Feldman’s Model of Art Criticism

Edmund Burke Feldman developed a model of art criticism that is still used by many people as a way to begin an understanding of individual art works. In fact as students you may recognise several of Feldman's stages of criticism in the advise given to you when you are asked to think and make notes about your relationship with other art. These are Feldman's basic steps:

Description: You are asked to make a list of the visual qualities of the work that are obvious and immediately perceived. Once you have exhausted the question; “What do you see in the artwork”? then you are to finally ask, “What else”? This "what else?" question is to ensure that you have included both the subject matter, especially in representational works, and the more abstract elements in nonrepresentational work.

Analysis: The focus is on the formal aspects of the work such as composition, tonal range, colour, texture, materials used etc. Questions asked are similar to, “Where is the focus or centre of interest?” "How do the formal elements, line, tone, colour, composition etc. direct or support this centre of interest?”

Interpretation: You are asked to propose ideas for possible meanings based on the evidence. You are allowed to bring your subjective feelings into this, and can project your emotions/feelings/intentions onto the work. The questions are often, “What do I think it means”? “What was the artist trying to communicate to me?", “What elements in the work support my ideas as to how the work is communicating to me?" and what does it make me feel?"

Judgment: Discuss the overall strengths/success of the work. "How powerfully has the work affected my feelings/understanding about something?" "Is it better or worse in communicating something to me than another work of art?"

Feldman's 'Becoming Human Through Art', presented this method for the criticism and evaluation of works of art and it became standard right across the western world of art education for many years. However like many things it comes with a lot of unacknowledged baggage and in Feldman's desire to be more rational and balanced perhaps more important things are missed, such as his acceptance of formalism as being central to a critical language. 

A quick search of methods of art criticism or art appreciation will give you a list similar to this: aesthetic, pragmatic, expressive, formalist, relativist, processional, imitation, ritual, cognition, mimetic, postmodern and communication theories. Feldman's theory is partly formal, (description and analysis) and partly expression (interpretation) and partly pragmatic and communication theory. However the theory that I'm personally most drawn to and the one that is the harshest critique of Feldman’s Model is the ritual theory of art.

In 'Art as Experience' John Dewey reminds us that there was a time when the arts were "part of a significant life of an organised community." and "the collective life that was manifested in war, worship, the forum, knew no division between what was characteristic of these places and operations, and the arts that brought colour, grace, and dignity, into them." Art (in this case the combined broad field of visual (painting, decorating, drawing etc.), aural (singing, rhythmic music making, chanting etc.) and anything else that helped communal integration into the life field, such as ingestion of certain foods or drugs, ways of clothing and moving the body, (costume, dance or breathing techniques) was part of "the rites and ceremonies in which the meaning of group life was consummated."

Dewey's definition of art as ritual, when applied to the current role of art in our society, is problematic, but if it was to be returned to, it does point to the need for a transformation of our approach to the arts, if they are to retain the sort of relevance or centrality that they used to possess. Dewey states that the "dislocations and divisions of modern life and thought" hinder art from achieving its true value. His writing is in effect a critique of modernity, and it suggests that if we were to begin evaluating whether an artwork was good or bad, we would have to think about how it celebrated the qualities found in common experience and how it helped us to come to terms with life as it is lived. As such it moves the attention away from individual works of art and begins to look at the events that surround the work or that are intimately associated with it. It also sets the scene for how those that encounter the art enter the ritual. For instance as I go up the steps of the National Gallery and enter its column framed portals, I feel as if I am leaving 'normal' life behind and am entering some sort of special place, whereby my engagement with the things I find in there will be made as part of a ritual.
The feminist aesthetician Heide Gottner-Abendroth, developed what have been called 'matriarchal aesthetics' and in doing so also called for a return, in some way, to premodern times, which she saw to be matriarchal and fundamentally ritualistic. Her "Nine Principles of Matriarchal Aesthetics" is a reflection on ways in which prehistoric art and mythology become a model for contemporary feminist art practice. She also looks at the aesthetics of what were previously considered not aesthetic, an issue I well remember Jill Morgan leading on when she came to Leeds. Back in the 1980s Jill had already turned Rochdale art gallery into a space known for its championing of working class, feminist and black artists and when she came to Leeds she brought with her fresh ways of appreciating other practices in such a way that the borders of what were then considered art, were rethought. I well remember a jam making project, whereby the jars of jam were exhibited as art and she asked the question, why is a painting seen as more important than a jar of home made jam?

