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Comment on Anthony Lock's "Evolutionary Aesthetics, the Interrelationship
Between Viewer and Artist, and New Zealandism"
José Angel García Landa (University of Zaragoza, Spain)
Lock's paper is highly cogent, informative and well argued, and I have found much to
learn from it. Let me also make clear that I strongly dislike, with whatever strength
indifference can muster, the modernist-primitivist art represented by his example of
choice, Colin McCahon. But the paper does an excellent job in arguing a number of
cultural, cognitive and evolutionary reasons why McCahon's work might be
successful. It is not so effective, in my view, when it comes to conveying why it has
actually been successful in the struggle for life of the art world ecosystem. By way of
critique, the paper is too deliberately restricted to one context of response,
evolutionary aesthetics, and to that extent it is an exercise in keeping out other
approaches. It does that so smoothly that one does not even notice it has been done.
But the paper lacks (much) discussion of the cultural context of art in New Zealand,
of artistic traditions in twentieth-century painting, of the dynamics of the art world
and the art profession.
Are these matters irrelevant? (Well, perhaps they are within the scope of Lock's
notion of evolutionary aesthetics). But what has created the bandwagon effect? It is
arguable that once the discourse of New Zealandism is active, any New Zealand artist
hailed as a New Zealander might have been able to occupy the slot and have the
discourse stick to him and characterize him. I take the technical incompetence of
McCahon's, and the lack of a militant focus on New Zealand in his work as proof that
any other artist might have filled the bill equally well—or better, indeed, in the case
of more explicitly regional painters. But the vortex of attention selected McCahon,
Rita Angus, and a handful of others. Lock devotes some attention to the role of critics
in selecting artists (quite arbitrarily, it would seem) and creating a tradition, but some
elements seem to be missing from the discussion. What makes those critics' views
influential, for instance, or what is the actual functioning of the art world as a
profession where things are bought and sold, who does the buying and the selling and
the reviewing, what other class interests, business interests, prestige markers, political
interests, whatever, are active in this small world. There is though the danger of a
vicious circle here, because Lock might perhaps answer that it is the inherent qualities
in McCahon's work that helped bring out his critics as perceptive ones in drawing
attention to him, or that it was those qualities that furthered his marketability or
emblematic potential in the NZ context. Still (in my current act as an Anti-
McCahonian) I tend to see the dominance of pure arbitrariness in the bandwagon
effect. Success in modern art (and we wouldn't be discussing McCahon otherwise) is
the result of a chaotic matrix of circumstances, and that argues somewhat against the
fitness dimension in Lock's argument.
A theory such as Lock's selects some elements from a tangled web of complexity in
order to foreground them or to show the way they are active. Still the clarity of the
theory plays against itself insofar as there are many elements left outside the complex
which are just as entwined with it as those which are brought to the light by the
theory. The theory then creates a kind of hindsight bias effect regarding its views on
those artists who are eventually consecrated.
Perhaps I'm just saying that Lock explains the success of some elements which are
present in art in general, as a scientific theory should, but does not really account for
the preeminence of specific artists, because this preeminence is not to be fully
explained at this level of reasoning. One would have to engage in a more detailed way
dominant discourses and counterdiscourses in the 20th century, postcolonial dynamics
of representation, and the whole shebang of historical, biographic, cultural-aesthetic
and poststructuralist criticism, which would make the paper less distinctive as an
intervention in evolutionary aesthetics. There would be downsides, and upsides. As it
is, the paper is an interesting specimen of Third Culture (i.e. cultural theory written
under the aegis of sociobiology and cognitivism). To its credit, it does make some
moves in the direction of what I would like to call Fourth Culture—integrating within
an evolutionary perspective the insights of cultural criticism, historical scholarship,
aesthetics… instead of dismissing them and restricting the scope to what can be seen
from an neo-paleolithic viewpoint.