4.1 A Complex Dynamic Systems Definition of Art
Definitions of art are components in the complex dynamic network of art itself and they participate in its complexity, temporality, transformations, and discontinuities. Definitions reflect the multiplicity of art by the perspective they take, and by doing so, by the perspectives they conceal. A typical art-historical perspective, for instance, is likely to focus on “real” or high art, whereas a social science perspective is more likely to focus on art as it functions in society for the majority of people, or for “average” persons. In the definition(s) I will present, I take the perspective of art as a complex system, implying that a definition is always preliminary and always an active participant in the processual phenomenon it wishes to define.
I shall begin with a definition that relates to autopoietic systems, that is, systems whose function it is to create themselves. It is the sort of definition that could follow from Luhmann’s sociological theory of art as an autopoietic system, for instance (see Section 4.2.1)Footnote 1:
Presently, there is no other definition of art than art itself, and art can only be a perpetual process of self-definition. This was the basic observation of Arthur Danto (Reference Danto1981) in his book The Transfiguration of the Commonplace.
Another perspective is of a functional nature: what does art do, in addition to creating itself; this leads to the following definition:
Art is the human activity of creating embodied visual presentations of existentially important themes and presenting them to audiences in forms that invite and afford deep experience, taking place in the form of entangled activities of emotionally rich contemplation, participation and reflection.
The visual presentations are embodied, for instance in the form of a painting, a sculpture, an installation, or even a telegram with a printed text “This is a portrait of Iris Clert if I say so.”Footnote 2 Examples of existentially important themes are beauty, religious scenes and stories, art itself, ontological beliefs, (in)equality among people, and so forth. These themes are important for every human being or, more often, for a particular, and often relatively small group. The experiences that these presentations invite are deep in the sense that they consist of intertwined (entangled) activities of perception and contemplation of the meaning of the work of art, including more than superficial, often entangled emotions, such as admiration, repulsion, joy, awe, or ambiguity.
In addition to these functional aspects, art has a number of formal properties. I will try to enumerate them, but I must leave open the question of whether these features are necessary or sufficient (maybe they are what the philosopher Mackie called INUS conditionsFootnote 3: insufficient, but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions); this leads to the following definition:
(1) Art is a network of iterative processes (a) involving many interacting agents of various kinds, (b) on a variety of intertwining timescales and levels of organization, (c) resulting in multi- and meta-stable dynamics (dynamic pluriformity), (d) generating emergent networks of functions in designated societal, cultural and economic contexts (“artworlds,” economics, ideology, politics, public and private spaces). (2) Art processes generate a network of emergent artistic meanings that are (a) enacted, embodied, situated (embedded) and distributed (extended), (b) self-determined and self-functional, (c) claiming uniqueness and authenticity, (d) exploiting critical state dynamics of entangled feelings and emotions, thoughts, cultural values, economic values and identities.
These definitions are clearly presentist, that is, they look at art from the perspective of the present time, and they are self-centered, that is, viewed from the perspective of an art praxis where definitions matter (that they do so is clear from the amount of effort theorists have spent formulating and discussing definitions).
Let me first try to explain the components of the formal definition given above.
4.2 Aspects of the Definition
4.2.1 Art as a Temporally Contingent, Iterative Process Involving Many Interacting Components
Several authors have stated, each in their own terms, that a work of art is a process.Footnote 4 In Art as Performance, David Davies states that “… an artwork, in any of the arts, is a performance that specifies a focus of appreciation.”Footnote 5 In An Ontology of Art, Gregory Currie defines a work of art as “… an action type, the tokens of which are particular actions performed on particular occasions by particular people.”Footnote 6 In Work and Object: Explorations in the Metaphysics of Art,Footnote 7 Peter Lamarque makes a distinction between a work of art as work and as object. Works consist of the activity of artists, of a public, and of institutions. A work in its capacity of being an object is a thing that does not distinguish itself in any principled way from other things. Chiara Cappelletto’s Embodying ArtFootnote 8 uses a neuro-aesthetics approach to show how creating and perceiving images cannot be reduced to internal processing in the brain. Images are performances, works of art are embodied and situated activities. In Just in Time,Footnote 9 G. Gabrielle Starr analyzes the fundamental temporality of aesthetic experience, that is, the fact that aesthetic experience exists in the specific pattern of its unfolding in time. This processual nature also extends to the work of art as a particular product. Heinich states that “In contemporary art, the most important transgression of the usual criteria used to define art is that the art work no longer exists – or, at least, does not merely exist – in the very object proposed by the artist, but in and through the whole set of operations, actions, interpretations, etc., brought about by its proposition: exhibiting, installing, performing, commenting, reproducing, selling, vandalizing, etc.”Footnote 10
Works of art, or systems of art for that matter, are processes, defined as patterns of events in a web of interacting components and timescales, ranging from the components involved in very short-term processes, for instance of putting a stroke of paint on the canvas or a viewer’s participation in the events of an artistic performance, to the long-term process of art history. At each of these timescales, the processes are iterative: the preceding state provides the affordances or adjacent possibilities for the next state (see Sections 3.2 and 3.3.5, and Chapters 6 to 13).
