The history of art is a dialectic between monism and dualism.

[Below are some thoughts on aesthetics I’ve been developing for a little while, and am still fleshing out.]

The history of art is a dialectic between monism and dualism; virtually all art falls into one of these two aesthetic categories. I use the terms “monism” and “dualism” in a slightly different way than they are commonly employed; I’ll explain below.



On Monism:

In traditional western philosophy, the term “monism” refers to a unity of mind and body. From an aesthetic perspective, monist art therefore describes the human experience as being contained within and part of the world around it, and especially as being subject to the laws and forces of nature (including human nature).

Realism, naturalism, romanticism, tragedy – these all traditionally reflect a monist perspective. Works featuring themes of interconnectedness, wholeness and unity, works that are built around archetypal or mythological motifs, works that emphasize instinct and human emotion (for good or for ill), fundamental unchanging truths (for good or for ill), tend to be works from a monist perspective.

Ironic distance is nowhere to be found in monist art, and is in fact the antithesis of it, as irony immediately creates a separation, simultaneously depicting the object and the critique of the same object: a dual perspective. Monist works do not seek to place the viewer/audience at a distance; instead, the goal is immersion, the suspension of disbelief. The monist work does not “wink” at the audience, it is played straight, intended to be taken at face value. This is not to say monist works are not often complex; in fact, monist works often operate at multiple levels simultaneously. However, the monist artist will take care to “hide the brushstrokes,” literally or figuratively, so that the viewer/audience does not necessarily have to be consciously aware of the many layers of meaning beneath the surface (in fact, it’s usually preferable for the deeper themes to remain at the level of unconsciousness, rather than calling attention to themselves). Genre storytelling—western, sci-fi, crime drama, romantic comedy—is traditionally monist, depicting a familiar moral universe that follows an agreed-upon set of rules in which the world is made balanced and whole by the end. Most popular and folk art (though certainly not all) is fundamentally monist as well; country music and folk music, for example, are prime examples of monist art, with organic, traditional instruments and familiar stories of fundamental human truths.

This description of monism can sound deceptively traditional; however, a monist perspective can be seen in many contemporary works of art. The second half of the 20th century witnessed a partial return to monist artwork: notably, the minimalist music of Glass, Reich, Adams and their contemporaries, which turn repetitive ostinato figures into immersive rituals; also, too, the action painting of Jackson Pollack and the later Rothko paintings, while abstract, could arguably be called monist, as they seem to depict the fractal patterns of the natural world (in Pollack’s case) or the pure sensation evoked by deep, saturated colors (in Rothko’s case). What these musical and visual works all share is an emphasis on art as something pre-logical and pre-intellectual, something to be felt physically as an emotional and intuitive experience.



On Dualism:

In western philosophy, “dualism” is the opposite of “monism” – the notion that the mind and body are separate entities (Rene Descartes is one of the most famous dualists). From an aesthetic perspective, dualist art therefore emphasizes, through form or content or both, the experience of feeling oneself, or even all of humanity, as something separate from the natural world; it often describes the self not as an organic whole, but as a fractured and fragmented construction.

Dualist art emphasizes the artificial, the manmade, the unnatural structures and symmetries that civilization has imposed upon the world. Both Modernism and formal Classicism are prime examples of dualist art; Classicism by celebrating humanity’s achievements as breaking away from the primal state of nature, emphasizing smooth shapes and ideal forms, and Modernism as Classicism’s shadow, emphasizing the alienation of existing in a machine-haunted environment, even to the point of resembling a machine. In dualist art, the presence of humanity is always felt – grids and straight lines, visible brush-strokes, irony or “self-awareness” that calls attention to the artifice of the work itself (as in Brecht’s “alienation” technique); these are hallmarks of art expressing a dualist perspective. Picasso’s famous definition of art as “the lie that tells the truth” is a classic dualist statement, not only because it contains a paradoxical dualism in and of itself, but because it describes the goal of making the viewer aware of the artifice, awareness of the artifice being the quintessential dualist description of the experience of reality.

The dualist perspective, especially in modern works, often places the viewer/audience at a critical distance from the work, signaling that the viewer/audience should not be “fooled” by emotionally manipulative techniques often employed in works of art from a monist perspective. The fracturing of perspective itself is a dualist trait, as in Cubism, conceptual art, and a great deal of modernist and postmodern literature (e.g. metafiction). Most popular art is monist, but a notable exception is hip hop music: its mechanized grid-like beats and frequently-ironic use of musical quotation through sampling reflect a strongly dualist perspective.