Going back to Feldman's model of art criticism, how in the above context, would it have been applied to a jar of jam? On the one hand there are few formal visual qualities beyond colour and texture of jam, type of labelling etc. that can sit alongside the traditional formal qualities we associate with art, (composition, handling, colour, material properties and tonal range etc.) and as analysis is focused on these formal qualities, perhaps a critique would fail or be very slight. If art is made without the background reinforcement of a pervasive community belief that it provides meaning, audiences may well feel disappointed by such art. As Dewey points out, if art is isolated and decontextualised as well as cut off from any sense of community, then the results or benefits of its experience will be diminished. Heide Gottner-Abendroth would argue that art needs to reclaim its ritual roots, which might mean changing our relationship to art, and in order to do so we need to drop Kant's idea of aesthetics being centred on a 'disinterested contemplation'.* The fact that the jam is actually tasty might mean that it helps bring a community together and in doing so the yearly ritual of jam making fulfils a purpose, one that Heide Gottner-Abendroth would argue is far more important than the aesthetics of the judgement of beauty that Modernist art practices have concerned themselves with. 

As you return to the university it will soon be assessment time and critiques will once again become important, but remember it is always important to ask questions and one of them may well be, "How are we critiquing the critique?" 

References

Feldmann, E. B. (1970) Becoming Human Through Art, Aesthetic Experience in the School London: Prentice Hall

Ross, S. D. ed (1987) Art and its Significance New York: State University of New York Press. 

("Nine Principles of Matriarchal Aesthetics" is found in Ross's collection)

Rowles, S. (2013) Art Crits: 20 Questions - A Pocket Guide: Featuring Interviews with UK Fine Art Staff on the Topic of the Art Crit London: Q-Art London  (I was interviewed as part of the research for this book, so you will find my thoughts on how we were conducting critiques at the time recorded here)

Kant, I. (1987) The Critique of Judgment London: Hackett

* Kant's Critique of Judgment begins with an account of beauty. The initial issue is: what kind of judgment is it that results in our saying, for example, ‘That is a beautiful sunset’. Kant argues that such aesthetic judgments (or ‘judgments of taste’) should be disinterested, meaning that we take pleasure in something because we judge it beautiful, rather than judging it beautiful because we find it pleasurable.

See also:

Strategies and processes 

How other disciplines critique themselves: Tim Ingold on Anthropology 

The mark of ritual

Aesthetics Today An interesting blog by Professor Tom Leddy, that comments on all things to do with aesthetics. 

Drawing and politics part three

For many years I have kept an eye on what Sue Coe is doing, she is an artist who uses her image making skills to highlight various aspects of society's ills, as well as making direct political interventions based on her strongly held beliefs. Sue Coe has campaigned for animal rights for many years, both by making imagery and by taking direct action. She uses traditional print and drawing techniques and sees herself belonging to a tradition that includes Goya, Hogarth and Kollwitz.

Sue Coe

Coe’s art speaks of the socially oppressed, the disenfranchised and outcast, and addresses everyone, not just the art going public. Her images arrive out of the struggle to balance her politics with a humanist art that searches for a deeper meaning, something difficult to reconcile, especially when working directly with a political group, because a situation can arise which can often be seen by outsiders as simply instrumental to the Marxist ‘class struggle’ and by insiders as a failure to fully communicate a political stance as laid out in a manifesto or other political tract.

