International Association for Aesthetics

Association Internationale d’Esthétique

Editor: Richard Woodfield

International
Yearbook
Of
Aesthetics
- Aesthetics in Practice -

Volume 4
2000

1
INTERNATIONAL YEARBOOK OF AESTHETICS
Contents Volume 2 1998

Editorial ……………………………………………………………………………………………… 3

Articles:

Why Don’t Art Historians Attend Aesthetics Conferences? ….……………………………. 4

James Elkins
Poetics of the Retrospective Future- Japanese Time Sensibility ……….………………… 10
Ken-ichi Sasaki
Balinese Musicians’ Assessments of Recorded Performances ..…………………………... 22
Stephen Davies
Realisation in Aesthetic Education ………………………...…………..…........................... 43
Nick McDoo

Project The Persistence of Painting:

Preliminary Premisses ……………………………………………………………………………… 60

Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager
Painterly Perception ………………………………………………………………………………… 63
Jeroen Stumpel
Abstaction in Art ……………………………………………………………………………………. 66
Benoit Hermans
Anachronism ………………………………………………………………………………………… 69
Carel Blotekamp
Painterly Beliefs …………………………………………………………………………………….. 72
Luc Tuymans
Statements on the Status of Painting …………………………………………………………. 74
Frank Reijnders
Reflecive Figurations ………………………………………………………………………………. 76
Ferdinand van Dieten

Discussion …………………………………………………………………………………………… 80

2
 International Yearbook of Aesthetics
Editorial: Volume 4, 2000

This fourth issue of the Yearbook is much more substantial than it might seem to
be from its table of contents. The contribution on The Persistence of Painting from
Annette Balkema and Henk Slager is virtually an issue of Lier en Boog in miniature
and I am very grateful to Annette and Henk for the amount of time and effort that
they have put into collecting the materials together. If their contribution includes
visual imagery, Stephen Davies’ essay includes brief snatches of Balinese music.
Perhaps future issues of the Yearbook might extend themselves in the use of non-
textual sources.

The topic for the Yearbook arose out of problems that probably crop up around the
world wherever aesthetics is being taught to non-philosophers. Practitioners of all
stripes have reservations about the value of teaching the subject. Those
practitioners vary from academic art historians and literary critics to artists and
musicians. I took the bull by the horns in inviting James Elkins to make his
contribution, knowing the kinds of feelings that art historians have on the subject.
The merit of his piece is that it attempts to identify that problem. I invited Annette
and Henk because of the sterling work that they have accomplished with Lier en
Book in taking practitioner issues into the domain of aesthetics. I remembered
hearing Nicholas McAdoo’s paper at a conference of the British Society of Aesthetics
I organised many years ago. I’ve always felt that Nick is one of the most stimulating
speakers around but on this occasion I felt that he had very important things to say
about the way in which the aesthetic domain is actually presented. Ken-ichi Sasaki
is another writer I admire and I welcome his distinctive views on a subject that can
be shared between East and West and, finally, Stephen Davies offered a thought
provoking essay on Balinese music, illustrated by the live examples that one rarely
encounters in the pages of aesthetics journals (for obvious practical reasons).

I hope that readers will enjoy this year’s offering and leave its pages feeling inspired
and having learnt something. Like any philosophical subject, aesthetics can be fun
and it can also be deadly boring. In the spirit of geniality and at the beginning of the
new millenium, I would like to offer a practical example of Aesthetics in Practice.

Richard Woodfield.

Email: richard.woodfield@ntu.ac.uk

3
Why Don’t Art Historians Attend Aesthetics Conferences?

James Elkins

Author’s note: This is a talk given at the 1996 American Society for Aesthetics
conference. For several years it was my last attempt to speak to aestheticians—to
imagine what it would be like if the two disciplines shared more interests, cited one
another more, and attended more of each other’s conferences.

Last year I gave a talk at the American Society for Aesthetics conference, in a
session on Jay Bernstein’s book The Fate of Art. At the time I had a number of
things I wanted to say about his book, but when I began to write I found myself
unsure about how I could address the issues in a way that would seem sensible, at
least potentially, to an audience of art historians rather than aestheticians. That
hypothetical problem proved rather debilitating. As the conference approached, I
realized my prefaces and parentheses were growing more rapidly than the
arguments they were supposed to protect, until I finally noticed that what I found
most intriguing about Jay’s book, and by extension, several books on aesthetics
that had appeared that year, was that they were somehow unrepresentable to art
history. I started paring away my comments on Jay’s reading of Derrida, in order to
make room for a kind of art historical explanation of Jay’s concern with Kant. I was
especially interested in framing my dwindling remarks in such a way that what Jay
had written could sound less like a philosophy of history and more like a history of
philosophy—in other words, so it would be an historiographic study of a certain
episode in the reception of Kant, rather than a theory about art in any less
constrained sense. In doing that, I began to wonder about the very idea of
rearranging a certain philosophic heritage, since that is not something that is part
of what most art historians would say that they do. Eventually my imaginary
audience divided itself into two even more improbable factions: a group of
historians interested in using Kant to speak about the anti-aesthetic, and another
group concerned with the late eighteenth century in Germany—in other words,
people who specialized in the two periods most represented in Jay’s footnotes. At
that point I more or less gave up writing about The Fate of Art, and I started trying
to write directly about the differences between our two disciplines.

The talk I ended up giving was really pretty unmodulated. I think I began by saying
something like,

It is notoriously true that art historians virtually never

look at the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, the
British Journal of Aesthetics, or the Zeitschrift für
Aesthetik—not to mention the twenty-odd other
aesthetics journals published throughout the world.
Most developments of interest to art history are reported
in its own journals, and when artists are discussed in
the pages of aesthetics journals, the essays are not
consistently cited in subsequent art historical literature.

4
And so forth. The idea was to make a survey of some of the more readily apparent
differences between the disciplines, in order to see if they might lead toward a single
kind of explanation. All I knew for sure was that I did not want to settle for the
kinds of answers my colleagues in art history had offered when I asked why they
did not go to ASA meetings—they had said, for example, tbat aestheticians don’t
talk about artworks, and that they don’t care about history. But of course I wasn’t
willing to fall into the Socratic trap of claiming that art history has some new and
improved way of talking about either art or history.

Eventually I settled on an explanation that is two-thirds philosophic argument and

one-third historical objection. Today I am going to recap it briefly, and offer some
responses and addenda that couldn’t fit in last year’s conference. I have two
excuses for reviving the same argument: first, because I still think it is the best way
to pose the difference between the two disciplines, and also because it seems like a
project worth working at: I can’t imagine two disciplines that are more nearly suited
to one another, more securely historically intertwined, than art history and
aesthetics. The two share common traditions regarding the meaning of artworks,
and they even share notions of rebellion against those traditions. It may be a good
sign that there are some very interesting art historians in this room (Michael Holly,
Keith Moxey, Stephen Bann, Anne Wagner, Thierry de Duve, and Tim Clark, among
them) but I would say, without sounding too curmudgeonly, that I am not sure if
that constitutes a trend, or even if it means anything in particular. It’s important
not to lose sight of the fact that we art historians are a small minority. The two
disciplines really have relatively little academic life in common: our conferences, our
journals, and our departments remain disjunct. My hunch is that the best way to
address that is to try to find a subject on which we could agree to disagree, and that
is the purpose of the argument I am going to recapitulate.

The argument concerns the nature of what is taken to be either irreducibly visual or
ungeneralizably particular about artworks. Art history would then be the discipline
that clings to either or both properties, and aesthetics the discipline that abstracts
or otherwise generalizes them. It’s true that the words for what counts as
particularity or uniqueness are variable between the disciplines. What art
historians might call the uniqueness of the object, philosophers might call its
nonidentity, or its specific ontological status. What art historians might call its
specificity or detail, philosophers might refer to as its nonverbal quality, or its
immanent materiality. But I take it that translations are not difficult; the problem is
not so much a difference of vocabulary, as a difference of differences.

Nor is it the case that the differences between alternate senses of what is inherently
visual, or what is unique about the visual, necessarily correspond to any real
properties of the artworks. Just because a text confines itself to concepts such as
"the object qua object" or the Ding–an–sich, rather than the sticky details of
Pollock’s gestural marks, does not mean it is somehow farther from the
particularities of the visual. Art historical texts that bristle with details can still
depend on the most broad assumptions about artworks; and conversely, aesthetics
texts that keep to the language of metaphysics can still turn on unique encounters

5
with unique works. Hence I don’t mean to propose anything about the true or
accurate description of artworks, but rather about the perception of disciplinary
distances.

So here is the argument, in a form I hope is clearer and fuller than the one I gave
last year. Imagine two societies that live on distant islands—call them Ah and Ae.
("Ah" for art history, "Ae" for aesthetics.) Although they are neighbors in their
archipelago, they are very far apart, so that they are just barely visible to one
another in good weather. One day a trader arriving from Ah carries with him a
request from the people on Ah for a picture of their own island as it appears from
Ae, and he brings with him a picture made on Ah, purporting to show the island Ae.
No one on Ae recognizes the odd shapes in the drawing, but they comply anyway,
and after a time the trader returns with the message that no one on Ah recognized
their island in the strange picture sent over from Ae. People on the two islands
study the drawings, and conclude that it is probably best to stay where they are,
since the people on the other island clearly can’t draw, and they may not even be
able to see straight.

I find this to be a fair allegory of my own experience as an art historian, speaking to

aestheticians about the gap between even the disciplines. It’s not that the gap is
denied on either side, but it is described very differently. In my parable, the
confusion might be a combination of the islanders’ wrong guesses about what they
glimpsed on the horizon, compounded by variable mirages or utopian delusions.
The central problem, both in the parable and in universities, is why accounts of the
difference seem different to the two sides. If the natives of Ae and Ah were on either
end of a long telescope, then a single account—a single optical equation—could
explain both distortions, and satisfy both sides. As it is, there is disagreement on
the nature of the difference itself.

Last year I quoted a passage from Jay’s book, The Fate of Art, where he is concerned
with what he calls the "threefold departure from theory" current in the practice of
art:

because art authorizes unique, individual items, it tendentially works

against the hierarchy of universal and particular; because art is
bound to the life of particulars, it tendentially celebrates the claims of
sensuousness and embodiment; because its practices are tendentially
governed by the claims of sensuousness and particularity, it instigates
an alternative conception of acting, one which binds doing and making
praxis and poiesis, together (12).

Where is a philosophy, I asked in response to this passage, when it can theorize

these concerns, but only by mentioning them as philosophic constructs or as
moments in other philosophic texts? What does it mean to occupy a position that
knows the need to say what it lacks, and even—as it transpires in the course of the
book—that knows lack as a necessary aspect of the position allegedly most different
from it, but that does not experience the necessity of "embodying" even a single

6
"tendentially particular," sensuously unique object? How does the ongoing
exclusion of actual examples of tendential uniqueness, as opposed to references to
the concept and existence of tendential uniqueness, affect an argument that defines
itself as an act of hybridization, as Jay’s did?

That was the jist of the paper I read last year, which was partly about nonvisuality
in Jay’s book and in Derrida. In his response, Jay said that my reading treated his
and Derrida’s failures to engage visual specificity as if they were "flatly failures of
will or intellect, failures to find the right mode of filling a space just there to be
filled." On the contrary, he said, "there isn’t any space yet that can be routinely
filled." The aporia, on his view, is a "categorial disposition of universal and
particular governing everyday life," so that "the difficulties of art and philosophy
token and repeat that aporia, they do not make it."

Thinking of things that way, it can seem as if misunderstandings between the

disciplines might ultimately be due to the ways the aporia is negotiated. But I am
not sure that the gap can be filled by dint of effort; if so, it should be possible to
imagine interdisciplinary texts that discuss, for instance, whether the aporia is best
described in a philosophic manner as a "categorial disposition of universal and
particular governing everyday life" or in some other, perhaps less orderly way. In
other words, no matter what was believed about the solubility, origins, meaning, or
significance of the aporia, it would be open to discussion. It might turn out to be a
practical matter, or it might not; it might be assigned to western metaphysics, or it
might not. Whatever the terms of the debate, such a conversation would follow the
model of the two islanders on either end of a long telescope—they would disagree,
but they wouldn’t disagree on how they disagree. But I don’t know any discussion
of that sort, and so I have come to doubt that the aporia is a single object to both
sides.

Luckily, because of the format of these sessions, I have had an entire year to think
about what I could say in answer to Jay’s response. And it is essentially this: that
the problem is not the truth of what he claims, but that it is a claim. When writers
like Jay, whose work entails some version of the aporia, approach questions of
particularity or uniqueness, and discern an abyss between the immanent object
and the domain of conceptualization. They tend to assume that the configuration is
available as a logical proposition—something like Immanent materiality is separated
from the conceptual by an aporetic gap. Once it’s put that way, any number of
propositions might follow as logical inferences.

I think this is where much of art history parts company with aesthetics.
Individually, and in different contexts, the three elements of the proposition—
"immanent materiality," the aporia, the "domain of concepts"—might find places in
historical and critical discussions. But together they form a sentence that I think
many art historians might regard with suspicion. By definition, the "domain of
concepts" is is amenable to logical argument, but ex hypothesi the aporia (or the
"abyss" or the "gap") is not a concept. And what about "immanent materiality"?
Since it is by definition the complement to the "domain of concepts," how are we to

7
understand what it means in the proposition "Immanent materiality is separated
from the conceptual by an aporetic gap," given that the proposition is grammatical
and does, after all, consist of ordinary words? "Immanent materiality" is not a
concept analogous to "illogic" or even "deviant logic." What would it mean to say—as
the proposition implies—that the uniqueness, or the particularity, or the nonverbal,
undescribed, inenarrable, "purely visual" portions of an artwork are conceptualized
in the same sense as the phrase "domain of concepts"?

From a philosophic standpoint, what is at stake here is a relation (aporia) between

two things (immanence and concepts). That is the picture of Ah, as it might be
drawn by someone on Ae. Since the relation itself is in question, the proposition
seems entirely open to rival interpretations. But I think things look very different
from the standpoint of the history of art. It is not clear that a phrase such as
"immanent materiality" does justice to what happens in the studio or in the viewing
of a work, when an artist is just plain confused about the work, or when an art
historian is absorbed in a single object, or that it captures those experiences in the
same way as a phrase like "domain of concepts" captures whatever analytic tools
may be applied in either case. The two are not conceptualized in an analogous
fashion. For one thing, "domain of concepts" is an example of the class it names,
while "immanent materiality" is a concept borrowed from the "domain of concepts"—
that is, from the very reservoir of philosophemes that it ostensibly counterbalances.
Its analytic purchase is uncertain since it is used to name the very domain of
experience that excludes it. What’s more, the act of borrowing itself is suspicious,
and so I think are the critical consequences. If we begin to doubt the conceptual
pedigree of "immanent materiality," the proposition disintegrates into a deeper
uncertainty: without a name for the first thing, there can be no relation, even an
aporetic one. Instead of an unknown relation (aporia) between two things (say
materiality and concepts), we have am unknown relation (aporia) between
something known (the domain of concepts) and something else unknown, and that
other thing cannot be known without giving up what is known. That, I propose, is
the picture of Ae, as it might be drawn by someone on Ah.

This may seem an unlikely point on which to lay the entire miscommunication
between the disciplines, but I think it is at the heart of the difference between the
differences between the disciplines, and if there is truth in it, it may help explain
why conversations and conferences have not brought the disciplines closer together.
At least I think this is a step forward from the usual explanations, and I propose it
as a way of thinking why people might remain artists, art historians, or
aestheticians: it would depend, in this light, on what they made of the proposition.

In order, for example, to value the act of making art or the chronicling of that act, it
is necessary not to see the relation as such; so artists who begin to take some
version of the proposition as philosophers do, might be tempted to give up art and
start doing philosophy (or to make more political or conceptual work). And
conversely, aestheticians who start to perceive the problems entailed in claiming
that the proposition is a well–formed sentence might be likely to begin writing
something that resembles history—or else they might try their hand at making art.

8
At least that is how I would defend the importance of what gets decided about the
proposition.

I’d like to close with an observation about the level of noise at last year’s conference.
I was startled then by the number of lunchtime and dinner conversations that were
given over to arguments: people were scrapping, in a good-natured way of course,
over various positions and theories held by their colleagues. The same is true of
journals like the JAAC: to borrow some of the common language of philosophy, art
historians don’t often find themselves "compelled to admit" that they are "trying to
have it both ways," or are "blocked" from saying what they think they ought to say,
or "committed" to some "position" that might end with an "–ism." Now I wouldn’t
want to say art historians don’t argue, but there was something about the
pervasiveness, the naturalness, and the inexhaustiblity of some of the arguments
that I heard that struck me as very different from the somewhat less deliberate
conversations I’ve heard over the years at art history conferences. I wonder if that
phenomenon might be connected to the general tacit acceptance of propositions, per
se, and especially the proposition I have been considering.

In my experience few art historians have articulated ways of thinking about the
relation between particularity and conceptualization. They haven’t made up their
minds, and they probably haven’t thought much about the problem—or thought of
it as a problem. To some degree, art history does not seem to want answers to these
questions: or to put it more exactly, it may depend on not seeing them as questions.

Contact James Elkins: jelkins@artic.edu

9
Poetics of the Retrospective Future – Japanese Time Sensibility

Ken-ichi Sasaki

0 Reverie in a Train

I was on my way to Vienna. It was just after the last congress in Ljubljana. The
railway runs along beside a river. In my carriage there were some alpinists. Looking
out of the window, I saw a clear stream, rich greenery, and here and there orchards,
and vineyards. The beauty of nature and the monotonous swing of the train incited
me to reverie.

Quite naturally, I recalled the past congress in Dubrovnik in 1980. At that time,
Dubrovnik and Ljubljana belonged to the same country. In the eighteen years that
have passed, what was once Yugoslavia has dissolved into several different
countries. When we gathered at Dubrovnik, none of us foresaw such a violent
change of political system so near at hand, or even the fact that we should come
back to the same land eighteen years later for the same purpose. We have heard
much sad news during this political revolution, but my memory of this Venetian
city on the Adriatic Sea has become all the more luminous. Several people now dead
had been there, such as Zuchlos, the famous regular participant from Athens,
Mikel Dufrenne, Eva Schaper: they were all active and full of life. Philippe Minguet,
the Secretary General and one of the main figures who strove to reorganize the old
International Committee of Aesthetics into the current IAA, was surrounded by
many friends; Philippe has long left our Congress.

From this stream of flashbacks emerged a figure that held my recollecting attention:
Milan Damnianovich, who organized the Dubrovnik Congress. If there were anyone
who should recall the days in Dubrovnik, it was he: but he too was dead, probably
without having foreseen the Ljubljana Congress. I did not know him personally. It
was only at the Nottingham Congress that I talked with him for the first, and last
time. This calm and smiling gentleman kindly addressed himself to me, and gave
me some of his offprints. I have forgotten every detail of our conversation but one.
He suddenly burst out crying, from what impulse I do not know. His subdued
words suddenly came back to me in the train from Ljubljana to Vienna. He had
said: "Mr. Sasaki, people are eating my country!" He repeated this phrase with the
gesture of Saturn eating his children, drawn by Goya.

Yes, the dissolution of ex-Yugoslavia was beginning. But this is an interpretation we

can only now, retrospectively, give to a passed phase of history. We all lived the
obscure present, in which no one could tell the future. It goes without saying that
we live even now in the same obscurity. Some day in the future light will be thrown
on this obscurity, by a retrospective gaze. In this reverie of mine, in the train from
Ljubljana to Vienna, several time spots rendered their reflected light one upon
another: 1980, 1988, the present, 1998, and the future. In this interplay of memory

10
and prevision, it is always the retrospective gaze, looking back from a future to a
past, that renders the past innocent. Hence the sweetness of memory.

1 The Play of the Retrospective Gaze

This prospective/retrospective play of imagination is very familiar to the Japanese.

It is so deeply rooted in our sensibility that most people do not even notice the fact,
even though they often follow this way of thinking. In fact, we find it expressed quite
frequently. One of the major programs of the NHK, the BBC of Japan, is a historical
drama serial, which is broadcast every Sunday evening for a year. For a long time,
narrative comments in the retrospective future were characteristic of this program. I
cannot, at present, quote from an actual scenario, so I will forge an example, in
order to demonstrate the style. Let's assume that the story concerns two warrior
brothers in medieval Japan. They grew up separately, because their family, one of
the two strongest families of warriors, had been defeated by another family, and
was in a critical situation of ruin. Having survived this difficult time, they came of
age. Then, they met one another for the first time, and united to recover the power
of the family. They finally succeeded in establishing a new government in place of
the old aristocratic one. After this initial success came a kind of tragedy. The elder
brother became uneasy and suspicious about the growth of the power of his
younger brother, and killed him. Now let's assume we are shown the scene of the
first interview of the two brothers. It is one of the happiest days in their lives. The
hardest days of winter were past, and their future is promising because of their
reunion: in fact, they had a firm confidence in one another. At this point the
narrator might insert the following comment: "At this time, they did not know that
the younger should be killed by his brother nine years later".

Now I wish to quote, as a second example, from a popular book on the life of the
famous German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler. After recounting how, at the
occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in 1952,
Furtwängler was once more nominated its perennial chief conductor, the author
adds this comment: "At this time, no one could foresee that his period as the
perennial chief conductor would end only two years and five months later1".

The retrospective future comments inserted in the narration of the NHK historical
drama was fresh at that time and impressive. It succeeded in giving the drama an
eschatological or deterministic flavor; it gave us a bird's-eye vision of history. We
may even assume that the phrase from the Furtwängler book might have been a
reminiscence of this narrative style. The author's "no one could foresee that" is, of
course, unnecessary in the context2.

