What Artistry Can Do: Essays on Art and Beauty 9781474494922

Citation preview

What Artistry Can Do

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Refractions At the borders of art history and philosophy Series editor: Kamini Vellodi, University of Edinburgh Poised at the threshold of art history and philosophy, Refractions offers a space for intellectually adventurous work that engages the theorisation of art and image as a persistent provocation for our times. The series captures the character of inquiry as refractive, forging resonances and oblique intersections between diverse zones of thought, while fostering breakaway strands of thinking. Editorial Board Andrew Benjamin, Kingston University Adi Efal, University of Lille 3 Jae Emerling, University of North Carolina Vlad Ionescu, University of Hasselt Sjoerd Van Tuinen, Erasmus University Sugata Ray, UC Berkeley Aron Vinegar, University of Oslo Hanneke Grootenboer, Radboud University

Books available Mieke Bal, Image-Thinking: Artmaking as Cultural Analysis Bart Verschaffel, What Artistry Can Do: Essays on Art and Beauty Books forthcoming Ian Verstegen, The New Vienna School of Art History: Fulfilling the Promise of Analytic Holism Kamini Vellodi and Aron Vinegar (eds), Grey on Grey: On the Threshold of Philosophy and Art Charlotte de Mille, Bergson in Britain: Philosophy and Modernist Painting, c. 1890–1914 Ashley Woodward, Lyotard’s Philosophy of Art Adi Efal-Lautenschläger, Ravaisson’s Method: Edification as Therapy Visit the series website at www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series-refractions

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What Artistry Can Do Essays on Art and Beauty Bart Verschaffel

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Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © Bart Verschaffel, 2022 Grateful acknowledgement is made to the sources listed in the List of Illustrations for permission to reproduce material previously published elsewhere. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked, the publisher will be pleased to make the necessary arrangements at the first opportunity. Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12(2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in Constantia by Biblichor Ltd, Edinburgh, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9490 8(hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9492 2 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9493 9 (epub) The right of Bart Verschaffel to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498). Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund.

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Contents List of Figures Series Editor’s Preface Preface by John MacArthur Introduction Part I:  Art as a Form of Understanding 1. First Ideas on Art, Being Moved and Criticism 2. Critical?Art 3. What Art Can Do (Malpertuis by Jean Ray)

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vii ix xii 3 11 13 19 26

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4. On the Pleasure of Finding What Is Hidden (With Hidden  Noise by Marcel Duchamp) 5. Memoria: Memory Work and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’

34 47

Part II:  Aspects of Artistry 6. On Laughter, Opinions and Artistic Freedom 7. Notes on the Work of Art as a Gift 8. Being an Artist Is an Art in Itself: On the ‘First Work’   and the Notion of ‘Oeuvre’ 9. Double-Speak

103 116

Part III:  Elementary Aesthetics 10. On Splendour and Modern Beauty 11. Fatal Truths: Notes on the Beauty Experience 12. On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Sources of Ugliness

129 131 142 154

First Publication Notes Index

175 177 197

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63 65 91

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Figures 0.1 Paul De Vylder, JYP, 1991 – Courtesy of the artist 4.1 Walter Swennen, Stark wie ein Stier, 2008 – Courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels 4.2 Marcel Duchamp, With Hidden Noise, 1916 – © DACS 6.1 Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman in an Inn, 1623, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 6.2 Johannes Moreelse, Democritus, c. 1630, Centraal Museum Utrecht 6.3 Johannes Moreelse, Heraclitus, c. 1630, Centraal Museum Utrecht 6.4 Wim Delvoye, Ring Corpus Inside, 2011 – Courtesy of the artist 6.5 Baubo / Putta di Porta Tosa, twelfth century, Museo Sforzesco, Milan vii

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8.1 Jorg Immendorff, Ich wollte Künstler werden, 1971 – Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner 9.1 Gustave Courbet, L’Homme blessé, 1844–54, Musée d’Orsay, Paris 12.1 Stephanie Kiwitt, from the Wondelgemse Meersen, 2012 – Courtesy of the artist 12.2 Stephanie Kiwitt, CHOCO CHOCO, Hand 6, 2015 – Courtesy of the artist

viii

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Series Editor’s Preface Kamini Vellodi

Refractions constructs a zone for inquiry that examines, tests and renews modes of address poised at the borders of philosophy and art history. Fostering unexpected synergies, volumes in the series illuminate the rich and complex intellectual lineage of this interface and its ongoing relevance for the contemporary thinking of art and image. In the transhistorical zones where concepts and experience meet, and across borderlines of theory, criticism, historiography and practice, philosophy and art history are brought together in remarkable and creative ways. ix

