D
anto is obsessed with the so-called indiscernibility problem, the question as to why and how perceptually indiscernible objects can belong to completely different ontological realms. In regard to art it is “the Brillo Box/Brillo carton problem”, in Christianity it is, he says, “the Christ/Christ problem” — actually the Christ/Jesus problem — because to all outward appearances Jesus of Nazareth is a human being, but at the same time also the Christ, Christos, “the anointed one”. The difference between a human being and an incarnated god, Danto claims, is invisible, and Jesus’ divinity a matter of faith (Danto 2013f, 706).Religious language, or, rather “religious description”, as Danto puts it, has had an “immense appeal” to him, particularly in discussing works of art, he confesses in a text written at the very end of his life. Here he again draws a parallel between transfiguration in religion and in art. “‘The transfiguration of the commonplace’”, is, “a transformation of an ordinary thing into a work of art”, and in religion (rather in Christianity) it is, “the moment when an ordinary human being is disclosed to his followers as a divine being” (Danto 2013f, 707). However, the analogy between the transfiguration of Christ in the biblical narrative and the transfiguration affecting Warhol’s Brillo Box limps badly. As regards the biblical transfiguration Danto claims that a human being is revealed — “disclosed”
to his followers, as he puts it — as a divine being, whereas in the artistic case an ordinary thing is transfigured or transformed into a work of art;
but there is no question of an ordinary thing suddenly being “disclosed”
as a work of art. That would be the case if Harvey’s commercial Brillo box were suddenly revealed to be a work of art, but the whole point of Danto’s theory is that there is a radical ontological difference between Harvey’s box and Warhol’s box. So, the Harvey box is certainly not transfigured, whereas the Warhol box, which is perceptually (almost) indiscernible from Harvey’s box, is. In the biblical narrative one and the same person, that is Jesus of Nazareth, appears first in an untransfigured state and then for a short instant in a transfigured state, whereas in the artistic case there are two objects, an ordinary untransfigured Brillo box and a Warhol’s Brillo Box, which has presumably been permanently transfigured into a work of art. Perhaps the most important disanalogy between biblical transfiguration and Dantoesqe transfiguration is this: transfiguration in the biblical case did not change Jesus’ ontological status, it did not transform a human being into a divine being, the transfiguration simply revealed him as the Son of God to three disciples, whereas in the artistic case the transfiguration is supposed to affect the ontological status of an object, transforming an everyday object into a work of art. I don’t think, however, that any transfiguration occurred in Warhol’s “Factory” when he had his Brillo Boxes made, for his boxes were not everyday things, they were just very similar to everyday objects, to wit, to Harvey’s commercial Brillo boxes. It seems to me that Warhol’s boxes were from the very beginning intended to be exhibited as works of art, and were perhaps works of art as soon as Warhol made them; if some sort of transfiguration took pace in Warhol’s workshop that would not in the least have affected the ontological status of the objects, since transfiguration in the biblical sense — and it is the biblical sense Danto relies on in his philosophy of art — reveals a previously acquired ontological status.
In the text I have discussed above Danto offers a succinct summary of the role of transfiguration in his conception of art: “artworks are transfigured into a higher, sacred ontological realm wholly different from mere real things from which they may be visually or sensorily indiscernible” (Danto 2013f, 707). We should note that this is an exceedingly general claim about all works of art, or, perhaps it is intended to apply
only to works in the visual arts. In any case the overwhelming majority of his analyses and his examples are taken from visual art. As I have already remarked, it is not always easy to see whether Danto is speaking of art in general, of works of art in all artforms, or, whether he is thinking only of the visual arts. Leaving that question aside, I think it is not difficult to see that transfiguration cannot achieve what Danto claims it can, namely to transform the ontological status of a thing into a work of art. If there is a radical change in ontological status without a change in appearances — as is the case with indiscernibles belonging to different ontological categories
— it is a question of transubstantiation. Danto’s conflation between transfiguration and transubstantiation runs through his whole œuvre. Now it might be said that I have taken Danto’s notion of transfiguration too literally, “transfiguration” after all being a metaphor in Danto’s texts. There is, according to The Oxford English Dictionary, a figurative sense of the verb
“to transfigure”, it means “[t]o elevate, glorify, idealize, spiritualize”, and The Oxford English Dictionary of Difficult Words says that “transfiguration”
refers to “a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful spiritual state” offering the following sample sentence: “in this light the junk undergoes a transfiguration; it shines”. Incidentally, this sentence has been used as a motto for an internet photo exhibition by the Indian photo artist Kunaal Bose (https://www.behance.net/gallery/19740427/transfiguration).