Now a question may be arise as to why we can consider as retrospective future the
"no one could foresee" phrase, which is written in a simple past tense. Who can
deny that this past phrase simply describes a past fact? This impression of being a
simple report of a past fact, however, is created, because we do not take notice of
the writing act of the author. In reality, this past phrase does not describe a past
fact in the ordinary sense. That no one could foresee in 1952 that the exceptionally

11
gifted maestro should die two and a half years later, or that, in 1980, a Milan
Damnianovic did not even suspect that he should suffer eight years later the agony
of his country being "eaten", or that another congress should be held in Slovenia in
eighteen years time, may be called 'past facts', but only for the convenience of
expression. The genuinely past facts, or simply facts, are such things as "W.
Furtwängler died in 1954", or "the ninth International Congress of Aesthetics was
held at Dubrovnik in 1980". These are facts because they really happened or were
really done (factum) at a certain place and at a certain moment. So anyone present
then and there could witness them. On the contrary, no one can testify to such so-
called past facts as "no one could foresee". The reason is simple: we cannot witness
them because they are the absence of fact rather than facts. I wish to call them,
using a contradictory expression for convenience, 'absent fact'.

The absent fact in the past is not an objective event in the past, but an
interpretation given to the past from the viewpoint of the present. In this case, the
present is not just any present. At a certain moment, we notice a certain relation
with a certain point in the past, because of a similarity, or more often a contrast,
between what happens then and the past event: the 1998 congress and the 1980
congress (and afterwards the 1988 congress was related to them), the joyful
interview of brothers and the murder of the one by the other, the sudden death of
the maestro and a scene of his triumph. This means that, because of such an event,
this present stands out in relief as a future of that past. Without the intervention of
this future of the past, the absent fact remains nothing. It is the retrospective gaze
which produces the absent fact in the past as something significant.

Now I hope it is clear that the absent fact is such in terms of a retrospective future.
It is, in fact, easy to conduct the imagination from this present-past relation to the
phase of the real future. Someone caught by a strong emotion in finding an absent
fact in the past, is naturally incited to consider his own present as a past of a
certain future: someday I shall recall this very moment as an innocent past. All
these are the phenomena of the retrospective future.

2. Poetics of the Retrospective Future.

I suggested with regard to the Furtwängler book, that the "no one could foresee"
phrase might have been a reminiscence of the narrative style of the NHK drama.
But the poetics of the retrospective future is far from being the invention of the
scenario writer of that 'fleuve-drama'. Rather, I think, narration in this style was
impressive, because it revived a very old aspect of sensibility, which remained
unnoticed, although continuing to function in our way of thinking. I find the most
explicit expression of this poetics of the retrospective future, in a waka, a short
Japanese poem of 31 syllables, from the twelfth Century. The poet, Kiyosuke
Fujiwara (1104-77), is one of the most eminent waka poets of the time. The poem is
prefaced with a short explanation of the occasion of its composition: "Recalling
repeatedly the past, the poet sent the following poem to Sanjô-Dainagon who was
then only Chûjô3". Below is the poem with a word-by-word gloss.

12
Nagaraeba, mata konogoro-ya shinabaren,

(If I shall be living even longer/ likewise/ to this time/ I shall be recalled)

ushi-to mishi yo-zo, ima-ha koishiki.

(the time when I considered this world hard/ now/ I remember sweetly).

It is not a poem of simple recollection. The poet relates three points of time: the
past, the present and the future. He remembers a certain period in the past when
he led a hard life. But he notices that this recollection is not so painful as the past
reality that is recollected. He knows now that this is the function of time. Time
tempers and, so to speak, makes mellow the hardship of existence. This grace of
time, then, should be accorded even to this very present: even if I feel that it is now
hard to live in this world, looking back retrospectively from some future point, I
shall probably find this time sweet too.

This waka of Kiyosuke represents the typical form of the retrospective future: the
present looks back to the past, a future to the present. It is meditative, of course,
but colored with a wisdom not so profound. However, sometimes, the retrospective
future brings about a profound view of the world. Kiyosuke the poet must have
known another poem of a similar conception, composed by Sanjô-in, the Tennô or
Emperor, about a century earlier, and included in the anthology "Go-Shûi waka-
Shû" (1086-87). Sanjô-in was an unfortunate Tennô, who, after being obliged to
abdicate the throne, died at only 42 years old. The preface explaining the occasion
of the composition of the poem in question is: "In an extraordinary situation and
state of feeling, when he was thinking of abdication, Sanjô-in composed the
following poem, looking at a clear red moon4".

Kokoro-nimo arade konoyo-ni nagaraeba,

(Against my own will/ in this world/ if I shall remain)

Koishi-karubeki yowa-no tsuki-kana.

(it should be sweetly remembered/ of this midnight/ the moon.)

While Kiyosuke brings the action of the retrospective gaze doubly into work -
present-past and future-present - the structure of vision shown in this waka is
simpler. Sanjô-in relates the present only to a supposed future. He, however,
realizes here the most profound act of the retrospective gaze. As the preface
explains, he looked at the moon in an extreme situation. The moon was, in ancient
and medieval times, one of the main subjects of waka representing the beauty of
autumn, and people were naturally induced to meditation at the sight of the moon.
Sanjô-in seems to be absorbed in this act. We have another waka of his: "Akini
mata awan awaji-mo shiranu mi-ha, koyoi bakarino tuki-wo miruran5", which
means: "As I cannot tell if I can see another autumn or not, I look now maybe at the

13
last moon". The tragic tone of his waka on the moon also has a specific context. He
was not only politically isolated, but also suffered ill health: in particular he had
almost lost his sight. The moon was one of the few things his weak sight could
discern, and so represented the very image of the beauty of this world, which would
be imprinted in his memory. This moon looked at from the palace is special,
because, having resolved to abdicate, he shall never view the moon from the palace
again, even if he can survive to the next autumn, the season of the moon. The
retrospective gaze from the future makes this sight of the moon all the more
beautiful, exceptional and irrevocable.

In connection with this waka of Sanjô-in, we get an extreme case of the

retrospective future that fuses into one with "Matsugo-no me" (eye/view at/from the
moment of death). Ryûnosuke Akutagawa (1892-1927) the modern novelist wrote:
"Nature is, to me who am thinking of suicide, more beautiful than usual. Nature is
beautiful, because it is reflected in my 'matsugo-no me' (eye at the moment of
death)6". The text is entitled "Letter to an old friend of mine", and was written as a
kind of testament. His vision is even more radical than Sanjô-in. Our medieval poet
supposed a certain distant future, although he was assured that he should have
very few days to live. Our novelist, on the contrary, is watching the world with the
eyes of the dead. The distance between the future and the present having
disappeared, we no longer have any reflexive movement. Speaking of the
extraordinary beauty of nature that appears to his eyes at the moment of death, he
suggests the absolute truth of nature, because he now transcends all earthly
interests. Although all retrospective gazes do not bring about this kind of absolute
vision, this is still its extreme possibility. Let us compare this with the case of
Kiyosuke. Through the double movements of retrospection, he relativizes the
present as well as the past. He says that even if it is hard to live, this very present
will be recalled as a sweet past, and that is the lesson of time. In the case of
"matsugo-no me", the relativization brought about by the retrospection is, as it
were, so much purified as to make the vision absolute. The reason for this may lie
in the fact that death represents a kind of absolute point in our future.

3 Discovery of the Retrospective Future in the Western World

We shall now turn our attention, for a moment, to the Western world, to make clear
the point of origin of the poetics of the retrospective future. To say that something
began to exist at such and such moment, implies that it was absent before that
time. To testify an absence is always very difficult. The discussion is limited by the
narrow knowledge of the interpreter. So the following opinion is necessarily
hypothetical and provisory.

To the extent of my knowledge, the conception most similar to the poetics of the
retrospective future is the "beauty of prophetic verses" of Jean-Baptiste Dubos
(1670-1742). Insisting that the judgment by the sixth sense is a disinterested one,
he refers to a possible objection to this claim based upon the fact that there exists a
beauty which requires certain knowledge for its appreciation. His example is taken
from the final act of Mithridate by Racine (1673). Mithridate, the King of Pontus,

14
who has been struggling against the Romans all his life, is now dying as a result of
betrayal by his own son Pharnace. We hear from Mithridate his last words
addressed to another son of his, Xiphares, who wishes to punish Pharnace: "Tot ou
tard il faudra que Pharnace périsse:/ Fiez-vous aux Romains du soin de son
supplice7": "Sooner or later, Pharnace shall perish:/ Leave to the Romans the task
of his punishment". Then, Dubos acknowledges that in order to feel the prophetic
beauty infused into these verses, it is necessary to know that some years later
Pharnace was actually expatriated by Julius Caesar8.

Indeed, I find here the poetry of the retrospective future. The last words of
Mithridate are colored with a prophetic beauty, in the retrospective light of future
history. We can find the same poetics, for example, in "The Year 2440", the novel by
Sébastien Mercier (1770), which describes the Castle of Versailles ruined in the
25th Century; or in "Imaginary view of the Grande Gallery of Louvre in ruins" (1796)
by the French painter Hubert Robert. This series will arrive at the notion of 'tragic
irony' in the British germanist Thirlwall (1832-33)9. In the light of these examples, I
think it is permissible to consider that it was a new sensibility at the time of Dubos.
In fact, I have the impression that this poetic effect of the retrospective future was
much more thrown into relief by him than by Racine. I think Dubos learned this
manner of the work of imagination from the context of the Quarrel on the Ancients
and the Moderns.

I confine myself to quoting Charles Perrault, the champion of the modernists,

although we can find the same manner of thinking among his contemporaries10. In
the part dedicated to the discussion on sculpture, in the second dialogue of volume
I of Perrault's Parallel (1688), the Abbot, one of the main characters of the dialogue,
representing the modernists, acknowledges the beauty of the ancient sculptures of
Apollo, Diana, Venus, Hercules or Laokoon. But he immediately adds his suspicion
that his admiration might be produced by the "natural inclination which we have to
estimate enormously" very old things:

But I am firmly convinced that if the group of Apollo, made for the grotto of the
Palace we are now visiting, or some other works having almost the same force,
survive for two thousand years, then they will come to be regarded with the same,
or even greater, veneration11.

This is clearly exactly the same way of thinking we found in Kiyosuke's waka. Our
Japanese poet resorted to parallelism in the following way: the relation of 'the past'
to 'the present' is equal to that of 'the present' to 'the future'. Now the logic of
Perrault's Abbot is the same: the relation of 'ancient times' to 'the present' (17th
Century France) is equal to that of 'the present' to 'the future' 2000 years hence. Is
it a coincidence? I do not think so.

4 Japanese Modernity in the 13th Century.

The similarity in logical structure between Kiyosuke's retrospective future, and

Perrault's relativization of the present as well as the past, is striking. The

15
retrospective gaze from the viewpoint of the future, which relativizes the present, is
a function of reflexive consciousness. This reflective act of consciousness can be
considered as a mark of the modern mentality. In Perrault's case, probably no one
would object to this view: his position as the champion of the modernists in the
famous dispute is very often cited as a milestone in the history of modernity. In fact,
his consciousness of being modern was based upon objective reflection on the
position of his own period from a global view of history. But in Kiyosuke's case, it is
more difficult to believe in the modern character of his mind. Indeed, in the
established description of Japanese history, Japan's modern age began at the end
of the 19th Century, under the impetus of pressure from Western countries. How,
then, should we consider Kiyosuke's time consciousness, which is so evidently self-
reflexive?

Let us turn our attention to a small text on the poetics of waka, written by Teika
Fujiwara (1161-1241), one of the most outstanding waka poets in history. This
short treatise is entitled "Kindai-shûka", or "On fine works of waka in modern
times" (1209). Yes, to designate the new style of waka in his times, Teika uses
exactly the same word as is applied to modern times. The word 'kindai' originated in
China, and meant adjectivally "of recent times". In the context of Japanese
literature, this word was used in a national history as early as the 8th Century12.
But in that case, the word did not designate any specified epoch. In contrast, we
find in Teika's treatise an evident trace of his consciousness of the specificity of his
times as 'kindai' (modernity). His horizon is not, of course, so vast as to embrace
the whole of history, but with regard to the waka's poetic style, he considers that
his times have the specific task of establishing a new style. He founds this opinion
on a description of the history of waka.

The starting point of his historical description is Ki-no Tsurayuki (?-945), the
famous poet and co-editor of the first official anthology of waka, "Kokin-shû" (905).
Teika holds that the style of Tsurayuki, consisting in a nobleness with intellectual
content and strong expression, dominated the generations that followed (maybe up
to the end of the 11th Century13). But as time went by (perhaps up to the mid-12th
Century), the original noble tone being lost, waka was vulgarized. More recent
generations emphasize only the conception, ignoring the effect of verbal expression
and the total impression of waka. Against this general trend towards vulgarization,
a few poets such as Tsunenobu Minamoto (1016-97), Toshiyori Minamoto (1055-
1129), Akisuke Fujiwara (1090-1155), Kiyosuke Fujiwara (our above-mentioned
poet), and Toshinari Fujiwara (1114-1204) the father of Teika, have been striving to
regain the archaic noble style. Their efforts now bear fruit: we now have many waka
adopting the old vocabulary of "Kokin-shû", among which a few succeed in reviving
the lost style of archaic waka, even that style anterior to Tsurayuki. Now we should
follow these excellent poets and seek to express a "new mind in archaic words14".
Those who criticize this style as a new one that perverts waka do not know that it is
in fact authentic. Such is the outline of Teika's argument concerning 'modern'
waka.

16
I think that Teika seeks to justify his own new style by reference to the history of
waka. We can perceive his self-confidence in pursuing this new style. Since the first
anthology of waka, poets always took as their model the style of Tsurayuki; now
Teika pretends to go back to an even more archaic style. So it is a kind of revolution
in the style of waka, and the content of this revolution constitutes the notion of
'modernity' (kindai). The word 'modern' (kindai) appears to be used as a kind of
technical term referring to this new style, because we find in another poetics,
"Mumyô-shô"(ca.1212) written by Kamo-no Chômei (1155?-1216), a chapter entitled
"On the modern (kindai) style of waka", which in fact discusses the waka of Teika.
This modernity as a kind of cultural revolution in the world of waka, was presented
by Teika as a Renaissance. The difference between this new style and the traditional
lies in two points. In the first place, speaking of the intellectual content of
Tsurayuki's waka, Teika holds that Tsurayuki ignored the style of 'yojô yôen'
(aftertaste of emotion and sexiness). But at the same time, he criticizes the current
style, which neglects the wording, and insists on the importance of this element and
the effect of the total style of a waka. In the light of his own compositions, we may
even speak of his formalism or mannerism.

I believe the following characteristics can be discerned in Teika's concept of modern

(kindai): the idea of the new age as a Renaissance, emotionalism, and formalism.
These characteristics are also found in Western modernity in its first stage (the 16-
18th Centuries). The fact that Kiyosuke and Perrault share exactly the same
schema of thinking should not be taken as a simple coincidence. Japan underwent
its own onset of modernity at the beginning of the 13th Century at the latest. I may
say that we had long lived in a post-modern age even before encountering Western
modernity. The poetic effect we feel in the retrospective future is a trace of this
proper Japanese modernity.

5. Modernity Produced by Poetic Practice.

The Japanese modernity of the 13th Century is not entirely identical with Western
modernity. Western modernity is generally determined by political revolution (the
inauguration of democracy), and the industrial revolution. In the mid-12th Century,
Japan also underwent a certain political revolution: power passed from the
aristocracy to the warrior class. Culture, however, continued to be the province of
the aristocracy, and this political change had the effect of encouraging the self-
consciousness of the aristocracy. Having lost political power, they wished to
establish their identity through cultural activities including poetry. Considered from
a Western viewpoint, then, this modernity was partial or strange, because it was
confined to the form of consciousness or aesthetic taste.

Even confining ourselves to the time schema which is our main concern, we must
take notice of a Japanese peculiarity. Time in the Christian world is characterized
by its eschatological structure15: there is the beginning marked by Creation, and the
end by Judgement, and time itself is always situated midway between these two
absolute terms. This structure is identical with that of tragedy as analysed by
Aristotle16. The reason lies in the fact that this world is a created work just like a

17
tragedy. The middle is always defined in terms of the beginning and the end. By
contrast, in our schema of retrospective future, it is the experienced present that
determines the past and the future. The past and the future are, so to speak,
produced by the present. The future, in particular, is invented in order to take
consciousness of this present. In short, time is here experienced and structured by
consciousness. The time consciousness of a Perrault displays the same character;
this means that this time consciousness was new, vis-a-vis the Christian structure
of time, in the Western world.

In spite of these differences, we may recognize a modern character in the time

sensibility expressed in the poetics of the retrospective future, because of the
reflexive movement of consciousness. It is, however, in the cause leading to this
reflexivity that we find the decisive peculiarity of the Japanese sensibility. In a
Western philosophy of history, such as Hegel's, this development would be
explained as the necessary result of the intrinsic maturation of the Spirit, which
consists in attaining a deeper stage of self-consciousness17. It seems to me,
however, that it is too facile to have recourse to this convenient hypothesis, as far
as it might be applied to waka. The existential situation in which waka were
composed contained something that encouraged a deeper self-consciousness in the
poet.

Prof. Hideo Suzuki, one of the most outstanding scholars of waka, points out that
waka composed as independent entities did not play so dominant a part in early
waka practice, seen for example in the oldest anthology of waka "Manyô-shû"
(compiled in the second half of the 8th Century), as did corresponding pieces (waka
exchanged as means of correspondence) and composition in groups practiced on
such occasions as feasts of flowers18. He pays special attention to so-called 'onna-
uta' or woman's waka, because they are highly representative of this poetic
practice19. It is always a young man who courts a young girl. So a man sends a
waka as a love letter to a girl, and the girl responds to the court: this response is
the 'onna-uta'. The 'onna-uta' is, in short, the retort in waka made by a woman.
Accordingly, the virtue of women's waka consists in the quick wit with which she
retorts to the man's message. Woman's waka is colored by negativity, which is
expressed in two ways: outwardly, the retort, and, inwardly, a moment of self-
reflection. Prof. Suzuki concludes that this preexisting framework of
correspondence or exchange of waka, determined the self-reflective spiritual
content.

It goes without saying that the awakening of self-consciousness is so complex a

phenomenon that we cannot reduce it to one or two causes. For all that, Prof.
Suzuki's theory persuades us not to interpret a spiritual phenomenon in purely
immanent terms. In fact, in the dialogical exchange of waka, poets found
themselves in a critical situation (in the sense of a situation requiring 'judgment'):
in order to find the most effective expression, he/she has to take into consideration
several factors, such as the words of his/her partner, his/her own feelings and
emotions, expressions in similar canonical pieces in the past, the behaviour to
follow or to avoid, etc. These elements are to be objectively calculated and judged in

18
the search for the best expression, which is always a response to the situation in
which the poet finds him/herself.

Now let us return to our two example. The waka of Sanjô-in ('If I shall continue to
live in this world against my own will, the moon of tonight should be sweetly
remembered') is indeed a soliloquy. We may however say that this soliloquy was
realized in a supposed dialogical situation. The self of the poet was divided into two,
and it is his future self that looks retrospectively at his present self. Kiyosuke's case
is plain. As the short preface of that waka tells us, it was a personal message
addressed to a friend of his. We know no more details of this address. The waka
itself bears a tone of consolation. This induces us to imagine the following situation.
The poet wished to console Sanjô-Dainagon, his friend, who was just then struck by
a certain misfortune. He noticed that some hard experiences he had had in the past
are recalled to him with a sweet emotion. In this he found his point: looking back
from the future, you will recall these hard days with a sweet emotion.

The Japanese modernity we perceive in the time sensibility of the retrospective

future was indeed supported by several spiritual factors, such as Zen Buddhism,
political change bringing about a sense of vicissitude, etc. These remained however
in the background. It is the dialogical practice of waka which actually orientated the
inspiration of every piece; so much so that we may say that it is this practice which
most directly determined that modernity we discover in the Japanese history of the
mind during the 10-13th Centuries.

e-mail: k-sasaki@muh.biglobe.ne.jp

Presented first at 2000 International Association for Aesthetics Executive

Committee Meeting and Colloquium, August 22 - 23, 2000, Seoul, Korea.

NOTES:

1 Eihachirou SIDORI, Furtwängler the man (in Japanese), Tokyo, Ongkunotomo-

sha, 1984, p.169.

2 I once noticed retrospective future phrases in a short biography a friend of mine

dedicated to his friend who had died young.

3 This waka is included in 'Shin-kokin waka-shû', 8th official anthology of waka

(1216). It is also collected in the so-called 'Hyakunin isshu' (A hundred waka by a
hundred poets) edited by Teika Fujiwara, whose poetics will be discussed below. As
'Hyakunin isshu' has been used as the basis of a card game, these hundred waka
are very popular. The case is the same with the waka by Sanjô-in, which we will
analyse below.

4 This waka is included in 'Go-shûi waka-shû', 4th official anthology (1086). See
note 3 above. Sanjô-in was obliged to abdicate by Michinaga Fujiwara, who, having

19
the political power, wished to become regent by bringing his grandson (his son-in-
law was a Tennô) to the throne.

5 This waka is included in 'Shika waka-shû', 6th official anthology.

6 R. AKUTAGAWA, Complete Works, vol.16, Tokyo, Iwanami-shoten, 1997, pp.3-28.

7 Racine, Mithridate, Act V, scene 5.

8 Jean-Baptiste Dubos, Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, t.II,

71770, pp.350-351.

9 Bishop Connop THIRLWALL, 'On the Irony of Sophocles', in Philological Museum,

Cambridge, 1832-33.