4.2.2 Art as a Distributed and Situated Process of Enactment
4.2.2.1 Distributed and Situated
What makes art “art” is a distributed process,Footnote 11 extended across a relational network, which typically consists of work(s) of art, creator(s), contemplator(s), technical and economic “enabler(s),” buyers and sellers, interpreters, and cultural and economic contexts. Based on the work of early twentieth-century art historian Paul Frankl, Das System der Kunstwissenschaft (1938), KolevFootnote 12 describes the artworld as a network of interlocking perspectives represented by author (artist), recipient, patron, collector, curator, connoisseur, art critic, historian of art, theorist, aesthetician, and metaphysician. The nodes or components of that network are agents, or actors, playing their respective roles, and their interactions create an emergent phenomenon, namely art. This notion is comparable to Bruno Latour’s concept of the Actor Network, where every component of a network (a person, an object) is a potential actor, capable of doing something,Footnote 13 of making a change in something else. In Art is Not What You Think It Is, Preziosi and Farago present what they call a matrix model of art: “… to think systemically about art, we need to understand the interplay of three general facets of the (modern, Western) idea of art – the work itself, the agent(s) or force(s) responsible for its material mode or appearance, and the functions to which a work may be put.”Footnote 14
The distributed nature of art is explicitly present in contemporary works of art, in particular in performance art, where the viewer is a participating co-creator.Footnote 15 Notorious examples are Marina Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, at New York’s MoMa in 2010, where she sat motionless for eight hours a day in silent eye contact with one of the many hundreds of visitors who took their seats in succession on the chair opposite her.Footnote 16 Another example of a work of visual art as a process distributed across time and participants is Roman Ondák’s Measuring the Universe at MoMa, 2007: “… As visitors enter the room, they are invited to stand against the wall and have someone mark off their height and label it with their first name and the date of their visit.”Footnote 17 Another example, which I mentioned in Section 2.3.3.2, is Félix González-Torres’ Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.), which consists of a pile of candy that visitors are invited to take and eat. And there is the famous quote from Joseph Beuys, Every Man Is an Artist, which, taken literally, implies that everyone is creating art.Footnote 18
The distributed and participatory nature of art is not a contemporary invention. During most of its history, art has been a component of an active, participatory practice.Footnote 19 Take for example the Altar of the Holy Blood in the St. Jacob church in Rothenburg-ob-der-Tauber. It was made from limewood in 1499 by Tillmann Riemenschneider and his Würzburg workshop. The centerpiece of the elaborate altar represents the Last Supper, and shows Christ and the apostles, with a very prominent central place reserved for the apostle Judas. The Judas figure can be removed from the scene, dependent on the time of church liturgy.Footnote 20 Art historian Johannes TrippsFootnote 21 describes many more examples of medieval altars and altarpieces with mechanical figures, which allowed the priest to transform the work of art into a liturgical performance implying the participatory acts of the worshippers. Other examples are the medieval Shrine Madonna’s, statues of the Virgin Mary that can be opened and then show other sculptures and painted scenes inside.Footnote 22 And there are of course the winged Renaissance altarpieces that could be opened on special liturgic occasions to reveal their spectacular interiors to be shown to the religious participants. The participatory and processual nature of religious art is also present in the practice of processions, where statues or icons literally move between the believers. Even in conditions of static presentation, as in a museum, the presence, movements, and activities of visitors cocreate the artistic and cultural significance of the objects on display (see also Section 7.3).
The distributed nature of the work of art also exists on the long-term timescale of the history of art, in the form of a work of interpretation and assigning meaning. For instance, Clive Bell’s philosophical interpretation of a Cézanne paintingFootnote 23 written in 1914 contributes to the long-term creation of that painting, that is, it contributes to the way the painting presents itself to a viewer (at least one who agrees with Bell’s interpretation). Bell’s interpretive scholarly work is part of a distributed process of creation that started with the actual physical creation of a particular work by Cézanne, for example, one of his Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings (1904–1906). Cézanne’s brushstrokes (a very short-term process) are, in fact, the primal contributions to the way this work presents itself to a viewer – a viewer like Clive Bell - who then took the work of presenting, appreciating, and understanding this painting further in the form of philosophical reflection, contributing to the meaning of the work for future generations and forming a starting point for even further reflection on the nature of visual art.Footnote 24 A Cézanne painting is thus a matter of long-term becoming, not of being (e.g., Section 2.3.4).
