Art as Intelligent Alien Being

 I have been interested and studying the use of the word 'language' in art criticism and conversation for quite a while now. There's something condescending about someone using it out of the blue when you're looking at a piece of art.

Why don't I see that?  Am I stupid?  WTF are they talking about?  Language? Is this just bullshit warmed over?

I took a communications course decades ago. Sender and receiver are two necessary components for communication to take place.  Language is tightly coupled to this. Whatever a sender is sending needs to be decoded into meaningful substance and acknowledged (received). Implicit in this exchange is the mutual coding of information into a transmissible language or set of reusable, recognizable notation.

When I'm observing an art object, I rarely sense that an artist is transmitting a message in a language unless its already just using an existing written code.  This doesn't mean that art objects can't emote sympathy or triggered emotion based on the composition and aesthetic material used to generate those responses. To me that's a call/response reactionary impulse.

And, I'm not the first to comment on the subject.  My own interest was intrigued by James Elkins book Why Art Cannot Be Taught. In a section on Critiques, he refers to a concept called theory speak - that of a vernacular tightly coupled to a material, theoretical, or otherwise esoteric aspect of aesthetic practice that acts as a common ground for discussing the subject (the art, the practice, the artist's trajectory, and so on).

In another example he talks about critiquing a painting by a student who claims that the painting contains a language. After asking the student how Elkins might say something in the language, the student more accurately explains the painting as a personal narrative describing a camping trip.

For a long time that was my hangup.  The use of the concept of language that referred to someone's art was something I automatically assumed was an attempt at one-up-manship regarding a recognizable pattern, style, or esoteric component of any given artist's canon.

And I have studied Wittgenstein's work implying we can't/shouldn't talk about art - a notion that has a romantic appeal but also leaves us with the unintentional consequence of being mutual aesthetically mute and dumb orphans. We can and do talk about art - tfb.

With all of that as intellectual baggage, I am reading Thierry de Duve's Pictoral Nominalism (On Duchamp's Passage from Painting to the Readymade). TdD is one of the most insightful Duchamp historians but its never an easy read - he demands a lot of attention and the subject matter is dense and deep. I'll not attempt a literary swim in the deeper waters.

There's a short bit about Kandinsky that I want to appropriate as a complement to a theory I want to propose.

Nominalism is a philosophical construct that asserts that the abstract doesn't exist - that every single entity is it's autonomous self (I'm generalizing but stick with me for the ride).

Alright, buckle your seat belt. If the abstract doesn't exist - let's buy the argument - then what the hell are these "...self-sufficient, spiritually breathing subject that also leads a material life: it is a being"

Let's play with that idea. TdD's book follows Duchamp's investigation and re-theorization of language itself. Both a decomposition of how reality is cognitively managed and objectively how it comes to *be*. Here, Kandinsky - maybe because of spirituality blinders that he shared with Hilma af Klint - misses the opportunity to solve a universal question. Is the work of art that "rises from out of the artist" an object or an alien being - the very intelligent life humankind has searched for from the days of primal soup?

Art objects defy everything we associate with searches for intelligent life yet if we squint our preconceived notions just a bit and apply a nominal lens to our focus, maybe we are sharing our planet with galactic stuff we don't yet recognize or acknowledge.

As for artistic language, TdD extends our (my) original presumptions about language with these thoughts.

Ah, "a fiction of a language".  That's really interesting given how loosely so many art critics use the concept.  In reading this book, language doesn't come cheap to artists and never arrives for most. I was warned by Richard Trickey at UNL not to allow myself the mistake of assuming that discussing art was just bullshit, it's not.  

But buyer beware when critics claim an intellectual fast lane into the language of a given artist.

You've taken the ride this far.  Here's a TED talk that complements the idea that art objects in a nominal world may in fact represent a form of alien life as aesthetic memes.