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Deflections of light or waves across media of different densities, refractions are passages that fracture whilst continuing. The title of the series is intended to evoke not only the moments when disciplines are brought into collision through the complexity and multi-dimensionality of their objects and problems, but also the indisciplined events of thought provoked when a discourse is made to explore the blind spots within its own histories and practices. The series captures the horizon where philosophy and art history meet, juxtaposing emerging, established, alongside overlooked or forgotten writers to offer provisional groupings that mobilise intellectual history. What Artistry Can Do is a collection of essays on art, criticism and aesthetics by the Belgian philosopher and theorist Bart Verschaffel, and the first synoptic collection of his work in English. Written over a thirty-year period, these writings address topics ranging from laughter to the artwork as gift, refracting different dimensions of ‘that special and remarkable endeavour known as Art’. The collection is compelling not only for its miniaturist inquiries into topics such as the nature of art criticism in today’s climate of practice research, and the place of artistic freedom within broader debates of ‘free speech’, but also for the way in which the juxtaposition of these little worlds retains the problematisation of art as dynamic and incomplete, and therefore timeless. Discursive and often conversational in tone, many of the texts gathered here were written for both academic audiences and the general public. Indeed, Verschaffel situates this project within the contemporary debate on the public value of the humanities, as the incitement to reflect on culture – a debate that, he reminds us, has never been restricted to the academy. It is from this commitment that the transdisciplinary, transhistorical and ultimately transacademic scope of his reflections is propelled. x

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In these crystallised adventures of writing, ideas are unmoored and cast adrift through constellations, across planes unhampered by the academic apparatus. Passing effortlessly across an encyclopaedic range of references – Verschaffel is as at ease writing about Renaissance artisans as he is discussing the avant-gardes or contemporary technology – the writing vibrates between reflection, poetics and theorisation. A precision of thought, one that can only be crafted through years of scholarship, is conveyed through a lightness of voice. Some of the pieces leave us with a statement or a conclusion, others a mood, but all provoke thinking. In recent years the essay format has become fashionable, a way of bridging the worlds of the public and the academy, offering writers a space of liberty where the personal voice can assume prominence. Verschaffel’s work, intimately connected to such modernist precedents as Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot and John Berger, sustains the essay as a poetics of intellectual judgement.

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Preface by John MacArthur Philosophical writing on aesthetics often has a problematic readership within art. The impulse to understand what attracts us to art and beauty leads us almost immediately into a thicket of questions. Is there an ‘art’ that all artworks participate in? Do works exist in their own right or are they expressions or relations of persons and institutions? Is beauty a judgement or an affect? From the point of view of the practitioner or the art historian, aesthetics is both fascinating and repellent. It asks the fundamental questions but in so doing takes us away from our initial orientation to the work. The intellectual adventure of attempting to understand how we appreciate nature and make art becomes instruction, often conflicting instructions, on how we ought to be in the world. xii

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A route to escape this thicket of aesthetics is offered here in Bart Verschaffel’s writings on aesthetics, and it is no mistake that the word ‘aesthetics’ does not appear in the title. The mode of the essay allows Verschaffel to open questions proper to aesthetics but to stay with the object or issue under inquiry. How can we have a discourse on beauty, one that is broad enough to encompass the beauty of persons and artefacts? How can we understand the artwork as a thing and as an individual and a culture’s capacity for making? Such fundamental questions of aesthetics are not answered in this volume, but they are departed from and arrived at anew in language that is immediate and compelling. Verschaffel trained in philosophy and history and has built a career teaching architectural theory and the philosophy of culture to architects at Ghent University. He has been instrumental in conceptualising what research in architecture should be in the modern university. His rigour and foresight about the possibilities and, perhaps more so, the pitfalls of fitting architecture and art into a template based on the positive sciences have been foundational for a whole generation of scholars and practitioners in Belgium and beyond. At the same time Verschaffel has been an active critic and curator in the visual arts throughout his career, acting as a scriptwriter for television documentaries on the arts from Thierry De Cordier to Jan Fabre. He currently directs the VANDENHOVE Centre for Architecture and Art at Ghent University, where students and researchers work with the collection and concepts of curation. This volume collects writings on art and aesthetics. His essays on architecture have yet to be published in English.1 Originally through the necessity of his role in teaching creative practitioners, Verschaffel’s work has been characterised by the avoidance of jargon and the technical language of philosophy – that practical constraint has become a powerful mode of thought in its own right. xiii

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We could retitle this book ‘On the Ontology of the Artwork’, because in the terms of philosophical aesthetics that is what it is about: the mode of existence of artworks, what their artifactuality tells us of this, what the proper terms are by which a film, a painting, a text might assume its disciplinary place but also operate as a work of art. Verschaffel’s approach would be consistent with the argument made by some philosophers that the generalisation of categories like the beautiful, and the project to make aesthetics a coherent distinct branch of philosophy, is the root of its problem, a problem which can be overcome by close attention to artworks, art forms and the historicity of thought on art. This is implicit in Verschaffel’s manner of working, which in some cases involves a close reading of a particular work, but more commonly works by unpacking what it means to have knowledge about art. Explicit in his Introduction to this volume is Verschaffel’s claim that art and reflection upon art, and the relation of contemporary art and the arc of cultural history, are necessarily a conversation and a co-creation. Beyond his preference to discuss artistry and beauty over theory, Verschaffel has another way of dispersing the leaden clouds of aesthetic discourse – the individuality of his voice. He explains in the Introduction his rule, a good rule for us all, of not assuming knowledge on the part of the reader. But to do this without a dreary didacticism is not easily achieved. In collecting essays written for differing occasions over decades, Verschaffel’s book assumes something of an episodic narrative character. It seems as if he has come across the objects of his inquiry like a person out walking across the landscape of cultural history. This is a book that comes from a daily practice of being in the world of creative endeavour with some philosophical boots on. It presupposes the value of thinking about art and beauty and the choice of this starting point is validated through Verschaffel’s ability to guide the reader in spending time in these places, to demonstrate the kind of comportment one xiv