10 Cf. François Charpentier, De l'Excellence de la langue françoise, 1683?/1695?,

Slatkine 1972, p.1055 (communication sent by Mr. T. Chikawa, student in the
department of French Literature); La Bruyère, Discours sur Théophraste, 1688,
Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1951, pp.11-12; Fontenelle, Digression sur les Ancients
et les Modernes, 1688, Oeuvres Complètes. t.II, Fayard, 1991, p.421.

11 Charles PERRAULT, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes, t.I, 1692 (2nd ed.),
pp.182-183 (my own translation).

12 The work is 'Shoku-nihongi' (797), 2nd official history. Cf. Great Dictionary of
Japanese (Nippon kokugo daijiten), t.3, Shougakkan, p.1001.

13 In interpreting 'Kindai shûka', I have consulted the translation into modern

Japanese by Sen-ichi Hisamatsu in Treatises of Art, Collection of Classical
Japanese Literature, t.36, Chikuma-shobô, 1967, pp.18-20.

14 Teika FUJIWARA, 'Kindai shûka', in Great Collections of Classical Japanese

Literature, t.65, 'Anthology of poetics; anthology of the theory of noh', Iwanami-
shoten, 1974, p.102.

15 For the fundamental position of the eschatological schema in the Christian

world, see Karl Löwith, 'Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeshehen', in Aanteile, Martin
Heidegger zum 60. Geburtstag, Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main, 1950,
pp.106-153. I learnt of this work from Jiro WATANABE, Contemporary Situation of
Ideas-Philosophy of History-(in Japanese), University of Air, 1995.

16 Cf. Aristotle, Poetics, chap.7, 1450b 26-27: 'A whole is what has a beginning and
middle and end' (translated by W. H. Fyfe, the Loeb Classical Library, 1965, p.31).

17 Cf. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die philosophie der Geschichte, Werke 12,
Suhrkamp, 1970, pp.30-31, 76.

18 H. SUZUKI, World of Ancient Waka (in Japanese), Tokyo, Chikuma-shobô, 1998.

20
19 Traditionally, we had in Japan two forms of poetry: Chinese and Japanese. Only
men practised the Chinese form, which was the official form; while women as well
as men composed the Japanese, which was more private and familiar.

* A French version of this paper was read at the General meeting of the French
Society of Aesthetics (November 18, 2000 at the Sorbonne). The French version,
which is to be published in the Newsletter of the Society, differs from the English
mainly in the introductory examples.

21
Balinese Musicians’ Assessments of Recorded Performances

Stephen Davies

There can be no doubt that Balinese music is alive. Some twenty types of gamelan
ensemble are in use. Of these the most common is gong kebyar, with about 1500
groups. Some other types of ensemble, such as beleganjur, anklung, and gender
wayang, are very common. Despite this proliferation, one might wonder about the
health of Balinese music and the effects that performances for tourists have on this.

The ethnomusicologist, Jacques Brunet, is one who sees a falling away in the
performance standards of Balinese kebyar and who attributes this mainly to a
desire to cater for tourist demand and taste. I quote him at length, since he makes
several points that I will consider.

‘The recordings presented here are an echo of the spirit in which kebyar was
played during the 60s, according to the styles and forms born of the
traditional music and dance teaching in each village. But tourism has
wrought havoc. ... One of the greatest dangers for contemporary Balinese
music is the attraction of musicians for accelerating the tempi, which pays no
regard to nuances. The modern world, the desire to put on "spectacular
shows" for tourists, and more and more "technical" virtuosity taught at the
conservatory have created the current situation in which, with the exception
of a few villages that have held on to their cultural autonomy, have made us
spectators to the decline of the great kebyar tradition into insipidness. ... The
Peliatan gong "Gunung Sari" was the most prestigious in Bali for a long time.
... This orchestra is probably the most [Since] the 1980s, the musicians have
given themselves over to giving almost daily performances for tourists and
have perhaps lost their soul forever.’ (sleevenotes, Les grands gong kebyar
des annés soixante, 1994:22-25)

Such views are by no means unusual among Westerners with a long-standing

familiarity with Balinese music.

Bali is a tourist Mecca. Some anthropologists have argued that the Balinese arts
have been sustained and invigorated by tourism (McKean 1978:96; Ornstein
1971:15, 56). This, too, is the position of the local government and the Balinese
intelligentsia; a debate in the Bali Post between December 1988 and April 1989
concluded that tourism has revived the interest of Balinese in their traditions,
reinforced their sense of identity and pride, and stimulated artistic creativity. The
government policy of Cultural Tourism introduced in the 1970s promoted both
tourist development and cultural preservation, while insisting that these two
objectives are connected and compatible (Picard 1990). A different position is taken
by others. Some anthropologists have argued in general that tourist art, because it
is commercialized and commodified, can no longer be an authentic expression of
the local culture. Forced to dance to the tune of the tourist dollar, the locals dish up
a kind of ethno-kitsch that cartoons the traditional genres and, thereby, they

22
sacrifice the autonomy and quality of their culture’s art (Greenwood 1978). Some
Balinists take a similar view. Picard (1990) thinks that the distinction between
economic and cultural value has been blurred to the point where the fate of
Balinese culture is entrusted to the interested care of the tourist industry (also see
Vickers 1989:198).

As Balinists like Picard, Vickers, and Bruner (1996) have argued, the relation
between tourism and culture is complex and subtle. Tourism is not something
apart from Balinese culture; not something that impacts on it only from the outside.
Rather, it is internal, because it connects with and grades into all aspects of social
life and because it can be as responsive to them as they are to it, so that the causal
interactions not only flow in both directions but also are reflexive. That tourism is
integrated with, and subsumed by, other dimensions of social existence within Bali
does not mean, however, that it is pointless to ask questions that draw us into an
examination of the intricacies and functional dynamics of these relationships.

The interviews

Rather than engaging with Brunet’s concerns via the theoretical literature, I chose
to address them in a much more direct and practical fashion. Through interviews, I
set out to discover if Balinese musical experts acknowledge changes in performance
standards over the years. I also hoped to identify the factors seen by the Balinese as
influencing performance and musicianship. Two considerations recommended this
approach:

(A) Balinese musicians are culturally self-conscious and sophisticated. They

are aware of the history of works and of the styles they play, they have a
developed theory and technical terminology, and they make aesthetic
evaluations in a way that is familiar to Westerners. The critical comparison of
different performances is thoroughly familiar to the Balinese. They have
organized and judged competitions for gong kebyar from about 1915.

(B) Balinese music was first recorded by the companies of Odeon and Beka in
1927-28 (see McPhee 1979:10, 71). More recordings were made on 16"
acetate disks by the Fahnestock expedition in 1941. And since the early
1960s, many discs and tapes have been issued. Because they span so many
years, these recordings allow for detailed comparison of performances,
thereby revealing what has altered, what is variable, and what has been
retained. In some cases it is possible to hear how a given work has been
treated, or how a particular group has played, over several decades.

For the interviews, I made tapes that juxtaposed excerpts from recorded
performances. I discussed these tapes not only with acknowledged masters from the
older generation, but also with respected younger musicians. Though I was mainly
interested in kebyar, which is performed at tourist concerts as well as for Balinese
in the temple, I also included kecak and gender wayang—the former because it is
presented exclusively for tourists and the latter both because its audience is

23
Balinese and because it is regarded as sacred. Rather than asking directly about
changes in performance standards, or about possibly deleterious influences on
these, I invited the musicians to compare the taped excerpts. This they were most
willing to do. Besides discussing performances, the interviewees often described
their careers and the influences that shaped their musical tastes and performance
style, as well as reflecting more generally on the current musical scene.

The interviews were conducted in August 1996. I Wayan Gandra of Peliatan

discussed kecak. I Wayan Loceng of Sukawati and I Nyoman Sudarna of Denpasar
conversed about gender wayang, as did I Wayan Wija of Sukawati. Kebyar was
covered by I Wayan Tembres of Blahbatuh and by I Wayan Gandra of Petulu. Dewa
Putu Brata of Pengosekan and I Wayan Sanglah of Lodtonduh represented the
views of the younger generation (that is, of those in their 20s or early 30s). The
dancer, Anak Agung Gedé Oka Dalem of Peliatan discussed legong, as did Tembres.
I was assisted in the interviews by I Made Berata of Peliatan.

The interviews with Wija, Gandra of Petulu, and Oka Dalem were in English. The
rest took place in both Indonesian and Balinese, with Made Berata asking the
questions and consulting in English with me about the replies. All the interviews
were taped. Translations were made by Made Berata, Kuming Tirtawati, and myself.

The evaluative terms

In Bali, good playing displays taksu (B), which means inner (spiritual) strength or
power. Taksu may be a quality of the performer, or of the piece, but, in the
interviews, the term referred primarily to the quality of the playing. Another general
term of praise was bagus (I) (good). Kebyar playing should be bobot (I) (weighty).

A distinctive feature of Balinese music is kotekan (B), the interlocking combination

of two rhythmically articulated parts to present a single melody or pattern.
Typically, kotekan is played at high speed. When the interviewees were asked to be
specific about the technical features responsible for conferring taksu on a
performance, it was the steadiness, clarity, and rhythmic accuracy of the kotekan to
which they most often drew attention. Precise (incep (B)) drumming or key-striking
was praised, as was definiteness and clarity in the space (jarak (I)) between drum or
key strokes. In the case of the metallophones, precision and clarity also depend on
key-damping technique (tetekep (B)), so this also was evaluated. Because of their
central role as leaders of the ensemble, the two drums were expected to provide an
unwavering beat. Any playing that was unclear was poor.

Gong kebyar and legong

Gong kebyar originated in north Bali in the second decade of this century and
spread to other areas in the 1920s and 1930s. It now is the most popular form of
Balinese gamelan. "Kebyar," which means "bursting open" or "flaring up," refers to
the aggressive, loud, metrically irregular passages that characterize this music.

24
Early recordings of kebyar

Kebyar Ding: 1928 by Gong Belaluan of Badung (Music from the Morning of
the World, from Odeon 204730/1; and an extract of the same piece from
Pankung (Music from the Morning of the World, from Beka 15620).

Genderan: 1941 by Gamelan Gong of Ubud ("Genderan", Music for the Gods,
track 4).

Gambang: 1941 by Gamelan Gong of Ubud ("Gambang", Music for the Gods,
track 9).

Kebyar Ding was composed in the north specifically for gong kebyar. The piece is
called "ding" because of the note on which it begins. Its structure is not of the
modern five-part type. While he judged the playing to be very good, Tembres
thought the piece was monotonic and long-winded (bertele-tele (I)) and the kotekan
too simple for the current taste. A modern version would alter the form, shorten the
piece, and a repair (perbaikan (I)) would be made to the kotekan. Gandra of Petulu
first heard these 1928 versions of Kebyar Ding in the 1960s when he was teaching
gamelan at the University of California, Los Angeles. He brought the piece back to
Bali and taught it at the KOKAR conservatory. He also taught it to Gunung Sari,
but the spirit, the feeling for the music, was not good. Both Dewa Brata and
Sanglah were familiar with the modern version of the piece taught at the STSI
conservatory. Sanglah, who had never heard the original, believed that the younger
generation would find it lovely if they knew it. But Dewa Brata shared the wider
view: the rendition of 1928 is not to the taste of modern audiences or musicians.

Unlike Kebyar Ding, Genderan and Gambang derive from gender wayang. Both
pieces have remained in the gender repertoire and have been incorporated in
subsequent kebyar works, so are well-known. Though the 1941 versions were said
to be good, the interviewees regarded them as unsuitable for modern performance.
The kotekan was too simple. The style of Gambang was more characteristic of
kebyar, in that the kotekan was played by the reyong while the various gangsa
carried the melody, but in both pieces the notes were simply transferred to gong
kebyar. Also, their structures were not of the modern variety. New works based on
these pieces would use and develop the borrowed material in only part of the piece,
with newly composed music introduced in the other sections. The motives from
Genderan would be used in the introductory section, while Gambang would yield
material for the middle parts.

Kebyar "classics"

For the comparison of performances, I chose kebyar pieces that have the status of
"classics." All of these have been played often since their composition and are
currently featured in tourist performances in the Ubud region, as well as in temple
ceremonies. The group discussed by Brunet in the quote given earlier, Gunung Sari,

25
appeared often in the chosen excerpts, which included the performances from the
1960s that Brunet recorded and judged to be far superior to the current fare.

Teruna Jaya dates from before 1920 and was composed by Gedé Manik, but it first
appeared in south Bali (Belaluan, Denpasar) in 1954 and was revised in 1960
(Ornstein 1971:118). The recorded excerpts were as follows:

1970 from Sawan ("Taruna Jaya", Les grands gong kebyar, disc 1,
track 1);

1970 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Kebjar Teruna", Bali South, side 1

track 2);

1972 from Sebatu ("Taruna Jaja", The Earth Greets the Sun, track 5);

1985 by Tirta Sari of Peliatan ("Tarna Jaya", Gamelan Semar Pegulingan [I],
track 1);

1990 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Teruna Jaya", Golden Rain: Gong Kebyar
of Gunung Sari, track 7);

about 1990 by Sadha Budaya of Ubud ("Taruna Jaya (Dance of a Young

Winner)", Dancers of Bali, track 4);

1993 from Tejakula, Singaraja ("Tarna Jaya", Gamelan Gong Kebyar [III],
track 3).

Oleg Tambulilingan was created by Mario of Tabanan in the 1951 (see Coast
1953:107-14). The recorded excerpts were as follows:

1966 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Bumblebee (Tumililingan)", Golden Rain:

Balinese Gamelan Music, side 1, track 2);

1969 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Oleg Tambulilingan", Les grands gong

kebyar, disc 1, track 4);

about 1970 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Tumililingan", Music from Bali:

Played by the Gamelan Orchestra from Pliatan, side 1, track 2);

1990 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Oleg Tamulilingan", Golden Rain: Gong

Kebyar of Gunung Sari, track 6);

about 1990 by Tirta Sari of Peliatan ("Oleg Tambulingan (Love Dance and
Bees)", The Very Best of Legong, track 5).

Kebyar Terompong was created by Mario in the 1920s (see Covarrubias 1972:232-
235). The recorded excerpts were as follows:

26
 1962 by Pelegongan of Abian-Kapas of Sanur ("Legong", The Music from Bali,
side 1, track 3);

1970 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Tari Terompong", Court Music and Banjar
Music, side 1, track 5).

Sekar Jepun dates from the late 1960s and was composed by I Wayan Gandra of
Petulu. Unlike the other pieces, which are dances, it is an instrumental piece. The
recorded excerpts were as follows:

1970 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Sekar Djepun", Court Music and Banjar
Music, side 1, track 1);

1970 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Sekar Djepun", Bali South, side 2, track
1);

1990 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Sekar Djepun", Golden Rain: Gong Kebyar
of Gunung Sari, track 1);

about 1990 by Tirta Sari of Peliatan ("Gamelan ‘Sekar Jepun’", The Very Best
of Legong, track 1).

Changes in the works

Classic kebyar works are not preserved unchanged. The general trend over the past
thirty years has been toward more complex kotekan, a faster tempo, and a
reduction in overall length. Different groups have introduced their own alterations.

Tembres compared recordings of Oleg Tambulilignan from the 1960s and 1970s
with those of the 1990s. In the early days, the tempo was slower because, at that
time, the dance involved more constant action. The basic melody was varied a little,
but only the five highest keys were used for angsel (sharply accented syncopations
introduced in response to dance movements). The contemporary versions employ
more variations and use more angsel, including ones on the five lower keys. Gandra
of Petulu noted that the long kotekan for reyong featured at the opening of Sekar
Jepun is now faster and more complex than it was when the work first appeared.

Tembres believed that, while changes and variations should be incorporated in the
classic works, these should not become excessive. In the case of Teruna Jaya, he
thought that the recordings of Gunung Sari (1970 and 1990), Sebatu (1972), Tirta
Sari (1985), and Sadha Budaya (about 1990) all introduce too many alterations to
the basic work. He preferred the performances from Sawan (1970) and Tejakula
(1993), both from the north where the piece originated. Teruna has more
significance and is more dearly loved in the north, he felt. Similarly, both Dewa
Brata and Sanglah thought the northern kebyar style, with its dramatic contrasts,
is better for Teruna. The current STSI conservatory style employs more gradual

27
crescendos and diminuendos which, though the result is aesthetic and refined, are
inappropriate for this piece.

Apart from the general features mentioned above, there is another respect in which
contemporary kebyar playing was identified as differing from that of 30 years ago:
the present style is aggressive. Gandra of Petulu lamented this and commented on
the difficulty of teaching musicians to adopt the older, comparatively more relaxed,
type of playing.

Performances Compared for Quality

The standard of performance was judged to be high for all the excerpts. In general,
though, the recent performances were thought to be less good than the best of the
older ones. For instance, Tembres thought the playing of Kebyar Terompong
nowadays to be always less precise than that of Gunung Sari in 1970. In the
rendition of Oleg Tambulilingan, Tembres regarded Gunung Sari and Tirta Sari in
about 1990 to be neither so steady nor so clear as Gunung Sari in the 1960s.
Gandra of Petulu thought that earlier versions of Oleg were better because the
musicians then had "more heart" for the music.

Not all the performances of the 1960s and 1970s were regarded as good, however.
Tembres thought the playing of Gunung Sari in 1971 was poor in Teruna Jaya and
merely adequate in the reyong part of Oleg Tambulilignan. The performance from
Sanur in 1962 of Kebyar Terompong was judged not to be satisfactory. Also, not all
performances from the 1990s were equal, though all groups could be faulted in
some respect or other.

Legong

Legong is a repertoire of dances that originated in the Nineteenth Century. Only

Legong Lasem (also knows as Legong Keraton) is played widely now. Tourist
concerts often include it.

The taped excerpts of Legong Lasem were as follows:

1969 by Gunung Sari of Peliatan ("Legong Kraton", Les grands gong kebyar,
disc 1, track 5);

1985 by Tirta Sari of Peliatan ("Legong Kraton", Gamelan Semar Pegulingan,

track 4);

about 1990 by Sadha Budaya of Ubud ("Legong Kraton (Legong of the King of
Lasem)", Dancers of Bali, track 2).

All the interviewees agreed that the sweet, light sound of the seven-toned semar
pegulingan orchestra (of which Tirta Sari is an example) is better suited to legong
than the weighty, aggressive tone of gong kebyar (of which Gunung Sari is an

28
example). Despite this general preference, Tembres thought the playing of Legong
Lasem by Gunung Sari in 1969 was superior to that of Tirta Sari in 1985. (For his
taste, there were too many drum-strokes in each of the performances, but the
playing in both was of a high standard.)

The interviewees expressed concern about the future of legong. Tembres thought
that works like Legong Semarandhana could be lost, because young musicians are
not learning them now. Gandra of Petulu suggested that young musicians do not
enjoy playing such music. This was denied by Dewa Brata, though he was of the
view that some in the Balinese audience no longer like or understand such music.

Kecak and Gender wayang

Although I was primarily interested in kebyar, the music singled out for criticism by
Jacques Brunet, it was relevant to consider other musical ensembles. I investigated
kecak (or "monkey dance"), on the grounds that, if any music is debased and
inferior by indigenous standards, it should be that created and performed only for
tourists. And I considered gender wayang, the music played by a quartet of gender
to accompany the Balinese shadow puppet plays (wayang kulit (I)) deriving their
stories from the Mahabharata epic, because it is among the oldest and most sacred
of Balinese musics, it is one of the most demanding in instrumental technique, and
it is rarely played for tourists. Fascinating though they were, these interviews did
not significantly alter the picture, so I treat them only briefly below.

The recorded excerpts for kecak were as follows:

1941 from "southern Bali" ("Kecak", Music for the Gods, track 10);

1962 from Bona ("The Ketjak of Bona", The Music from Bali, side 1, track 1);

1966 from Peliatan ("Ketjak", Golden Rain: Balinese Gamelan Music, side 2,
track 1);

about 1970 from Peliatan ("Ketjak (with male chorus)", Music from Bali:
Played by the Gamelan Orchestra from Pliatan, side 1, track 3);

1970 from Peliatan ("Tjak", Music Atlas, side 1, track 1);

1990 from Ganda Sari of Bona (Kecak and Sanghyang of Bali);

about 1990 from Bona Sari of Bona (Kecak of Bali: Monkey Dance: Bona
Sari).

According to Gandra of Peliatan, the tempo was slow and only the simplest
interlocking pattern was used in the 1941 recording from "southern Bali." The
narrator’s singing was striking for its "classical" style. The best of the recordings, he
thought, is that of the Peliatan group from 1966. But the performance of the same

29
group a few years later (the Music Atlas recording of 1970) is poor; in particular, the
beat is not positive. He regarded the recent recordings from Bona as rhythmically
unclear and believed that his Peliatan group is better.

Gandra of Peliatan commented adversely on the current rapidity of change. Not

many alterations were made between 1970 and 1990 and different groups gave very
similar versions. But recently, all groups have become obsessed with departing from
the basic pattern.

The taped excerpts of gender wayang were all from the pemungkah (the
instrumental introduction to the shadow puppet play):

1928 from Kuta (Music from the Morning of the World, from Odeon A 204765);

1941 from Ubud ("Pemoengkah", Music for the Gods, track 5);

1969 from Teges ("Pemungkah", Music for the Balinese Shadow Play, side 1,
track 1);

1983 in Sukawati style ("Pemungkah", Music of the Wayang Kulit [II], track
2);

1990 in Sukawati style ("Pengmukah", Gender Wayang of Sukawati Village,

track 5).