All these processes are situated in very specific contexts and occasions that constrain and enable the ways in which the distributed practices contribute to the creation of art: the museum context, major exhibitions, religious celebrations, and academic contexts of scholarly work.
4.2.2.2 Enacted
Art and works of art are enacted, that is, they exist in the form of particular actions or activities that are specific ways of “doing” art, of enacting art by showing what art is or means at a particular moment and in a particular context. Examples of such activities are the creation of objects, installations, or performances intended as works of art, the experience and interpretation of works of art in their quality of being works of art, participating in the creation or presentation of works of art,Footnote 25 the experience of emotional appraisals in the form of admiration, awe, beauty, disgust, resistance, or anger with respect to some object or phenomenon in its capacity as a work of art, theoretical and philosophical speculation about the nature and properties of works of art and their creators, actively conserving and restoring works of art as carriers of cultural and historical value, and so forth.
Enactment takes place in the form of a network of activities, practices, contexts, that is to say, in the form of an art praxis distributed across many participants.Footnote 26 This distributed praxis is what Howard Becker (and many others) called artworld(s).Footnote 27
4.2.3 Art as Emergent
Art, a work of art, artistic activity, or quality are emergent properties, that is, they emerge from the underlying activities and processes of art creation, experience, and distribution.Footnote 28 According to Joseph Margolis, a philosopher with a relativist and historicist view on the nature of thought and reality, a work of art such as a painting or a performance is an embodied emergent property.Footnote 29 It self-organizes out of its underlying processes of creation, against a backdrop of cultural practices and values. In this sense, even the most stereotypical, non-creative work of art is an emergent phenomenon because it is always more than the sum of its parts, the sum of the processes and constituents that created it, more than the sum of the patches of color on a canvas or the objects from an installation. Of course, emergence – in the sense of novelty, surprise, and creativity – comes in gradations, from highly predictable to shockingly novel.
We have seen that an emergent property stands in a cyclical causal relationship with the properties that created it (Section 3.4.4).
An emergent artistic pattern, such as a painting or an installation, constrains and enables the processes out of which it originated. It will also constrain and enable future processes, namely the creation of new works of art and the way those works will be appreciated.
Prigogine,Footnote 30 who emphasized the focus of becoming over that of being in the physical sciences (Section 2.3.4), has given some hints as to how the physical, thermodynamic nature of the universe can be related to the nature of art, in an interview to Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator and author of the Interview Project.Footnote 31 The creation of the universe, according to Prigogine, is above all a creation of possibilities, some of which are realized. That is to say, the notion of creation is an intrinsic feature of the physical world, which, – at least temporarily – defies the inevitable final deterioration of the universe, that is, the inevitable increase in entropy (the increase of disorder, the loss of structure). Creation is deeply connected with the fact that the physical world is subject to “the arrow of time,” which means that processes are inevitably irreversible (processes cannot be played backward). This is in contrast with classical physics, where the direction of time (from past to future) is arbitrary: the basic equations of physics work forward as well as backward. In such a “classical” universe, physical creativity in the sense of creating new possibilities is not possible (anything can be undone to its original state of departure, that is, nothing new really happens). On the question “How does art come into this debate?” (about the physics of complex systems subject to the arrow of time), Prigogine answers: Because physics, by becoming a matter of probability and emphasizing the new and a certain indetermination in nature, produces a vision that emphasizes creativity, and creativity is an essential feature of art, which nevertheless fully complies with the nature of physical reality.Footnote 32 This idea, that creativity is rooted in the structure of physical reality, runs counter to the widely accepted view that creativity only exists as a mental process, something psychological, that escapes from the shackles of brute physical forces. But in accordance with the complex dynamic systems idea that Prigogine favors, the creative activity of human beings, including the processes of thinking and imagination, are nothing but expressions of the basic physical nature of creativity, of physical creation through processes of emergence, of new possibilities, some of which are realized and become the source of new realizations.Footnote 33
4.2.4 Art as a Unique and Authentic Visual Embodiment of Self-determined Artistic Meaning
What emerges in the visual arts is a specifically embodied artistic meaning that cannot be separated from its individual sensory embodiment,Footnote 34 namely a particular observable material, spatiotemporal formFootnote 35 (a painting, sculpture, performance, text, or visualization). Artistic meaning exists in the form of the affordances and adjacent possibilities that works and contexts of art offer in the form of embodied actions and interactions: creation, contemplation, evaluation, reflection, transformation into economic commodity, conservation, and so forth (they are actions of an agent with a specific human body, acting in a human context). These affordances and adjacent possibilities of works of art are deeply and fundamentally conditioned and determined by the constraints and possibilities of their actual physical embodiment, that is, the concrete materiality of a work of art and its material and social context. Conceptual art, for that matter, is no less physically embodied than any other form of art, but its embodiment tends toward texts, drawings, digitally embodied presentations, or communications between persons and physically present symbols.