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ought to have there. This is not to suggest that these essays are merely observational. They each assay an argument: from the nuances of what is meant by a ‘first’ work, to monoliths of aesthetics such as the concept of ‘beauty’; from the primordial concept of the gift, to an account of the critical role of contemporary practice. Verschaffel is modest about his and, indeed, any theory of the arts, as this ‘theory’ cannot claim generalisation or irrefutability. But this does not mean that his texts are ambiguous or loosely evocative. Rather, they provoke thought rather than encourage reverie. It is no simple thing to explain why artworks are necessarily enigmatic without becoming enigmatic oneself, but Verschaffel achieves this using the example of Duchamp’s work With Hidden Noise (1916). With the characteristic directness of Dutch speakers, Verschaffel often proposes startlingly definitive views on complex matters. This is an authority that rests on his erudition and sharp analysis, but also on the way that questions are framed with the weight of their intellectual history and existential implications. What would we expect of the author who explains the relation of beauty and ugliness? Certainly not equivocation. The authority of Verschaffel’s voice is demanded by the seriousness of the matter at hand. Like Nietzsche and Adorno, whom he cites frequently, Verschaffel is not afraid of parataxis and aphoristic turns of phrase. For example: ‘The awareness of the lost possibility of a first reading reveals the structural weakness of any interpretation.’ Or on the subject of the art museum: ‘Private appropriation must always somehow counter canon and consensus.’ His is a voice unlike any other I know on contemporary writing on culture. Verschaffel succeeds in being straightforward with matters that are often too much honoured by mystification in anglophone writing on culture. He tells us plainly how it is possible to think with concepts that will never be fixed. xv

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The public realm is constituted by the critics and the spectators, not by the actors and the makers. And this critic and spectator sits in every actor and fabricator; without this critical, judging faculty the doer or maker would be so isolated from the spectator that he would not even be perceived. Hannah Arendt

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Introduction The articles and essays collected in this book were written over the last three decades and published in art magazines, cultural magazines and edited volumes. Most began as invited lectures, written for various occasions, with many addressed to general audiences made up of art people, and some presented in academic contexts. The collection, therefore, does not make for a coherent whole. The individual essays offer short and – I hope – helpful reflections on some of the basic components and assumptions informing our thinking and dealings with that special and remarkable endeavour known as Art. I do not discuss art-theoretical issues systematically here; nor, save for a few exceptions, do I discuss specific works or artistic oeuvres. The essays 3

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are about art as a form of knowledge and what can properly be said about artworks, about provocation and artistic freedom, about artistic authorship and artistry, about the relationship between individual art collecting and heritage, about forms of beauty and ugliness and about what stake art might have in all this. And yet the texts, despite their differences in motivation and tone, also belong together, seeing as they share certain guiding principles. The first is that of operating between the academic institution and the broader intellectual culture. The texts are written in such a way that the reader can understand what they are about without knowing or having read the works read and used by the author. Assuming and referring to shared knowledge is logical and appropriate for specialised discussions among scholars and scientists. The humanities, however, and particularly the arts disciplines, produce a special, reflexive form of culture that merges with the general culture they are studying. They can distinguish, but never separate themselves from, what they study and co-create. This manifests itself clearly in their specific form of discursive rationality: one can certainly invent concepts, and develop and define technical terms, but speaking carefully and precisely is not the same as using a technical language. Understanding in the humanities is always grafted on to common speech. It is always based on meanings that have already been formed and expressed in different ways, and on prereflexive concepts that have been explicitly defined to a greater or lesser degree. The humanities reformulate, clarify and test – and thereby objectify – this understanding. But the humanities do not produce technology, and the arts disciplines do not produce social technology: they do not yield organisational models, therapies or anything other than ideas and reasoning. The understanding they produce in their studies and erudite discussions can only be made public, find readers and thereby seep into the great murmur that fills 4

