On: Contemporary Art and Hanna Segal's Thinking on Aesthetics by Adela Abella

Dear Editors

I would like to say a few words about Dr. Abella's paper (IJP 91: 163-81), as these seem to belong in the context of its discussion. The paper presents notions of contemporary art via the works and writings/statements of Duchamp and Cage. Contemporary art, it is suggested, offers a shift of emphasis, from reparation of destructive impulses through form — as suggested by Segal — to an emphasis on the process of rethinking experience, which is more in line with Bion's conceptualization of learning from experience. Bion's notion of transformation is presented as a form of aesthetic truth, which to my mind is a valid and valuable point.

Still, a few points come to mind. It is not always clear that the relationship between an artist's statements to his works and creations is a straight and simple one. There is a way in which by the time an artist begins to grasp the meaning of his project he is likely to have moved to different one (Bloom, 1973; Frey, 1964). Indeed, the gap between meaning and its origin is clearly established within the area of psychoanalytic thinking and should perhaps also apply to an artist's comments about his work. Even taking the paper as a source of reference, Duchamp is said to suggest that one should approach ready-mades “as if you had no aesthetic emotion” (p. 173, my italics) — thus expressing complex relations between conscious intent and the end product. So what an artist says about his work and intent cannot be taken as an articulation of the comprehensive meaning and resulting impressions of his work. The appreciation of this complexity seems to be absent from the paper as the artist's comments are taken to represent the meaning of his work.

Duchamp, it is said, aims to move beyond “the tyranny of taste” (p. 172) to a realm of “total absence of good or bad taste” (p. 173) which opens the way to the process of free thinking that “stands on a different level than the beauty sought by classical art” (p. 173, Abella's phrasing). Onc