A specific work of art is an event in an overarching temporal web or network of embodiments (other paintings, performances) and actions (from creation to contemplation to conservation and commercial trading) by a network of participants (artists, public). By virtue of its volatile, processual, and emergent nature, artistic meaning is almost always fuzzy, open, subject to negotiation, pluriform, and, importantly, subject to power and authority relationships (artistic authorities, such as artists, critics, curators, philosophers, arguing why something is art, or why it is artistically significant). Its specific embodiment implies affordances – constraints, enablements – for a range of embodied activities, including concrete activities of reflection, contemplation, interpretation, and evaluation in broader artistic contexts (for instance, in the context of reflections about the nature of art, see Section 7.3).
The meaning embodied in a work of art is, to a greater or lesser extent, self-referential or self-intentional: the function of a work of art is – among other things – in the first place to be itself, to present itself in its identity of being this specific work of art. It is – to a greater or lesser extent – an autopoietic structure, that is a structure with no other function than to create and perpetuate itself (a fundamental feature of art, according to Niklas Luhmann,Footnote 36 and also a fundamental feature of complex dynamic systems, such as organisms and living beings).
A specific feature of art is the uniqueness and authenticity of the visual embodiment, that is the object or event that embodies a particular artistic meaning. Note that this uniqueness and authenticity is processually defined, that is, depending on its unique provenance, its origination from a particular artistic process, with the artist as the seed of origin. For this reason, uniqueness does not exclude seriality, that is, the existence of several versions of a work of art, such as Rodin’s Thinker, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes, or his paintings and screen prints of Marilyn Monroe or Campbell’s soup.Footnote 37 The bananas taped on the wall of a museum or gallery are precious works of art only because they are steps in processes that go back to the activities of celebrated artist Maurizio Cattelan (see also Section 2.3.3.2). The value of a work of art can be increased if its provenance can be dated back to the artist’s most creative or celebrated period. This mechanism was recently illustrated by Works of Damien Hirst produced in 2017, but antedated to 1999, which is in fact a form of “reverse engineering.”Footnote 38
Uniqueness, defined by its origination in a specific act of a particular artist, implies non-replaceability. That is, works of art do not obey the type–token distinction (the idea that a particular object represents a general class, namely a relationship between any member of the class of objects and its function). A traffic sign on a particular streetcorner has a legally established form and refers to a particular traffic rule or situation. It can be replaced by any other token of the same traffic sign. However, this is not so with works of art, which are unique in terms of authenticity. The famous Warhol Brillo box, for instance, can only be replaced by another Warhol Brillo box if that replacement is explicitly intended by the artist Warhol. A painting, referring to a particular artistic framework of meaning, stops being a work of art if it is replaced by a perfect forgery that cannot be distinguished from the original (hence the perennial problem of artistic originFootnote 39 and the artistic evil of forgeriesFootnote 40). In contemporary art, the nature of uniqueness has become a difficult issue, especially in those cases where ready-mades are used as examples of genuine contemporary art, or in the case of conceptual art. In the case of ready-mades (Duchamp’s urinal), the uniqueness refers to a specific artistic event of providing an arbitrary object with the status of art by the special powers of an important artist, whose powers are attributed to, or negotiated, in the context of a web or network of artistic events and the associated objects and persons.
Finally, what emerges through processes of creation, experience, or contemplation obtains the quality of being art by an act of “proclamation” or declaration: “This object is declared to be art” by somebody (or some institution) that is part of the web or network of art. Declaring something a work of art, and more precisely declaring the artistic value of a particular work from insignificant to exceptional, is often a process of negotiation, of art-historical development, of commercial and financial dynamics, and inevitably, of power and inequality of the forces governing the dynamics. In the end, the declaration only works for those who believe in it. Note that this aspect of the definition is reminiscent of procedural and historic definitions of art. In this sense, the definition of art becomes purely circular,Footnote 41 which is a direct consequence of art being a dynamic system characterized by iterativity: the multiplicity and complexity of current art constrains and enables later art, on all timescales involved.