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the world, to become part of what Oakeshott calls the ‘conversation of mankind’, with all its inevitable simplifications, distortions and misunderstandings. The essays collected here deliberately try to smuggle themes and problems, ideas and concepts developed within the humanities, with as little jargon and reliance on implicit knowledge as possible, back into a society’s chaotic conversation about its ‘culture’. The book aims, more particularly, to supply ideas and conceptual clarity from art theory and aesthetics to the ongoing conversation within the arts. The texts are meant to contribute to what Anne Cauquelin aptly calls the ‘theorizing doxa’ about art: theory that does not claim strict scientificity and irrefutability, and cannot be metho­ dologically applied, but enriches the cloud of ideas that informs our living with and thinking about art. The second principle that guides this collection of texts is the author’s growing astonishment at the deceptive ‘scientification’ of the academic knowledge culture, whereby academic research management seeks to professionally steer the study of the humanities and the arts according to the outlook and conventions of the hard sciences while imposing the latter’s procedures for evaluating quality and productivity. This so-called professional steering has recently been combined with, and reinforced by, a narrow interpretation of ‘social relevance’, which determines research agendas. Such agendas help in ascertaining which research topics and proposals will gain (political and public) approval and in determining how to raise funds for academic work and ‘project’ research. Increasingly, however, this has resulted in a kind of commissioned research, an intellectual herd behaviour and an embarrassing homogenisation of the intellectual culture and of academic profiles. Furthermore, ‘cultural studies’ has begun to internalise this logic, assuming a topical focus combined with a restricted set of conceptual schemes and references – for the most part based on a limited post-structuralist 5

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idiom – to form new ‘disciplines’: ‘trauma theory’, ‘performance theory’ and so on. The result is an obligatory adherence to a small set of concepts, explanations and ever-changing buzzwords that make transient fashions not just of the research topics but of the so-called theories themselves. The idea that what is produced under these terms in the fields of the arts, philosophy and culture constitutes the ‘state of the art of research’, and a necessary touchstone, testifies to a startling naivety. I believe that it is academia’s responsibility, on the contrary, to carry out idiosyncratic memory work, to bring back past themes, ideas and concepts and thus to broaden the forgetful, near-sighted present. The essays collected here do not report to fellow specialists but are addressed to the general reader, and consciously choose to engage with important authors of the past who are well known and remembered albeit barely read today. The third guiding principle of these essays, in line with the previous one, concerns the definition of art. Within Western culture, the arts have been emancipated and institutionalised. They have, together with the sciences, acquired freedom and autonomy. Art, in theory, now exists independently of religious, political, social and economic power. The arts have acquired many rights and – compared with the sciences – surprisingly few obligations. A remarkable diversity of practices has grown up and developed within that special artistic field. Western societies have come to accept, and now even encourage, individual experimentation and play with the meanings by which they live. Over the last twenty years, however, in a manner consistent with intellectual culture more broadly, ‘content’ has become all-important in the making of and dealing with art. Art must follow an agenda and deal with the right things. Moreover, it seems that the artist (only) acquires ‘the right to speak’ based on direct involvement. Invoking his or her background and situation seems to be a precondition, and even a guarantee, of relevance 6

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and authenticity: this is art as ‘testifying’. Questions of ‘how’, or considerations of what the work stands for artistically, seem to be secondary if not irrelevant – to the point where merely asking the question feels ‘incorrect’. These essays, by contrast, consider the aloofness of the form essential, and situate the importance of art on the side of reflection. The essays are grouped into three sections. The first revolves around the role of art criticism and the possible reflexive and critical content of the artworks. The opening texts respond to a situation dating to (just before) the so-called academisation of the arts, the Bologna convention and the art-as-research movement, all of which determined the vast import of ‘theory’ in the making of art from the 1990s on. In part these texts still argue against the former – and, until the 1980s, widespread – reluctance of art makers toward criticism and toward an intellectual approach to art. In the meantime, this situation has been reversed, to the point where (young) artists in art schools are now obliged to model their work as a ‘research practice’, to plan and manage their artistic careers professionally and to do so by selfinterpretation and theoretical self-legitimation. I seriously doubt that this theoretical objectification and justification, and certainly those numerous hybrids of confessions and private impressions interlarded with theoretical terms and always mumbling the same references, can be considered art criticism. The second section deals with aspects of the status and agency of artistry. It starts with a reflection on the importance of the cynical tradition of mockery and insult for the culture of rationality and the difference between freedom of opinion and artistic freedom; this is followed by essays dealing with the ‘animated’ status of the artwork and with the beginnings and other specific aspects of artistic authorship. The third section discusses the relationship between the aesthetic, or the appreciation of the first and immediate appearance of things, and artistic 7

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activity. Certainly, these days, art is no longer supposed to decorate the world or make beautiful things. But questions remain as to what, if anything, art has to do with beauty, and how beauty relates to meaning. Here, I try to clarify the issues surrounding the relationship between art and beauty, focusing on how art deals with ugliness, and what ugliness means or evokes. First versions of most of the texts collected here were originally published in Dutch and have been collected in De Zaak van de kunst from 2011. All have been revised and rewritten, but the arguments remain unchanged, and the references and bibliographies have not been updated. The essays should be read in the context of their time of writing and first publication. Each of these texts has a history. I thank everyone who, in one way or another, contributed to or offered feedback on the lectures and writings included in this book. In particular, I thank my compagnons de route in work and life who, over the years, have been my interlocutors. Finally, I thank Kamini Vellodi and Vlad Ionescu for the proposal to make the book, and especially my editor, Sam Fleck, for his precision, patience and understanding in making the texts readable. What is found to be of value in these writings I owe to many; the mistakes are mine alone.

