August 2005    

Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life Author: Arthur C. Danto Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux $27.00 Cloth (384 P.) ISBN: 0374281181 B&T         YBP Reviewed by Sally Metheany, Team Leader, Customer Service Bibliographer Vacationers could easily include Arthur Danto's latest collection of art reviews, Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap Between Art and Life, in a summer reading bag. If you find yourself visiting galleries or museums on your travels, Danto's voice over your shoulder could help you see old art in a new light and provide an entry point and vocabulary for confronting unfamiliar art. If you are not traveling, and do not often look at art, these pieces may make you curious and draw you into visiting galleries or browsing through the art section of the library. This collection includes reviews appearing in The Nation between 2000 and 2004. It covers exhibitions ranging from Tilman Riemenschneider's early 16th century altarpieces to Damien Hirst and Matthew Barney's recent, and controversial, installations. The 24-page introduction, "Art Criticism After the End of Art," sets the context for reading the reviews that follow and is valuable as an overview of what was happening in the New York art scene at the turn of a new century, particularly with regard to the breaking down of the barriers between high and low art. Danto takes great care to provide detailed information on each art work. Since his readers aren't with him, he is very meticulous in providing a physical sense of the work - size, texture, color, all the physical details. If I'd had easy access to pen and paper while reading his line-by-line description of a Robert Mangold painting, I might have come away with a passable copy. Equally important, as a philosopher by education and profession, Danto invites us to think through the broader context of art's place in the modern world. He is eager to explore the familiar question- "but is it art?" He leads us through his thinking about what art has become: "I had to be as open as the art world itself had become. If nothing was ruled out as art, I could rule nothing out as art." He helps us to look at unfamiliar art forms in new ways, to take a leap from the rectangular canvas to any number of new configurations of materials and objects. Danto does not make immediate judgments in confronting unfamiliar and discomforting works. What he does is to say, "well, this person has created this object and here it is in the gallery. Let's take a look at it. What is it? How was it put together? What appears to have interested the artist?" He asks the same questions whether he is viewing a retrospective of an old favorite like Norman Rockwell or a puzzling contemporary artist like Jeff Koons. His piece on the latter was a high point of the book for me. I had seen the exhibition in question and was both intrigued and repelled by it . After reading the essay I felt the same, but had a clearer understanding of what I admired and liked, and what pushed me away. In his essay on Dieter Roth, Danto uses the German word entgrenzen (to overcome boundaries) to describe the artist's approach to his work. Roth's installations and performance pieces often feature foodstuffs (cheese, sausage, chocolate) which go through a process to a state of decay. Moving beyond the strangeness of the materials, Danto sees a serious exploration of life and death and the "fragility of beauty." The biggest test for him, and perhaps for the reader, is his piece on Damien Hirst. The word "disgust" keeps popping up. Time to leave the gallery? Close the book? Rather than turning around and walking out the door, Danto sticks with it, finding ways to break through the disgust into something else. Lest the reader shy away from all this stretching of the notion of what makes a work of art, we are also given fresh insights into Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci and other more familiar names. The Nation is a very political magazine. As its art critic, Danto is most interested in aesthetic and cultural questions, and only occasionally ventures political commentary. He throws some jabs at politicians -- in particular former Mayor Giuliani of New York for attempts during his administration to close down controversial exhibitions. As a New Yorker, Danto is pre-occupied throughout these reviews with the question of how the artist can respond to the 2001 terrorist attacks. One of his statements in the 'Art and 9/11' essay stands out because it also summarizes very nicely Danto's approach to art and is a fitting end to this review: "One of the things contemporary art has made available to artists is the freedom to appropriate to their own artistic ends the very things with which ordinary, artistically untrained persons express themselves, so they can now bring the powers of life into art. So, much of contemporary arts consist in selecting and arranging the things that define ordinary life." Published by YBP Library Services 999 Maple St., Contoocook, NH 03229 USA v: 800.258.3774   f: 603.746.5628 w: www.ybp.com   e: academia@ybp.com All rights reserved.