4.2.5 Art as Embodied Meaning that Exploits Metastable, Critical State Dynamics of Values
Art can be described in the form of different types of attractors (Section 3.3.6), but its most typical form is that of metastability, occurring on the timescale of art creation and experience to that of art-historical changes. Metastable states are critical states, that is, they represent conditions where relatively small perturbations may cause important changes (Section 3.3.6.4).
There are many different ways in which critical state dynamics can be created in the visual arts. One way is to alter principles of figuration, for instance, in realist or representationalist art. Nineteenth-century examples are the Impressionists who altered the way landscapes were pictorially rendered, creating “impressions” that conflicted with the then familiar interpretation of a painting as a realist rendering of an existing scene. On their turn, these alterations will become an established canon, that is, stable attractors, losing their critical metastability, except maybe for the totally uninitiated viewers. They will be replaced by new forms of figuration, such as the post-impressionist formalism and intuitionism in Cézanne and Van Gogh.Footnote 42 Virtually any innovation in the visual arts is an example of creating a new type of metastability, for instance the introduction of the ready-made and its proclamation to the status of art, which is still one of the favorite items of art-historical discussions. Other examples are spectacularist forms of contemporary art, such as stuffed sharks or calves in formaldehyde, skulls covered with diamonds, or the Reichstag building covered in silver fabric. In fact, all works of art that trigger the “But is it art?” question are examples of triggers of metastability, of opposing interpretations that evoke one another, and exist by virtue of their simultaneous opposites.
An important way of creating metastable or critical attractors occurs through processes of artification, that is, the process through which “… things acquire the traits of what we call art and come to be collectively sanctioned as such.”Footnote 43 An important form of artification takes place through actively decontextualizing things, events, properties, actions, styles, or ways of doing that have an established meaning or position in their proper context, that is, in their proper or original attractor state. By lifting them out of their context – such as the packaging of soap pads – and assembling them into a new attractor, which is the work of art, novel meanings emerge that embody metastability. They become critical attractors for which different “solutions,” that is, different volatile stabilities (different stable attractors) are possible. In fact, any form of “artification” is a decontextualization of something that originally featured in a different context, in a different attractor state. One example is the work of Francis Alÿs, a Belgian–Mexican artist, whose work consists of lifting events, people, or objects from their obvious contexts and placing them in entirely “anti-consistent” environments, such as letting a fox loose in the National Gallery, London, or sending a peacock as his representative at the 2001 Venice Biennale.Footnote 44 Another example of decontextualization is the use of simplistic and highly common forms of figuration, scribbles, etc., that, on the face of it, typically evoke a reaction of the “my little sister can do that”-type, in particular in “uninitiated” viewers. Notorious examples are many of the scribble works of the American artist Cy Twombly. These works typically embody critical state attractors that balance between opposing forms of interpretation, with the opposing forms of interpretation forming a metastable state. This metastability is easily “resolved” by moving toward one of the opposites, thus turning it into a stable, self-sustaining attractor. In the case of Cy Twombly’s paintings, one possible attractor may be that “… each line and color is infused with energy, spirituality, and meaning”;Footnote 45 another may be that it is all “… pretentious claptrap.”Footnote 46 It is easy to dismiss each of these opposite interpretations, accusing them either of advertising the emperor’s new clothes or of reactionary ignorance. Of an established masterpiece like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, Arthur Danto said, “Nobody really understands it; nobody can even say whether it is a success or a failure.”Footnote 47 However, in line with a complex dynamic systems approach, works such as these may be appreciated – or rejected – for what they are, namely metastable, critical states. The ultimate example of decontextualization is to create a work of art that lifts itself out of the context of being a work of art, with the intention (honest or not) to make the viewer think about the nature of art. However, a viewer will only do this thinking if the trigger – the work of art in question – is unquestionably a work of art, thus making the invitation to contemplate the nature of art in relation to the work of art presented intrinsically impossible and paradoxical.