Figure 0.1  Paul De Vylder, JYP, 1991 – Courtesy of the artist 9

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Part I Art as a Form of Understanding

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1. First Ideas on Art, Being Moved and Criticism Art is certainly no longer about glorifying or praising or teaching. It is no longer a means of cultivating people or explaining moral, religious or civic truths and values. Everything that art can communicate by way of an image, a poem, a song or a theatre play, and that can be put into ordinary words, we already know. It is not the artist’s ‘research’ into abstracta such as space, movement, colour and so on that will bring scientific progress. And all the wisdom art can convey about life has long been established. All told, it does not amount to much. Albert Camus writes how the pharaoh who had studied 13

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little during his life and on his deathbed asked the sages what they knew was told that ‘people live and die, and they are not happy’ (‘Les hommes naissent et meurent, et ils ne sont pas heureux’). The rest simply follows: bodies are sad and hopelessly alone, life is never easy, we can never say exactly what we mean and never really know what we want, everyone is capable of just about anything, words do not allow us to grasp things, every life story is an invention, no one knows exactly what men and women want from each other, everyone is caught up in old debts and blood ties, we are lost in a cold echoless universe, people want children, and power, and fame, and money. And in a few billion years the sun will explode and leave nothing of what we care about and live for now. We can reformulate this list and update it; we can make art about what is going on today; but that will not bring much that is new. We are already in the books and know everything. What can art possibly add to that? But there is knowing, and then there is ‘knowing’. The textbook example of a syllogism goes: all humans are mortal, Socrates is human, therefore Socrates is mortal. I am human; therefore, I know that I am going to die one day. But this awareness is quite different from the way I feel when my doctor tells me I have a maximum of six months to live. In that case I suddenly ‘realise’ my mortality in a different way. I am suddenly confronted with what I already knew; it suddenly becomes inescapable. I suddenly realise that what I already knew is true. But oddly enough, the kind of insight that can be acquired in situations such as these, where life itself teaches us a lesson, also seems limited. In visiting the doctor people can be confronted with the truth ‘I’m going to die’ but not with the general truth ‘all humans are mortal’. For, when at the doctor with my cancer, I am the exception: I am going to die, but all the others walking near me, or having a drink on the sun-drenched terrace, are not. Thus, I ask myself: why me? Or, why my child, or my beloved, and not all those others? Suffering is always due to an accident or misfortune, 14

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and the loneliness or sense of loss is immediately enwrapped in self-pity. Suffering does not make lucid. In one’s own life and suffering, one is confronted with one’s own finitude as an exception, and not with the cold, objective, general truth that people are born, they live their lives and die, and they are not happy. The realisation of or confrontation with general human truths is offered at times by religion, at times by philosophy, by history writing and by art. Art does not uncover much, but it can yield an intense, compelling awareness of what everyone has long known yet never believes because knowing is not the same as ‘knowing’, and the former without the latter is tantamount to forgetting. Art is about confronting with general truths. And the interest we humans take in voluntarily confronting unpleasant truths is – according to a tradition tracing back to Aristotle – a peculiar kind of reconciliation and comfort that comes from realising we are too small to bear our destiny. What matters in art is not what it says or teaches but how it gets us to realise what we already know. It is about intensity, increased awareness. What is art expected to provide? Culture, including good design and knowledge about art and literature, is a desirable asset for the upwardly mobile: it is a status symbol. But at the same time, the world of culture is often an unfamiliar and somewhat uncomfortable terrain. It seems to follow a logic we can only ever partly master through study and training; it is governed by something as elusive as ‘(good) taste’. How do we figure out what to choose, what to buy, what to like? Art is expected to be understandable and moving, not difficult, and to connect instantly with what is enriching in life, with what is elevated, deep, authentic. In cultural-economic terms, art must provide the need for emotion. With the erosion of the Bildungs-ideal and the decline of ideology-based cultural production, the logic of enter­ tainment has taken over. Culture and art must simultaneously elevate, 15

