Form and Meaning in Avant-Garde Collage and Montage

Magda Dragu

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000026283
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Storia dell'arte moderna

This book uses intermedial theories to study collage and montage, tracing the transformation of visual collage into photomontage in the early avant-garde period.

Magda Dragu distinguishes between the concepts of collage and montage, as defined across several media (fine arts, literature, music, film, photography), based on the type of artistic meaning they generate, rather than the mechanical procedures involved. The book applies theories of intermediality to collage and montage, which is crucial for understanding collage as a form of cultural production. Throughout, the author considers the political implications, as collages and montages were often used for propagandistic purposes.

This book combines research methods used in several areas of inquiry: art history, literary criticism, analytical philosophy, musicology, and aesthetics.

Part I

Theories of intermediality: form and meaning

1 The history

Comparative arts, interarts studies, and intermediality

The theory of intermediality I operate with in this volume is restricted to a research tradition continuing formalist analyses of the arts, which began at the end of the nineteenth – beginning of the twentieth-century mainly in the works of Heinrich Wölfflin¹ in the fine arts, and of Eduard Hanslick² in music. The theoretical apparatus of intermediality I use, shaped in the works of Werner Wolf³ and Irina Rajewsky,⁴ draws on the interarts theories of a previous generation of scholars active in the musico-literary field (Steven Paul Scher⁵) or the visual-literary one (Ulrich Weisstein⁶), whose arguments point back to the formalist theories of Hanslick and Wölfflin.

Currently, the theory of intermediality applied in this book consists of a delimited number of theoretical phenomena derived from concrete analyses of literary works in their relations with other media, mostly musical or visual media. Thus, my understanding of intermediality does not relate to media and film intermediality, as defined by scholars working in film and media studies departments.⁷

The concept of intermediality that I use and further develop has more in common with aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, and derives from certain aesthetical writings, which observed and discussed the concrete manifestation and behavior of arts/media.

The formalisms of Hanslick and Wölfflin dealt a deadly blow to the content-oriented and expressionist theories of music and the visual arts, respectively, putting an end to a tradition of emotional responses to the arts, at least in the thought tradition that I follow.

Hanslick’s influential and no less controversial On the Musically Beautiful (Vom Musikalisch-Schönen) indicated with clarity that instrumental music does not contain and does not raise emotions, or at least not real cause-related emotions, and that music consists of “tonally moving forms” [“tönend bewegten Formen”].⁸ Hanslick distinguished between emotions, which are rationally caused, and sensations, which are fleeting and pertain to the senses. Music does not trigger emotions, but it is defined by the perception of sound through the senses, argued Hanslick.⁹ Hanslick’s distinction between feeling and sensations echoes in Nick Zangwill’s formalist approach to the issue, who claimed that music may trigger in the listener moods, which lack “an intentional object” and are “contentless emotions.”¹⁰ Hanslick’s insight regarding the a-causal nature of the sensations triggered by music is also confirmed by recent research on music and emotions. The editors of Music and Emotion: Theory, Research, Applications pointed out that “affect” would be a more appropriate term to describe the emotional response to music, which does not resemble at all the nature of everyday emotions, as Nico Frijda further emphasized in the “Foreword” to the volume.¹¹ Furthermore, because instrumental music does not operate with concepts, music cannot tell a story, describe feelings, or anything outside itself. Instead, it develops melody and harmony in a rhythmic fashion, claimed Hanslick. The pleasure of the music listener, according to Hanslick, is to follow the rapid changes of the musical tones, which may be slow, strong, weak, rising, falling.¹² The idea that music contains or raises emotions in the listener had been the stock interpretation of music aesthetics since the eighteenth century when the discussion on the nature of the arts was kindled by the philosophical developments of the time.

One cannot really think of the eighteenth-century debate regarding musical expression and mimesis in England without John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding of 1690, a first statement of empiricist philosophies, concerned with the way sensations, feelings, and ideas are formed in the human mind and conscience, shaping our knowledge of the external world, of ourselves, and of our senses.¹³

Almost half a century after the publication of Locke’s volume, the polemic on the nature of artistic perception has taken the world of the London intelligentsia by storm. Hildebrand Jacob’s hugely influential but small treatise Of the Sister Arts (1734)¹⁴ opened up the discussion on modern aesthetic theories in England. The bold ideas expressed in this book kindled the debate on the mimetic theory of the arts, the only theory of the arts available at the time. Not only did Jacob notice that some arts can be forged while others not,¹⁵ an insight that lies at the basis of Nelson Goodman’s distinction between autographic and allographic works of art,¹⁶ but Jacob also pointed out that music does not have concepts.¹⁷ Ideas such as these raised a conundrum for the thinkers of the time operating with the mimetic ideal of the arts. If all literature and music obviously imitate something that exists in real life, what does music imitate?

