Session 7A: Voices, Narratives and Soul
Chair: Bernadette McCarthy

Rembrandt’s Self-portraits: The Insistence of the Visual over the Autobiographical
Judit Varga
University of Bristol, United Kingdom

No abstract is presently available

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Dialogue in Art: Gombrich’s History of Pictorial Representation and the End of Art
Stephen Snyder
Saint Louis University, USA

Arthur Danto argues that Ernst Gombrich fails to explain the shift of post-historical art away from optical fidelity.  Consequently, Gombrich is unable to take seriously Marcel Duchamp, one of the twentieth-century’s most significant artists.  This failure, in Danto’s view, invalidates Gombrich’s theory of pictorial representation.  Danto argues that artistic interpretation must occur with the assistance of a body of theory, providing a conceptual understanding of artworks that provide few or no visual cues.  This necessitates the philosopher-critic’s role in elucidating the art of “post-history.”  Despite its shortcomings, Gombrich’s theory predicts the communicative breakdown of late modern art and provides an explanation for the divergent forms of contemporary art.  Gombrich emphasizes the development of an artistic language, suggesting an explanation of the artworld today that does not require art ceding its communicative capacity to philosophy.  Rather than signaling a transition into a new era defined by a radically different approach to artistic production, the interpretive aid called for in understanding the art of today indicates artists’ rejection of inadequate modern icons.  This rejection is coupled with the continuing efforts of artists to expand and re-evaluate the visual metaphors currently available.
Support for Gombrich’s argument, that art manifests a communicative structure, is found in Habermas’ critique of Hegel, which applies the theory of communicative action to the notion that modernity has ended.  This critique, in turn, is applied to Danto’s end-of-art theory.  Danto’s explanation for art’s change in narrative succumbs to the paradox of modernity—the task of forming a uniquely modern guiding principle without recourse to past traditions—in the same manner as Hegel’s end-of-art theory.  A communicative theory such as Gombrich’s, if applied with a more flexible notion of the visual schemata, would not be vulnerable to Habermas’ critique.  Viewing the contemporary artworld within the framework of a developmental learning process, I conclude that as the contemporary artistic language becomes more fully articulated, the interpretation of the philosopher is no longer required. 

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Warhol, Postmodernism and Reality
John Scoville
Humanities Columbus State Community College, USA

This presentation takes a look at how and why Andy Warhol’s works represent a dramatic move towards a postmodern cultural outlook in the United States.  It marked a change that inaugurated a new and different set of cultural axioms defining how both life and art was to be viewed.   A basic premise of this paper is that culture provides a framework for the complex fabric of ideas that define reality.  Culture is of course far from passive.  It teaches, through such institutions as, information media, education, and art, what should be paid attention to, what should be ignored, what is right and what is wrong, and guides the essential manner in which life is lived.
There is much in Warhol’s works that disclose cultural values and beliefs which strongly persist to this day, but Warhol’s work is but part of a larger cultural whole.   Strikingly similar premises of disengagement are also embodied in deconstructionism and critical theory.   These doctrines have provided a method for looking at and judging art with a philosophical underpinning that coincides remarkably well with the United States’, C.I.A., cultural cold war doctrine.     
This is not to suggest that there was a single compelling directive that orchestrated a pervasive plan to shape cultural values, but it is possible to discern a complementary and reinforcing set of conceptual and social forces that acted over time and had sufficient impetus to significantly shape the general cultural environment in the United States.  Today, this environment sustains an undereducated, disengaged, and ill informed general pubic, a public that is viewed despairingly by many and happily by some for embracing a very Warholesque reality.        

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