Danto’s transfiguration, however, does not involve a change in appearance but in essence; after Dantoesque transfiguration a piece of junk does not begin to shine, it still looks like a piece of junk but is elevated to the spiritual category of art.
What transfiguration achieves, according to Danto, is something that only the miracle of transubstantiation is capable of achieving. I have argued, and so have Fricke and Mathisen, that when Danto speaks of transfiguration he should have taken transubstantiation as a more apt metaphor for art. Yet, that does not seem to be quite right. Consider the following: in the biblical transfiguration Jesus is revealed to be what he was and is, the Christ; in Dantoesque artistic transfiguration something that was an ordinary thing is supposed to be transfigured into a work of art; but it is not the case that an ordinary thing is suddenly revealed to be a work
of art. There is thus no/Brillo Box/Brillo box, or, Warhol/Harvey problem as a parallel to the Christ/Jesus problem. Warhol did not, nor did anybody else, transfigure the Harvey box into a work of art. What Warhol did, it seems to me, was to represent a Harvey Brillo box, to produce an artistic representation of a Brillo box. He did not present an ordinary Harvey box to the artworld. The fact that a thing that looks almost identical to an ordinary thing can be a work of art has nothing to do with transfiguration, nor is the metaphor of transubstantiation strictly speaking apt, since Warhol did not consecrate an ordinary Harvey box by presenting it to the artworld, thereby affecting a transubstantiation of the ordinary box into a work of art. He presented a thing almost identical to the Harvey box as a work of art. But the Harvey box and the Warhol box were not numerically identical, they were just more or less perceptually indiscernible or qualitatively identical.
In contrast to Warhol’s Brillo Box, which is not the real Brillo box, Duchamp presented a real bottle rack as a work of art; similarly Tracey Emin exhibited her real bed as My Bed as a work of art at the Tate Modern in 1998, the bed that was in her bedroom is numerically identical with the bed in the Tate Gallery. To use Danto’s terminology, one might say that there is the problem of Tracey Emin’s Bed/Tracey Emin’s bed, one and the same thing being an ordinary bed and a work of art. In one of his last texts, a reply to criticisms, Danto says, in relation to the transfiguration of Jesus that “[t]ransfiguration is metamorphoses [sic], a change of form — but the transfigured has to be recognizable” (Danto 2013d, 253), thereby recognizing that the notion of transfiguration presupposes that the transfigured person or thing is recognized as identical with the previously untransfigured person or thing.
When in Strauss’ tone poem, Death and Transfiguration (1889), the dying poet is finally reconciled with his fate, his consciousness is “transfigured”, but he is still identical with the person with a previously untransfigured consciousness, and in Schoenberg’s string sextet, Transfigured Night (1899), later scored for string orchestra, the lovers are “transfigured” in forgiveness and reconciliation, but the whole point is that they are the same individuals previously unreconciled. When Danto claims, quite rightly, that the transfigured has to be recognized as the previously untransfigured, this claim seems to be in stark contradiction with his central thesis to the
effect that ordinary untransfigured objects are perceptually indiscernible from their transfigured counterparts. The Brillo box is not the Brillo Box.
In mentioning Christ’s glowing face and blindingly white garments during the transfiguration, he adds somewhat curiously that “[i]t is possible to think that art has always been the transfiguration of its subject” (Danto 2013d, 253). Curious, because now it is the subject, or theme, in a work of art that is being transfigured, not an untransfigured everyday object.