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entertain and shock, amuse and stir, produce intense experiences, address everybody and retain a touch of the wild rebellion against good taste. Why could art not be both ‘high’ and entertaining, profound and witty? Why not a kind of high leisure? Roland Barthes writes: ‘We know the refrain: too much intelligence hurts, philosophy is useless jargon, we must make room for feeling, intuition, innocence, simplicity, art dies of too much intellectuality, intelligence is not an artist’s quality, powerful creators are empirical, in short, cerebrality is sterile.’1 What is special about the work of art is not that it ‘cannot be put into words’ but that we want to talk about it, that we find talking about art worthwhile. What is special is not that the work is beyond words but that it provokes a desire to speak and write, to analyse, to interpret. It demands attention. And attention is more than experiencing and feeling, more than wordless ‘likes’, tears or applause. It is difficult to stand wordless before a work. What really counts is not the oft-cited first and immediate experience, but the second time around: returning to a city, viewing a painting again, rereading a poem with a question, thought, vague idea or association in mind, and a desire to find something out – for example, to verify the memory of that ‘first time’. To be able to stay with a work of art, and give it one’s full attention, one needs to have read a lot. Criticism is not about applying theory. It implies giving sustained attention to a work of art, taking it in, so as not to let it sink to the bottom of history. Most of the artworks made today will soon be completely forgotten, not because they are bad art, but simply because nobody has tried to talk about them. Criticism is an attempt to articulate, understand and judge that can interrupt the endless stream of old and new artworks, films, shows and books, to devote an increased attention to a single work, and to save it from oblivion. The (first) goal of criticism, therefore, is to wrap the work in attention, giving 16

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it a chance to engage with a spectator and connect with the world. After all, an artwork does not come with a meaning; it acquires meaning when someone chooses to focus and dwell on it, discuss it within the conversation about art and add world to it. Great art, which leaves us speechless in the end, is also the art that is most talked and written about. Criticism is the attempt to say something interesting about a work, see if it can withstand proximity to other works and relate it to a tradition and a history. This inevitably does violence to the work, and rightly so, because the artwork is full of tricks and cannot be trusted. Art itself always tries to overpower the onlooker. It wants to fascinate, move, shock, intrude into a life and stick in the memory. One must resist the temptations, the fascination, the boredom that comes from a work. Indeed, it is far too easy to seduce, shock and move: nakedness, vulgarity, dead children, sunsets, fog, the dark, violins, small animals, victims of all kinds and the like. Only in talking and writing about an artwork do we find, for instance, that it cannot hold our attention, or that there is really nothing meaningful or interesting to say about it. To talk or write about a work is to test it. Certainly, good art can invite many different and contradictory statements at once. Art that does not make for interesting conversation, and is not worth discussing, is bad art indeed. After all, art criticism merely prolongs and develops an element of artistry itself. Most artworks are presented as if they were perfect and could not have been otherwise. But that sense of completeness is fallacious. A work of art is always the result of a decision-making process. The exhibition of a work is itself a decision, as is its presentation, the materials used to make it, its form and scale and so on. Getting drunk and then painting ‘spontaneously’ is a decision. And every decision draws from alternatives and conceals hesitations. Analysing a work must therefore begin by detecting the 17

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meaningful decisions that make the work what it is. And that has nothing to do with guessing what the artist-maker did or did not intend, or what was on his or her mind during the making. Criticism is not supposed to retrieve or reconstruct the thoughts, feelings, impulses or intuitions of the artist but to formulate accurately the presuppositions and implications of the decisions that determine the work. This is not foreign to the artwork but instead develops and makes explicit a critical moment of its content. Much of what is said and written by way of criticism is not more valid or more interesting than the art itself. Analysing and interpreting art not only tests the artwork but also tests thinking. Thinking has its habits, conventions and tricks. It has a stock of ready-made thoughts and arguments that are used until they are completely worn out, until they have lost their sharp edge. Thinking that remains confined to habits – to the prevailing theory, to the topics and concepts of the day and to media codes – loses its agility and does not discover anything. Of course, there are more important things than art. But it is because works of art are so specific and so complex, because it is often so unclear what to say about them, because one must always start from scratch and because dissensus is the rule, that art is important: it is a whetstone for thinking.

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2. Critical?Art Does art have to be critical – that is, when being critical means something more or other than conveying a message or a protest, or declaring solidarity? The criticality of art means that the work or artistic practice is a refusal in itself; it presupposes that the work itself is resistant, that the work somehow says ‘no’. Modern art is supposed to be inherently critical. After all, the modern condition as such implies an awareness and an affirmation of a discontinuity or a rupture. Being modern means quitting, leaving behind, letting go of the old world in which everything and everyone had a proper place, in which identities were clear and assured. Modernity exchanges the old world – 19

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Lyotard’s domus: a shared time, a shared world, a common language1 – for another world and another life, for individualism. Everyone is now on his or her own and manages a personal agenda. There are no ‘common places’; everyone has to find his or her way in the big city. Everyone picks up new words and experiences, speaks for him or herself and thus can no longer be understood by those left behind in the village. The uprooted condition of modern life, however, is not yet a radical refusal. It is first and foremost a liberation, the start of a new life elsewhere. The big city is the intermediate stop on the way to a new world and a better situation. The rupture is a moment in a dialectic, meant to create a turning point, a means of opening possibilities. The negation serves a future where everything could be different, better and freer for everyone. The various modernist movements in the arts took up this cause, each in its own way or domain, and tried to anticipate and explore that better future, to be avant-garde. But then the twentieth century revealed where these social and industrial revolutions led, and what that new world dreamt of by the utopian modernists looked like. The massacres of the World Wars, the Holocaust, Stalinist and Maoist terror – among countless other atrocities – crushed all hopes for progress. The result was that the dream of radically refusing and destroying the old to create a new and better world was over for good. The awareness of these failures and impossibilities – according to Adorno – should bring the arts to radically refuse the world: In order to survive amid the extreme and darkest of reality, the works of art that do not want to sell us solace have to make themselves similar. Radical art today means something akin to dark, with the basic colour black.2 20

