Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 5 Number 3, December 2004
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Davies, David. Art as performance. Malden, Oxford and Victoria: Blackwell Press, 2004. 278 pp, ISBN 1 - 4051 - 1667 - 6 (pbk.: akl. Paper)
Reviewed by
McMaster University, Canada
This very impressive work on the performative constitution of ontological aesthetics by David Davies is a critical triumph constituted by entertaining anecdotes, sound arguments, and an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of the hermeneutical dimensions of literary and art theory. Davies’ successful critique of contextualism never fails to brilliantly embody his notion of performativity as an interpersonally generative experience in which there is a fusion between artwork and interlocutor, and thus really does “better equip” a reader with the rhetorical tools to actually entertain “the role that context of creation plays in . . .our modal intuition about . . . the modes of artistic value” (X-XI). Thinking of art as performance not only allows one to develop a broader conception of being, Davies suggests, but it also “provid[es] a framework for resolving many central questions in the philosophy of the arts” (xi), simply because, “without the appropriate intentional use of an artistic medium, there is no articulation of an artistic statement and therefore no artwork” (246). Artworks, qua performances, “while they are not itself the work,” Davies reminds us, are nonetheless still constitutive of the “focus of our appreciative interest” artworks in general (151).
The wonderful discussion of Tom Wolfe’s infamous comment on the incorrigibility of postmodern artworks is a great place for Davies to start his critique of most “common-sense” theories of art, which he see inclusively as having ontological, epistemological and axiological dimensions, namely by way of providing empiricist assumptions about the appreciation and value of artworks as objects. As “ontological conclusions licensed by the pragmatic constraint . . . depend upon the epistemological premises with which it is conjoined,” we soon learn, such “common sense” theories are tautologically inefficient for the purpose of building any sort of objective mode of appreciation (23). An “artistic medium is a necessary link between an artist and receiver,” Davies argues, “because it mediates between the manifest properties of the vehicle and the artistic statement articulated through that vehicle. It is that in virtue of which certain of the manifest properties of the vehicle count as artistic properties and contribute to the articulation of an artistic statement” (245). In other words, artists consciously operate by reference to certain culturally presumed understandings for his or her manipulations of a vehicular medium, at least if it is to count as an articulation of an artistic statement. Therefore, any “individual’s manipulation of a vehicular medium can serve to specify the focus of appreciation of an artwork only if the artist is guided in her activity by her beliefs about shared understandings in virtue of which what she is doing articulates a particular artistic statement -- that is only if she is working in an artistic medium” (246).
On the other hand, aesthetic empiricism suffers as a generalised theory of critique/ recognition because of its overwhelming tendency to be too “heuristic,” Davies suggests (133). For example, Currie “build[s] the heuristic path into the individuation and identity of artworks,” Davies argues, and this presents a serious problem” (133). Thus, aesthetic empiricism in its purest form is the “thesis that the focus of appreciation is what we may term the ‘manifest work’ -- an entity that comprises only properties available to a receiver in an immediate perceptual encounter with an object or an event that realizes the work” (26-27). This is another way of saying that simply following precedent apropos artwork appreciation, provides nothing to the artist-audience relationship that, after all, still dictates what criteria is constitutive of artistic performativity.
This insightful and engaging rejection of aesthetic empiricism, moreover, soon grows into an outright epistemological critique of common-sense ontology, as well as a critique of the aesthetic empiricist theories of appreciation. For example, Davies’ sees only a “refinement” of empiricist axiology in Levinson’s work; a fascinating, if ineffective, pairing of epistemological relevance and anti-empiricist epistemology in the name of formulating an “enlightened empiricism” (255). Such enlightened empiricism, however, is ontologically reducible on hermeneutical grounds, for an artwork’s (rather than an artist’s) achievement ultimately is a function of an audience’s (culturally determined) recognition of it. Accordingly, there must be “a principled connection between the artist’s manipulative intentions in the actual world and the interpretive norms that must be obtained in any possible world in which her work exists,” Davies suggests, regardless of however “mistaken the artist may be about the specific interpretive norms obtaining in the community of receivers to which her work is addressed, she can be ascribed an overriding intention that her work be understood according to the norms of that particular community” (162). In short, any pivotal commonality in our contemporary public sphere between postmodern performance artworks, and those fashioned in the Renaissance, requires that ontological pluralism be superseded.