Both Loceng and Sudarna judged the 1969 performance from Teges to be poor. All
the other performances were of the highest standard. Most of the discussion
concentrated on differences in the dominant styles of Kayu Mas and Sukawati. The
former involves slower playing and less elaborate kotekan than the latter. Also, the
style of Kayu Mas is the more conservative. Whereas Sudarna regarded the old
works as fixed (tetap (I)), so that he would not dare to alter them, Loceng drew
attention to innovations introduced to works played in the Sukawati manner.

This contrast was evident even in discussions of the oldest recordings. Sudarna’s
father, Bapak Konolan, had been taught by Bapak Wayan Lotring, who was
identified by Sudarna as one of the players on the tape made at Kuta in 1928.
Sudarna was surprized to notice a slight difference in part three of pemungkah
between what was on the recording and what he had been taught by his father.
That is, he expected the 1928 version to be exactly the same as that played now in
Kayu Mas (only a few kilometres from Kuta) where his father lived. Meanwhile,
Loceng detected the influence of Sukawati style in the more complex kotekan of the
1941 Ubud recording. He surmised that this derived from performances at Ubud
Palace in the 1920s and 1930s given by Pak Granyam and three other players from
Sukawati.

Wider considerations

30
Tourist performances

In the interviews, the subject of tourist performances did not often arise, though
Dewa Brata thought that many changes (in dynamics, the interpolation of new
material, and faster tempos) were a result of trying to please tourists and Oka
Dalem noted that the format of the tourist concert was unsuited for legong. When
the conversation was steered to the topic, the comments were interesting.

Tembres insisted that, when he was its leader, the Pinda group played in hotels in a
positive and serious manner, just as they did in the temple. Their tourist
performances were orderly (tertib (I)), not casual. He also thought that it is good that
skilled orchestras should play for tourists, who might thereby learn about the
musical culture of Bali. On the negative side, he noted that tourist performances
sometimes are given by groups with not yet competent student musicians and that
the hotels sometimes want pieces to be cut too drastically. He commented that it is
bad for Bali if the groups are not skilled, because the tourists can tell adequate
from poor performances, and serious from casual playing.

Tembres’ observations led me to recount a case described in Ornstein (1971:63), in

which the orchestra leader reversed his drum but played it as if it were in the
orthodox position, thereby making a nonsense of the music. Apparently this was
done to express his contempt for the tourist audience. The idea that a player might
make a deliberate error of this kind turned out to be difficult to convey. It was
explained to me that a left-handed drummer holds the drum in a position that
mirrors that adopted by a right-handed player, and also that Gedé Manik would lift
the drum over his head and play it behind his back (though this would not be
acceptable nowadays). When, finally, I succeeded in making my meaning clear, my
assistant, Made Berata, was shocked. He exclaimed spontaneously in English: "This
is a very bad man!" He went on to describe a group that did not take tourist
performance seriously and very quickly got a bad name as a result. Tembres added:
This is not good for Bali generally. The reputation of Bali as a whole is damaged.

To get an idea of the importance placed by the musicians on the adequacy of their
performances, not only in the temple but also in the tourist setting, it is important
to recall the religious and social implications of gamelan performance. The Balinese
do not compartmentalize their world, seeking to preserve their music by insulating
the "real stuff" from an inferior product offered to tourists. An animist religion is
present throughout Balinese life and there is no reason to think it stops short
where tourism is involved. Ornstein writes: ‘Balinese music in its traditional setting
is essentially religious ... Every performance is an offering to the gods or an attempt
to placate evil spirits ... Music for entertainment is also religious. ... Although the
visible audience is composed of Balinese, its primary purpose is to entertain and
propitiate an invisible audience: the gods ... Music for entertainment includes ...
gamelan gong kebyar. ... However, the same music that is played for the
entertainment of the gods is also used on secular occasions when it is performed for
tourists or official government guests’ (1971:8-11). Moreover, the structures of
musical works, the relations between the parts played by the various instruments,

31
the iconography of the carvings on the instruments, and the spatial disposition and
orientation of the orchestra are all metaphors for cosmic, divine, social, and
personal structures which, in turn, are seen by the Balinese as icons for the
universe in both macrocosm and microcosm (McPhee 1979:43-44; Wayan Dibia
1989; DeVale and Wayan Dibia 1991; Harnish 1991). Because the orchestra and its
music are as intimately associated with the spiritual universe as are the temples
themselves, the Balinese cannot leave their religious feelings and obligations behind
them when they perform for tourists.

Money and the performance of music

Although the prevalence of tourist concerts was rarely identified as having a

detrimental effect on Balinese music, such performances were indirectly implicated
in a common complaint: that musicians now play for money rather than from love
of the music they perform. Both Tembres and Gandra of Petulu made the charge in
discussing the younger generation of musicians.

Taken literally, the claim is hard to believe. In August 1996, tourists in Ubud paid
7,000 Rupiah (about US$3) for a concert and as many as 200 regularly attended
the weekly performances of the more famous groups. Though some musicians are
near professionals and others teach at conservatories, the vast majority of Balinese
musicians do not earn their living solely from music. Most of the revenue earned in
playing for tourists is paid into the coffers of the gamelan club (sekaha (B)) and goes
towards the hire of the venue, electricity charges, the upkeep of the costumes and
instruments, and so on. Thanks to the co-operative system of village life and music-
making, much of the income from tourist performances continues to be used to
vitalize gamelan music (Ornstein 1971:15, 56; McKean 1978:96). Moreover, tourist
dollars have also been used to revive threatened forms of gamelan and to restore
older instruments (Margaret Eiseman, 1990:340).

In one leading ensemble, all participants (about 50 in number) received 2,000 Rp

per tourist performance in August 1996, regardless of rank or experience, though a
bonus was paid at galungan (the holiday that marks each Balinese year of 210
days). At that time, one could buy about 20 Indonesian cigarettes or a cheap meal
for 2,000 Rp. Many of the group’s members rehearse many hours per week. It is not
the level of remuneration, obviously, that accounts for their participation in the
performance group. Indeed, a number of its members are wealthy, even by Western
standards.

So, what lies behind the complaint that musicians now play for money? I
understand it as revealing a general worry about threats posed by
commercialization to the traditional Balinese way of life, not a particular worry that
can be laid solely at the door of paid tourist performances. In the past, musicians
played for love of the activity and of the music, as well as to please the gods.
Famous teachers received only food and accommodation in return for their services.
All this was made possible by a co-operative social system that emphasized group
goals and the pooling of common resources. Many aspects of Balinese life were

32
organized communally. Under this system, money earned went toward the group,
not into the pockets of individuals. While this social system remains largely intact,
everyone, musicians included, now needs money. (As Gandra of Petulu emphasized,
money is necessary not only for themselves and their families but also for the
temple.) All dimensions of life in Bali, not solely those connected with musical
performance, have become more materialistic and individualistic than they were
formerly. This may be an inevitable, if regrettable, consequence of modern economic
development, in which tourism is but one element. It is a recognition of the dangers
posed by this new regime to the traditional social fabric and, more specifically, to
the place of the arts within it, that lies behind the reproach that musicians now are
motivated to play for money. As Gandra of Petulu put it: "Before the social system
was stronger, but now everything is a little bit money."

The Role of Conservatories

More frequently mentioned than tourist concerts for its impact on Balinese music
was the role played by conservatories, such as STSI (and its predecessors, such as
ASTI and KOKAR) was more frequently mentioned by the interviewees than tourist
concerts for its impact on Balinese music. Most of the leading musicians of the
current generation, including Dewa Brata, Wayan Sanglah, and Made Berata, are
products of such institutions.

Gandra of Petulu (a former teacher at KOKAR and STSI) noted that, whereas the
traditional approach to the study of music was entirely oral, notations supplement
the teaching process in the conservatory. But the resulting performance standard is
still the same, he concluded. Tembres, on the other hand, thought that the playing
taught at STSI sometimes is of a lower or less even quality than was achieved
previously by traditional methods.

Both Dewa Brata and Sanglah, observed that the STSI kebyar style, along with its
versions of standard works, is becoming widespread as its graduates become
teachers. They regretted the way in which local styles and work-variants are
disappearing as a consequence. Both believed, however, that STSI is very important
for the development and continuity of Balinese music and dance. The students
receive lessons in style, feeling, and technique. Also, rarer types of gamelan
ensemble, and the repertoires associated with them, are taught.

The Younger Generation of Musicians

While the interviewees were not inclined to identify performances for tourists as a
source of concern, they were quick to locate a potential threat to Balinese musical
traditions in the attitude adopted by the generation of younger musicians. It was
widely maintained that, as regards executive competence, younger musicians were
no less technically skilled than their predecessors. What was in question,
apparently, was their interest in, and commitment to mastering the intricacies of,
difficult "classic" works.

33
Tembres thought that the current generation of musicians is not serious and
prefers easy music. Gandra of Petulu held that young musicians do not enjoy
legong. They look for dynamic contrast and constant change in the music they play.
They do not care if the work is good, only if playing it makes them happy. But he
detected a growing interest in "old" music, such as legong and Kebyar Ding. He
predicted that, in the next twenty years or so, a respect for the musical precedents
of the current style would be reawakened.

It is so common in all cultures for the older generation of musicians to allege of

younger players that they lack interpretive depth, despite being technically skilled,
that one is likely to be wary of taking the above comments at face value. And it was
obvious that these generalizations did not apply to the younger musicians that I
interviewed. But they, too, expressed reservations about the attitude of their
contemporaries. It was said that younger players are not always prepared to
practice difficult passages and that the commitment to excellence now is not what it
was thirty years ago.

The Attitude of the Balinese Audience

The attitudes of the younger musicians appear to reflect those of a wider Balinese
public, especially of the younger generation as a whole. Dewa Brata noted that
Balinese audiences now are beginning to complain that the temple performances
are too long and to say that they do not like or understand legong. They prefer STSI
style and new pieces, not the older works played in a traditional manner. What and
how the musicians play, even in the temple, is dictated by what the people enjoy.
This situation is very bad, he thought, and threatens the traditions of music and
dance.

The dalang, Wayan Wija, expressed concern about the way in which wayang kulit is
changing in response to pressure from the Balinese public. Few Balinese are
expected to follow dialogue in the old Javanese language of Kawi, but, increasingly,
audiences can no longer understand the parts of the drama that are spoken in High
Balinese. It is the humorous interludes supplied by the clowns in Low Balinese or
Bahasa Indonesia that attract the audience’s attention. As a result, performances
are becoming briefer and more diverting. The musical interludes and
accompaniments also are being reduced now—repeats are cut, shortening pieces by
a minute or more.

Overall Conclusions From The Interviews

Before drawing conclusions from the interviews, four caveats should be registered.
Things in Bali now may not be what they once were, but I know of no other society
that is so pervasively steeped in its indigenous cultural traditions. The music that I
have been discussing (with the exception of kecak, perhaps) percolates more deeply
into the fibre of the average Balinese than most Westerners can comprehend. For
instance, it remains true that everyone in Bali knows the music of Legong Lasem,
though it might no longer be to the taste of all, as it is not true that, in Germany,

34
everyone is familiar with Brahms’s German Requiem. Secondly, I should reiterate
that the issue concerns the kind or quality of change over time, not change as such.
Alteration is expected and valued in most kinds of Balinese music. Thirdly, while
the interviewees expressed negative evaluations of some past and current
performances and practices, these depended on discriminations that were fine even
by the standards of Balinese musical experts. Fourthly, the interviewees often
emphasized the personal aspect of the judgments they were making and were aware
that others might differ. While all agreed that "classic" kebyar works should be
subject to creative development, they did not coincide, and neither did they expect
to, on the extent of change that is appropriate. And while there were concerns about
the growing dominance of STSI style, at least some of the interviewees found that
style congenial.

So, what is the overall picture? On the positive side, many musicians retain a deep
devotion to the music of Bali and are equipped to communicate this on a practical
level. The negative picture is more complex. There were poor performances of kecak,
gender wayang, and gong kebyar in the past, as there are fine ones now. In the
case of kecak and gong kebyar, not every group that performed well in the past did
so consistently. The best current performances of gong kebyar and legong perhaps
are not quite so good as the best of those recorded thirty years ago. This last result
may be a direct consequence of the nature of tourist performances, particularly as
these require that works be shortened. And it might also be affected indirectly by
the prevalence of tourist performances to the extent that these create an
environment in which musicians play more for love of money than for love of music.
It was the attitude of the Balinese to their music, however, not the influence of
tourism, that was more often identified as a source of concern. Many of the current
generation of musicians do not deeply feel works and styles central to the
traditional repertoire, though they are as technically competent as was ever the
case in rendering such music. And this coincides with a loss of interest in and
comprehension of such music by young people in general. The threat to Balinese
dance and music, if there is one, comes primarily from within. This is apparent in
pressure from the Balinese public for changes in wayang kulit and in musical
performances for the temple. Even in kecak, the current trend toward innovation
arises from the musicians, rather than from tourists.

The most significant influence on Balinese music, I have suggested, is the shifting
attitude of the Balinese to their own cultural heritage. This change in attitude is
more readily explained by alterations within the wider society than solely by the
impact of tourist concerts. It is important to recall that the last four decades have
been ones of extremely rapid technological and economic development—Bali has
gone from kerosene lamps to electricity, from setrop to Coca-cola, from bicycles to
four-wheel drive Toyotas. To take just one of the more obvious cases, television is
present in many homes and eating-houses, and Balinese avidly watch U.S. and
Japanese programs, as well as those from Jakarta (which emphasize Muslim, rather
than Hindu, culture). The Balinese are inundated with information, products, and
values that have foreign sources. At the same time, the assumptions of
entrepreneurial capitalism that underlie the moneyed economy adopted in

35
Indonesia (as elsewhere) are in tension with Bali’s traditional social systems
organized along co-operative lines. To my mind, these factors create much more
powerful pressures for social change than does the immediate presence of tourists
as such.

As for Western commentators on Balinese music, I believe Tenzer comes nearer

than Brunet to identifying the factors that might threaten the traditions. While he
mentions tourism as both beneficial and dangerous, he places the emphasis on the
wider social context when he writes: ‘The yearly Festival Gong and Bali Arts
Festival, the constant stream of musical performances emanating from the
conservatories, and the ever-increasing number of village sekaha with regular work
performing for tourists, have created a broader range of contexts for gamelan in
secular life than has heretofore been known in Bali. This has often had the effect of
strengthening the sacred ties which are the root of the tradition, simply because
there are more sekaha available and eager to play their part in rituals. ... At the
same time, many young Balinese, bombarded by a hail of outside influences
resulting from Indonesia’s increasing international presence, and the influx of
tourists, foreign goods and Western culture, are perhaps less aware than ever of the
history and diversity of their own music’ (1991:110-11).

Stephen Davies,

Department of Philosophy,

University of Auckland,

Private Bag 92019, Auckland,

NEW ZEALAND.

Contact Stephen Davies: sj.davies@auckland.ac.nz

WORKS CITED

BAKAN, Michael.

1997/1998 "From Oxymoron to Reality: Agendas of Gender and the Rise of Balinese
Women's Gamelan Beleganjur in Bali, Indonesia." Asian Music, 29 (1), 37-85.

BANDEM, I Madé and Fredrik Eugene DeBOER.

1981 Kaja and Kelod: Balinese Dance in Transition Kuala Lumpur, Oxford
University Press.

BRUNER, Edward M.

36
1996 "Tourism in the Balinese Borderzone." In Displacement, Diaspora, and
Geographies of Identity, edited by Smadar Lavie & Ted Swedenburg. Durham &
London: Duke University Press, 157-79.

COAST, John

1953 Dancers of Bali New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons.

CORNET, J.

1975 "African Art and Authenticity." African Art 9 (1), 52-55.

COVARRUBIAS, Miguel

1972. Bali P. T. Pustaka Ilmu, Jakarta: Oxford University Press. (First published in
1937.)

DeVALE, Sue Carole and I Wayan DIBIA

1991 "Sekar Anyar: An Exploration of Meaning in Balinese Gamelan." The World of

Music 33 (1), 5-51.

DE ZOETE, Beryl & Walter SPIES

1973 Dance And Drama In Bali Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. (First
published by Faber & Faber in 1938.)

DIBIA, I Wayan

1989 "The Symbols of Gender in Balinese Dance." UCLA Journal of Dance Ethnology
13, 10-13.

DJELANTIK, A. A. M.

1995 "Is There a Shift Taking Place in Balinese Aesthetics?" Paper presented to the
Third International Bali Studies Workshop, The University of Sydney, 3-7 July
1995.

EISEMAN , Margaret

1990 "Gamelan Gong: Traditional Balinese Orchestra." In Eiseman Jr., 333-42.

EISEMAN, JR., Fred B.

1990 Bali: Sekala & Niskala Singapore: Periplus Editions. Vol. 1.

FAIRBAIRN-DUNLOP, Peggy

37
1994 "Gender, Culture and Tourism Development in Western Samoa." In Tourism: A
Gender Analysis, editors Vivian Kinnaird & Derek Hall. Chichester: John Wiley &
Sons, 121-41.

GREENWOOD, Davydd J.

1978 "Culture by the Pound: An Anthropological Perspective on Tourism as

Cultural Commoditization." In Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism,
edited by Valene S. Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 129-38.

HARNISH, David

1991 "Balinese Performance as Festival Offerings." Asian Art 4 (2), 9-27

HATLEY, Barbara

1990 "Theatrical Imagery and Gender Ideology in Java." In Power and Difference:
Gender in Island Southeast Asia, edited by Jane Monnig Atkinson & Shelly
Erington. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 177-207.

HOOD, Mantle

1971 The Ethnomusicologist New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company.

HOUGH, Brett

1995 "Sekolah Tinggi Seni Indonesia, Denpasar and the Tri Dharma Perguran
Tinggi." Paper presented to the Third International Bali Studies Workshop, The
University of Sydney, 3-7 July 1995.

JULES-ROSETTE, Bennetta

1984 Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective

New York: Plenum Press.

McLEOD, M. D.

1976 "Limitations of the Genuine." African Art 9 (3), 31, 48-51.

McKEAN, Philip Frick

1978 "Towards a Theoretical Analysis of Tourism: Economic Dualism and Cultural

Involution in Bali." In Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, edited by.
Valene S. Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 93-107.

McPHEE, Colin

38
1966 The Music of Bali: A Study in Form and Instrumental Organization in Balinese
Orchestral Music New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

McPHEE, Colin

1979 A House in Bali Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press. (First published by
Victor Gollancz Ltd., London, in 1947.)

McPHEE, Colin

1981 The Balinese Wajang Koelit and Its Music New York: AMS Press. (Reprint of the
1936 edition: Overdruk Uit Djåwå, No.1, 16e Jaargang.)

NORONHA, Raymond

1979 "Paradise Reviewed: Tourism In Bali." In Tourism: Passport to Development?

Perspectives on the Social and Cultural Effects of Tourism in Developing Countries,
edited by E. de Kadt. New York: Oxford University Press, 177-204.

ORNSTEIN, Ruby Sue

1971 Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Development of a Balinese Musical Tradition. Ph.
D. thesis, University of California at Los Angeles.

PICARD, Michel

1990 "Kebalian Orang Bali: Tourism and the Uses of 'Balinese Culture' in New
Order Indonesia." Review of Indonesian and Malaysian Affairs 24 (Summer), 1-38.

PICARD, Michel

1996 "Dance and Drama in Bali: The Making of an Indonesian Artform." In Vickers
(ed), 115-57.

SCOTT-MAXWELL, Aline

1996 "Women's Gamelan Groups in Central Java: Some Issues of Gender, Status
And Change." In Aflame with Music: 100 Years of Music at the University of
Melbourne, edited by Broadstock, Brenton, et al. Centre for Studies in Australian
Music, University of Melbourne, 223-230.

SEEBASS, Tilman

1996 "Change in Balinese Musical Life" 'Kebiar' in the 1920s and 1930s." In Vickers
(ed), 71-91.

SELWYN, Tom

39
1992 "Tourism, Society, and Development." Community Development Journal 27,
353-60.

TENZER, Michael

1991 Balinese Music Berkeley & Singapore: Periplus Editions.

VICKERS, Adrian

1989 Bali: A Paradise Created Ringwood, Victoria: Penguin.

VICKERS, Adrian (ed.)

1996 Being Modern in Bali: Image and Change New Haven, Connecticut: Monograph
43/Yale Southeast Asia Studies.

RECORDINGS CITED

Bali South: Compositions of Wayan Gandera: Teacher, Composer, Gamelan Master,:

Peliatan, Bali. cp1973. IE Records stereo ier-7503. (Institute of Ethnomusicology,
University of California, Los Angeles.) One LP. Recordings and notes by Gertrude
River Robinson. Recorded in 1970.

Court Music and Banjar Music. cp1971. Philips 6586 008. One LP. Recording by
Jacques Brunet and Ngac Him. Photographs and notes by Jacques Brunet. [The
Peliatan group was recorded in September, 1970 -- Jacques Brunet, pers. comm.]
{Reissued cp 1994. Unesco collection D 8059. (International Music Council.) One
compact disc.}

Dancers of Bali: Sekehe Gong: Sadha Budaya - Kelurahan, Ubud. Maharani RCD-01.
One compact disc. Recorded**

Gamelan Semar Pegulingan [I]: "Tirta Sari" Ensemble of Peliatan Village. cp1990.
Produced by Soh Fujimoto. JVC VICG-5024-2. (JVC World Sounds.) One compact
disc. Recording, notes, and photographs by Tsutomu Oohashi. Recorded January
1985, Peliatan, Bali.

Gamelan Gong Kebyar [III]: The Ensemble of Tejakula Village. cp1994. Produced by
Soh Fujimoto. JVC VICG-5352-2. (JVC World Sounds.) One compact disc.
Recording, notes, and photographs by Tsutomu Oohashi. Recorded January 1993,
Tejakula Village, Buleleng, Bali.

