The search for the real

I have been thinking about Hans Hoffman recently.  A second hand copy of his 'Search for the real and other essays' was going cheap and for a moment I thought about buying, but decided no, because it brought back too many memories. 

Hans Hoffman

Plato said that art imitates life and that the reality of life itself is something we can never actually perceive, all we actually experience is something akin to shadows cast by the light of a fire on the walls of a cave. He stated that there existed a world of true perfect forms, and that they lay behind what we experience as everyday reality. A work of art is therefore according to Plato, a copy of a degenerate copy of a perfect form. It is therefore even more of an illusion than ordinary experience.

This stinging rebuke has been problematic for many generations of artists and over the course of time, various artists at different times, have set out to disprove him. Hoffman was one of them.

Hans Hoffman was very influential on the teaching of drawing and painting when I began my own teaching career. The preservation of 'life' in an image was deemed vital to a painting or drawing's success and there were various approaches to this, mostly it seemed at the time to do with 'formal' principles and how they could be used to generate this life force. Hoffman had this to say; "The creative process lies not in imitating, but in paralleling nature; translating the impulse received from nature into the medium of expression, thus vitalising this medium. The picture should be alive, the statue should be alive and every work of art should be alive." 

A drawing done in one of Hoffman's classes

The key to 'reading' a drawing of this sort was to watch both sides of a line. As you did your eyes/ brain would 'tick-tock', into surrounding space and back into the mass of the form. Mass and space perception being made by the visual events that made up the image. The crime was to shade it all in. 

The 'finishing' of a drawing, as above, was seen as killing it off and making it lifeless. It was in Plato's terms an imitation, and as such could never live up to the reality of the model. You can see the leg and the back are rendered 'realistically', but the experience of the perception of the figure, was lost in the attempt to render the figure as something separate from the experience. Hoffman's teaching was of its time and an essential element in the understanding of how abstract expressionism could be applied to direct perceptual experience. It is 2020 now and not the early 1970s when I first experienced Hoffman's influence on art education, a time when it was already somewhat dated. I don't need to draw in the way Hoffman suggests, but I still carry the lesson in my head, experience is about relationships and how they constantly change, about events, not separate things. 

Over the last few years I've thought a lot about what a big mistake it is to categorise difference. Art is of course part of life, but so are humans part of nature. The old nature / culture divide is in fact an illusion. We can't separate ourselves out from nature because we are nature. We can't separate art out from nature, in exactly the same way we can't separate a bird's song or a bird's nest from nature. The song and the nest are inseparable from the nature of the bird. What is perhaps more interesting is the dialogue the bird is having with bits of stick, old feathers and some dog hairs. This is the bird's reality, and we could spend more time trying to empathise with it. 

Words as nouns associate themselves with things. A dog, a man, a stone, a tree, and because of this we have a tendency to think that there are such things as dogs, men, stones and trees. However what we are really thinking about are sets of categories as set up by words. Going back to Plato, his 'ideal' I would argue was a problem with nouns. He thought there was an ideal 'horse', but this was, I would argue, because words work like that, every noun is in fact an 'ideal'. We learn that the word 'horse' stands for lots of different creatures that can be dappled, black, white, small, aged, wild or domesticated. However they are also events that take place between plants, landscapes and ecological systems; events that can also combine with the events that humans take part in. But nouns separate one thing from another and this makes us think all things are separate from each other. 

I am English, you are Dutch. I am male, you are female. I am white you are black. I am a Remainer, you are a Brexiteer. And so it goes. I am also over 50% bacteria, a living repository for a hosted colony that I need to keep replenished by engaging in a close association with my environment. 

Reality is another word, to search for it suggests that it can be picked out as separate from everything else. If there were no words we would simply live in the now and die in it and be reconstituted in it; one event, morphing into another, into another. 

Think of these words as links not things, as events in chains that join events, that sit alongside all those smells and tastes and sounds and inner body feelings, entering and exiting the event of you today and not as proofs or understandings or worst of all, as any form of 'reality'. 