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The many, heterogeneous artistic forms of this ‘dark’ radical refusal are well known: abstraction, the black square, a new iconoclasm and the debunking of representation, the ‘concept’ as an artistic principle, ‘less is more’, Duchamp’s Fountain-strategy and the refusal to ‘make’ something or continue adding ‘art’ to this world, institutional critique, the cult of banality and the refusal to say anything ‘important’, making nothing. This conception of art and the many twentieth-century artistic practices it has inspired, the intellectual movements associated with it and the collective experience that has driven it cannot simply be set aside. The directive that art be radically critical still stands. But nor can the critical tradition simply continue as is. The facts and circumstances have changed. The ‘radical refusal’ did become an aesthetic. The artistic provocations, the institutional critique and – later – the cult of the defect, the cracks, the gaping, the fragmentary, the provisional, the coincidental, the hesitation, the informal, the interruption, the in-between-spaces and so on, all turned into recipes: into clean negativity. Making art became at once highly challenging and curiously easy: it involved few words, little meaning, limited gestures, anorexic, pale, empty paintings, various bits and pieces, found facts, a lot of white – and no stories. ‘In the impoverishment of the means implied by the ideal of blackness, if not by all objectivity, poetry, painting and music, too, grow poor; the most advanced arts are on the verge of falling silent.’3 All silences, unfortunately, sound alike. A second problem with the ‘total refusal’ was that, as with many of its precursors in the via negativa in philosophy and the arts, the artistic refusal lapsed into a Sublime Absence, which then presented itself once more as a Truth. The avant-gardist refusal – entirely parallel to the logic of negative theology and mysticism – allied itself with the sublime and became an Inverted Truth. Is the work of art that sets out to fail, that is just a beginning, 21

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that is a simple gesture, that is almost nothing, that is just trying, not the last possible form of utopia? Is it not just waiting and keeping a place open for ‘what is to come’? To quote Adorno, every work of art reveals something; even the ‘nothing’ it represents starts to appear as a kind of ‘extra’ or beyond, and tends to immediately forget or conceal that it produces this treacherous ‘transcendence’ itself (and therefore is ‘separated from that transcendence’). It claims to be the Schauplatz or stage of a natural, authentic Revelation.4 A third problem was that the principle of radical negation generated a specific dynamic in the making of art. To be able to refuse radically and hit the mark, the artist needs to be constantly reorienting and repositioning him or herself: the critical intervention presupposes a kind of ‘historical consciousness’, in addition to an awareness of exactly what is going on in the arts. Repeating radical refusals indeed makes no sense; an adversary cannot be killed twice. To ‘matte’ the entire history of art in one smart stroke requires knowing the game. Art, consequently, became more sophisticated and self-­ involved, and more preoccupied with internal references, making its radicalism abstruse. In the end, the reflexive potential of the artistic work was almost completely absorbed in self-reflexivity, and the energy all but consumed in the effort to ‘hit home’. What the artist had to say or show was then reduced to a minimal gesture that derived its signification completely from the vast history of art and the (art) world it aimed to negate. These artworks could be quite sensitive, intelligent, precise and nuanced. But their radicalism often ended up being inversely proportional to their cultural impact. The situation began to change in the 1980s and is different today. Many artists, joining the continuous undercurrent of twentieth-century figurative art, have rediscovered the image: the new painting, the postmodern rediscovery of art history, the rise of artistic photography, the introduction of video and the polaroid and so on. And with the image, the world, too, has 22

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made a comeback in the arts. An image is, after all, a sponge that absorbs world. The human is a cultural being. That means, in brief, that for us to be someone and build a social identity; to know where we are, situate ourselves and have a place and a position in society; to have access to a worldview; and to carry out our day-to-day routine, the meanings by which we live need to be clear and defined. The complex ensemble of signs and meanings we call culture is a vital resource for life. Especially in traditional societies, the passing on and reaffirming of this culture (words and gestures, stories, symbols, images, etc.) is carefully safeguarded. As we are now aware, the premodern mechanisms, practices and institutions that promote social consensus, cohesion and closed communities are losing strength. Should people learn to live without a stable worldview? How fundamental, how inescapable, is the need for fixed identities? Should we learn to live – as in the title of Robert Musil’s novel – without ‘qualities’: without strong, secure beliefs about who we are, about what a body is, what happiness is, what it entails to be a man or a woman or a child, what home and time and work mean? How should we deal with the vast heritage of old meanings that have accumulated, that are stored and preserved in the languages we speak, in our gestures and habits, in our way of materially organising and building the world? Art has become one of the last places where one can work freely and autonomously, with a sense of urgency, on meanings and representations. For artists and curators, as well as a large and heterogeneous group of ‘insiders’, art has become a kind of laboratory for investigating and playing around with meanings. One could argue that young artists are largely akin to amateur anthropologists who scout out and experiment in the field of ‘cultural studies’. This implies that content matters in the making of art – indeed, it sometimes seems to be all that matters. 23