Gender Wayang of Sukawati Village. cp1992. Produced by Hoshikawa Kyoji. King

Record Co. KICC 5156. (World Music Library.) One compact disc. Engineered by
Takanami Hatsuro. Notes by Minagawa Koichi; translated by Gerald Groemer.
Recorded 3. December, 1990 at Sayan, Gianyar.

40
Golden Rain: Balinese Gamelan Music: Ketjak: the Ramayana Monkey Chant.
cp1969. Nonesuch H-72028. (Nonesuch Explorer Series.) One LP. Recordings,
notes, and photographs by David Lewiston. Recorded in 1966. {Several tracks from
this LP, including the kecak, have been re-released on Music From the Morning of
the World. cp.1988. Elektra/Nonesuch 9 79196-2. (Nonesuch Explorer Series.) One
compact disc.}

Golden Rain: Gong Kebyar of Gunung Sari, Bali. cp1995. Produced by Hoshikawa
Kyoji. King Record Co. KICC 5195. (World Music Library.) One compact disc.
Engineered by Takanami Hatsuro. Notes by Minagawa Koichi; translated by Oshima
Yutaka and Matthew Zuckerman. Recorded 6. December, 1990 at Peliatan, Bali.

Kecak and Sanghyang of Bali. cp1991. Produced by Kyoji Hoshikawa. King Record
Co. KICC 5128. (World Music Library.) One compact disc. Engineered by Hatsuro
Takanami. **Notes by Koichi Minagawa; translator unacknowledged. Recorded
November &. December, 1990 in Bali; performed by "Ganda Sari", desa Bona.

Kecak of Bali: Monkey Dance: Bona Sari. Maharani MR-001. One compact disc. **

Les grands gong kebyar des annés soixante. cp 1994. Ocora, Radio France C
560057/58. Two compact discs [ADD]. Recording, photgraphs and notes by
Jacques Brunet; translation by Peter Lee. [The Peliatan group was recorded in June
1969 and the Sawan group was recorded in July 1970 -- Jacques Brunet, pers.
comm.]

Music Atlas: Bali. cp1972. EMI/Odeon 3/C064-17858. One LP. Recording by

Jacques Brunet and Ngac Him. Photographs and notes by Jacques Brunet. [The
recording date was May 1970 -- Jacques Brunet, pers. comm.]

Music for the Balinese Shadow Play: Gendèr Wayang from Teges Kanyinan, Pliatan,
Bali. cpXXXX**. Nonesuch H-72037. (Nonesuch Explorer Series.) One LP.
Recordings, notes, and photographs by Robert E. Brown. Recorded July 25, 1969.

Music for the Gods: The Fahnestock South Sea Expedition: Indonesia. cp1994.
Produced by Mickey Hart and Alan Jabbour. Rykodisc RCD 10315. (Library of
Congress Endangered Music Project.) One compact disc. Notes by Sue Carole
DeVale and Jim McKee. Recorded in 1941.

Music from Bali: Played by the Gamelan Orchestra from Pliatan, Indonesia. cp1971.
Decca ARLP 2308. One LP. Recording and notes by John Coast. [No indication of
recording date. Assume about 1970.]

Music from the Morning of the World, Bali. Vol. 1 & 2 1920s. Recorded in 1927-28 by
C.M. von Hornbostel for Beka and Odeon. Source: taped copies from 78s, Archive of
Maori and Pacific Music, Department of Antropology, University of Auckland.

41
Music of the Wayang Kulit [II]: A Shadow Play from the Dewa Ruci. cp1993. Produced
by Soh Fujimoto. JVC VICG-5266-2. (JVC World Sounds.) One compact disc. Notes
by Koichi Minagawa; translation by Robin Thompson. Photographs by Yuki
Minegishi. Recorded 29 July 1983, Tokyo, Japan.

The Earth Greets the Sun: Gamelan Music from Bali. cp1972. Produced by Dr.
Andreas Holschneider. Deutsche Grammophon 447 499-2. One compact disc
[ADD]. Recording by Jacques Brunet. Notes by Neil Sorrell. Recorded February
1972, Sebatu, Bali.

The Music from Bali. cp1962. Philips 631 210 LP. One LP. Recording and notes by
Joachim E. Berendt. Recorded March and April, 1962.

The Very Best of Legong: Most Beautiful Music of Bali: Part 1: "Tirta Sari" Semar
Pegulingan of Peliatan Village - Ubud, Bali. Maharani RCD-08. One compact disc.
Recorded**

42
Realisation in Aestethic Education

Nick McDoo

In this paper, I shall advance the following thesis: within the language-game of art,
our experience of extra-linguistic mental images (which I also take to include
aspect- perceptions and empathic emotions) is a sine qua non for a full
understanding of all works of art, however abstract. This is by contrast with
ordinary language wherein the meanings of our utterances are normally quite
independent of any image, aspect or feeling associated with any particular personal
point of view. To distinguish such ‘experiences’ from our imageless and unfeeling
‘bare thoughts’, the concept of ‘realisation’ seems to be particularly apt, carrying as
it does the implication that some important idea has ‘come home’ to us personally,
as when we say "I knew at the time that. ..but only later did I realise what it meant".
Such acts of realisation are not, of course, confined to the aesthetic realm but to be
found in most areas of human experience, such as suddenly realising that one has
fallen in love, or how amusing a certain situation really is.

Aesthetic educators, then, should be concerned with the type of situation where two
pupils have both grasped the ‘bare thought’ of demonic energy embodied in Blake’s
Tyger, yet while one of them ‘sees’ in his mind’s eye some bright and fabulous
creature, being moulded in the hands of a god, the ‘forests of the night’, etc., all
‘shaping up’ into an ever richer configuration generated as much by the sound as
the sense of the poem, the other pupil, although he may think about such things,
imagines nothing, or perhaps at best, simply a conventional tiger. Not, of course,
that such imagining is to be understood simply as an attempt to visualise the
absent object since in fact a whole gamut of imagined sensations and emotions are
evoked - the roar of the tiger, sensations of unbounded energy, feelings of fear
mixed up with those of beauty and so on, for as Sartre rightly says:

The entire body participates in the make-up of the image. ..There are
no

feelings without a harmony of bodily phenomena [ 1 ]

- even, one might add, where olfactory images are evoked, as when we imagine the
smell of the blood on Lady Macbeth’s hand that "all the perfumes of Arabia will not
sweeten". Nor, one must also quickly add, should the distinctive vividness of such
mental states be thought of as arising from the achievement of some kind of ‘one to
one correspondence’ (the hypostasised ‘inner film show’ of empirical psychology). As
both Sartre and Ryle have correctly pointed out, it cannot be the image itself which
is the object of my thought (for how could a mere image of a tiger, whether painted
or imagined, be threatening?), but rather what it is an image of, i.e. this awesome
creature as it might be if it existed, and which the image functions to ‘conjure up’. It
is this transparency of the image before what it intends that also helps to explain
why the sparsest of images are often found to be the most evocative, as in the
following

43
Japanese Haiku:

To the yearning seekers of blossoms

With pride would I offer

A delight of the eye,

The green from under the snow,

In a mountain village in springtime.

wherein the whole ‘presence’ of spring is evoked by the power of a single image, ‘the
green from under the snow’.

In the case of the perceptual arts - painting, sculpture, music, cinema, etc. - where
the imaging has already been done for us, at least up to a point, the counterpart of
the mental image that should most concern the aesthetic educator is clearly that of
‘aspect perception’. This type of experience arises when we come to see in the
perceptual object more than is strictly given either by its obvious features or, in
advance of the experience, by the description under which it is presented to us,
however much we may have grasped such a description at an intellectual level.
Such ‘aspects’ may be seen to range from (a) those cases where the imagination
simply strives to supplement features that are missing from the work although
implied by it, such as the landscape hidden behind the head in a portrait, or the
sound and movement of waves in a sea painting, to (b) those cases where we come
to see what are often called ‘emergent’ features of the work, such as when we ‘hear’
the sadness in a melody or ‘see’ the sadness in the blues of a Picasso painting, to (c)
those cases where a far more radical transformation of the primary object takes
place, as when the columns in a cathedral take on a forest-like appearance, or
when certain kinds of music evoke a ‘world’ out of sound, as for example, a
climactic passage in Debussy’s La Mer may be seen to evoke a sea-god arising out of
the waves. In such cases we come to ‘hear’ the god-like aspect in the music as we
come to ‘see’ the forest in the cathedral or the rolling movement in Hokusai’s great
wave, even though all that we literally experience are loud chords, stone columns or
a ‘frozen’ image of the sea. As with the mental images that mayor may not arise
from our reading of Blake’s Tyger, pupils may grasp at the ‘bare’ conceptual level
that it could ‘make sense’ to attribute the aspect of a sea-god to Debussy’s music,
e.g. in virtue of the triple forte major chords that suddenly appear in the score, yet
when they attend to the music all that they actually experience are some very loud
sounds.

But after all, it may be asked at this juncture, do we really need to bolster up our
thoughts about works of art with such elusive extra-linguistic experiences, as long
as we can justify what we say by reference to features in the works themselves?
Even supposing we can meet Ryle’s celebrated denial of mental imagery in any
shape or form, are not such mental images as works of art generated, at least in

44
some of us, in the end as expendable as those exemplificatory or aide memoire
images that sometimes accompany our ordinary language utterances. Why, in other
words, should not the language game of art be as subject as ordinary language to
Wittgenstein’s stricture that: It is no more essential to the understanding of a
proposition that one should imagine anything in connection with it than that one
should make a sketch of it. [2]

Both Ryle’s denial of mental imagery and the more moderate view of such
phenomena as expendable appendages to our concepts, have the same basic origin
in an understandable desire to eliminate any concept of the ‘mental image’ as
having a free-floating existence independent of our thoughts, like Wittgenstein’s
‘beetle in the box’. However, while images, along with aspects and emotions, are all
undeniably the products of our thoughts (for to deny this would be to bring on the
impenetrable obscurity of a ‘private language’), they are nevertheless not the same
as the ‘bare thought of x’ since they do not intend their-object just as a meaning. If
the difference between them were simply a semantic one, i.e. that an ‘imagined’
thought differs from a ‘bare’ one simply in virtue of the rule that it posits its object
as absent or non-existent, then it is difficult to see how, in the end, we could make
any substantive distinction between the acts of thinking and thinking with images.
It is precisely this problem that dogs Ryle’s uneasy formulation that "roughly,
imaging occurs, but images are not seen" [3]. As a result of this, when we ‘imagine’,
along Rylean lines, Blake’s demonic tiger or the forest-aspect in the cathedral
columns, we find ourselves in the strange position of seeing nothing at all [4], or
worse still, ‘pretending to see’ what we have not. In fact ‘pretending to see’ what one
does not is precisely the kind of response that the aesthetic educator wants to avoid
above all else. Not, of course that the cathedral columns literally turn into a forest
before our eyes any more than a real tiger leaps into view as we read Blake’s poem
or a ‘real life’ fear seizes us and we hurl the book fearfully out of the window - all of
which ‘experiences’ would be more correctly described as hallucinatory! No image,
of course, can ever be identical with what it is an image of - a feature which lies at
the root of the well-known aesthetic phenomenon of ‘distancing’ [5]. Nonetheless, as
Sartre argues in ThePsychology of the Imagination, if we are to distinguish ‘the bare
thought of x’ from its imagined counterpart, then something must appear to us:

It is evident that the mental image must also have a material, and a
material

which derives its meaning solely from the intention that animates it.
To see

this clearly I need only compare my initial empty intention (i.e. bare
thought)

with my mental image of Peter. At first I wanted to produce Peter out

of the

void, and then something loomed up which filled my intention. [6]

45
The same goes for our experience of aspect-perception where, as Wittgenstein
pointsout: The flashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half
thought. [7] What this ‘something’ is that appears is not at all easy to say beyond
the fact that it must be some kind of ‘analogue’ of the absent or fictional object
which may or may not closely resemble it but which, in Sartre’s words, embodies: a
certain way an object has of being absent within its very presence. [8] Despite the
mysterious nature of this material, yet immaterial embodiment of the thought of the
tiger within the image of the tiger, it is nonetheless on experiential as much as on
logical grounds that we must argue for a distinction between the ‘bare’ and the
‘imagined’ thought. This is because what also characterises the imagined thought is
its vividness which the thought alone entirely lacks. In fact, Ryle himself came to
concede that this recalcitrant feature posed a major problem for his own account of
the- imagination in a paper given to the Colloque de Royaumont in 1961, in which
he looks once again at the notion that when someone is ‘hearing a tune in his
head’:

he must be in fact thinking how the tune goes... without its being
played

and without humming it. ...But what stopped me was that I did not
know

what more to say on this notion of thinking how the tune goes. For a
man can

say, even with an ajr of surprise "It was almost as if I really he.ard the

notes". ...It is because of this concept of quasi-sensory vivacity of

auditorily

imagined notes, among other things, that I was sure of not having
succeeded

in finding my way. [9]

How then, are we to account for this aura of vividness given off by the mental
image? I would suggest that we look for an explanation (a) in the power of
imagination to transform the necessarily impersonal, public thought into a highly
personal experi- ence, and (b) in the special way that the fullness of the absent
object is gradually revealed to us as the imagination sets about its work. As regards
the former, it is ‘of the essence’ of imagining, as of perception, that I must ‘put
myself into the picture’ as

it were, as when I come to know a city by walking around its streets, feeling its
amosphere at different times of the day and imagining how it would appear, say in
winter, or how it once appeared in wartime. As Merleau-Ponty rightly points out Is
not to see always to see from somewhere? [10]

46
Such ‘positional’ experiences, which are so different from the necessarily a-
positional ‘bare’ thought, derive their vivifying power not only from my imagined
spatio- temporal relationship to the object, but also from all the feelings, emotions
and associated memories that contribute to constituting a ‘personal point of view’.
What, then, of the fullness with which our imagination is capable of realising
theabsent object itself? Although each particular viewpoint can only ever be a
partial one (‘from over here’, ‘at this point in time’, etc.), each nonetheless seeks,
through an imagined synthesis of aspects, to ‘give on to’ the experienced object as a
whole, as when we ‘see’ the whole of Paris implicated in a sketch of a street cafe or a
snatch of piano accordian music. This potentiality of partial points of view to vividly
realise such whole configurations whereby, in Husserl’s words: Thoughts repose as
if satisfied in the sight of their object [ II ], would seem to be quite the most
remarkable feature of the imagination and also helps further to explain, as was
discussed earlier, why the ‘vividness’ of an image has little to do with ‘one to one
correspondence’.

Even if the reality of such images is now accepted, however, we still need to show
why their presence is a necessary condition for the full understanding of works of
art, by contrast with the semantically expendable images that sometimes
accompany our ordinary discourse. In the case of the latter, it is clear that I need
neither imagine nor feel anything in order to grasp the significance either of definite
descriptions like ‘there is a blackbird in the back garden’, or of generalisations like
‘human happiness does not last’, although I may of course, from time to time
produce memory images or exemplificatory ones to aid my thinking. If our interest
in works of art, however, were simply confined to the extraction of a ‘bare’ meaning,
then, as Roger Scruton has argued:

The content of the work could be phrased in any abstract way, and
one’s

interest would not outlive the perception of its truth. [ 12]

It is to avert this fundamentally mistaken view of aesthetic understanding -

mistaken because it cannot explain the distinctive nature of our interest in works of
art - that we must argue for the necessity of extra-linguistic acts of realisation
within the aesthetic realm. As Roger Scruton puts it, in this case of poetry,
although it is as true

of all other art forms:

At every point where a poem presents something that needs to be

under-

stood, understanding comes to rest in an ‘experience’ and not a mere

hypothesis or paraphrase. [ 13 ]

47
Unless, in other words, we actually come to see the ‘fearful symmetry’ of Blake’s
tiger we cannot really understand it, anymore than we can understand the sadness
of the blue in the painting unless we feel it. We cannot, of course, say any more
about the work after such an experience than we could before (e.g. the idea
expressed in the poem that ‘human happiness does not last’), although we may well
say it in a much more expressive tone of voice! Rather, as

Ray Elliott has put it:

Typically, realisation occurs owing to our experiencing for the first

time some

state of whose nature we are already able to give an account. We

‘realise what

it is’ in the living of it. [ 14]

The ‘order of learning’ may sometimes be reversed, however, as when our

experience of a work of art appears to us strange and mysterious, like Proust’s
madeleine, and ‘sends us off’ in search of a meaning. In fact, within the aesthetic
realm, this would seem most likely to occur in the case of the visual arts and music
insofar as the imagining has already, if only partially, been done for us. The
experience of literature on the other hand, would seem more often to commence
with the ‘bare’ thought alone, which then moves on towards imaginative fulfilment.
Works of art, then, are clearly complex dynamic events in so far as what follows
from the above account is that their potentiality can only reach completion in
constitutive acts of our imagination. We may also, however, look for further
confirmation of such a view in the unconditioned character of our aesthetic
judgments whos acceptability, as aestheticians from Kant to Sibley and Scruton
have sufficiently argued [ 15], must find confirmation in a personal response, in the
absence of any sufficient set of rules that can tell us how to ‘see’ the work.

Such a view of aesthetic understanding as I am advancing has not, it must be said,

gone unchallenged. Dufrenne, for example, voices the suspicions of many
‘objectivist’ aestheticians who see ‘imagination’ in any constitutive sense, as a direct
threat to the ‘plenitude of the sensuous’ revealed to us by the aesthetic object itself:

Imagination appears to us to be repressed rather than stimulated by

the aesthetic object [ 16],

he argues, citing the case of Debussy’s La Cathedrale Engloutie:

Is it suitable that we evoke this submerged cathedral, thal we raise

images of

some fabulous city, of submarine ruins in transparent and perfidious

waler,

48
 and of bells whose spirit survives the disaster by some miracle? Such

representation only obstructs the listening. [ 17]

Here, I would simply argue that the very richness of Dufrenne’s description betrays
a tacit acknowledgement of the evocative power of such music to produce a
coherent aesthetic experience that could never be equalled by the austere attention
to pure sound that he is ostensibly advocating. As Wittgenstein openly affirms of
listening to music, in Culture and Value:

I can imagine an exciting scene in a film accompanied by Beethoven’s

or

Schubert’s music and might gain some sort of understanding of the

music

from the film. [18] [My emphasis.]

What also bothers ‘objectivists’ about such very personal associations is what they
see as their highly arbitrary and self-indulgent nature which must rule out any idea
of aesthetic education along such lines. All we need do here, I think, is refer them
back to the criterion of ‘appropriateness’. There are surely many ways in which, for
example, I may appropriately imagine Blake’s demonic tiger (e.g. my imagined tiger
may be in the middle of a leap, yours may just have landed or be prowling about),
but it would clearly be quite inappropriate to imagine it as a cuddly pet.
Furthermore, there are times when we may recognise an identity between our own
life experiences and the work which immeasurably enhances the fullness with
which we perceive the work. As

Proust says of his great novel:

In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own
self. ...

The recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says, is
the

proof of its veracity. [ 19]

Similar considerations of ‘appropriateness’ apply, of course, to our justifications of

aspect-perception, thereby permitting, as with our mental images, an admittedly
loose notion of rationality and therefore educability to enter in. Such looseness,
however, seems infinitely preferable to the ‘objectivist’ goal of a free-standing
‘aesthetic object’ independent of any inter-personal collaboration on the part of its
audience - a goal which, if once attained, would completely emasculate the concept
of ‘realisation’ that I have been advancing. As Sartre says of literature:

49
 It is the joint effort of author and reader that brings upon the scene
that concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind.
There is no art except for and by others. [20]

The practical problem of how the teacher is to communicate such seemingly

incommunicable extra-linguistic experiences remains however, for as Sartre goes on
to say:

The literary object, though realised through language is never given in

language. On the contrary, it is by nature a silence and an opponent

of the

word. [21]

To this problem, I shall now turn.

II

Most classrooms in which aesthetic education takes place, in fact. are more likely to
be filled with the sound of highly verbal, analytic inquiry into what the work of art
means than the contemplative silence of which Sartre speaks. ‘Is the poem about
love - or death?’ the teacher asks provocatively, in order to alert the pupils to
possible ambiguities and ironies in the text. Aesthetic and other cultural
conventions are identified and related to the preoccupations of the communities in
which they arose. while moral. psychological, political and other ‘lessons’ are drawn
from the work in order to show its continuing relevance to the present day. What,
then, of the pupils’ own first-person adventure into the world of the work without
which, the work’s meaning must remain inert? What can be said about this beyond
the ritual aesthetic commonplace that ‘each pupil must see for his or her self ‘?
What we need to avoid here is the over-fragmented view that artificially divides the
work into translatable, interpretable statement and sui generis ‘experience’ such as
one finds, for example, in the following, uneasy formulation advanced by Valery:

Transmettre un fait - produire une emotion. La poesie est un

compromis, ou

lIne certaine proportion de ces deux fonctions. [22]

From such a view, the following kinds of undesirable practice may easily arise:
First, there is the teaching that dwells only upon ‘reading off’ or decoding the
implications of the work to the exclusion of its identity as a living object. This has
the effect of reducing the ‘text’ in the pupils’ eyes to the level of an expendable text-
book - and often an unnecessarily obscure one at that, when set beside the
teacher’s own explanations. ‘Well, if that’s all the author is trying to say’, the pupils
think, ‘then why didn’t he say so in the first place’! At the other extreme however, is
the ‘teaching’ that simply mystifies the aesthetic form of life by dwelling exclusively

50
upon what is taken to be the untranslatable experience of the work at the expense
of even attempting to articulate anything of its meaning or what makes such an
object ‘a work of art’

[23].

