James “Jim” Herbert’s latest book, Brushstroke and Emergence: Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso (University of Chicago Press, 2015) may very well change the way you view and address a work of art.
The question of how much the author exists in his/her work and whether intention or authorship even matter when discussing works of art have been constant questions of critical theory. Herbert takes these perennial questions a step further.
Blending emergence theory, philosophy and art history, James Herbert, professor in the Department of Art History and co-founder of the Ph.D. program in Visual Studies, closely examines the brushstroke in ten nineteenth-century French paintings. Instead of telling us what makes a work of art by Monet “a Monet,” he unravels what has been taken for granted when discussing famous works of art—that the author really has any control over his or her work.
Below, Herbert answers questions about what inspired the book and how the theory of emergence challenges the author’s portrait in his work.
What painters does Brushstroke and Emergence study?
“The book covers a swath of time in France beginning with Courbet’s canvases in the middle of the nineteenth century, extending through the heyday of impressionism in paintings by Manet, Monet, Cézanne, and Seurat, and concluding with Picasso’s early cubism in the early twentieth century. This is a period when loose, visible brushstrokes rose to prominence in painting and in criticism written about it—at least until, I argue, Picasso brought that overriding emphasis to an end. Rather than attempting a comprehensive history of this period, Brushstroke and Emergence instead fusses over less than a dozen paintings. It’s my conviction that we can make sense of artistic technique only by subjecting it to painstaking examination and analysis, rather than speaking about it in generalities.”
What ideas and experiences caused you to write this book?
“Brushstroke and Emergence is result of a ‘perfect storm’ of three forces coming together. First, I’m a historian of French modern painting, a period when critics began to regard corpulent, colorful brushstrokes as some sort of representation of the artist’s authentic self, of his or her intent. Think of an impressionist landscape, about which we are perhaps more inclined to say, ‘It’s a Monet,’ than ‘It’s a field of hay.’ But this conjunction of person and paint had always struck me as odd, an artificial critical conceit. Why should a flick of the wrist, or the happenstance of rapid painting, tell us anything about the personality of the artist? I only began to have an idea about how to approach this question when—second force!—I began playing the viola about a decade ago. I’ve been a musician my whole life, and I’m also accustomed to overcoming challenges through the application of intellect and the sheer force of will. But this oversized fiddle proved cussedly difficult, and my limited mastery of it had nothing to do with intellect, will, or intent. My impasse with the instrument lead me—third force!—to investigate certain aspects of the philosophy of mind, where I learned that manual dexterity and creative production are more often then not realized at the level of ‘embodied cognition’: muscle memory and such. Thinking about such things too much will just slow them down or mess them up: you need to get to the point where your hands and fingers just do it. Which brings us back to painting of the nineteenth century. I wanted to provide an account of how, say, Monet painted like I play the viola (or wish I could!), of how the painted surface, far from revealing intent much less personality, instead registers the complex interactions between mind, body, and world over which the artist exerts no more conscious control than we do when we breathe.”
How does the theory of emergence inform your approach to the brushstroke?
“A conscious mind is a single complex thing—or, at least, a mind imagines itself to possess such autonomous singularity. But minds thinking and bodies acting actually consist of a huge number of relatively simple things functioning together: nerves sensing, neurons firing across synapses, muscle fibers twitching. What relation could possibly exist between the singular massive thing and this microscopic multitude? The recent science of emergence—a truly interdisciplinary field spanning disciplines such a biology, economics, and sociology—provides an answer, perhaps best exemplified by an anthill. Individual ants are very simple beings: all they do is sense pheromone X and then perform action Y. Yet when you cluster hundreds of thousand of ants together, a highly complex thing, the anthill ‘emerges’ out of the millions of resulting interactions. Crucially, the simple individual ants don’t determine what form the anthill will take, but conversely the anthill doesn’t tell the individual ants what to do: the queen issues no commands. Neither level—the complex singularity nor the teeming multitude of simple entities—determines that nature of the other. Surely this provides a useful way to think about the mind: it is both a single consciousness aware of itself, and millions of neurons and axons, with the former emerging out of the latter but taking on properties (such as self-consciousness, and thought) that exceed the characteristics of microscopic nerves. Now comes the final metaphor posited by the book: as nerves are to self, so brushstrokes are to painting. A completed painting seen as a single thing is exceedingly complex. We can even talk about the ‘big’ theme of a painting having been chosen by the intentional artist. Meanwhile the brushstrokes are quite simple yet massively multiple. We could say that the singular painting ‘emerges’ out of the myriad interactions of these small simple artistic gestures, but is would be silly to maintain either that the nature of the brushstrokes determine the meaning of the painting, or that the meaning of the painting dictates to the brushstrokes how they should behave. If all of this is true, then we can see how the reigning art-critical conceit of the nineteenth-century, which associates a multitude of simple brushstrokes with the singular complexity of the artist’s intent, is making a categorical mistake; it’s comparing apples to oranges (or rather, many tiny apples to a single enormous orange). What Brushstroke and Emergence attempts to do is sort out all these strands—neurons and persons, brushstrokes and paintings—in order to discover the ways in which painters and painting are intimately intertwined, while none of these entities fully control any of the others.”
If the brushstroke is not an expression of self, what is a better way to find the artist in his or her work?
“I would hope that the reader, after finishing Brushstroke and Emergence, would recognize that the complications hidden within the question are more intriguing than any answer could hope to be. What is the artist’s ‘self’: his or her personality or the creative process that has become embedded as habit into that particular body? Does the artist possess ‘his or her’ work, or do the brushstrokes in the work well up to take possession of the artist?”
Which leads me to . . . Are we ever really in control of our creative work?
“No. Or rather, yes and no. Or rather, we can’t know. We (our conscious, intentional selves) can attempt to exert control over our creative work (painting a canvas, playing a viola), but it’s absurd to think we’ll ever succeed completely. Conversely, various aspects of the work strive to exert control over ‘us,’ but they also will never succeed completely. Think of the novelist who creates a character who then takes on a life and intent of its own. Similarly, the impressionist artist may start out painting a landscape, but during the long process of its realization, the process itself will take on a life and intent of its own, assuming a direction and purpose to which the intentional artist has no choice but to succumb and follow.”
What was the hardest thing about writing this book, or the most surprising discovery while researching/writing it?
“Everything I say about the painter’s control over the creative process applies equally well to my creative process as a scholar. If anything, this basic reality, explicitly addressed in Brushstroke and Emergence, has only become more pronounced the longer I’ve been at work in my career as an art historian. As a young scholar, I carefully planned out what I should study—or at least I thought I did. By now, I recognize that I have very little control over what I will take on as my next research project. I don’t chose it; it chooses me. I pass through the world, looking at paintings, listening to music, until some cultural artifact reaches out to me, grabs me by the lapels, shakes me around a bit, and says: ‘You are going to study me, now.’ I think that, as a young scholar, I would have found this to be a hard reality to accept: I would not have liked confronting my lack of control over what I do. But now, here in my fourth book, I find this realization more of a comfort than a confrontation. It is a liberation. I didn’t write this book to any greater extent than it wrote me, and by now I can take from that serendipity great joy.”
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