Paul Crowther

How Pictures Complete Us (eBook, ePUB)

The Beautiful, the Sublime, and the Divine

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Despite the wonders of the digital world, people still go in record numbers to view drawings and paintings in galleries. Why? What is the magic that pictures work on us? This book provides a provocative explanation, arguing that some pictures have special kinds of beauty and sublimity that offer aesthetic transcendence. They take us imaginatively beyond our finite limits and even invoke a sense of the divine. Such aesthetic transcendence forges a relationship with the ultimate and completes us psychologically. Philosophers and theologians sometimes account for this as an effect of art, but How Pictures Complete Us distinguishes itself by revealing how this experience is embodied in pictorial structures and styles. Through detailed discussions of artworks from the Renaissance through postmodern times, Paul Crowther reappraises the entire scope of beauty and the sublime in the context of both representational and abstract art, offering unexpected insights into familiar phenomena such as ideal beauty, pictorial perspective, and what pictures are in the first place.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: 13. April 2016
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9780804798587
• Artikelnr.: 48420662

Autorenporträt

Paul Crowther is Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His many books include Phenomenology of the Visual Arts (even the frame) (Stanford, 2009).

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
0Introduction: Pictorial Beauty and Aesthetic Transcendence
chapter abstract
The Introduction argues that the customary concepts of expression or
expressive qualities used by Anglo-American philosophy cannot explain art's
capacity to give us a sense of psychological completion. It is argued
further that aesthetic transcendence (a felt symbolic 'going-beyond' our
finite limitations, and, also - in some circumstances- a felt communion
with the Divine) is a better way of grounding such self-completion. Each
artistic medium is able to evoke such transcendence on its own terms. To
show what is special about pictorial art in this respect, a general theory
of pictorial beauty is formulated - emphasizing the twofold open unity of
the spatial object as its key feature. This suggests a link between
aesthetic transcendence and the Divine that can be interpreted in either
secular imaginative terms, or, on the basis of faith, as a genuine
intimation of Divine presence.
1Ideal Beauty and Classic Art: A Philosophical Vindication
chapter abstract
Part I traces the philosophical origins of the concept of Ideal beauty in
classical antiquity, and in later European thought. Part II examines Joshua
Reynolds account of ideal beauty as a justification of the 'grand style' in
painting. In Part III, this theory is evaluated. Part IV salvages some key
elements from it, and argues that Ideal beauty in art is philosophically
viable - but only if we supplement Reynolds with ideas that tie the Ideal
to the classic tradition in painting rather than to some more global notion
of a 'grand style'. In the course of this, the ideal beauty of classic
painting, is shown to have a distinctive aesthetic character bound up with
geometric immanence and the metaphysics of the concrete universal. Part V
shows the continuing relevance of Ideal beauty and classic art through
discussion of Malevich's late figurative work, and Ian Hamilton Finlay's
postmodern classicism.
2Pictorial Art and Metaphysical Beauty
chapter abstract
Section I of this chapter describes how picturing symbolically reconstructs
the human experience of space and time in terms of presentness. Presentness
is picturing's idealization of the visual present. Section II shows how the
role of pictorial space in this also involves an idealization of the
systematicity of our visual relation to the spatio-temporal world. At the
heart of this is linear perspective, or, just as importantly, the
appearance of being perspectival. Section III argues that these
idealizations constitute a metaphysical beauty - which admits of both
religious and secular interpretations. In Section IV, it is argued that
this beauty is a useful factor in explaining why pictorial art is of
enduring transcultural and transhistorical intrinsic fascination, i.e. why
it matters expressively.
3Transcendent Subjectivity: Kant and the Pictorial Sublime
chapter abstract
The present chapter explains the aesthetic transcendence involved in the
sublime by reference to Kant's complex theory. Parts I and II outline and
criticize his notions of the mathematical and dynamic sublime,
respectively, through adapting and revising theories set forth in Kant's
Critique of the Power of Judgment. The upshot is a viable general theory of
the sublime which is then further refined, through the identification of an
important variant of the dynamic sublime, namely an iconographic sublime.
In III, a further, distinctively pictorial version of the sublime is
formulated through further adaptation of Kant's position. The work of the
contemporary Israeli artist Bracha Lichtenberg Ettinger is considered in
some detail as an illustration of the contemporary complexity of the
pictorial sublime.
4Color-Field Abstraction and the Mystical Sublime
chapter abstract
Mark Rothko is quoted as saying that 'A painting doesn't need anybody to
explain what it's about. If it's any good, it speaks for itself.' But if
Rothko's claim is to have any truth, it must be based on some dimension of
inter-subjectively intelligible meaning in abstract works. Fortunately,
there is a theory that can explain how this intersubjective intelligibility
is possible. It argues that abstract art operates through allusive meaning.
The present Chapter, accordingly, first outlines the general theory, and
then develops it further through a link to three metaphysical factors that
enable a distinctive mystical variety of the sublime. It is then argued
that a particular kind of color-field abstraction - exemplified by the work
of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman - has an important relation to the
mystical sublime.
5The Momentary Subject: Photography, Painterly Transformation, and Digital
Imagery
chapter abstract
This chapter addresses how the experience of momentariness can be
illuminated and brought to a kind of completion through cooperation between
old and new media. In Part I, the significance of photocollage is
addressed, and the possibility of a related quasi-painterly practice where
the artist uses photographs taken only by himself or herself. Part Two
relates the upshot of this practice - the Experience-Object - to aesthetic
criteria, and to the role of the body, and the relation between painting
and the holistic unity of experience. Part Three considers some further
philosophical implications of these points, and, in Part Four, the way in
which the creation of Experience-Objects could be extended through digital
imagery. In Conclusion, the significance of this practice for the future of
art is briefly addressed.
6From Perspective to Icon: Marion's Theology of Painting
chapter abstract
Jean-Luc Marion argues that there is important religious meaning in
pictorial art, but that its meaning has been obscured by historical
developments. This meaning results from the complex interrelations of a
number of factors. Part I of this Chapter offers a detailed account of this
complex, by analyzing Marion's accounts of perspective, invisibility, and
the gaze. Part II then addresses his concept of authentic painting and the
'unseen' and the particular problems raised by some key modernist
tendencies. In Part III, it is shown how Marion understands the meaning of
the icon as an overcoming of these problematics. Part IV subjects Marion's
whole theory to detailed critical review - identifying both its strengths
and (much greater) weaknesses vis-à-vis aesthetics so as to set the scene
for the alternative metaphysics and theology of pictorial art offered in
the final Chapter of this book.
7Metaphysics and Theology of Pictorial Art
chapter abstract
Part I makes general points about the character of the universe considered
in itself, and then in relation to self-consciousness. It is argued that
only with the advent of self-consciousness does a temporal horizon of past,
present, future, and possibility come into being. Part II considers how
this horizon is made concrete in spatial terms through the making of
pictorial art. It is shown that such art concretises the temporal horizon
through its idealization of the notions of the present, and that of
possibility. In Part III, it is argued that the metaphysical structures
just described have a further level of religious significance viewed in the
context of faith. Accounts of faith and of this religious significance in
pictorial art are offered in turn. The book ends with some remarks on the
theological significance of beauty and sublimity as such in relation to the
Divine.