By contrast with both these approaches, I would argue that effective arts teachers
display a capacity not only to articulate the theme of the work but, in so doing, to
reproduce in their pupils’ imaginations something of the living experience that they
themselves must have had of the work - sometimes, but not necessarily, as a result
of reproducing it again in themselves, for they may rely simply on their memory of
an earlier experience. Sometimes, although more rarely. they may actually come to
realise the work for the first time during the lesson, which can be a most startling
experience!

Throughout the performance, however, their talk, in Sibley’s words:

often serves to support (their) judgments in a special way: it helps us

to see

what they have seen. [24]

This is not to imply that such teachers will always have the last word, for there is
always the possibility that the pupils themselves will supply fresh perspectives that
have escaped the teacher. However, for this to be possible, the pupils will also have
had to grasp something of the powers of communication to which Sibley refers
which, hopefully, they will have ‘picked up’ from such teaching.

How, then, does this type of communication come about? In so far as such teaching
seeks to convey something more than can ever wholly be captured by the rule-
governed operations of everyday language, its power to achieve this end may be
seen to lie in its rhetorical structure and expressiveness of delivery. As Wittgenstein
points out, it is often characteristic of the aesthetic language game, in the absence
of ready-to-hand rules, that it is phrased in a persuasive way:

Here it occurs to me that in conversation on aesthetic matters we use

the

words: "You have to see it like this, this is how it is meant"; when you
see it

like this, you see where it goes wrong". [25]

Sometimes, such persuasiveness may involve - and here, I draw on Sibley’s very
useful synopsis of such approaches [26] - the teacher’s own use of poetic imagery
for its evocative power. I remember, for example, when Arnold’s Scholar Gypsy first
‘came to life’ for me when I heard a teacher describe it as ‘one of the great, green

51
poems of the English language - almost singing the word ‘green’ as he said it [27].
At other times, an appeal to personal associations may have a profound effect. I
remember an English. teacher once trying to get across the evocative power of the
moon in Wordsworth’s Lucy in terms of its virginal significance, its dramatic
disappearance being a highly appropriate symbol for lhe outlandish anxieties
generated by a first love:

My horse moved on, hoof after hoof

He raised, and never stopped;

When down below the cottage roof,

At once, the bright moon dropped.

What fond and wayward thoughts will slide

Into a lover’s head!

‘O mercy!’ to myself I cried,

‘If Lucy shoud be dead!’

We saw the point of his exegesis at a conventional ‘literary’ level, but remained
unmoved, even to the point of seeing the poem as rather ridiculous. What, after all,
were these ‘fond and wayward thoughts’? Seeing the expression on our faces, he
then added: ‘Have any of you ever had an experience like the following’? While
waiting outside the cinema for your girl-friend, who is very late, you say to yourself,
"if she doesn’t arrive by the time that screwed up bit of paper has blown across the
pavement and into the gutter then it is all over between us!" , [28] At that point, I
realised the meaning and the feeling of the poem. Sometimes, a teacher may aim to
intimate, e.g. the ‘tragic feel’ of Julius Caesar through a highly detailed discussion
of the different motives of the conspirators, the moral ambiguities of their
arguments, Caesar’s combination of ruthlessness and naivety, etc., and then, at
some point, the poignancy of the drama as a whole strikes the pupils and they are
moved - but moved in a way that would not have been possible without this prior
discussion. At other times, as Sibley points out:

The use of the aesthetic term itself may do the trick; we say what the
quality

or character is, and people who had not seen it before see it. [29]

More often, we draw the pupils’ attention to ‘first order’ features of the work, like
the Use of flattened thirds and sevenths in jazz, and relate these directly to the
‘emergent’ aesthetic feature, in this case the ‘blues’. It is not only with words,
however, that teachers may succeed in bringing about a realisation of the work’s

52
theme in their pupils. As Roger Scruton has argued, we naturally tend to
communicate authentic aesthetic experiences in a manner wich is in itself
expressive of the experience - as when we ‘betray’ our anger as much by our angry
tone of voice, gestures and facial expressions, as by what we say:

The subject will describe the object of his feeling in terms that can
them-

selves be construed as an expression of feeling. It is significant that he

describes the painting in a certain tone of voice. [30)

- as when the teacher, in trying to convey the lyrical freshness of The Scholar
Gypsy, almost ‘sang’ what he had to say. Sometimes, such aesthetic experiences
may even be conveyed by an expressive gesture alone, as when a great work of art
fills us with awe and we find that, for example, a grave nod is the best that we can
manage in the circumstances, as in Wittgenstein’s example:

I should like to say - "These notes say something glorious, but I do not
know

what". These notes are a powerful gesture, but I cannot put anything
side by

side with it that will serve as an explanation. A grave nod. [31 ]

What all such teaching approaches have in common is to generate within the pupils
a personal point of view upon the work, which may sometimes be ‘close up’, as
when they are taken ‘inside’ the work to explore a detail, and sometimes at a
distance, as when they are encouraged to stand back from the living object that
they haven brought into being and to survey it as a synoptic whole. However, it is
not only with the proliferation of appropriate images and emotions that such
teaching should concern itself, but also with the proliferation of further appropriate
thoughts and, in turn, their realisations in image, aspect and emotion. This is
because it is part of the power or geist of works of art, as Kant argues in his
account of the ‘aesthetic idea’ [32], to set off within us the ‘free play’ of the
imagination and understanding. Seen thus, the work of art not only functions to ‘fill
out’ its underlying meaning with:

such a multitude of partial representations... that no expression

indicating a

definite concept can be found for it [33),

but also, at the same time, generates much more thought, in so far as it induces:

on its own account, such a wealth of thought as would never admit of

53
 comprehension in a definite concept. [34]

As was discussed earlier in this paper, both the images and the thoughts, taken
individually, are partial. Collectively, however, they aim at the whole content of the
‘aesthetic idea’ intimated by the work. The work, therefore, like a pebble tossed into
a pool, may be seen as generating a wealth of further associated thoughts and
images which ripple outwards in our imagination until at the furthest reaches, we
may even be hard pressed to tell whether what we are aware of is a thought or an
image. In looking at Turner’s The Fighting Temeraire, for example, the teacher may
attempt to envelop pupils in the ‘world’ of the work not, initially, by getting them to
feel, as an educated art-lover might, its overall ‘threatening’ atmosphere, but rather
by inviting them to ‘hear’ in their imagination the lapping of the waves and to ‘feel’
the sea breeze indicated by the fluttering flag. Then, more ambitiously, he or she
might urge them to imagine from start to finish the slow, sad progress of the proud
ship on its final journey to the breaker’s yard-all of which is intimated by the
painting, even though all that can literally be seen is a ‘frozen image of boats on a
river. From such imagining, the ‘formal’ aesthetic aspects of the work may also
dawn- sometimes gradually, sometimes suddenly- as when the vastness of the sky
and the great plane of the sea painted by Turner ‘shape up’ into an awesome
configuration framing the ghostly presence of the Temeraire and the ‘satanic’ tug
boat. To see this for themselves, however, the pupils will most certainly need to
stand back from their earlier envelopment in the work. They will also need to stand
back in order to understand the way in which this painting dramatically renders a
more general theme - the historical shift from sail-power to steam - which, in turn
evokes many further thoughts (along with their ‘fulfilling’ images), some of them
highly public, like reflections on the Industrial Revolution and its conflict with
romanticism; others more personal, like the pupils’ own associations with ships and
rivers, industrial cities and romantic daydreams of the past. There can be no
specifiable ‘horizon’ to such responses beyond a general demand that they be, in
some way, germane to what the work itself intimates which will, in turn, depend
upon some agreement being reached with others who are familiar with the painting
and its background. More than this, we cannot and should not expect, not only
because of the presence of culturally related and more personal perspectives, but
also because of the often pointed out inexhaustibility of such works.

In all those classrooms where the teacher manages to convey the living experience
of the work, or at least a foretaste of it, through the expressiveness, style and geist
of his or her own teaching performance, the lesson itself may even come to be seen
as something like a work of art. It should also be, and usually is, a most enjoyable
affair for the teachers themselves, for when they are in full flow, improvising their
teaching in the manner of an inspired jazz musician, they are surely experiencing a
peak as a teacher - not that they could, or should keep this up all the time, of
course! In all those classrooms where such realisation is not forthcoming, on the
other hand, we may expect the following reactions from the pupils: either they will
become alienated from the aesthetic form of life, rejecting it because they do not
really believe that it exists; or else they may attempt to simulate appropriate
responses - much as one forces a laugh at a joke one does not understand. In so far

54
as such simulated responses are linked to powerful, though aesthetically irrelevant
motives such as a desire to come up to a required, academic standard, it may be
hard, at times, for the pupils themselves to tell whether their responses are genuine
or not, as when they try to convince themselves that they really are seeing what, in
reality, has not emerged for them at all. Here, successful art teachers must be able
to distinguish the simulated from the genuine response, for how else are they
ultimately to assess their teaching?

This is not a simple matter, however, for such behaviour comes in a variety of
forms, ranging from that which suggest some degree of realisation on the part of the
pupil which he or she either exaggerates or plays down, to that which masks a
complete absence of any aesthetic realisation whatsoever, even though the pupil
may be able to give a correct verbal account of the work. For example, the pupil
may know at an ‘educated’ level that the Cubist still-life at which he is gazing
‘ought’ to be seen as a harmonious structure of crystal-like forms. Yet the harder he
gazes at it, the more insistently does it appear as nothing more than a distorted
blue guitar embedded in a mass of unrelated shapes!

As with the development of any kind of judgment, no blue-print can be

given for

the infallible recognition of genuineness in what the pupil says or does. Rather,
what the experienced teacher develops is a feeling for its presence, for as
Wittgenstein says of such expertise:

Can one learn this knowledge? Yes; some can. Not, however, by taking
a

course in it, but through experience.-Can someone else be a man’s

teacher

in this? Certainly. From time to time he gives him the right tip.-This is

what ‘learning’ and ‘teaching’ are like here. ...There are also rules, but
they

do not form a system, and only experienced people can apply them
right.

Unlike calculating rules. [35]

Just as the lover learns to discriminate between responses of love and flattery or
pity by the subtlest of hints, so can the experienced teacher recognise whether a
silent response, for example, denotes rapt attention or merely the adoption of a pose
of thoughtfulness to mask the absence of response. Finally, the ideal teacher that I
have in mind, should be sensitive to the following ways in which acts of realisation
differ from each other. First, they may be seen to range along a ‘scale’ from states of

55
‘Apollonian’ contemplation at one end, such as may arise from our contemplation of
very tranquil landscapes, ‘lingering’ melodies and much highly abstract art, to
states of extreme ‘Dionysian’ excitement at the other end such as may be evoked by
the ‘heroic’ finales of symphonies like Dvorak’s Eighth or Janacek’s Sinfonietta, ‘hot’
jazz, dramatic paintings like Picasso’s Guernica or the literary presentation of
emotions in extremity, as when Prince Muishkin meets Rogozin on the darkened
staircase in The Idiot, or when Mrs Verloc learns of the death of Stevie at the end of
The Secret Agent. Secondly, they may be seen to vary in terms of the actual
demands that different works of art make upon us. At times, for example, thc
realisation of a work may come effortlessly, often striking the pupil when he or she
least expects it and, by contrast, eluding them as soon as they make a conscious
effort of the will to retain it. This is particularly true of those works of art where
‘atmosphere’ has an important role to play. On the other hand, especially with very
obscure or in other ways demanding works of art, the realisation may appear only
after a long and hard struggle, and even then, perhaps, only partially, as when one
tries to hold together all the leitmotifs of a piece of music in one synoptic whole.

Unfortunately, however, this very variety of response has itself given rise to a
number of dogmatic and distorting aesthetic theories, characterised by their
elevation of one mode of response only to a place of supreme importance along with
a dismissal of all other modes. Roger Scruton, for example, in Art and Imagination
rejects all ‘excitement’ in aesthetic response in favour of high-level intellectual
engagement [36]. Equally, however, some teachers, perhaps with an eye to the
competition from commercialised ‘popular’ culture, attempt to put across a view of
aesthetic experience to their pupils as paradigmatically exciting. Rarely, in fact,
does one find any aesthetic theory that does anything like justice to the full range of
possible types of aesthetic experience, so it is little wonder that pupils often grow
confused about how they ought to be responding and lose confidence in the value of
aesthetic criticism. Whether an appropriate realisation of the work of art is
effortless or hard-won, contemplative or excited, however, underlying all such
experiences is an involuntary element over which, necessarily, neither the pupil nor
still less the teacher, can ever have full control. This is something with which all
lovers of art simply have to live, for in Ishiguro’s words:

In the case of seeing images or aspects there is an added element of

something beyond our control, of being an experience probably

governed by

causal forces we do not understand. [37]

We may speculate about these ‘causal forces’ of course, for example, from a psycho-
analytic point of view, and there is no doubt that such involuntariness has its
origin, at least in part, in the involuntariness that lies at the root of all emotional
experience. Nonetheless, for our present purposes, such explanations may be
‘bracketed off’ because, despite this involuntary element, it is nevertheless true that

56
a capacity for aesthetic realisation can be developed by the right kind of teaching.
As Ishiguro goes on to point out:

At the same time aspect seeing or image seeing seems to involve a skill
that

can be acquired by effort or practice. ... It is knack that I can acquire

by

effort - although I cannot explain how I acquired the knack. [38]

Correspondence: Nick McAdoo email: nam8@tutor.open.ac.uk

NOTES:

[1] JEAN-PAUL SARTRE( 1972) The Psychology of the Imagination, p. 157 (London,
Methuen).

[2) LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN ( 1963) Philosophical Investigations, p. 120e, para. 396

(trans. G. E. M. Anscombe) (Oxford: Blackwell).

[3] GILBERT RYLE ( 1966) The Concept of Mind, p. 234 (London: Penguin).

[4] See also HIDE ISHIGURO ( 1967) Imagination, Proceedings of the Aristotelean
Society

Supplementary Volume 41.

[5] See, e.g. EDWARD BULLOUGH (1912-13) Psychical distance as a factor in art
and an aesthetic Principle, British Journal of Psychology, 5.

[6] SARTRE, op. cit., p. 18.

[7] WITTGENSTEIN, op. cit., p. 197e.

[8] SARTRE, op. cit., p. 81.

[9] GILBERT RYLE (1971) Phenomenology versus The Concept of Mind, Collected
Papers Vol. I, p. 194

(London, Hutchinson).

[10] MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY ( 1981) Phenomenology of Perception, p. 67 (trans.

by Colin Smith)

57
(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul).

[11] EDMUND HUSSERL ( 1970) Logical Investigations Volume II, p. 695 (trans. by
J. N. Findlay)

(London: Routledgc & Kegan Paul).

[12] ROGER SCRUTON ( 1974) Art and Imagination, p. 206 (London: Methuen).

[13) SCRUTON, op. cit., p. 186.

[14] R. K. ELLIOTT (1974) Education, love of one’s subject, and the love of truth,
Philosophv of Education Society Proceedings 8, p. 145.

[15] See IMMANUEL KANT (1966) Critique of Judgement (trans. by J. H. Bernard)

(New York: Hafner);

FRANK SIBLEY (1962) Aesthetic concepts, in: J. MARGOLIS (Ed.) Philosophy Looks
at the Arts (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons); SCRUTON, op. cit.

[16] MIKEL DUFRENNE (1973) The Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience, p. 210

(trans. by E. Casey) (Evanston: Northwestern University Press).

[17] DUFRENNE, op. cit., p. 217.

[18] LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN ( 1980) Culture and Value, p. 25e (trans. by Peter
Winch) (Oxford: Blackwell).

[19] MARCEL PROUST ( 1970) Time Regained, p. 283 (trans. by Andreas Mayor)
(London: Chatto & Windus).

[20] JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1950) What is Literature?, pp. 29-30 (trans. by B.

Frechtman) (London: Methuen).

[21] SARTRE, op. cit., p. 30.

[22] PAUL VALERY ( 1936) Je disais quelquefois à Mallarmé, in: Variété III, p. 17
(France: Editions Ga1limard).

[23] For a very amusing and detailed examination of this, see DAVID BEST ( 1985)
Feeling and

Reason in the Arts p. 14 (London: Allen & Unwin).

[24] SIBLEY, op. cit., p. 78.

[25] LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN ( 1963) Philosophical Investigations, p. 202e (Oxford:

Blackwell).

58
[26] SIBLEY, op. Cit., pp. 81-83.

[27] MICHAEL CONNORS, verbatim.

[28] HUGH SYKES-DAVIES, verbatim.

[29] SIBLEY, op. cit., p. 82.

[30] SCRUTON, op. cit., p. 131.

[31] WITTGENSTEIN, op. cit., p. 15ge.

[32] KANT, op. cit., para. 49.

[33] KANT, op. cit., para. 49.

[34] KANT, op. cit., para. 49.

[35] WITTGENSTEIN, op. cit., p. 227e.

[36] SCRUTON, op. cit., p. 77.

[37] ISHIGURO, op. ciI., p. 53.

[38] ISHIGURO, op. CiI., p. 53.

59
The Persistance of Painting: Preliminary premisses

Annette W. Balkema and Henk Slager

The well-proclaimed end of painting seems to be a logic outcome of the concluded

modernist project. However, one cannot dismiss that modernist project so easily.
Albrecht Wellmer convincingly argued in The Persistence of Modernity that, "With
postmodernism it becomes obvious that the critique of the modern, inasmuch as it
knows its own parameters, can only aim at expanding the interior space of
modernity, not at surpassing it. For it is the very gesture of radical surpassing -
romantic utopianism - that postmodernism has called into question."(1) In other
words, modernism appears to be intrinsically characterized by an unsurpassable
horizon. Therefore, one can only arrive at a real revision within modernism's own
boundaries. All in all, the conclusions Wellmer draws from the present situation -
described by him as a postmetaphysical modernism - seem to apply as well to the
present position of painting. After all, painting as the pre-eminent modernist image
production is no longer dominated by utopianism's dream of ultimate reconciliation
but, in line with Wellmer's persistence of modernity, it "preserves a rational,
subversive, and experimental spirit."

From the awareness of a necessary and topical reformulation of the painterly

domain, the starting hypothesis of the project "The Persistence of Painting" - a
symposium with theorists and artists at the Amsterdam State Academy of Art
(Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten) together with the parallel exhibition
"Reflexive Figurations" in Gallery Ferdinand van Dieten-d'Eendt, Amsterdam - was
based on questions such as, "Is there such a thing as a painterly paradigm in
current imagery?" or "What is the role of painting within today's media culture?" In
order to answer such questions, first of all one should explore the ontological status
of "painting as an art." Such an exploration implies questions such as, "What are
the present conditions for a painting to be defined as a painting? How are the
boundaries of the painterly domain being established?"

In the late 1980s, art critic Robert Hughes could still loosely contrast the painterly
domain with mass media. He maintains, "Painting is exactly what mass visual
media are not: a way of specific engagement, not of general seduction." In the
1990s, however, it appeared that painting could assimilate any other medium
without any problem. In Pittura-Immedia, Peter Weibel outlines how, until the
1970s, painting was dominated by the classical belief "that there is a direct
relationship between paint/color and the canvas, with artistic subjectivity as the
only mediator."(2) Weibel argues that, in the 1980s, however, painting relapses into
an illusion of immediacy because of the transavantgarde movement and "wild
painting's" lesser degree of complexity. In Weibel's view, the 1990s bring the ideal
synthesis since painting both "links up with earlier achievements" and "takes the
horizon of representation itself under closer scrutiny through critical
experimentation." Weibel argues that, in the 1990s, "Painters do not simply react to
the images created by the media and the history of art, but they go further by trying

60
to anticipate the impact of these images on art. Their paintings reflect a world
which has been transformed by technology." Weibel understands such a form of
image production as immediation, i.e. "the process of going through different media
before ending with a `painting' again and rethinking the question of the visual."
Thus, if the first half of the 20th century showed a painterly method characterized
by a dialectic of abstract and concrete (until 1950), and the subsequent period a
dialectic of immaterial and material, presently painting's discourse is dominated by
a tension between mediacy and immediacy.

Could one conclude from this that other media could be explored through the
painterly as a reflexive detour? The answer seems to be yes, since the activity of the
image in other (dominant) media can be meticulously be explored through the
detour of the painterly. Thus, in today's visual culture, the painterly image emerges
as a meta-picture, or, as Mitchell puts it, "It constructs a second order discourse
without recourse to language, without resorting to eksprasis."(3) Against mass
culture's accelerated image, this meta-image places the ideal `still' as an antidote
for the rapid detoriation of the capacity to consolidate memories. Therefore, the
meta-image is characterized by immediacy, depth and complexity. It focuses on the
logic of visibility i.e. on how an image is constructed. Consequently, such an image
offers "a post-linguistic, post-semiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex
interplay between visuality, apparatus, discourse, bodies and figurality." Precisely
from this initially (at first sight) more or less marginal, peripheral position (4),
painting as a producer of complex images seems more than ever to be able to
establish what art's center is.

In addition, more and more sculptures and installations have emerged with a
primarily painterly character (5). Does this mean, then, that the way one perceives
visual art is still (paradigmatically) defined by painting? In many theoretical
(aesthetic) surveys, it is indeed true that one naturally departs from the figure of
painting. However, the question of this symposium is whether, in the practice of art,
the presence of painting as tradition, attitude, art-historical reference, sign system,
mode of recognition, representation and exemplification is in fact still as natural?

Henk Slager e-mail: lierboog@dds.nl

Notes:

1. Albrecht Wellmer, The Persistence of Modernity, Cambridge, 1991, pg.viii.

2. Peter Weibel, Pittura/Immedia, Klagenfurt, 1995.

3. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory, Chicago, 1994, pg. 38.

