Eclectic Reflections on Language and Art

This text intends to be an abbreviation of thoughts and feelings I’ve been developing for the past few months concerning the importance of the various languages and texts that influenced my fine art practice.

1664. Anyone who now intends to write or argue bout about art ought to have some idea of what philposophyhas achieved and continues to achieve in our day.
Goethe, On Art and Art History - Maxisms and Reflections, page136


I do not intend to write a purely philosophical or academic text because I want to step outside the limits of language. That is precisely where I believe my creative process occurs and where I intend my work to be placed: just outside the intelligible. This does not mean that I won’t make references to Ricouer’s combination of both phenomenology and hermeneutics, Wittgenstein’s thoughts about the limits of language, Cultural Materialism or even Nietszche and Plato’s decisive work. If I had time I would also like to investigate thinkers who’s theories I ignore such as Heideger and many other (mostly reflective artists) referenced in books such as the Art in Theory 1900-2000 but for now I intend to leave it for later.

Science also plays a crucial role in my creativity because of my previous studies in medicine and biological engineering but I’ll try to avoid this topic in this text and simply mention it, if relevant, as another system of signs and methods of thought.

I’m also aware of the art & language movement happening in the second half of the XXth century and how important it was in Coventry University. However my research intends to go through a reflective aproach on my individual past and interactions with language, literature, systems of thought and artists I’ve been exploring other then describe what others did before in the “Fine Art conceptual sphere”.
Before I start I would just like to explain that the reflections written on this text include questioning the process that is happening this precise moment: How does the research and the fact that I’m using language to express some of my ideas influence my practice?

2.Intoduction

Art is not about ideas. Ideas are good for writers. An artwork will not endure if it is made to be understood.
Pedro Cabrita Reis, Modern Painters Nov. 2005, page 89

Cabrita Reis is one of the artists that is frequently mentioned in the discussions I have with Craig Cooper while making collaborative[1] work. We have been to a private view in Camden Art Center this year and even though I partially agree (because art is not just about ideas) I still found this quote a non-sense because during his presentation in Camden he explained ideas and meanings in the work he was exhibiting.
Susan Sontag’s essay Against Interpretation played a crucial role in the process of clarification of my opinion and Coopers divergences in what concerns interpretation. During these discussions I realized that on one hand we agree about all the practical issues and political and philosophical ideals we want to express, on the other hand we think and feel differently about the meanings we want to explain to the observers/tutors/public, the importance of language in the interpretative process and how distructive or creative interpretation is. For me interpretation isn’t as distructive as Sontag wants us to believe:

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hipertrophy of the intelect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intelect upon art.
Susan Sontag, Againt intepretation – A Susan Sontag Reader, page 98


For me interpretation is the “other half” of the creative process, as a consequence of that it becomes crucial to influence it and to ensure the observer even if confused has the right expectations about the work in what respects to depth and vastness of meanings and references.
Before these healthy arguments I read Wittgenstein’s Tractus Logicus Philusophicus and I was aware of the limitations of language but still my intuition asked me not to to stop talking and writing as much as possible about it. But some text kept haunting me:

4.116 Everything that can be thought at all can be thought clearly.
Everything that can be put into words can be put clearly.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be put into words. Ethics istranscendental. (Ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.)

6.522 There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.

Wittgenstein, Logicus tractus Philosophicus

Could it be that talking about my intentions as a practitioner was a simple tautology? It’s a risk and it might get the practitioner is trouble every now and then but if we don’t talk and write about our creations to a certain extent we will never be able to induce what is the best consequence possible of the creative process:

162. It used to happen, and still does, that I dislike a work of art because I’m not up to appreciating it; but if I sense some merit there, I try to get at it and this often leads to the happiest discoveries: new qualities are revealed to me in these things, new capacities in myself.
Goethe, Maxisms and Reflections, page 19

How can this happen in the observer if an artist or someone knoledgable about his work state a few things about the work? If it truly is “avant la lettre” very few, if any will be ready for it. It’s a universal fact that without anything else feeding the observer in such a situation he will lose any interest on further investigation just because he dislikes it (taste is usually stongly connected to how usually someone interacts with something). If it’s new people have to find alternative ways to engage with it: one of the many possible ones and probably the most effective is the intelect and the power language has over it.


200. No one can control what is really creative, and everybody just has to let it go its own way.
Goethe, Maxisms and Reflections, page23

[1] Work jointly, esp. In a literary or artistic production. – Oxford English Reference Dictionary
I thought it was relevant to find the exact meaning of this word because until recently used to say cooperative work instead of collaborative. Cooperate means to work or act together (as well as three other meanings) according to the same dictionary. This means that it is less specific then collaboration.