The artist, representation, and reality

Introduction

There is an intuition that is worth putting to the test: that the artist does not create reality from nothing, but receives, contemplates, transforms and manifests aspects of a preexisting reality. The intuition consists of a negative part — the artist does not create from nothing — and a positive part — the artist receives and re-manifests the real —. The first is firm; the second requires examination, because there is a class of art that seems to belie it: abstract art.

1. The thesis and its two parts

The negative part is the most solid. The artist does not produce the being of things from nothing; he always operates upon received matter and experience. The distinction between being (esse) and form makes this precise: only being is created ex nihilo; the artist produces new form in given matter. This distinction is treated in Creating, making, and imitating nature.

The positive part is more vulnerable: it holds that the artist receives something from reality, contemplates it, interprets it, reorganizes it and manifests it through a medium. Describing the artist this way amounts to describing, at bottom, the representational mode of art. And not all art is representational.

2. The objections

The positive part attracts serious objections. Plato would deny that the artist receives “reality”: he receives appearance (φάντασμα), three degrees from the truth (Republic X). The expressive theory (Croce, Collingwood, Tolstoy) inverts the direction: the artist expresses the inner, he does not receive the outer. Formalism (Bell, Hanslick) holds that pure form refers to no external reality: music represents nothing. Conceptual art (Duchamp, Kosuth) neither “transforms” nor “manifests through a medium”: the readymade remains intact and the idea is the art. Fiction represents the nonexistent: the dragon does not preexist. And the productive imagination (Kant) produces forms that do not derive from any determinate perception.

All these objections point to the same thing: the positive part describes one mode of art, not art in general. Presenting it as a universal law would be false; as a description of the only thing art does, also false.

3. The counterexample of abstract art

The most difficult case is abstract art, because its own founders denied that they were representing something. Kandinsky holds in Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1911) that art expresses “inner necessity” and spiritual content, not objects. Malevich coined the term “non-objective” (bespredmetnoe) and spoke of the “zero of form” (From Cubism and Futurism to Suprematism, 1916): Suprematism is “art of pure feeling, with no interest in representing the visible world”. Mondrian, with Neoplasticism, reduces painting to line and primary color in order to manifest “universal harmony”, not an object.

If “representing” means referring to a sensible object, abstract art represents nothing. The thesis, in its naive formulation, fails here.

4. The pluralist reformulation

The failure requires reformulating the thesis, not abandoning it. The relation between art and reality is not one, but plural. Art can represent (referring to objects, relations or structures), express (manifesting states), evoke (occasioning experiences), symbolize (referring to concepts) or produce form (constructing forms without a sensible referent). “Representing” is one of those modes, not the only one. The positive thesis is only valid for the first, and even within it needs to be made precise: what the artist receives is not “reality” in bulk, but forms — intelligible aspects — by way of cognition.

5. Abstract art as reference of another order

The decisive point, which the objections do not reach, is the following. The distinction between “representing” and “producing form without a referent” presupposes that the only possible referent is the sensible object. That presupposition is the one to be discussed.

It can be maintained that abstraction does not consist in lacking a referent, but in referring to a referent of another order. Abstract art can refer to abstract forms of ideas and feelings that are given by reality itself: Mondrian’s harmony, Kandinsky’s “inner necessity” or Malevich’s “pure feeling” are not arbitrary inventions, but structures, ideas and affects that belong to the real, even without being sensible objects.

If this is so, the abstract artist functions in his own way as one who receives and re-produces: his “input signal” is not an object, but an ideal or affective form. Abstraction does not abandon reality; it shifts levels within it: from object to structure, from appearance to idea, from fact to feeling.

Still, that intuition needs a nuance. Not all abstract art “represents” a real idea or feeling: it can degenerate into empty formalism or mere effect. The thesis does not claim that all abstract art is referential; it claims that abstraction can be, and that denying it all referent in advance is to confuse the “non-objective” with the “without-reality”.

6. The reformulated thesis

The formulation that survives the examination is the following.

The negative part is universal: the artist does not create being from nothing, but always operates ex aliquo — upon received matter and experience —, never ex nihilo. The positive part is restricted to the representational mode: the artist receives forms through cognition, contemplates them, interprets them and re-produces them in a medium, preserving the universal and adding new form. And an extended part covers the abstract: even abstract art can be referential, when its referent is an abstract form — idea, feeling, structure — given by reality itself.

From all this results a sentence: the artist is an active intellect that receives form — sensible or abstract — from the real and re-produces it in a new matter. He is neither a creator from nothing nor a copyist of appearance; he is the one who receives the form of the real and gives it back transformed.

Conclusion

The initial thesis survives in its negative part (not creating being), the positive part is restricted (to the representational mode), and it is enriched by the extension to abstract art (the reference to ideal and affective forms). It should not be asserted that all art represents, nor that abstract art lacks a referent in principle. The relation between art and reality is plural: representation is one of its modes, and abstraction can be another, not its negation.