User:ClareParlett/sandbox/Approaches to Knowledge/Seminar Group 10/Truth and Arts

This is for the UCL BASc Approaches to Knowledge Course: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/basc/current/core/atk. This page is for one team in Seminar 11 to work on their content for the UCL Wiki book for the end of the term and will be populated over the period 19/11/2018 - 17/12/2018. It has been created by Clare Lewis who is the seminar leader. See https://www.ucl.ac.uk/basc/people/academic-staff/clare-lewis. Please do not delete this page. Contents under creation here.

Introduction

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, Art [ɑːt] is "the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power." From a first look at what defines Art - that is, imagination and creativity-, and what defines Truth - an accordance with reality-, the two notions seem to oppose each other. As a result, two types of truth emerge: conceptual and aesthetic truth, and scientific and rational truth which "has had the dominant criterion" in England.

Mimesis

Questions whether or not truth and art oppose each other arose in ancient philosophy with Plato and Aristotle. Both argue that Art is a mimesis, an imitative representation of the real world.

Aristotle : art reflects a universal truth

Art is the representation of a possible, credible truth; it is reality's "pseudo-double". Tragedies, for instance, portray idealized, yet incarnated, real-life sentiments, situations and characters in which the spectators can project themselves and their own empiric experiences by identification. Behind the particular in poetry lies a premise of "universal truth". Art is thereon a form of education, it aims to achieve catharsis as "we delight to view [its] most realistic representation of [all objects]".

Plato: art is a purely visual representation

However, in his Republic, Plato supported the idea that art is an imitation of "looks", distancing humanity from Truth. Through Socrates' words, he argues that poets are "imitators of images of excellence and of the other things that they 'create', and do not lay hold on truth" [600e]. Poets, as much as painters, create images of things they are ignorant of, for people who are equally as ignorant: "The creator of the phantom, the imitator, we say, knows nothing of the reality but only the appearance."[601b] This is further linked to his theory that the world “…as we experience it, is an illusion, a collection of mere appearances like reflections in a mirror or shadows on a wall.” He argues that it is not possible to represent an object without having knowledge of it, but that this knowledge is only based on immediate and superficial, "admitted looks". of that object Hence, Plato refuses to distinguish art from sophistry, and asserts that only philosophers can see the true essence of objects. He uses the allegory of the cave to sustain his theory: Truth lies in the universal “visual form”, the eidos, of a given object, which cannot be accessed through mere physical appearances. "Art stands aside from philosophy and science insofar as artworks are made less to explain the mysteries of existence than to invoke them."

Magritte's La Trahison des Images as an example

Such a conception of Truth and Art can be seen in Magritte's La Trahison des Images (The Treachery of Images): the painting shows the image of a pipe, with a legend: this is not a pipe. This legend underlines the idea that images fool our senses: what we see is not a pipe but paint applied in a way that it creates the illusion of the presence of the object.

Art's representation of essence

Hegel' Lectures on Aesthetics (1835)

Hegel argues in his Aesthetics that it is "in the essence of essence to appear". In his thesis, Hegel recuses the theory of mimesis. He argues that, although "Art will always remain inferior to nature", it should not be considered as a mere imitation, as it particularizes and conceptualizes the idea of the object it depicts, which, without an artistic figuration, would stay abstract and obscure. As the incarnation of a reference model, it signs a sort of "act of presence".

Realism

Gustave Courbet, A Burial in Ornans, Musée d'Orsay, 1849-1850

Such a claim, that artistic creation can be inherently truthful, is found in literary and artistic realism. Stendhal in The Red and The Black writes, “a novel is a mirror carried along a high road. At one moment it reflects to your vision the azure skies, at another the mire of the puddles at your feet...". He intended to take the study of reality as the basis for fiction and create novels that showed truth. At the same time, Honoré de Balzac was writing his Comédie Humaine, a series of novels aiming at showing life in its intimacy and reality. He writes: "French society was to be the story, I was only to be the secretary". In the same fashion, Courbet's realism aims at being truthful to reality and real-life events. L'Enterrement à Ornans serves as a manifesto of his style: the faces are precise, realistic portraits, and the subject itself is taken from the everyday life of real people: a funeral in a country-side village. Artists of realism, painters or writers, turned their back to allegories and heroism and aimed at representing life truthfully.

Art for art's sake

Aestheticism (also known as aesthetic movement) is "a literary and artistic movement which flourished in England in the 1870s, devoted to ‘art for art's sake’ and rejecting the notion that art should have a social, didactic or moral purpose. The slogan 'Art for art’s sake' was translated from the French l’art pour l’art. The poetic group of Le Parnasse defends these ideals: their poetry aims at virtuosity, formal perfection and self-sufficiency. Charles Baudelaire writes in l'Art Romantique: "Poetry (...) has no other purpose than itself."

The normative Truth of Art: truth as a social consensus

Pierre Bourdieu in La Distinction explains how different social classes respond to culture. The upper classes constitute what Bourdieu calls a "cultural nobility". They dictate what is legitimate culture, what is good taste and bad taste, what is art and what is not. The lower classes' culture is then considered as illegitimate. Therefore this cultural nobility creates a truth for society to live in, defining the limits of general culture and good taste and establishing them as objective truths. The rest of society conforms to these normative truths created by ruling classes, even as it changes through time and trends. The notion of what is true art, while it may first appear obvious and objective as a sort of consensual truth, is in fact constructed.

Art engagé

The French expression art engagé is used to qualify an artistic practice defending a political or social cause. Here, art is used as a medium to depict the artists' vision of truth on political matters. For example, during the First World War, artists such as painters, sculptors and printmakers, that took part in the military were affected by the horrors of war. Once it ended, artists through "Europe, Russia and the United States"decided to denounce the atrocities of the war and the trenches. Such artists are for example Ludwig Meidnerand Otto Dix.

Otto Dix

Otto Dix specifically conveyed his experiences through Expressionism. When the First World War started, he volunteered for the German Army and took part in various battles such as the Battle of the Sommeand the German Spring Offensive. After being discharged from service in 1918, he started documenting his experiences through a portfolio of fifty etchings called "Der Krieg", "The War" in German, and in The War Triptych, painted from 1929-1932.