Between one thing and another

See also:

Object orientated ontology and drawing
A line of disjuncture
Illusion
Mathematics and rightness Includes a reflection on the Jacob Kramer red spot, meant to 'tick-tock' between squareness and circularity. 

Philip Guston and alien phenomenology

Steve Bell: Boris Johnson

In times of political turmoil artists often turn to the absurd to communicate their obvious dismay as to what is happening around them. Steve Bell has seen Boris Johnson as an arse, and back in the 1970s Philip Guston saw Richard Nixon as a prick and ballsack. For Guston in particular his use of caricature was part of an ongoing transformation of his work as he moved from being an abstract expressionist to being an artist that dealt with harsh uncompromising imagery, imagery that was as much a reflection of popular culture, as an awareness that if as an artist you had to match up to one of the greats of the past, Goya was as powerful as Velasquez. 

Untitled (1971), Philip Guston

Untitled (Poor Richard) (1971), Philip Guston. 

Philip Guston: Richard Nixon

From the Richard Nixon series 1971-74

The Richard Nixon drawings helped Guston to develop an approach to drawing that highlighted the raw absurd nature of life. He was also able to use the processes of caricature that he used to reinvent Nixon as an image, on other not always human objects, such as sticking plasters, shoes and coats. A severe distortion of human forms, could also be applied to non-human forms, giving to each subject a new 'reality' or 'attention' that ensured that these objects were no longer just 'background' details to a human drama but significant 'players' in their own right. 

Philip Guston 1980

The smoke from the cigarette is just as powerful as the fingers, which are as weighty in this image as sticking plasters or an ear or an eye. A coat and some shoes stand for an absent human and in doing so they are just as important in terms of image hierarchy as a human subject. This is where Guston's importance lies. He is able to transcend the human centred preoccupation of the cartoonist's imagery and in applying these conventions to non-human forms, is able to show us our own closed circuit of anthropomorphism, to be what it is, a problematic navel gazing, that has led to the dangers of climate change and species destruction. 

Philip Guston

A dismembered head, a green bottle, a light bulb, all inhabit the same space and all have a presence in this image that suggests that as actants (Bruno Latour's term) they all have equal possibilities, each one open to speculative narratives that may or may not entangle the others in their narrative gravity. These images of Guston's are perfect illustrations of what Ian Bogost calls Alien Phenomenology, a philosophy in which nothing exists any more or less than anything else, in which humans are elements but not the sole or even primary elements of philosophical interest. A position that has at times been called a flat ontology. 

This post is one of a series that begins to collect together ideas related to object orientated ontology, agential realism, speculative materialism, and other ways to give more weight to things that sit outside human centred disciplines. Gradually these posts will be used to put together a hopefully coherent philosophy of drawing as material thinking. 

In essence, other things have as much impact about what goes on as we do. We cannot but be entangled in the influence fields of other things in order to be part of the events that happen in our local timeframe. We have though in the past tended to not recognise the role that all these other actants have and we have instead prioritised the human (and often just one sort of human; white, male, middle class European) to the exclusion of everything else.  

See also:

Object orientated ontology and drawing 

An interesting dictionary of OOO terms 
How OOO is effecting contemporary art practice 
Underground comics and art

The Beano and Viz Hardeep Pandhal 

Narrative drawing

Kaws and Disney

Drawing and humour

Chad McCail 

The politics of comic art Consequences of political action

Richard McGuire's 'Here' 

Key texts

Barad, K (2007) Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning New York: Duke University Press 

Bennett, J (2010) Vibrant Matter: A political ecology of things New York: Duke University Press

Bogost, I. (2012). Alien Phenomenology. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press

Bryant, L, R. (2011) The democracy of objects Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press

Harman, G. (2011). The Quadruple Object. United Kingdom: Zero Books

Latour, B (2017) Facing Gaia London: Polity Press
Latour, B. (1999) Pandora’s Hope Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Press

Morton, T. (2013) Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press