On Difficulty in the Arts
Introduction
The Difficulties
Another difficulty
Additional examples
Introduction
Some art is sometimes said to be “difficult.” What we do we
mean by this term “difficult”?
In his book, On Difficulty (1978), critic George Steiner
identifies four kinds of difficulty in poetry: contingent, modal, tactical,
ontological. I think they apply to many of the arts.
Four Difficulties
Contingent -- a cultural reference that
you might have to "go look up." Your understanding (and,
presumably, enjoyment) is contingent on knowing some fact. In the case of
jazz, your enjoyment might be contingent on the experience of hearing a tune in
many different versions and performances.
Modal -- after sincerely trying to engage and understand the work, you just can't like it due to fundamental issues of taste or personal experience.
Tactical -- the artist(s) deliberately
gets in your way of immediately understanding the work's meaning or story,
perhaps as a way out of deepening or intensifying the experience for you, or
for the pleasure in puzzlement. (Which is more enjoyable – the tale or
the telling of the tale?) The film Pulp Fiction is my favorite
example of this idea. Speed or overwhelming complexity of music might be
such a tactic. Insider slang is probably such a tactic.
Ontological -- the artist(s) through the
work challenges the very definition of the genre or even the idea of art itself
Another difficulty
How to know if there
is any meaning at all to be ferreted out? This might be called the
ambiguity of contingency, another layer of difficulty. For example,
scholars have struggled to track down the “Nicean barks” reference in Poe’s
poem “To Helen,” and found no single clear referent. Did he choose the
term primarily for its sound? How would
a typical reader know when something is worth looking up, when there might not
be anything there? In painting, some signs
elude interpretation, as in Bruegel's Netherlandish Proverbs. Does
the painting now become less “meaningful”?
A radical response is to put such questions of meaning (and difficulty)
aside in some art forms. As James
Elkins wrote in his book Why Are Our Pictures Puzzles?, “Pictures are
effectively and forever without meaning.
Art history is the bruise is grown up around that injury.”
“To Helen” by Edgar
Allan Poe
Free poetry found at:
http://www.able2know.com
TO HELEN.
Helen, thy beauty is to
me
Like
those Nicean barks of yore,
That gently, o'er a
perfum'd sea,
The
weary way-worn wanderer bore
To
his own native shore.
On desperate seas long
wont to roam,
Thy
hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have
brought me home
To
the beauty of fair
And the grandeur of old
Lo ! in that little
window-niche
How
statue-like I see thee stand!
The
folded scroll within thy hand —
A Psyche from the
regions which
Are
a discussion of “Nicean barks” can be
found at this Poe
website.
Additional Examples of The Difficulties
Tactical Difficulty
We want to see faces in paintings. Eckersberg’s Woman in Front of a Mirror teases us, first
denying us the face as we look at the back, and then offering the hope of a
mirror, but cutting off that hope by blocking the view with the arm.
Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg
Woman in Front of a Mirror, 1841
Contingent
Music: knowing the “Dies Irae” tune
to get the reference in Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique.
Painting: religious imagery
Ontological
Music: John Cage, 4’33”
Painting: Jackson Pollock splatter paintings
Sculpture: Donald
Judd, Richard Serra
Art, Music
& Ideas (MUS 115)
Music
Appreciation (MUS 202)
this page is in progress
and I will be adding examples
from different art
forms in each difficulty
DC Meckler
revised 8-8-2007