Besides, ontological pluralism has been the rule for the past three
decades, Davies argues, mostly because critics simply have tweaked the
Wollheimian model of artworks in order to account for the structural role of
chance or “provenance” in artworks, even though doing so often makes little
ontological sense (126). For example, whereas Currie’s (1989) pioneering work
on the ontology of art coherently argues that to be legitimately comparable
artworks must belong to a single and relatively respectable ontological
category, his action-type hypothesis (ATH) is based on the notion that, if
artworks are to be at all comparable, they must still be viewed as
products of processes, rather than as dialectically generative processes,
themselves.
In contrast, Davies argues that “artworks are doings of a particular kind,” because “[t]o appreciate a work is to appreciate what was done” in it performatively (174). This is because one’s sense of a work as a “particular doing” explicitly individuates the conditions of the action-token, so that we have a tendency to “arrive at a conception of the type of thing we are appreciating in appreciating the token action in question” (175). Accordingly, “performances are what I term ‘happenings’ or ‘doings,” Davies explains, they are “particular occurrences that might have transpired otherwise. Happenings, I shall argue, are required to make sense of much of our modal talk about events in general, and artistic performances, as happenings, have the properties required to make sense of the work relativity of our modal judgements about artworks” (116). This is because any aesthetic theory associated with the relativity of contextualism, in fact, “fails to reflect the fact that aspects of provenance bear upon our modal judgments with a variable force that reflects our overall sense of what is to be appreciated in a given work” (263).
It is important to note that Davies’ delicate balancing act between on the one hand, the relativity of contextualism, and on the other hand, the dramaturgical nature of hermeneutics, is possible only because of the acute coherence of his aesthetic genealogy. This is only proper, we soon realize, because one’s experience of any artwork, “must be properly grounded in experienced qualities of the work so that a proper characterization of the experience in question cannot be given without referring to the details of the work” (Davies 255). Artworks should be conceived of as a “performances themselves,” which is to say as “a moment in the unfolding of a possible work” (X). Accordingly, Davies coins the term, “focus of appreciation,” to refer to “that which, as the outcome or product of a generative performance on the part of one or more individuals, is relevant to the appreciation of the artwork brought into existence through that performance” (26).
Ultimately, an artwork, then, is a performance whereby a focus of appreciation is specified. And yet, the gaze is also teleologically performative, for to specify a focus is both to make a focus specific, and to make it intersubjectively available. “The focus specified through a generative performance completes the performance in three senses,” we are told, “first, the thing whose specification is the aim of the performance, this being what animates and motivates the performance. It is also the thing whose specification, when accomplished, marks one of the temporal boundaries of the performance identified with the work. Third, and perhaps most significant, as the product of the performance it is central to our appreciation of the performance construed as a doing which achieves something determinate” (151). Therefore, Davies’ performance theory takes the articulative intentions that guide an artist’s manipulations of the vehicular medium to be constitutive properties of the work assuming that “an agent is rightly described as acting with certain intentions when that agent’s behaviour is rightly explained through the ascription to that agent of appropriate intentionally characterized mental states, where the latter include, but are not exhausted by, beliefs, desires, hopes, fears and wishes” (163).
In conclusion, Davies brilliantly argues that serious aesthetic critiques must conceptualise artworks as performances, whereby one or more individuals articulate an artistic statement by working in an artistic medium when manipulating an artistic medium, and that the notion of performance is so important because “one kind of legitimate interest in any artwork takes the work to be, or be representative of, a performance which constitutes some sort of achievement. While this is not the only legitimate interest in an artwork, it is an interest that grounds much of our discourse about art, and is central to discourse about the self-referential and self-reflexive art of the late twentieth century [i.e. postmodernism]” (198). Enough said.