Strange Tools is a strange book. It is a self-described work of philosophy by Alva Noë, a UC Berkeley professor who is best known for his theories of perception and consciousness. For many, that description alone would deter the curious reader, since it suggests a footnote-laden, scholarly slog through prose understandable only to a narrow circle of initiates.

However, it is not that kind of philosophy book. Noë offers his ideas about the nature of art, technology, and philosophy in a spirited and highly personal series of reflections on his subject. While he does engage, glancingly, with other academic theories, Noë here seems to be reaching back to an older, pre-institutionalized form of philosophical writing, in which the author is not constrained by the pretenses of objectivity, formality, and dispassion. And yet Noë steers too far in the other direction, on the strength of his considerable authority, to offer a series of provocative assertions that rely more on personal hunches and breezy digressions than informed argumentation. The result does little justice to his subject or his reader. (This is particularly strange for a book that does not hesitate to point out when the other philosophers and neuroscientists whom he cites make assertions without a supporting argument.)

Noë rose to prominence with earlier works, such as Out of Our Heads, in which he argues that consciousness is not something we have or that happens to us, but rather something that we do. It is an activity rather than a condition. In Strange Tools, Noë makes a similar move with respect to art. Art, he says, is not a phenomenon that stands in need of explanation, but should be understood as a kind of technology. Noë recasts art as a tool, albeit a “strange” one, that we use in order to investigate the world and ourselves. He goes on to argue that this is also the case with philosophy: it does not do anything useful; it does not teach us new facts about the world that we can then apply in order to navigate it better. Rather, both philosophy and art have a kind of meta-cognitive value. Philosophy is a form of thinking turned onto itself: it is thinking about thinking. Art, too, is intrinsically self-critical, in so far as it is always engaged with the question of its own nature, limits, and possibilities. In both cases, this self-referential turn sheds light on the human condition itself. For example, he writes, “When a choreographer stages a dance, he is representing dancing. That is, he puts dancing itself on display. Choreography shows us dancing, and so, really, it displays us, we human beings, as dancers . . . Choreography puts the fact that we are organized by dancing on display.” But, in addition to the repetitive prose, there are two problems with this theory of art: first, it merely repeats a modernist theory of art that has been common currency for the past century; second, it ignores and excludes most of the art in human history. Some art, particularly contemporary art, may indeed serve as a kind of self-reflection, but that hardly captures the diversity of purposes that art serves. In the quote above, for example, Noë seems to be suggesting that other forms of dancing, such as social or ritual dances that are not staged by an artist-choreographer for the contemplation of an audience in a formal setting, are not art, at least not in this deeper sense of the term. And that is a profoundly problematic claim for a text that promises to tell us something about the essence of art and human nature generally.

Noë further makes the curious and unconvincing move of claiming that, because both philosophy and art are “useless” in this way, philosophy is art, and art is philosophy. But that latter claim, that X is Y and Y is X, simply does not follow from the observation that X and Y share some important similarity, Z. Such flimsy argumentation will not be lost on Noë’s readers, whether or not they possess a degree in philosophy.

In addition to these considerable problems, for me the fatal flaw of Strange Tools is the author’s own unrelenting self-referentiality. Reading the book feels a bit like being in a carnival fun-house: at every turn, one is confronted with another version of the author’s own reflection. Personal anecdotes from Noë’s life are woven throughout the book from opening preface to endnotes; we learn of his artist father, and his father’s many artist friends; we are told about Noë’s son’s piano recital, of Noë’s childhood trips to the museum, of his interest in blues music. Such digressions, when judiciously incorporated, can help to make a theoretical text more lively and accessible to a general audience, but here they often come across as gratuitous.

Indeed, in some cases, Noë’s focus on himself seems downright solipsistic. In his chapter on boredom, for example, the author observes that we experience a great deal of it in childhood, but that our workaday adult lives are woefully lacking in idle time. While that certainly seems true for Noë himself, and is probably the case for many of his readers, it is shortsighted to generalize from his experience to all of humanity. An internationally recognized public intellectual has a busy and fulfilling schedule, to be sure, but what about adults who are unemployed, underemployed, retired, or who have monotonous, unfulfilling jobs?