Metastability, and the resulting dynamics of creation, experience, and evaluation of art is an essential property of art in general and is not reserved for contemporary art, of which it might have become a central feature.Footnote 48 Even a simple realistic portrait exists by virtue of the inherent conflict between, on the one hand, it being a flat object that bears the characteristics of its maker (brushstrokes for instance, as in Hals’ portraits, or in the Fayum mummy portraits that covered the bodies of the death) and, on the other hand, the experience of likeness and similarity with the portrayed person that it imposes on its viewers. Most portraits do not generate an exact likeness or something that comes even close to the way the portrayed person looks during a real encounter. This distortion of the literal likeness may result from a lack of artistic competence but also and most importantly from the artist’s deliberate artistic choice. By adding a title, such as a portrait of Iris Clert, or a portrait of Gertrude Stein, another layer of metastability of the portrait may be added. In a different context, Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe is the proverbial example of layers of incompatibilities that create a new, emergent pattern of visually embodied meaning (see Figure 4.1 for a representation of a metastable attractor landscape).
Figure 4.1 A rugged attractor landscape with a critical (unstable) point, marking the distinction between opposing interpretations of an artwork’s quality (“it’s rubbish” or “it’s brilliant”). The most likely interpretations are (a) and (b), but (b) might be pushed toward (c) by a strong enough perturbation (e.g., an art critic’s opinion). The landscape may be transformed into a metastable attractor landscape, where only faint versions of the original attractors remain (figure in the middle); the system will more or less erratically move over the landscape of possible interpretations, with weak stabilities for the original attractors (a, b, and c).
A beautiful example of how historical works of art embody metastable dynamics is Rubens’ Descent from the Cross, created in the cultural and political context of the Counter-Reformation. The painting is still present in its original location, namely the Cathedral of our Lady in Antwerp. The Baroque figuration of the triptych and the Baroque architecture of the surrounding frames and chapels balance on the brim of a conflict with the austere Gothic architecture of the Cathedral. The painting itself rests on a complementarity of features: the religious, Catholic framework of a tortured body who is a fragile human person and the almighty God at the same time. The poor and abandoned Christ, who himself is the symbol of comfort for the poor and oppressed of the world, contrasts with the richness and opulence of the figures in the painting. Christ is a muscular and athletic man, who is untied from the cross by muscular figures and received by beautiful, young women in gorgeous and, no doubt very expensive, clothes. In the panel to the left, we see an unmistakably rich, self-conscious young woman, dressed in opulent clothes, visiting her niece in the context of an impressive piece of architecture. The wealth of the environment is emphasized by the presence of a maid, a young and very attractive woman carrying a basket on her head, most likely containing bread or other stuff for the kitchen. Interestingly, it is the maid who looks at us spectators, but she looks a bit aside, not directly focusing on us, believers and contemplators of this religious scene. The total work is based on the confrontation of conflicts and oppositions. And perhaps the greatest conflict of all, which runs through many works of art made in the Catholic tradition, is that between a tortured, dead human body on the one hand, and the symbol of divine hope and comfort that Catholic believers derive from it. The artistic visualization of these conflicts and complementarities turns Rubens’ Descent from the Cross into an emergent paradoxical unity, from which different exits toward eventually incompatible interpretations can be made and to which these conflicting interpretations can always return.
4.2.6 Art as a Pluriform Complex Dynamics
Pluriformity is self-organizing and emerges from the properties of dynamics and complexity discussed above. Art is a network of very diverse interactions between a great number of qualitatively different components: works of art, contexts of display, cultural and financial institutions, artists, viewers, curators, buyers, conservators, critics, theorists, and so forth. A relatively new and very powerful form of coupling in and between artworlds is the Internet and Internet-based social media,Footnote 49 in which artists can – and do – compete for the greatest number of followers.
It is a fundamental feature of complex dynamic systems that these components and interactions tend to self-organize into patterns of subnetworks, with a high degree of internal connectivity and a considerably lower connectivity with other subnetworks. That is, artworlds develop into subworlds: artworlds become pluriform by their own dynamics (Section 10.4).
In a complex network that consists of ever smaller, increasingly tightly knit networks, there is no overall hierarchy, no single master component that defines the ultimate nature of art, to which all other components and interactions can be subordinated. This does not alter the fact that in complex systems such as the art system, some clusters, including their associated forms of art, are bigger, have more internal and external connections, are more “powerful” in a sense, than other clusters. There is a constant struggle involving artistic, intellectual, financial, political, and cultural power relations among those clusters (or subsystems) that claim top positions in an overarching artistic hierarchy in terms of taste, artistic, cultural, and financial value.Footnote 50 In fact, the notion of forces or powers is central to the whole idea of a dynamic system: the word dynamics stems from the Greek dynamis, which means force or power. In a complex system, power implies the ability of one component to alter another component with which it is coupled, implying reciprocity in the sense that the other component has a certain power to change the first. All this results in changing, heterogeneous structures of power relationships (in the above general sense of the word), resulting in different processes of artistic emergence and thus in a fundamental but uneven pluriformity of what art is. The power of defining real art may be bestowed on absolutist, dictatorial regimes that impose their homogeneous ideologies of what should count as art with coercive means.Footnote 51 The power of defining real art may also be claimed by absolutist historians and critics of art. On the other extreme end, we find the specter of a totally “entropic” art where pluriformity has degenerated into mere arbitrariness.Footnote 52 The complex system of art can, in all likelihood, only thrive on the edge of order and chaos,Footnote 53 if by chaos we understand diversity, pluriformity, and uncertainty that can self-organize into emergent processes of artistic creation and experience.
