Review of Alva Noë's "Strange Tools Indeed: Alva Noë and Art as Reorganisation"

Volume 1526-0569 Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature Kate McCallum Strange Tools: Art Human Nature Alva Noë. New York: Hill Wang. pp. $ - This engaging and refreshing book takes the reader carefully through a characterization of a wildly diverse field that is notoriously resistant to analysis. Remarkably, it does so in a way that is explicit and understandable and nonetheless succeeds in doing justice to the disruptive, rebellious character of art. This is a rare feat; so many cross-disciplinary analyses of art seem to move so far from what many love about art that they risk irrelevance, and so the success in this case deserves close attention. As its title hints, this book puts forward a picture of art as resistant, powerful, and, in its idiosyncratic way, useful to us as reflective beings. The book is very ambitious in that it sets itself a broad remit, which includes the world of contemporary fine art, mainstream cinema, architecture, pop music, and so on; in short, anything that comes roughly under the category of art. The vast range of media and approaches thus encompassed requires that Noë’s account be based in fairly broadly defined ideas about the underlying methods, aims, and concerns of practices that might be considered art, as opposed to focusing on the objects produced. The one line that Noë draws is to distinguish art from more functional pursuits such as design, a line that might seem more problematic were it not so clearly felt by those working within the art world. Noë introduces his basic picture of art early on, carefully justifying it with reference to a bottom-up explanation of the basic principles that lie behind it, several examples, and some general arguments about the nature of particular traditions of art-making. A reader already familiar with Noë’s work can probably skip the externalist arguments and discussion of organized activities, but it is to his credit that these are included, since research that hopes to reach a broad audience is most likely to succeed if all of the relevant ideas are properly addressed in the course of the text. In chapter 1, the notion of organized activities is introduced; these are a vast range of person-environment—or personperson—activities in which some rhythm or system is developed, the rhythms developed by parent and infant when breast- or bottle-feeding taken as a paradigmatic case. These activities, according to Noë, demonstrate the ways in which our actions are developed in dialogue with the world. In the following chapters, Noë’s basic thesis is introduced. It runs as follows: as well as organized, technological practices, art is there to reflect on and reform our organized activity, itself a reorganizing practice. This is illustrated by the case of choreography and dance. Dance emerges naturally in the lives of humans, and it is creatively and reflectively explored by—and subsequently performed with reference to—choreographed performance, which is done “to fashion for us a representation of ourselves as dancers” (17). This practice is characterized by an “evaluative attitude” (56). Noë then establishes a key parallel that he draws between art and philosophy: “Philosophy is the choreography of ideas and concepts and beliefs” (17). Art, then, folds back and comments on some of the organized practices that we engage in just as philosophy constantly redevelops writing and the fixing of ideas. Noë states several times that art is made up of a range of “activities bent on the invention of writing” (36), a statement that is initially perplexing, since not all art results in permanent representations, let alone writing. This is clarified by his reference to Plato’s disdain for poetry, which Noë identifies as rejection of a repetitionbased, oral tradition, as contrasted with writing as a method of fixing that can lead to contemplation and critical examination. The point then is not the outcome or the form that it takes but the attitude with which it is approached; playing with writing allows us to reflect on language, to experiment with it, to test out new ways to manipulate it, and thus to develop the ways that we write and speak going forward. General theories of art can only really be made convincing by a demonstration of their relevance to a diverse selection of particular examples, and Noë launches into just such a demonstration in chapter 7. This book is exciting to read in part because of the examples he uses. So many texts claiming to cover the whole of art seem unable to account for anything less than fifty years old, or expound principles that hold for painting or music but seem entirely inappropriate for other disciplines. A reader accustomed to these difficulties could be forgiven for worrying when the first examples mentioned orbit the familiar poles of Cézanne, impressionism, and Richard Serra, but Noë launches satisfyingly into a nuanced discussion of far more varied and contemporary work from Tino Sehgal, Richard Lazzarini, Sara (...truncated)