4. In The End of Modernity (Cambridge, 1988), Gianni Vattimo describes such a

strategy as an ornamental aesthetics. Vattimo treats antithetical concepts (center
versus periphery) from a radicalization of Heidegger's differential thought in such a

61
way that hierarchic differences ultimately collapse, i.e. the terms become
distinctless.

5. Cf. for example Troublespot Painting, MUKHA, Antwerp 1999, catalogue edited
by Luc Tuymans and Narcisse Tordoir.

62
The Persistence of Painting: Painterly Perception

Jeroen Stumpel

The question of the persistence of painting implies questions of how painting will
persist in the future, why it has persisted for so long, and above all, so strongly in
the past. Today, it is quite clear that, in the tradition of Western culture, the art of
painting developed as a major art form. Therefore, it seems wise to start with the
last question and investigate the reasons for painting's long and strong persistence
in Western culture. Even today, it seems to be the case that when people hear the
word "artist" most of them tend to visualize a painter. If one would perform this as a
sociological-psychological experiment, it might be proven that some vague image
relating to the person of Van Gogh will emerge in most of the cases.

It is by no means obvious why painting acquired such a strong role during the
development of Western culture. However, in China and Japan, I believe the only
two other major cultures where painting enjoys such a strong position, it is at least
possible to follow how the act of painting has different potentials, different lines of
exploration, and different avenues of development. In China and Japan, it seems
that the relationship between the art of painting and the art of writing was of major
importance. The connection between writing and calligraphy exists in our tradition
of painting as well, but without any prominence until the end of the 19th century.

In the tradition of painting as we know it in Western Europe, an important

distinction has always been drawn between color and design, between drawing and
the application of paint. About the persistence of design we can be very brief,
because it is unimaginable that design would not persist. Design (disegno) was and
is not only related to the drawing act of lines and contours on a piece of paper, but
also to the mental faculty of imagining things, of drawing plans. In fact, design
(disegno) was the factor which united the arts of design, i.e. painting, sculpture,
and architecture. Of course, today's art of modern design stems from disegno as
well.

It is hard to believe that, in a near or far future, the art of designing objects, plans,
outlines or machines might happen without the use of drawing of some sort. Yet, it
is quite imaginable that the art of painting i.e. paint and brush might entirely
disappear in the production of imagery. A reason for this could be that what has
been ascribed to the art of painting is now performed by other media. In the history
of painting, it is indeed true that painters have always been at the forefront of
technological developments in the area of image making and image production.
Painters not only employed new means of composing an image, space, light,
shadow, and perspective, but also made use of material inventions, such as the
camera obscura. Of course, the invention of the camera obscura contributed greatly
to the development of photography, but again painters played a major role in the
development of that new medium whereupon film and video followed.

63
If one would study the art of painting within the much broader perspective of
historiography - the history of the production of images - then one would discover
that painting produces a way of image making similar to the imagery of
photography, film and television - that gives painting an important position in the
history of the image. However, the conception that there is a continuity between the
history of painting and the history of newer media as far as image creation is
concerned could also lead to another observation. That is that the development of
image making as part of painting caused at the same time a discontinuity in the
history of painting. In other words, painting's function has been modified due to the
emergence of other imagery.

In addition to the traditional distinction between colore and disegno - color and
design - another distinction was projected in the art theory of Western Europe. That
was the distinction between images after models, after life, after objects actually in
front of one and images created by heart, by imagination. It was the latter faculty of
imagination which was particularly related to the academic tradition of disegno.
However, it was the tradition of painters chosing subjects such as still lifes and
portraits, where supposedly the object depicted had been present or could easily
have been in front of the painter that strongly referred to colore. Clearly, it is this
latter tradition of colore, of painting after the object which continues to play a role
in the history of photography as well as in the history of film. However, the digital
image differs in this respect. I will come back to that shortly. First I want to embark
on the question of whether painting has indeed been superseded by recent
developments. I think there are many reasons for arguing that painting as an art
has the right to exist alongside other media such as photography and film. Let me
give one specific argument for that. This argument does not refer to the producer
i.e. the artist, but to the audience, i.e. the persons who receive and enjoy the
painting. Traditionally, paintings are presented to the viewer in museums where
different paintings hang separately on a wall. In that museological situation, there
is a priveleged and curious way of perception, to which, I believe, too little attention
has been paid. Experiencing a static painting in front of one and experiencing a
movie differ greatly. Since the painting is not moving, the viewer has the freedom to
inspect it as long and as intensely as the viewer wants. That is a very particular way
of experiencing something. Of course, one could argue that the difference between
viewing paintings and films is an obvious one, whereas viewing still photographs
might have a similar status as paintings, especially when presented in galleries or
museums.

However, I believe that while enjoying images their dual nature is of prime
importance. In other words, the spectator observing and enjoying paintings,
photographs or films is indeed aware that at the same time an image world is
presented which is fictitious. Wollheim has argued that the act of perception does
not necessitate the reunion of those two aspects. What is important is that the
awareness of the dual nature of perception is always present in the act of viewing
the artwork or indeed any image. This duality, however, is heightened, I believe, in
the case of pictures related to photographs. In viewing a picture, one not only
realizes that it contains figuration. One not only realizes that one is looking at a

64
thing, which, at the same time, is not a thing, but an image of a specific world. One
also realizes that every aspect of the work one views is somehow related to the
movements, the motor skills, or clumsyness of the human hand, and the ingenuity
and archeology of the human mind. In respect to this distinction, the art of painting
differs from the art of photography. Again, we deal with a view already contained in
traditional art theories where the notion of wondering about painting refers to the
italian word mirare, meaning both to admire and to be amazed about something.
For me, a miracle is precisely all these aspects together: having the freedom to
examine paintings at the speed and in the way one prefers given the framework of
the presentation; while examining a painting to have the possibility to experience
the mind and hand of the painter present, so to speak, within the painting. Given
the wealth and strength of the tradition of painting in Europe and given the unique
positions the perception of painting has within the larger field of reception of
images, I believe that the production of such miracles will always persist.

65
The Persistence of Painting: Abstraction in Art

Benoît Hermans

Painting is situated between a rock and a hard place. In any case, it is heavily on
the defensive. Critics blame it for being at best academic, and at worst reactionary.
If it is about expressing the time we live in, other media are taken to be superior.
The fact that it is so old and its record of service so long seem to hinder it rather
than benefit it.

Although I partly agree with this criticism, in my case, it does not lead to the notion
that painting as such would be an anachronistic medium. On the contrary; in my
view, its weakness is to be found in the way in which painting has developed itself
during the course of the past century. A silent agreement has been established
between weak abstraction on one side and weak figuration on the other side. It is as
if in being a painter, one is forced to choose between these two extremes and, with
that choice, doomed to arrive at second-rate art. Flirting with another medium to
overcome this deadlock is a weak option. It is necessary to come to revise painting
using the means with which it has developed itself in the past.

For a start, that means a reinterpretation of Modernism, and the

exaggerated attack of early abstract art on figuration. Thus, the
abstract-figurative opposition on which Modernism was based is
not valid, although, in the beginning of the last century, it had
an important, polemic value. In retrospect, however, that
opposition turns against painting. Abstract art was exclusively
resistant to certain decadent aspects of late 19th-century
painting, such as its desire for sentimentalism, its bourgeois
prejudice and all those other aspects of wasted religion. In
reality though, all good figurative art is always abstract as well.
Therefore, this attack was not as much a purification of art with
Benoît Hermans, the help of ushering in a totally new element, but more a
Pietà, Mixed purification of the means of figuration itself. A good painting, be
Media, 160 x 122 it from the Van Eyck brothers, Holbein or the Italian
cm, Collection: Renaissance, always derives its strength from the fact that it is
Kunstcollectie figurative and abstract at the same time. In other words,
Rabobank, The abstraction is not only a means to evoke a sense of space as in
Netherlands. so-called pure abs-tract art; it embodies a much richer and
complex whole in which both portrait painting and the rendering
of materiality play an equal part.

Take for example the series of Renaissance portraits Malevich made at the end of
his life. In a traditio-nal view of abstraction, they would be a relapse to old, retro-
gressive forms. Yet, the portraits are beautiful works holding the power and the
promise of an entirely new beginning for painting, much more so than Malevich's
programmatically justified suprematist works. In my conception of abstraction, that

66
opinion could easily be understood; Malevich's insight increased by working purely
abstract for a certain length of time, which also added to the strength of his
figurative paintings. As a consequence, the Renaissance portraits are not only much
more abstract than Malevich's ear-liest paintings, they are stronger figurative works
as well.

The emptiness of the traditional notion of abs-traction can be inferred from how it
merely applies to an art historical discourse, which overlooks entirely the concrete
experience of art. In that traditional realm, abstraction is nothing but a rough
indication of a painterly style without telling anything about the quality or
particular properties of a painting as such. The terms impressionist, baroque or
post-modern are equally fuzzy approxima-tions. Conversely, what I take to be
abstraction pertains above all to internal relationships within one painting, i.e.
relationships unique to each image.

In my opinion, a good painting demonstrates an expe-rience of "higher simultaneity"

similar to how one walks down the street and notices in one glance a passerby's
strange gait, clothes and facial expressi-on. At the same time, as a car passes, one
notices a traffic-light turning green and suddenly one has to slow down to prevent a
crash with a cyclist. In every-day life, all these things occur in one single moment
separated by space. In a painting, howe-ver, they are combined within one
framework.

With respect to this, two things are essential. First, I strive for a continuous
interaction with the world. From a perspective of simultaneity, reality and painting
are two structures in themselves with much room for creating new intercon-necti-
ons. As a painter, I demand that my images continuously generate new experiences
both inside and outside the work and vice versa, i.e. an unexpected occurrence in
my daily life asks for a reaction in the form of a new image in my studio. Thus,
reality and painting not only resemble each other in their simultaneous
experiences, but they also both imply a similar way of being interrelated.

Secondly, I aim for an optimal interaction with art history. Currently, I am involved
in Italian Renais-sance and Baroque works. In those works, I tend to look for
criteria applicable to my own work. There is a certain kind of knowledge contained
in those works from the past connected to simultaneity. They respond to questions
such as how much order and chaos, how much sense and non-sense, and how
much aggression and compassion could one experience simulta-neously in one
work.

A good example of this is Caravaggio's "The Entombment". In my view, the structure

of the work belongs to the most complex ones in art history. In a most subtle way,
psychological realism, a well-balanced chiaroscuro, and above all a beautiful
combination of human drama and clear, monumental construction of the image all
come together in the work.

67
The pivotal point of the image is the protruding left elbow of Nicodemus - the old
man holding Christ's legs - which forms the top of a pyramid. The projected arm of
Nicodemus tightly constructs the background, while keeping a strange mixture of
figures with a diversity of expressions in check. At the same time, although
differently, the pyramid is important for the action which takes place in the lower
part of the picture. On the one hand, it stresses the force of the effort Nicodemus
makes. On the other, it emphasizes the reality of the carried body by giving Christ's
body extra plasticity.

Although I have to limit myself to the description of one structure in the painting
there is, of course, much more to it. At each discovery of another coherence,
another reconstruction of the work starts all over again. It is not those
reconstructions as such which are most fascinating, but rather how they blend into
the representation and start competing with the depicted human drama. Not only
does the work's complex construction enable an indirect experience of the tragedy
of the burial, it also gives the possibility of undergoing that tragedy on many
different levels, which enhances the intensity of the experien-ce.

All those strange overlaps and forms merging together are ideal resonances of the
real subject of the painting. In that sense, this work is not unique. As soon as
Italian Byzantine space has made room for a more natura-listic approach, the
aspect of resonance starts to play a role in art. This problem is solved time and
again in the work of a great series of painters from

68
The Persistence of Art: Anachronism

Carel Blotkamp

The experts tell us time and again that painting is completely outdated. But let's
face it: painting has been outdated right from the start. When, 30.000 years ago,
some dumb painter was putting pigments on the wall in the cave at Lascaux, a
smarter fellow cave-dweller was controlling the fire. When, over 2000 years ago,
Zeuxis was painting grapes to fool the birds, Greek engineers were already doing all
kinds of interesting experiments in the construction of automata. Around 1665,
when Rembrandt was struggling to bring some light in his muddy selfportraits,
Antonie van Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope. In 1914, when Picasso was
sitting in his studio, mixing sand into his oil paint and fiddling about with
newspaper clippings for his Cubist collages, up in the sky air planes were carrying
troops and bombs to the battlefields of the First World War. In 1969, when Barnett
Newman simply covered a canvas with cadmium red acrylic paint and cut the field
in two with a razor-sharp zip, Armstrong set foot on the moon. At all times painting
was lagging behind the discoveries, inventions, and technological innovations that
made the world go round. Painting is an anachronism by nature.

Nowadays, painting is considered by many to be antiquated and reactionary, and

therefore inadequate to grasp the reality of the modern world. The more spectacular
forms of site-specific sculpture, installations, video and the computerized image
seem to offer a far more satisfactory response than painting to the premise that the
purpose of art is progress and innovation. However, we should note that this
premise itself is a modernist concept that is outdated.

I am fond of painting, probably for the very reasons which have discredited it in the
eyes of other people. I cannot see painting's material limitations as limitations, or
the lateral boundaries of a painting as restrictive, or the elusiveness of the painted
image as objectionable. Nor is its ineradicably illusionistic character to my mind a
problem: even in a painting by Robert Ryman, the paint is not just paint, it acts the

69
part of being just paint. Painting's appeal to the eye, disparaged by Marcel
Duchamp, is in my opinion no impediment to a high level of conceptual content,
witness the work of Jasper Johns. Painting is a versatile medium which can be
employed for an infinite number of purposes. The white canvas of one painter is
simply not the white canvas of another.

What I particularly like about painting are its elements of risk and responsibility.
These, I believe, constitute the greatest challenge to painters today, especially in
comparison to other media, such as the various forms of site-specific sculpture and
installations, which in recent decades have been presented in abundance and
which have to a large extent come to determine the standard for what is considered
vanguard art. Let me clarify.

Early efforts in these media, such as Michael Heizer's dug-out sculptures in the
Mojave desert, Jannis Kounellis' installation with horses in a gallery in Rome, the
Museum of Marcel Broodthaers, and the Index of Art &Language, all from around
1970, derived a large measure of their force from their critical component. These
works compelled the public to think about the role of art institutions. That function
has worn thin, and not much has come in its place.

Since then we have been swamped by installations which are geared to a specific
location. We have seen hundreds of exhibitions in old factories, in docks, in stately
villas and on barren wasteland. As a rule, the picturesque and theatrical qualities of
the location are integrated into the work: a gift, as it were, to its maker. But there is
poison in it. Notwithstanding the favorable exceptions, of course, many such
installations are characterized by artificiality and pretentiousness, just because of
that picturesque location, and that theatrical element. Also, there is often
something non-committal about installations, which is partly due to their transient
nature: they live on only in carefully selected and edited photographic
documentation, modelled on the example of architectural photography with its quite
conspicuous aestheticism.

Compare this to the position of painting. In 1947, Mark Rothko wrote: "A picture
lives by companionship, expanding and quickening in the eyes of the sensitive
observer. It dies by the same token. It is therefore, a risky and unfeeling act to send
it out into the world." Rothko turns looking at art into an exceedingly moral activity,
but his statement is to the point. The painter makes a painting and sends it out
into the world. He is responsible for it, but can no longer exercise any control over
it. He has no influence over the material and immaterial conditions under which it
will be viewed in the future. Whatever he originally put into the work will have to
do. Whether the painting hangs in darkness or in light, in a large room or a
cramped space, between flowered curtains and Queen Anne chairs or next to a
Rembrandt or a Picasso, whether it is isolated or forced into a dialogue with other
works of art, it will have to make it all on its own, each time anew. Painters of
course have means to give their work more power in its future existence, for
example by making use of a large or unusual format, but what counts in the final
analysis is the presence of the work itself, whatever the circumstances it may

70
encounter.

An installation is suspendend in time. Afterwards it is just a photograph or a

memory. It can be a great memory, of course. But a painting is entrenched in
history. Painting's long tradition provides a context and a touchstone. A painting
comes to hang near another painting sooner or later, and although in most cases
that will not be a Rembrandt or a Picasso, a confrontation, a comparison, always
takes place. Awareness of this is essential to anyone who makes paintings. The
tradition of painting is not something which paralyses its practitioners, but is
rather a source of inspiration, and a call to action. Everything has not been said or
done; that is modish claptrap. "Everything has been said," wrote the French critic
Jean Paulhan, "but words change their meanings and meanings change words."
That goes for painting as well.

71
The Persistance of Painting: Painterly Beliefs

Luc Tuymans

In talking about the specificities of what makes painting important I can be very
brief: painting is very specific and very precise. However, it is precise in different
ways. I remember my first "big blow" in terms of painting which was the

experience of something I did not expect. My favorite painter ever is El Greco. First
I saw reproductions of his work and they did not really startle me since I thought
them very mannerist. Then at the age of nineteen, I walked into a museum in
Budapest and saw three El Greco portraits of saints. I was amazed by the way the
portraits were painted, the diversity. They did not look mannerist at all.
Afterwards, it was impossible for me to memorize the pictures due to the fact that
there was a huge deconstruction and juxtaposition within the imagery itself. The
juxtaposition within a framed image is something which is inevitable in every
image influencing the element of memorizing the imagery. In fact, every type of
memorizing imagery is inadequate since it is impossible to memorize it entirely.

El Greco knew this. While coming from Venice, where he had obtained certain
knowledge from having seen the last works of Raphael - which are the most
harmonious of all - Greco took out the middle piece of a painting, heightened the
colors and just killed the entire harmonious imagery in order to open up the
boundaries of the framework and to surpass the ridiculous idea of harmony
proposed by the Renaissance.

That poor Renaissance is something which I find utterly vulgar in the sense that it
is absolutely bombastic. It is bombastic since it is a belief. Painting is a belief as
well. Painting is "shoot to kill" and a very lonely conceptual way of working with art.
It is always belated towards its own compliance with what it is: portrayal. Even
when painting from nature, there are many restrictions and an immense distance
between the portrayer and what is portrayed. So even in this case, there still is the
mental image.

To every discussion of whether painting is as valid today as it was before

photography came into being, I can respond with a quote. Bertrand Russell once
said that the explosion of "technological innovations at the end of the 19th century
is just an implication that one technique multiplies other techniques." So, in that
sense, painting is in a great position. First of all, it really is about a high form of
concentration. In my view, it is very good that painting is at the place where it is
now, i.e. no longer in the center of the art world. But one can ask oneself: what is in
the center of the art world? Therefore, being in the peripheral outskirts of the art
world, painting has the huge possibility of influence. I give you a short visual
example about influence, since I continue to be a visual artist. If one sees slow-
motion imagery of Bill Viola, one sees pictorial elements, in other words, one sees
painting. For me, everything could be painting, or, in fact, everything just is

72
painting. Every image is important because it is specific and only within such
specificity can imagery be worthy or worthless.

When going to a movie theatre, I have this silly habit of trying to find or recollect
one image with which I could recollect all the perceived moving imagery. Now a
painting does something like that in reverse. Painting is a reduction of imagery. It is
hanging on the wall, already an object, where it should multiply within its reduction
all the meaningfulness of one image. Painting should mute its image, deny its real
proportions and color, and be difficult in terms of being memorized.

To conclude: What is important about painting? Painting is utterly soundproof. It

does not make noise or remind one of music. It does not look like Kandinsky or
Paul Klee. However, painting should look like the execution of Maximilian by Manet
where, in the far corner, one sees Napoleon III loading his gun. Bataille once said,
"Manet truly muted the imagery." He was also the first to situate this as a line
within painting. So, if I go to a museum, I do not observe in a historical sense.
When I look at a Velazquez in the Prado, I have a special heartbeat because I can
understand the way it has been painted. But still then it is very strong. I do not see
Velasqeuz as an old master. I comprehend his work as something imminent, as
something precise, as something one should not even talk about. One should just
look at it.

Luc Tuymans, Untitled, 1980/81, Oil on Canvas, 140 x 110 cm, Private Collection.

73
The Persistance of Painting: Statements on the Status of
Painting

Frank Reijnders

1. Is painting still topical? This is characteristically a question for confirmed avant-

gardists believing they still have a grip on history. However, is that question still
relevant? Aren't we in a situation of being confronted with the omnipresence of
topicality? A topicality where history does not progress, but is absorbed? A
condition which makes it impossible for art to expand into a critical project?
However, for painting, such a condition is not unfavorable since, after all, painting
is over and always has had trouble anyway being deployed as a vector in avant-
garde strategies. In recent decades, art has been confronted with and challenged by
an arsenal of technological images and, therefore, it feels compelled to search for a
new identity. Advanced painting, however, rather makes the reverse movement of
lack of identification exactly since it has become inconceivable. Technically,
painting is an anachronism and seems to have disappeared from view entirely. But
at the same time painting observes the topical in order to be able to suddenly
emerge from an ambush into an unexpected shape.

2. In the beginning of the 20th century, Marcel Duchamp made a radical move
when he stopped painting. Thus, for people who really love painting, Duchamp is
the evil genius. No matter how strange it may seem at first sight, the ready-made is
an important contribution to painting precisely because painting does not persist.
Important tasks were taken from painting, not only through the invention of
photography and cinema, but also through the production of the paint tube:
"Because the paint tubes used by the artist are industrial and ready-made
products, we have to infer that all paintings in the world are in fact `assisted ready-
mades'," says Duchamp. The paint tube which need not be opened is the secret
paradigm of the ready-made. Paradoxically, however, the renouncement of painting
merely increased its freedom of movement. Operating from its absence, painting still
continues to be a possibility. Perhaps that explains why painting has adopted
highly unexpected forms since the beginning of the 20th century. Because its
persistence had been shattered, painting had to be reinvented time and again.

