth because it has become visible.
Composition 8 by Wassily Kandinsky
All of this points to the thing that can be said for an art that takes work to look at and which does not guide me by the hand to a conclusion predetermined by the painter. To the art that is hard, hard to follow perhaps, and that demands a great deal of me, but that provides a different kind of visual experience, because, instead of being shown this thing or that thing, the value of this or that, I am the one doing the looking and the seeing—being directed by the painting, perhaps about where to look and how to see, but always with the end of enabling my vision of the true instead of presenting the artist’s vision of the beautiful. This is something I can trust. Something I can give myself to, because in giving myself to it I don’t abandon my judgment, or foreswear my world. Instead, I set my eyes to work. I look into the painting. I look for how it shows itself to me. And I try to see what truth can be found there.
Tom Break is an artist, critic and editor at In the Wind Projects.