In order to accommodate Jacob’s inconvenient thoughts about music within the context of mimetic theory, in his book published ten years later, James Harris reorganized the theory of mimesis as Aristotle proposed it, to prove that music imitates through “natural media or mere sounds” (i.e., a-conceptual means), these being the sounds found in nature.¹⁸ In the first part of the second treatise of his book, the one dedicated to the mimetic theory of the arts, Harris first compared all the arts from the point of view of their ability to imitate sounds and natural media devoid of concepts, providing hierarchies among the arts from this point of view. In the second part of the same treatise, he dealt with imitations by “word significant” or conceptual imitations. In addition to imitating sounds of nature, music can imitate sounds that have meaning, or “sounds significant” as Harris named them, which are sounds expressive of emotions, such as grief, happiness, sorrow. However, these “sounds significant” cannot express concepts.¹⁹

Jacob’s and Harris’s volumes immediately echoed in the small society of the London thinkers about the arts and volumes supporting the expressive nature of music within the context of mimetic theory continued to gather, almost immediately in the work of Charles Avison, who built on the observations of both Jacob and Harris in his theory regarding the nature of musical expression published in 1752–1753.²⁰ Writings endorsing the idea that music imitates and expresses emotions were published throughout the rest of the eighteenth-century England.²¹

The eighteenth-century discussion on music, mimesis, and emotion in England comes within the context of a vogue of the writings on emotions, which really peaked in England during the previous century, as Claude V. Palisca pointed out.²² Thus, it was convenient for the writers on mimesis in the arts to frame musical mimesis as expressive of feelings, since the topic of emotions was very popular in the London society at the time, rather than open up new ways of approaching musical meaning outside the Aristotelian model. It took another century and further developments in the sciences, especially physiology of sound perception through the works of Hermann von Helmholtz,²³ to pave the way for Hanslick’s bold claims he made at the end of the nineteenth century.

Harris’s book and the subsequent tradition of writing on the arts reek mimetic theory in an Aristotelian way. Harris’s understanding of the expressive content of music, as being able to raise emotions in the listener, is not very remote from the current discourse of the Cultural Musicologists or New Musicology. According to the representatives of this recent trend in musicology, instrumental music does not only raise emotions but can tell stories, and provide descriptions. However, eighteenth-century thinkers were working within the strict confines of a rudimentary aesthetic theory, or Aristotelian mimesis, without having access to the subsequent developments of science and philosophy.

Aristotle’s mimetic theory of the arts, also named representational theory,²⁴ which developed from Plato’s previous theorizations,²⁵ has at its core the emotional impact representations have on the spectator. It is the essence of tragedy, the only type of mimesis fully discussed by Aristotle in his Poetics, to cause fear and pity when the actions on stage display recognition [ἀναγνώρισις] and reversal of situations [περιπέτεια]. Aristotle’s text is very precise about the moment when mimesis is achieved: “But the kind most integral to the plot and action is the one described: such a joint recognition and reversal will yield either pity of fear, just the type of actions of which tragedy is taken to be a mimesis [emphasis mine].”²⁶ The most famous example of such a sudden change of events is the recognition of Oedipus that he killed his father and married his mother, followed by the reversal of status, from being the king of Thebes to the most despised of its citizens in Sophocles’s play Oedipus King. The strong surprise the audience experienced within these key moments of the representation was for Aristotle the essence of mimesis. Although at the very beginning of his treatise, Aristotle indicated that all arts achieve mimesis by different means, such as color and shapes (painting), rhythm, language, and melody (music and poetry),²⁷ the text of Poetics gave a detailed account only of literary mimesis, as manifest in tragedy.

Aristotle discussed the effects of music in Book Eight and last of his Politics from the point of view of its educational component, leading to amusement and relaxation, and emphasized its strong impact on the soul. He wrote: “So it is clear from this that music has the power to produce a certain quality in the character of the souls” [ἐκ μὲν οὖν τούτων φανερὸν ὅτι δύναται ποιόν τι τὸ τῆς ψυχῆς ἦθος ἡ μουσικὴ παρασκευάζειν].²⁸ “δύναται ποιόν,” translated as “a certain quality” is more accurately translated as “create a strong impact.” The rest of the passage goes on to emphasize the force of music, called “motion” [τῆς κινήσεως] in one instance.²⁹ Music is described as having power, motion, strength, while emotions such as religious ecstasy, may appear in people who are more likely to feel the ecstasy, and not in everyone, claimed Aristotle in the same passage.³⁰ Although only just sketched here, my argument is that Aristotle is not writing that music triggers emotions, but on the contrary, he describes the medium of music as having a forceful impact on the senses. This interpretation is also considered in view of the preference of medieval authors for “sensum” versus “affectio” when describing the effects of music.³¹ However, in the last lines of the book, the word παθητικός (subject to feeling, capable of feeling) is used, to describe two musical modes, the Dorian and the Phrygian, and not music in general: “for both [modes] have to do with religious ecstasy and emotions” [ἄμφω γὰρ ὀργιαστ...