Abstract
In contemporary debates concerning the definition of art a recent book by an American philosopher, Alva Nöe, has attracted overall attention. The title of this book reads Strange Tools.
Art and Human Nature (2015). In this volume Noë argues that works of art are "strange tools", i.e. artefacts, which stand towards usual, ordinary tools and technologies in very peculiar relation.
That is to say, art is, according to Nöe, a "philosophical practice", whose sole function is to resist and reverse negative, numbing results of application of ordinary technologies. Hence, it should be possible to understand the purpose of art-making and experiencing works of art only in the wider context encompassing various usual practices, skills, tools or technologies.
Against this background art and related pratices turn out to be something extraordinary, strange, but, on the other hand, these cerate a logical whole. The proposed paper will focus on one of the main inspirations of Nöe's thesis, namely on Ludwig Wittgenstein's notion of "perspicuous representation" and his usage of the so called "cartographic metaphor".
According to Noë, art is like mapmaking and since we do not make maps just for the heck of it, but because we get lost without them, so we create and seek for artworks for the same purpose. At the same time, a work of art is an implement or instrument that has been denuded of its function, art is thus "the enemy of function, "the perversion of technology".
We consider the basic intention of Nöe's theory of art, that is his effort to account for continuity between usual, everyday practices on the one hand and creating and appreciating artworks on the other, as desirable and to a certain extent successful. Unlike Nöe, however, we do believe that analogy between works of art and maps reveals something important not only about the purpse of these "strange tools", that is about what is the nature of artworks.
This comparison is, in our opinion, also capable to show what artworks are not; at least in several important regards. This analogy between the function of artworks and the function of maps that Nöe proposes together with his at the first glance antithetical suggestion to understand artworks to be "strange tools", which retards or opposes to present ordinary practices, quite naturally directs our attention to a phenomenon of the so called "unsurveyable maps" which are to be met both in philosophical treatises and in literary or visual works of art.
In the proposed paper we would like to show that a reflection on several selected insatnces of these "strange maps" can result both into a confirmation of Nöe's basic insight into the nature of art, i.e. of his conviction about continuity between art and life, and, on the other hand, into substantial revision of one of his main claims.