Sue Coe: Factory farm

I have often remarked on that barrier that stands between fine art and illustration. Sue Coe is an artist that straddles the two disciplines and asks questions as to the relative purpose of them. The censorious nature of commercial illustration forced Coe to make compromises when she tried to get her images into what she saw as relevant publications. She was interested in reaching a much wider audience than the traditional art gallery going one and was therefore forced to see if she could use the illustrational route as a way into the pages of popular publications. For years she used editorial work to make a living, but art directors tended to think of her as a kind of exotic outsider who had 'working-class rage’. Within a fine art context she was seen as merely an illustrator. The reality is that she uses a visual vocabulary rooted in art history. "Like Goya and the seventeenth-century etcher Jacques Callot she isolated vignettes of horror; like Daumier and Grosz she made totems out of the commonplace; and like Rivera and Orozco she froze the historical moment".(Heller, 1996)

During the 1980s Sue Coe became suddenly trendy and as the art world became 'politically conscious', (something it sometimes does, more as a fashion statement I sometimes feel), she was picked out as a rising star. An art world that she herself described thus, ‘The art world is a zipped-up body bag of what they call culture.’ (So I'm sure she was very aware of how fickle the art world's embrace can be). During this time she exhibited a huge 20 foot wide image, a brutal picture of a gang rape called 'Woman Walks into Bar – Is Raped by 4 Men on the Pool Table – While 20 Watch'. Critics during this time equated her with Beckmann, Posada and Siqueiros and the format of 'Woman walks into a bar' is clearly a reflection on the expressionist compositions of Max Beckmann. In 1987, Art News put her on its cover. and in 1994, she was honoured with a retrospective at Washington’s Hirshorn Museum. You can read about her early career here in an excellent Eye Magazine article. Since that time her art world career has been one of confusing indifference and sudden moments of interest, as the fickle finger of art fame has moved on to point in other directions.

Sue Coe

Most contemporary Fine Art practitioners tend to use a range of media to get their ideas across. Film and video are however usually the media of choice when it comes to working in an area that is politically focused. What this means is that the sub sets of skills required are different and when you look at an artist's work in detail you will notice that other people have to be involved in the production. An artist that has had a long involvement in this area is Harun Farocki.

Serious Games III: Immersion: Harun Farocki

For the video installation Immersion Farocki visited a workshop organised by the Institute for Creative Technologies, a research centre for virtual reality and computer-simulations. One of their projects concerns the development of a therapy for war-veterans suffering from Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Farocki is interested in the use of virtual realities and games in the recruting, training and also therapy for soldiers. Farocki explores the connection between virtual reality and the military – how the fictional scenarios of computer games are used both in the training of U.S. troops prior to their deployment in combat zones, and in psychological care for troops suffering battlefield trauma upon their return. In order for the work to be made a series of production stages and roles were needed, for instance, Harun Farocki was the director and scriptwriter, Matthias Rajmann conducted the research, Max Riemann was the editor working alongside Farocki, Ingo Kratisch was the cinematographer and Matthias Rajmann was in charge of sound.

'I Thought they were convicts' is centred around grainy surveillance footage from a maximum-security prison which captures the dramatic moment when an inmate is shot dead by guards. The shooting of William Martinez was one of many similar incidents at California State Prison, which became notorious for its brutal conditions. Farocki’s film focuses on the investigation into the shootings, revealing that guards intentionally set up fights between prisoners, allowing them to escalate before interceding with live ammunition. I'm interested in this work because of the way that drawing is used, the prison footage being juxtaposed with computer-generated drawings based on the movements of supermarket shoppers. In this way Farocki explores the power relationship between the observer and the observed, drawing parallels between the role of surveillance in the lives of prisoners and those of everyday shoppers.