The pluriformity of art occurs in various ways: historical differences in artistic styles; differences in terms of medium (painting, sculpture, performance art, installation art, digital artFootnote 54); geographically and culturally defined forms of art, often associated with power differences (forms of world art,Footnote 55 art globalizationFootnote 56); sociological and ideological differences, including the art of minority cultures and minority groups based on race, gender, and social power differences; fluid differences between art and nonart, such as kitsch,Footnote 57 outsider art,Footnote 58 amateur art, and so on. Each of these contexts of art generates emergent properties, that is, forms of art that differ quite fundamentally from one another but are nevertheless dynamically linked, in one form or another, to at least some other forms of art. There is no such thing as a common component, a common essence of being art (or not). This artistic pluriformity comes close to a “Wittgensteinian” family resemblance approach, which goes back to Morris Weitz’ theory of art.Footnote 59 However, these family resemblances are not static, overlapping categories or properties or “states of being.” Family resemblances and differences are continuously created and eventually abandoned in the form of dynamic links, that is, processes of exchanges, processes of assimilation or rejection, and so forth, that exist in the form of concrete events. For instance, outsider art is outsider art because of the active artification of some outsiders, which takes place in the form of art-theoretical writing, financial valuation, shows in prestigious galleries, and museums of particular outsiders.Footnote 60 The pluriformity created and maintained by these processes is inherently dynamic. Pluriformities may come and go, increase or decrease in terms of interest, understanding, and appreciation.
4.2.7 The Dynamics of Presentation, Re-presentation, and Reference
According to the functional definition given earlier, the visual arts create embodied visual presentations. In its original, Latin meaning, presentation refers to “placing before,” in the sense of showing: a presentation thus establishes a relationship between something and someone, a viewer.Footnote 61 A re-presentation thus implies “placing before again” or “showing again,” of something that has been shown before. The classic, representationalist theory of visual art thus implies that a representational work of art (such as Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe, which represents a pipe) is putting something before an observer that had been put before the observer at some earlier moment, such that the re-presentation allows the viewer to recognize the thing that was shown before (the pipe). But whereas a pipe offers the affordance of smoking, a painting of a pipe does not do so. Hence, even the most realist, representationalist work of art is in the first place a presentation: it presents a highly specific object, such as a painting in a museum context, to which a particular re-presentational intention has been assigned.
Works of art are specific, embodied ways of presenting something to somebody, at a particular time and in a particular context. Compare, for instance, Brancusi’s Le commencement du MondeFootnote 62 with Courbet’s l’Origine du Monde,Footnote 63 in terms of how and what they represent: they both re-present and refer to the same thing, which is the idea of the beginning of the world. However, the concept of monde (world) itself is an example of a complex meaning, with different aspects that interact, but nevertheless flow into a sort of common idea, an emergent meaning that depends on the way it is presented (either as a work of art, or as a scientific account of the Big Bang, for instance).
In a work of art, the functions of presentation and re-presentation interact: the concrete, embodied, spatial, and contextual way a work of art is presented (e.g., a specific museum setting) contributes to what and how the work represents or refers to (there are lots of natural stones that look quite a lot like Brancusi’s sculpture). Brancusi aimed at a purist, essentialist form of representation, of bringing a form back to its core (as he, the artist, saw it). The association with an egg as the origin of an organism is obvious, but it is too elongated for an egg (at least the eggs we find in the supermarket or the chicken coop). It calls associations with the many religions and cosmogonies for which the egg represented the beginning of something, including the cosmos.Footnote 64 And it calls associations with many other works of Brancusi, for instance, one where the egg shape is further differentiated and is called The Newborn,Footnote 65 which exists in various forms in various materials (wood, marble, bronze), which then allows for a multiplicity in the presentation of the work, a multiplicity that becomes part of its attributed essence (comparable to the way cultic objects can be presented in various forms and versions in different places of worship). The whole of these associations, in addition to the work’s embodiment in the form of a concrete object, or series of objects, displayed in very special spaces (museums) forms a network of components or features that interact in particular ways, co-defining each other’s meaning or value. The functions of presentation and re-presentation interact. And the totality of these interactions results in a fuzzy totality, an emergent property that is in a sense the “essence” of Brancusi’s particular work of art (e.g., the specific “egg” displayed in the Kröller-Müller Museum in the Dutch city of Arnhem), and, broader still, an emergent property that represents Brancusi’s art, or Brancusi as a particular artist.
