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Aristotle's Mimesis and Abstract Art

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Garry Hagberg
Garry Hagberg
Affiliation:
University of Oregon
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Abstract

Does non-representational art itself constitute a refutation of any theory of art based upon mimesis or imitation? Our intuitions regarding this question seem to support an affirmative answer: it appears impossible to account for abstract and non-representational art in terms of imitation, because, to put the problem simply, if nothing is copied in a work of art then there can be nothing essentially imitative about it. The very notion of abstract imitative art seems self-contradictory.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 59 , Issue 229 , July 1984 , pp. 365 - 371
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1984

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References

1 See, for example, H., Gene Blocker, Philosophy of Art (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1979) 3637.Google Scholar

2 See, for instance, Diotima's speech in Symposium (trans. M., Joyce), E., Hamilton and H., Cairns (eds) (Princeton University Press, 1961) 211d-212 (p. 563). He who has seen ‘beauty's very self’, who has ‘gazed upon it in true contemplation’, will never be seduced again by the charm of gold,of dress, etc.Google Scholar

3 I do not mean to suggest here simply that the complex view of imitation can include metaphor, which will become clear below.Google Scholar

4 Aristotle, Poetics (trans. Ingram, Bywater) in The Basic Works of Aristotle, R., McKeon (ed.) (New York: Random House, 1941) 1453b1.Google Scholar

5 Ibid. 1453b31.

6 Ibid. 1453b8.

7 Ibid. 1454b8.

8 Ibid. 1457b17.

9 Ibid. 1458a16.

10 Ibid. 1459a18 (my italics).

11 Ibid. 1459a28.

12 Ibid. 1460b8.

13 Ibid. 1460b12.

14 Ibid. 1460b12.

15 Ibid. 1460b18.

16 Ibid. 1460b18.

17 My reading of this work follows that of Ronald Paulson in Emblem and Expression: Meaning in English Art of the Eighteenth Century(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975).Google Scholar

18 See J., Elderfield, The Wild Beasts: Fauvism and Its Affinities (New York, 1976) 49.Google Scholar