I thought they were convicts: Harun Farocki

Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades: Harun Farocki

Workers Leaving the Factory in Eleven Decades, is displayed on twelve monitors simultaneously. When it comes to social conflict, the show place 'in front of a factory', is very significant; when it comes to a private life of a film's character, which really only begins after work, the factory is relegated to the background. In Fritz Langs Clash by Night (1952), you see Marilyn Monroe on the assembly line, coming out of the factory, and hear her talking about it. A movie star working in a factory evokes associations of a fairy tale in which a princess must work before she attains her true calling. What Farocki is pointing to here is that factories and the whole subject of labour are often relegated to the fringes of film history.

Deep Play: Harun Farocki

Deep Play is made up of various perspectives on the final of the 2006 World Cup. We see the 'clean feed', the television networks’ raw material, as well as individual players on both teams in close ups alongside abstract computer-generated representations of the flow of play. These drawings help classify and assess what's going on because they are used by trusted experts to analyse and evaluate all quantifiable events. Above all, what we experience is how the laboratory of football is able to exhibit the most advanced technology in the production and presentation of moving images. We see how eerily close the wishes of the consumers, the trainers and the police really are to each other. Just as they are in real life. Drawing in all these cases is woven seamlessly into the artwork, and it is common now to see drawing featuring as just one way amongst several others to carry information within complex communication packages. 

Kara Walker: Endless Conundrum

Old technologies can still be made relevant, again it is context that reveals the political position taken by the work. Walker has used black paper cut-outs, which are usually fixed directly onto the gallery walls, since the early 1990s. Silhouette art peaked in popularity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and Walker has re-appropriated the style to create imagery that is often shocking and uncomfortable, addressing issues of race and gender, power and sexuality. Walker examines the influence of African tribal art on Modern artists, as well as looking at the wider appropriation of black creativity in Western art and culture. 

Nancy Spero

Nancy Spero was making art alongside the beginnings of the Women’s Movement in the 1960s. Her large scale images were often emotional reactions to war as well as responses to emerging feminist issues. She rejected the use of paint on canvas as it was synonymous with misogynistic male painters. Instead she opted for a variety of drawing materials to create intense, raw, and illustrative political works. Of her 'War' series of images she stated,  “ With the War Paintings, I had to figure out how to paint ‘manifestos’ against the war and the violence. From 1966–70 I worked fast and furiously. No more labouring over oil paint and canvas. I used gouache, watercolours, drawing inks, and paper.” It is interesting to remember how political the use of oil paint was and I could argue still is. One of the reasons this blog is about drawing rather than painting, is that painting is still saddled with many of its old associations with male privilege, media hierarchy, consumerist values and art world prejudice. Drawing hopefully escapes some of these associations because it is seen as less formal, is not as gendered, is more about thinking through ideas and is less collectable because works on paper have never been valued as highly as works on canvas.  

Theatre Gates: Civil Tapestry (Dirty Yellow) 

Using unusual materials to make your artwork can be a powerful way of engaging with history. A decommissioned fire hose is used to make this work, its formal arrangement, recalling American abstract art of the early 1960s, such as the minimalist abstractions made by Frank Stella. However, Gates’s work is actually about the violent hosing of civil-rights demonstrators by police in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963. Gates uses money raised from the sale of his works to help in the regeneration of deprived neighbourhoods. He works with architects, craftspeople, and unemployed labourers, buying and renovating derelict properties. Salvaged materials from the buildings are then used by him to create new artworks, in this way ensuring that the process is as important as the products. It is perhaps the engagement with process that is becoming the most important aspect of current politically motivated art practice. 

The New York City artist Tatyana Fazlalizadeh, has been drawing portraits of women that have suffered street harassment. The posters are put up in the places where the harassment happened, obviously hoping to embarrass the harassers but also making people aware that there is a powerful movement engaged with making sure that social customs and behaviours are both challenged and changed. 

If you want to know more about art and activism the link to this booklet is a good starting point. Why artistic activism? 

Drawing and politics part one

Drawing and politics part two

Drawing and politics part four

Drawing and sexual politics

Social sculpture

John Gerrard

Drawing with alternative materials

Drawing with unusual materials