Let us compare this with Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde. The degree of similarity of the titles of both works invites the viewer or beholder to establish a connection between the two and to arrive at some overarching artistic presentation of the notion of “world origin” or “world beginning.” This connection is dynamic; it originates out of the interpretive and associative activity of a viewer and may disappear again after the mental association has passed, or survive in the form of a verbal description (like the current one printed in this book). Courbet was a realist and his realism is rooted in the intellectual climate of nineteenth-century France, with realism and naturalism strikingly present in the writings of de Balzac, Flaubert, or Zola. Hence, Courbet’s origin of the world takes the form of a highly realist representation of “… a woman’s thighs, torso, part of one breast – and, at the center of attention, her genitals.”Footnote 66 It represents the origin of the world in terms of nineteenth-century male imagination, where an explicit display of female breasts, thighs, and genitals evokes male sexual desire and invites sexual intercourse, from which pregnancy and birth will result. In this gender- and history-specific sense, it presents a metaphor for the fact that the world originates anew in every newborn child. However, for many of Courbet’s contemporary, elite male viewers, explicit female genital display was probably directly associated with the brothels they frequented and in which pregnancy had to be avoided at all costs. Hence, there is already a fundamental aspect of inherent and probably intended conflict and ambiguity in the content presented by the painting to its viewers, a content that represented a critical or metastable state. However, speaking about viewers, Courbet’s painting is one that was intended not to be seen, at least not to be seen by a public that was supposed to see Courbet’s hunting scenes, for instance. That is to say, its presence, its “presenting itself,” was intended to be a concealed presenting, to be present, but to be present behind a curtain, to be seen only by a very select happy few, namely the guests of the original owner, the wealthy Turkish–Egyptian diplomat Khalil-Bey (1831–1879). In 1955, the painting was purchased by the (rather hermetic) French psycho-analyst Jacques Lacan, who hid the painting behind a neutral landscape painted by André Masson (which is rather peculiar, as psychoanalysis is supposed to reveal what is hidden, in particular sexual desiresFootnote 67). In a twenty-first-century context, L’origine du Monde offers a particular artistic affordance, namely that of a physical confrontation with a real woman – an artist preferably – showing her genitals, which was indeed done in 2014 by performance artist Deborah de Robertis (she also impersonated the nude from Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe in another performance; these performances usually lead to police arrestsFootnote 68). In summary, L’Origine du Monde is a rich network of connections between images, meanings, facts, habits, social history, art, values, and wealth that is both dynamic and complex, resulting in an emergent presentation with all the features of multi-stability and criticality described earlier. There is an interesting contrast between the comforting formal puritanism, smoothness, and simplicity of Brancusi’s beginning of the world and the murky, embarrassing aspects of the world and its beginning in Courbet’s realistic, semi-pornographic picture. This pluralism of presentations defies the notion that representational art is imitation, or simplistic even, as re-presentation itself is an utterly complex and pluriform way of referring to something (the origin of the world, for instance).
4.2.8 The Critical States of Definition
A definition of art, such as those proposed by various authors, or such as the one I have discussed in this chapter, can be compared to a particular attractor in the complex state space of art, and different definitions correspond with different attractors. They are attractors in the sense that a variety of facts and ideas about art converge on a particular definition, which exhibits a certain resilience. That is, when perturbed by criticism, a particular attractor – that is, the definition one has chosen – will tend to respond with counterarguments that strengthen or restore it, demonstrating a form of theoretical resilience (any conviction, of whatever kind, functions as an attractor in this sense). However, the landscape of art is characterized by several such resistant attractors, that is, theoretically resilient definitions that have been self-maintaining over the course of art-theoretical discussions the last 50 years or so. That is, in terms of its definitions, art is itself a multi-stable and critical attractor landscape, that is, a state of definitional indeterminacy or deferred decision that respects the multiplicity of definitions. What integrates these definitions is the possibility of moving from one to the other, of transforming one’s perspective as well as the possibility of going back.