3. In an objective sense, the most important reason for the loss of painting is the
booming media-technology of the last thirty years. Painting and technological media
seem to be entirely at odds with each other. However, it would be short-sighted to
write them off and house them in separate museums. Andy Warhol gave painting
another stature when, in the 1960s, in his screens and movies, he anticipated the
new situation arising from the expansion of mass media and popularization of
technological apparatus. The actual existence of the camera enabled him to produce
contemporary painting. Warhol's movie Empire (1962) - an eight-hour-registration
of the Empire State Building - invites contemplation. However, as time goes by, one
feels bored and physically uncomfortable. The best thing to do is to leave for a
couple of hours. On return, hardly anything seems to have changed, just as in a

74
painting. Warhol put painting into another dimension by subjugating it to the
procedures of the screen. Thanks to technological media, painting could transform
and even absorb an element which used to be alien to it, i.e. the interval of time.
Warhol's impetus is followed up by some current video artists such as Douglas
Gordon or Pipilotti Rist who relate their work explicitly to painting.

4. Strictly speaking, presently there is no longer "real" painting as an indisputable,

self-evident fact (paint, canvas, brush). If one acts as if that still would be the case,
one is no longer connected to the world. Of course, that could be painting's power
as well. Excluded as an inconvenient obstacle, painting could appear to be able to
change roles and turn out to be the shadow of technology. Painting disappeared
into the margin. There is nothing left that necessitates the continuation of its
tradition; there is no reason to resist - as often happens in painting - the
dominance of technology, nor to protect it against the omnipotence of the screen.
Perhaps it would be better for painting to comply to the topicality of the screen,
since precisely its quality of screen can hardly be surpassed by anything else. It is
true, painting's screen is a surface, but it is not flat, nor smooth or transparent. In
painting, thickness, relief, layers, and - no matter how minimal - physical space
always come up. Therefore, the fascination with the screen does not have to lead to
the abolition of typical painterly qualities. Even painters such as Gerhard Richter,
Sigmar Polke, Ross Bleckner or David Reed play with the magic of the screen.

5. Would painting currently appear in the shape of the screen? As a screen among
other screens? Would that be painting's new context? If one should answer such
questions affirmatively, then an unbridgeable gap would exist between the picture
screen and the paint screen. Since the paint screen is not transparent but acts as if
it is, it provokes ambiguities and antinomies. The ambiguity of a second and a third
dimension. The antinomy of representation and the texture of paint which keeps
that representation at a distance since nobody knows exactly where figuration
starts or abstraction ends. Just because of such ambiguities and antinomies, one
has always tried to get rid of painting. Painting was an illusion, a lie, a phase or a
poison. However, the objections against painting could be turned into power when
one admits that painting as a medium has been superseded some time ago. For
painting's opponents that is its greatest weakness, because in our day
communication and information are the first matter of importance.

75
The Persistance of Painting: Reflexive Figurations

Ferdinand van Dieten

The artists of the parallel exhibition are united in the

hypothesis that there is both a correlation and an
interrelation between abstraction and figuration. In
the 20th century, painting was, on the one hand,
defined by and explored for the sake of pure object-
oriented experience whereby its constitutive elements
were considered absolutes in an abstract way. On the
other hand, however, the postmodern era showed a
reflection on the history of painting transformed into
a mere domain of figurative and narrative rhetoric.
Both trends were accompanied by academic schools,
which all failed to assure painting a conceptual
position in its confrontation with today's abundance
of media. I believe that painting should currently
combine both the logic of the abstract gaze and the
knowledge of iconographic canons. In so doing, a
painterly attitude will emerge which could be called
"reflexive figuration".

Let's start by looking at Britta Huttenlocher's work.

Huttenlocher achieves a relationship between
abstraction and figuration whereby the abstract is the
primary element. Although the abstract paintings
have a strong rhetorical suggestiveness, what is
suggested remains unsolved within the image's
figuration. While perceiving a suggestion of space, the
spectator is continuously drawn back into the play of
the abstract and figurative elements of Huttenlocher's
paintings.
Aloysius Donia's "paintings" show a tension between the space in and
the surface of the painting. However, the expressive- oriented Donia
does not refer literally to any painterly element since he believes that
suggestion should speak for itself. Thus, with a slight Hegelian accent,
one could speak of "the primacy of figuration in an abstract form". Luc
Tuymans' paintings show images as moments in a painterly process.
Thus, in Tuymans' work, one is able to observe the tension between the
beauty of the skillfully applied paint and the collective image behind
the paint. As the presence of the paint becomes increasingly strong, it Aloysius
seems as if Tuymans distances himself more and more from the image. Donia, T-
Michael Kirkham once called painting "a disengagement from the shirt 1,
present technology-based world". Consequently, Kirkham paints huge, 1998/1999,
almost monochromatic spaces in deliberate color schemes. In his work, 1 of 5 b/w

76
the human body or parts of it are predominant. Behind Kirkham's photo's
explicit style, a great diversity of paintings emerges before the (photo:
"disconnected" and purely retinal gaze. Daan van
Golden).

Benoît Hermans constructs paintings rather than paint in a

specific style or handwriting. In these constructions, the form
is continuously explored based on material and themes.
Hermans' mastery of the complex image reveals a great
familiarity with Renaissance painting, although he does not
limit himself to the Renaissance world. In David Claerbout's
Michael Kirkham, work, the complexity concerns the experience of time. The
Untitled, 2000, Oil spectator becomes aware that the shown object or image of
on canvas, 100 x 150 recollection is an abstraction of something which has once
cm, Courtesy Gallery been alive, since a trace of that life is still present in a detail.
Sabine Wachters, Gert Verhoeven considers imagination a continuation of
Brussels. patterns of forms and signs captured in objects.
In other words, he works on an aesthetic
investigation of the world, which is a detour to
represent himself as an artist. In his work,
Verhoeven repeats models of interpretation in an
evolutionary process until variables have dissolved.
Subsequently, origin is not a starting point but
merely a random consequence. In Fransje Killaars'
work, the attractiveness of color competes with the
sensuousness of her objects and materials.
Although the spectator can touch or even sit on
Killaars' objects, the work still keeps the spectator
at a distance precisely because of the magnificent
display of color. Rinke Nijburg's point of departure
is narrativity. He works in a variety of techniques
such as graphics, drawings and paintings of
several sizes. They all serve a particular purpose in
how stories and images develop. Nijburg's
paintings and graphics are restless, random
indications of his own world, whereas the balanced
forms of his small paintings present complex
David Claerbout, allegories. Tiong Ang's paintings are open
Engeltje/Angel/Ange, 1997, explorations of the world. He surrounds the
Courtsey Gallery Micheline continous stream of mass media imagery which
Szwajcer, Antwerp. dazzles and mutilates the gaze with extremely
concentrated images showing moments of semantic
transition.

77
 In my view, the exhibition Reflexive Figurations
shows an art of painting which is alive. The
persistence of painting is demonstrated in the
continuous change of the relationship between
Gert Verhoeven, Il
abstraction and figuration, and in how
Grando and Auto-Mio,
experienced reality and painting vary. The
1999, photographic
exposition is composed based on a hypothesis
colourprints and ink on
about such a relationship and variation. In
aluminium, 75 x 110
addition to this, I would like to state two additional
cm and 60 x 90 cm,
assumptions now as a contribution to the debate:
Courtesy Gallery
Ferdinand van Dieten-
d'Eendt, Amsterdam.
1). In the past century, there was a tendency to discard
tradition. One assumed that without tradition the artwork
would present itself as an object, as pure as possible. In
relation to this, another tendency saw art to be topical
based on its capacity to reveal the experience of the here
and now. Recently, many articles have been written in this
spirit, where work of painters such as Pia Fries, Bernard
Frize, and Fiona Rae is merely praised for its capacity to
Rinke Nijburg, Lucifer, bring about immediate experience in paintings. At least,
2000, Oil on acrylic on they will save the art of painting. Although the intended
canvas, 150 x 225 cm, openness to the meaning of the object as such is
Collection: Museum sympathetic and important as a counterbalance to the
Het Valkhof, Nijmegen. assumptive attitude of prevailing cultural patterns, the
reference to concepts such as being and life are rather
boring.

78
 In that view, it seems as if each empty abstraction is valid as
long as there is no reference to tradition, cultural
achievements, solid knowledge, and support for the
materiality of the working process. The existential desire to
attain the unmediated being reveals itself as a need to forget
the historicity of our existence and to reject any
transformation whatsoever of the past.

2).I believe that visual art exceeds instrumental design. The

art of painting has always been more than just a formal skill
of composing images or creating representations out of forms.
After all, it is the image and its meaning which dictate the
form of the work. It seems that the pictorial view has a
specific meaning for the artists participating in the exhibition.
In other words, they demonstrate that the act of painting by
itself creates shifts in meaning. Thus, one could conclude that

Fransje Killaars, the art of painting has its own specific tradition regarding the
Untitled, 1993, relationship abstraction and figuration, the struggle between
Muslim Clothes, 215 the artist's subjectivity and the work's materiality, and the
x 158 cm, Courtesy necessity of formulating the tension between perception of
Gallery de Expeditie, reality and the elements in a painting. This is what painting
Amsterdam. is about and what can never be reduced to an aesthetics of
reception of the immediate experience. That is why the
practice of topical painting resists the omnipresence of the
modernistic "anything goes".

79
DISCUSSION

Balkema (moderator): One of the things I noticed over the course of the
presentations was that apparently painting is still heavily embedded in history.
Conversely, in new media, there seems to be an enormous lack of historical
consciousness and knowledge of what has happened in earlier work.

Tuymans: First, I would like to make a general remark about the presentations. I
think it is a bad proposition for art and culture at large to mingle the principles of
tradition and origin. Tradition and origin are two different aspects which cannot be
substituted for each other. That mistake has been made by some of the speakers,
similar to mistakenly observing progress in painting. These things do not reach the
heart of the matter. One should try to do that by turning to the more specific realm
in which painting displays itself, which is related to its specific time zone. The
aborigines, for example, have a different time zone. For us, reality as structure
within our time zone is the time we live in. That is in fact unreal to think today. The
aborigines turn the whole situation around whereby the only time which is real to
them is the time they dream. I think it is interesting to think about painting in such
a way; to consider painting as a different time zone.

Stumpel: The story that the aborigines have a different conception of time is
spreading very fast. I think what they mean by dream time is what we call "fiction",
that is things you talk about which happened in the past or indeed things you
dream about. Of course painting is a part of fiction.

Tuymans: That is not what I mean. We do not have the experience of linear dreams.
Within our Western culture, we do remember, but the image structure is highly
fragmented within that memory. In the case of the aborigines, memory is entirely
related to space and time, whereby space is sometimes not even related to land.
Aborigines do not own land, it is still a nomadic culture. Although we have become
sedentary, we should not forget that there is a different way of framing reality where
one looks upon reality within a fragmented form. What I am trying to say is that
painting is a different time zone, because it deals with reality within a different way
of adapting time. That is the anachronism we are talking about, which is, I think,
typical for all the arts. What would happen if you went outside, looked at
something, had the experience of what you were looking at, and at the same time
created the meaning of what you were looking at? You would no longer need to
visualize and this is precisely the so-called mythological proposal of cyberspace.

I once got an offer to do something for Swatch on MTV, a channel that eats up
imagery and uses Magritte in videoclips. I said, I could do it, but I need two minutes
without any sound,so there is just imagery. Swatch and MTV refused, because
within their time frame - and that again is the explanation - this is an eternity and,
therefore, an impossibility. So, within the art world, paintings will acquire a
different time zone. Paintings are kept systematically out of the big shows because
they are entirely problematic and deal with things in completely different ways.
Painting is not about persisting, but about resisting. Painting is a mental, linear

80
imagery that obsessively portrays itself within time, without boundaries. There is
only the physical boundary of what you can experience. That is what painting is.

Balkema: Since you talked about the screen - the mythology of cyberspace and
MTV's conception of time - I would like to refer to a statement by Peter Weibel, the
present director of ZKM, the Institute for Media Art in Karlsruhe. He once wrote a
beautiful piece on painting, where he stated, "Our concept of the image has shifted;
originally associated with the tableau (the painting) and then with the photograph,
it is now associated with television and computer screens." Because of this, Weibel
maintains, painting is undergoing a recodification. In other words, our perception of
reality, to which Luc referred, is in fact changing due to our awareness and
consciousness of the screen. So that is why the imagery of painting will change.

Reijnders: One of my statements, number 5, was about that point. I have trouble
with Peter Weibel's statement. Although he maintains that painting will change
because of that new type of image, he does not explain how painting will continue to
differ from such imagery. That is a difficult point. Therefore, in my opinion, one
should view painting as a screen, but when saying that one should of course
articulate the specificity of the painterly screen.

Otherwise it seems as if painting will continuously adapt to new media. Conversely,

I believe that because of painting's specificity, it will always be able to shadow any
medium. Painting will transform itself again and again, but will never adapt entirely
to other types of imagery. That is why painting still exists. Those transformations
are of the greatest importance.

Balkema: In my view, Peter Weibel did not mean that painting is in a process of
reacting to new media, but rather reacting to a general awareness of a change of
perception and a general awareness of the omnipresence of the screen. In fact,
Weibel maintains that painting will always adapt its imagery and never disappear.
Any art form will react to other media, to the world and viewers of its day. Likewise,
painting will transform. Of course, artists creating images undergo influences of
current imagery and, thus, will have a different type of perception than Manet or El
Greco had. In other words, there will be another set of codes through which
painting will appear today.

Tuymans: I teach at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, so I have the experience of the first "big
media school". The problem is that painting has been overly criticized. Moreover,
every painter has to have an enormous cultural baggage in order to enter the field,
which is completely ludicrous. New media has not yet been criticized since they are
new on the scene. One does not talk about media, but about how a new medium
translates itself into art. Therefore, one could say there are social implications,
which are far more influential than what is actually portrayed. I think that is an
interesting point, which will lead us into the realm of art and politics. And that is
exactly what the discourse should be about.

81
Balkema: I am not sure that painting is that much criticized. My experience is that
there are many artists who say they work in a different medium but still consider
themselves painters. In fact, one of the questions of this symposium concerns the
assumption that there is a painterly paradigm prevailing in all media and in all
current imagery.

Stumpel: If one discusses the persistence of painting, one would expect at least
someone in the panel to say: painting is dead, let's forget about painting! It seems
that this afternoon we all agree - in spite of all kinds of differences - that painting is
a very interesting medium. Consequently, another problem arises. Since we all
seem to somehow defend painting, we need to know what the attack on it really is. I
do not see how interactive CD-Roms as such would undermine the art of painting.
Of course, there have been predictions about the status of the art of painting before.
There was for instance the famous prediction by Walter Benjamin that in the age of
the mechanical reproduction of art, painting would lose its aura. As we all know,
precisely the opposite happened. So even the plundering of images, either by MTV
or the Internet, will only heighten the status of painting. So once again the question
is what is the attack on painting that we are supposedly discussing?

There always is the cheap repetition of the phrase "Well, times are changing,
therefore painting must change," although we do not know how. To me seems to be
a kind of, if I may say, obsolete approach to the connection between art and society.
There is, I believe, no task for the artist to incorporate comments on new
developments. Art is much freer than that.

Apart from how all the speakers defended painting in one form or another, I also
noticed that all of them referred to the history of painting, sometimes to
masterpieces of the 15th or 17th century. Perhaps another question, although not
precisely stated, is to what extent do painters today continue within the powerful
tradition of painting?

Blotkamp: That has to do with how, in the past, all kinds of technical innovations
in image making influenced painting to a certain degree. I am not sure that there is
a direct link, but in general one could say that, over the centuries, new ways of
image making have been a threat to old ways of image making. Particularly the
more technically oriented inventions have been a threat to the monopoly of painting
and image making by artists. The same counts for the more recent so-called new
media. There is the conception that the new media take over a certain part of the
original field of art, the original area that has been art's competence. Connected to
that is the idea that modern art, real good art, should express the spirit of the
times. Today's spirit is much more connected with those technical innovations than
with oil paint.

Tuymans: The way a painting is made is not relevant today, since we have
surpassed that type of progressive, formal way of thinking about image making.
Even in our broader culture, image making has become much more subtle. For
example, a Toyota ad campaign shows a moving tree that could easily be a work by

82
David Claerbout. So, it is valid to ask what the artist is portraying, what is
meaningful and what is not? That question has been significant throughout the
entire history of art. The allusion to old masters could be meaningful. I want to
stipulate though that I consider the so-called old masters as different rather than
as traditional. I view them from a current perspective and not from how they were
first shown. Of course, in a museum, sometimes you are aware of looking at works
produced years before and currently shown to you now in a specific way. However, I
think we have to reevaluate and open up the entire discussion and become aware
that the term new media means all the media incorporated.

Reijnders: There have been many longstanding conflicting discourses on painting.

Carel Blotkamp said painting has always been an anachronism, but from ancient
times on there has been another discourse stating painting is not true, whereas
Plato's opinion on painting was not favorable at all. The discourse on the
technological progress of images always has to do with the power of communicating
and circulating images. I believe that painting stands apart from that and,
therefore, Carel Blotkamp's statement on painting as an anachronism is very
strong. However, I do not entirely agree, since the discourse on the end of painting
changes the anachronism of painting. Thus, after the avant-gardes one cannot say
with the same impact that painting is an anachronism. After that break in history,
painting made another move into two directions. On the one hand, painting is dead,
and on the other, painting is currently in the process of transformation. From the
beginning of the 20th century, painting has had many interesting forms, but that
was different from the 19th century with its continuous creation of paintings.

Stumpel: If you talk about a discourse on the death of painting, that immediately
reminds one of other forms of art. For example, the novel or theater have been often
declared dead out of fear that a new technique or a change of scenery would render
them obsolete. However, none of them really died. That is the current position of
painting. In spite of the production of images or shapes and colors in other areas,
there is still a specific potential for expression in painting that artists want to
exploit. Perhaps the question is what this specific potential of painting is.

Blotkamp: Let's put it another way. Frank Reijnders has quite specific ideas about
what is relevant in painting today and what is not. That is perhaps something we
can discuss to find an answer. I have no fixed ideas about that. What I can say is
that there is quite a difference in what one experiences in a daily contact with art
and the kind of discussion we are trying to have today. Theory and practice are not
very easy to reconcile. I am probably more on the side of the practice of art - not
only in creating art, but also in dealing with art - than Frank is. That might
contribute to the difference in our opinions.

In terms of what is relevant and what is not, we all seem to agree that painting is
still relevant. Underneath, however, there are certain ideas about what painting is
and what it is not. So, my question is, what painting is relevant and what is not?

83
Reijnders: In this era of imagery and new media, the relevance of painting is that
painting is in a position without power. Because of that, painting is able to observe
the self-evidence of other forms of picture-making. Most of the media are self-
evident with respect to the image, but since painting has no necessity it is able to
observe. When painting denies and ignores that, then it does so in the framework of
that new position. You cannot possibly deny our media culture.

Blotkamp said painters were involved in inventing new media. For photography and
film that was indeed the case, but after the invention of television that has changed
completely. Painters had nothing to do with the invention of televisual images; that
is an entirely different domain. After the invention of mass media, there is a
concurrence between those sort of images. However, I believe that painting has a
prominent position since it will always have possibilities to explore the image more
strongly than other forms of picture-making are able to do.

Stumpel: What you are actually saying is that it is a major task of painting, and
perhaps its reason for existence, that it questions images and comments on them?

Reijnders: No, that is not what I mean. What I am saying is that since painting is
no longer present in the center of power where images are developed, a sort of
freedom has emerged. Precisely the absence of a necessity to experiment with
images created many more possibilities for painting. At the same time, those
possibilities could be painting's weakness when they are not exploited. I would not
say that 20th-century painting has fulfilled more pretensions than 16th-century
painting. One cannot deny that developments occur simultaneously so that
painting is not always in the same position. At the same time, it is not true that
painting should be forced to take a position with respect to mass media. However, it
is obvious that painting is connected, in one way or another, to the emergence of
mass media and the circulation of another type of imagery.

Tuymans: If one is brought up with television one has entered a certain imagery.
The lack of such experience is obvious, since it changes one's vision. I completely
agree that even if you position yourself against that medium, that position is still
within such a framework since it is impossible to completely step outside. One
simply cannot escape the overwhelming influence of such imagery. My statement
about the peripheral element in which painting currently finds itself is similar to the
big change you talk about. Perhaps a symposium like this could clarify that such
influence goes both ways. It is not a one-way street, but a discourse which is in
many ways perturbed by the fact that there is the icon of what painting is. That is a
huge mistake, since there is the icon of the new media as well, although that is not
even an icon yet. It would make complete sense to think about those icons
separately.

PARTICIPANTS

Annette W.Balkema and Henk Slager, L&B Editors, Dutch Society of Aesthetics,
Amsterdam

84
Jeroen Stumpel, Art theorist, State University, Utrecht.

Benoît Hermans, Artist, Jan van Eyck Academy, Maastricht

Carel Blotkamp, Artist and Art theorist, Free University, Amsterdam

Luc Tuymans, Artist, State Academy of Art, Amsterdam

Frank Reijnders, Art theorist, University of Amsterdam

Ferdinand Van Dieten, Gallerist, Amsterdam

Visual material: parallel presentation Reflexive Figurations, Gallery Ferdinand van

Dieten-d'Eendt (www.dieten.demon.nl) Amsterdam, March 17 - April 29, 2000

This text is based on the symposium The Persistence of Painting organized by the
Dutch Society of Aesthetics in co-operation with the Rijksakademie van Beeldende
Kunsten (Research in the Visual Arts), Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

85