. . . that the various relations of coexistence result from the generalization, or rather the transposition, of the act-person relationship, namely, that the categories of essence and of person can be used to interpret the same phenomena. Whenever arguments based on deficiency are used, the notion of essence is applied, even to the person. On the other hand, whenever one wishes to make a group or an essence stable, concrete, and present, personification will be used.
Chaim Perelman, L. Olbrechts-Tyteca 1
A solitary lamb figure is surrounded by penguins. The white walls of the gallery are arctic snow, made the more so by the undulating contour of a light blue sky painted along the top edges of all but one of the walls. Two CD players provide the sounds of a chill wind through headphones. Geometric snowflakes, large and small, cut from paper, are spread about over the four table tops and adjacent areas of the floor, and form a large collage drawing suggesting a snowflake with an eight-axis cruciform structure on the wall opposite the entrance. Lamb and penguins alike are clothed in sweaters of snow flakes or flower petals, six-pointed, in bas relief on the figures.
The lamb is isolated, notwithstanding being amid twenty nine penguins. The lamb is female, the penguins androgynous. The penguins are taciturn, introverted, reticent, even cold. The face and torso of the female lamb is touched with the only color in the gallery other than that of the sky. The all-white penguins uniformly turn their heads a bit to the side, with a downward gaze. The eyes of the penguins are white, blank, vacant; the eyes of the lamb are a deep brown. Placing the headphones on one's ears to listen to the chill wind from the CD players, one assumes the bodily gesture of the penguins, assimilating one to the flock of penguins. Using the headphones places one in audile isolation from the actual physical space of the gallery, with its potential for intersubjective interaction, while entering more fully into the virtual illusory space of the gallery qua installation wherein intersubjective interaction is precluded.
A pity party is in progress, remarkable for its absence of intersubjective engagement.
The penguins are a generic alterity to the lamb, whose wool has perhaps been used to knit the sweaters of the penguins, whose icy mountain of loneliness the lamb shares. Lamb and penguin thus together constitute a strange social formation, seemingly oblivious to each other: the lamb inhabits the otherness of the penguin's domain, while introducing the otherness of lambs wool sweaters to penguins. Otherness here denotes a trope of unnaturalness, of beings out of place, of loneliness and alienation.
To engage the installation in this way is to employ the pathetic fallacy. The pathetic fallacy is related to the rhetorical trope of personification and its related figures of prosopopoeia, in which an entity is rendered as a speaking and acting subject, and of apostrophe, in which a speaker addresses that which is personified and thereby becomes capable of being a listener. 2 While the pathetic fallacy occurs at least as early as Homer, the term 'pathetic fallacy' was introduced by John Ruskin in 1856, in chapter twelve of Modern Painters, "Of the Pathetic Fallacy."3 The proximate cause of Ruskin's engagement of the pathetic fallacy was its widespread deployment by late eighteenth century poets and visual artists. To commit the pathetic fallacy is to attribute natural beings with the feelings of human beings and thus presupposes a category mistake.
Engagement with another category mistake is evoked by the figures of lamb and penguins: that entailing the distinction of art and kitsch. The sweetness of the lamb and of the penguins is such that the notion of kitsch is inevitably invoked. Such figures would once have been unthinkable anathema, at least for the epigones of Clement Greenberg's "Avant-Garde and Kitsch."4 Kitsch, on Greenberg's distinction, entails "the debased and academicized simulacra of genuine culture," is "mechanical and operates by fomulas," to elicit "vicarious experiences and faked sensations."5 Presupposing a mature cultural tradition of representations, kitsch deploys those conventions of representation in a debased form of cultural production. Art, for the Greenberg of "Avant-Garde and Kitsch" is coterminous with the avant-garde, presupposing the notion of progress, an enterprise directed "to keep culture moving. . . ." While the avant-garde, on Greenberg's view, imitates the processes of art, kitsch imitates the effects of art. 6
The matter is not so simple now, if it was so simple in 1939; indeed, Greenberg later finds the matter not to subsist in the single cause of an antithetical distinction of art and kitsch.7 Deployment of kitsch as a component of content within the artwork entails a sublation, in which the kitschness of the kitsch component remains discernible as such even as the artwork retains its identity qua art by putting into question its status qua art. Thus Meehan's lamb, with all the sweetness one could want in a kitsch artifact, and her multiple but seemingly identical penguins manifesting the mechanical and formulaic characteristics of kitsch, negate their kitschness by their subsumption within the installation qua artwork. The sublation of kitsch and art is correlative with a shift, from discrete object to installation, from the level of individual entity to the metalevel of ensemble.
Heinrich Wölfflin, in The Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in Later Art, famously urged that "Not every thing is possible at all times, and certain thoughts can only be thought at certain stages of the development."8 This is apt for Meehan's installation, which would have been unthinkable in 1939 when Greenberg wrote "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," and for a long while thereafter. That it is thinkable now is perhaps indicative that Greenberg's early deployment of the notions of 'progress' in art and of an historically critical art were not entirely misplaced, though the current manifestations of those notions would have been unthinkable for him. Now, after the modernism in which Greenberg's criticism was saliently imbricated, and after the postmodern turn which was in part a reaction against the reductivism, purism, and essentialism of Greenbergian formalism, the thinkableness of the work is a manifestation of the shift from the specific to the generic: the question the work presents to the viewer shifts from that of employment of a particular medium to the definition of the extension of art in itself.9 Indeed, the notion of medium dissolves, as Rosalind Krauss urges:
That nothing could be constituted as pure interiority or self-identity, that this purity was always already invaded by an outside, indeed, could itself only be constituted thourgh the very introjection of that outside, was the argument mounted to scuttle the supposed autonomy of the aesthetic experience, or the possible purity of an artistic medium, or the presumed seperateness of a given intellectual discipline. The self-identical was revealed as, and thus dissolved into, the self-different.10
If nothing is constituted as pure interiority or self-identity, the attributed interiority of lamb and penguins and the interiority of their human viewers are always already constituted through introjection of alterity, difference, exteriority. Part of the attributed interiority of personification is the regard of the artwork as a quasi-subject,11 as having something of the depth of one's lived experience of interiority, and which one intersubjectively attributes to an other
Margaret Meehan received the Master of Fine Arts from the University of Washington at Seattle in 1999. Exhibitions from 2002 through 2005 include: Unreal, University of Texas at Dallas; Art in the Metroplex, Texas Christian University; Pinewood Derby Invitational, M5 Artists Collective, Chicago; Walking Clay, Dai Ichi Arts, New York, New York; School's Out, Gallery at CCBC, Baltimore; Great Things in Small Packages, Grey Matters Gallery; A Little Bit Icky, Southside at Lamar; The Fall of Nature, HEREart Gallery, New York, New York; Wit, Wisdom, and Innovation; Gruss Center for Visual Arts, Lawrenceville, New Jersey; Pulse, The Art Corridor, Tarrant County College; Specimen, Soil Art Gallery, Seattle; Portal Spaces, Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids; Storyville, Vermont Studio Center; Transformations, Municipal Museum, Sakai City, Japan.