My point here is not to chide Noë for his insensitivity to his own privilege, but to point out that such sweeping generalizations from the author’s admittedly interesting and full life can be alienating to the reader, who starts to wonder whether the real subject of this book is not art, but Noë himself. Strange Tools is less a work of philosophy and more an autobiography describing the author’s experiences with art and the nature of his life, with some interesting digressions about the neuroscience of pictorial seeing, or the significance of pop music thrown in. Works of serious philosophy do not have to be impossibly difficult or unpleasant to read. But they do have to offer something more than the wishful thinking and unreasoned assertions that Noë provides us in his latest book.

Alva Noë, Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Hill and Wang, 2015). ISBN: 9780809089178 $28

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November 29, 2012 to January 5, 2013
51 East 57th Street at Madison Avenue
New York City, 212-755-2828

Offered a residency in the historic Haining House near Edinburgh, Scottish painter Richard Walker responded with a series of modestly scaled canvases, setting up his easel each day in the common rooms of the house to depict the objects and furnishings left by its most recent owners. But as he progressed, Walker brought to his project interventions of his own, so as to extend its artistic ambitions well beyond its initial documentary premise.

Like a movie director, Walker deliberately kept the lighting subdued, so as to produce a visual drama of shapes and images emerging from darkness. There’s tension in the seepage of light around shutters and curtains; trees loom, framed by curtains just beyond the intimate clutter of books and lamps. The formal staircase provides a stage for domestic drama. Mirrors sometimes provide ways to enlarge and complicate these interior spaces, but Walker goes much further, to incorporate photography and digital projection, the ubiquitous new media that now extend the scope of our daily lives. They enlarge the compass of his documentation, by taking, for example, a family photograph in one room and projecting it in another, where it seems to be observed by a sculpted head (Bust, all 2011).

These virtual images bring ambiguous life to the memories that suffuse the house and construct new layers in its family history. They provide the viewer with something like trails of clues – a lamp in one painting reappears in another, offering some stable evidence as to the layout of the room. In one painting, Pamela, a woman’s figure – real or projected – appears by a distant pool table, evoking, as Edward Hopper’s often do, some unspoken drama.

Yet here there is no secret story to uncover, no Agatha Christie mystery of hidden crime. Rather, once our attention is engaged, Walker presents us with more philosophical conundrums about the role of painting in its contemporary media environment. Like painters from Chardin to Braque, Walker incorporates the tools of his trade in his paintings: in Brown Interior, for instance, he depicts a glowing laptop along with the projection it spawns, and the scrims and poles of his projection apparatus, as though to make honest acknowledgement of his process. He thus also acknowledges our complexly mediated relations to the past, to one another, and to ourselves in a world as interpreted by Marshall McLuhan.

Walker’s argument for painting’s relevance within this contemporary media environment is convincing on the purely visual level, where his painterly touch grounds his conceptual superstructure in materials. Worked wet into a dark ground, his strokes of light hover on the verge of legibility, with a poignancy that recalls the way good painting has traditionally endowed its subjects with life – a drama repeatedly enacted as his paint lends substance to transparent films of projected photos. The images themselves and the shadows they generate provide a formally satisfying interplay of dark and light, punctuated by the emergence of faces or other recognizable details amid more ambiguous patches of luminous pigment, often contrasted to more sharply defined silhouettes, as in Fireplace and Shadow.

Walker acknowledges the heritage of Cubism in these complexly articulated compositions, and his work goes beyond contemporary debates about painting and technology to open up, as Cubism did, a deeper questioning of our commonsense view of the perceived world. His paintings address themes of consciousness and presence discussed recently by the philosopher and perceptual psychologist Alva Noë, who asks, for example, how my awareness of a person in the room next door differs from my perception of the person in front of me, or from a memory of that person. If the eye, as is now generally acknowledged, does not present us with a high resolution photograph of the world before us, then our perception becomes a much more complicated interplay of active construction with the passive reception of light. We select and compose the objects of our attention. Walker’s intriguing blend of active construction with more passive, retinal responses to light obliges us as viewers to seek out the constant structures we take for granted, to ask again the question, “What do we see?” He thus engages his work not just with new visual technologies but also in an evolving understanding of our place in the world.

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