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This ‘anthropological turn’ goes along with a ‘return of the image’. The (artistic) image is not just a means of communication or a cultural fact and document but also a means of research, capable of capturing and depicting meanings, questioning them, trying out variations and transformations and so on. The image is a cultural workspace. Yet the arts have lost their monopoly on and exclusive rights to the image, along with the ownership of visual history, which they had custody of for centuries. Now the creative industries produce and deliver the images and meanings, the desires and needs that make up their customers’ lives. For more than a century, the commercial mass media have operated as highly influential meaning-producers that select, encode, format and manufacture their own reality. The media plunder the images and stories accumulated in the past on a prodigious scale: intimate body images, images of power, domestic dreams, touristic beauty and so on. Commercial cultural production is often interesting and original, and necessarily ‘positive’. Art therefore can no longer be just about creativity and coming up with new things. Art can no longer compete with the culture industry in making ever more new, original, entertaining and striking images. The specificity of the artistic image lies in the fact that it exists in a critical environment. Commercial images operate in an environment where neither memory nor position-­taking is required, and where friction and criticism are impossible. For the most part, the discourse that accompanies commercial image production (commercial movies, blockbuster exhibitions, journalistic previews, etc.) offers little more than consumer advice. It does not need, and never encounters, an argument. Those who create these products are probably also capable, with the same effort and intelligence, of making good art. But their functional position in a commercial context indicates that they are designers and not artists. One can, of course, study and theorise about any kind of image. All 24

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images are cultural documents. The importance of the artistic image, however, lies in its density and complexity. The artistic image requires not only cultural relevance, creativity and newness but, more than anything, a special aptness, precision and resistance that stimulates art criticism and cultural analysis. To be more than just another cultural fact or document, the artwork itself must do part of the thinking. In the arts, then, there are two interests at work, only one of which is the drive to be creative and original. The artistic image calls for a critical response, for a reply that expresses an attitude, an interpretation, a judgement or a choice. The viewer and the critic should not surrender quietly but always challenge the artwork. Everything that appears new, that pleases or that emotionally moves should be questioned. To like or not to like is just a reaction, not a reply. Nevertheless, the principle that a critical response is essential for art does not imply that the critical moment and the creative moment must or can coincide. The two can exist alongside each other, and even conflict. The way that avant-garde art internalised the negative-critical moment yielded art that initially was lucid and radical but by the end was impoverished and easy. Art criticism should not just evaluate whether a ‘move’ in the art game is interesting or not. It should start a conversation about the artwork’s relation to the world and pursue, in a different medium and an institutional context, the cultural labour that starts with the image.

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3. What Art Can Do (Malpertuis by Jean Ray) The gods are dying [. . .] Somewhere in space float corpses unheard of [. . .] Somewhere there, monstrous agonies are slowly coming to an end through the centuries and millennia. (Les dieux meurent [. . .] Quelque part dans l’espace flottent des cadavres inouïs [. . .] Quelque part dans cet espace, des agonies monstrueuses s’achèvent lentement au long des siècles et des millénaires.) Jean Ray, Malpertuis, 1943 26

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By the time the first humans awoke, the universe was already populated by strange creatures. There were many animals, of course, but also gods and demigods, demons, ghosts, false guides, monsters, satyrs and nymphs, divine heroes, goblins and tormentors, guardian angels and devils. Surely we did not expect to have the whole universe to ourselves? And everything that exists, that lives, that moves, wants something and hides something. What can be read in the eyes of animals, in the flight of birds, in entrails? In the beginning there was panic. ‘First of all, God created Fear’ (Primum in mundo fecit Deus timor), writes Tibullus. At first, there was a bit of consciousness, filled with fear, a tremendous release of energy, running and screaming. This was not because one did not know who or where one was: an identity crisis or just feeling lost and alone in a boundless universe is a distressing but relatively modern concern. The primal fear was not that the universe was empty but that it was overcrowded: full of presences, full of spirits and ghosts. One never knew with whom one was dealing, and on whose terrain. What for modern man are merely meanings began as forces. Understandably, humans long to have the universe to themselves, to be alone in an entirely familiar world. That is what we expect from the house today: a house is a home. Yet we retain a vestigial awareness that our appropriation of the universe is never entirely successful or secure, and that the places in which we live can never be completely domesticated. The anthropology of building and dwelling shows founding a home to be a risky affair: the site must always be purged of dark and hostile forces; it must be purified. This cannot be accomplished without sacrifices, conjurations and divine protection, without entering into alliances and also – often unknowingly – making enemies. A place that seems safe and secure may be cursed for unknown reasons that cannot be traced. After all, the gods are jealous! Why does misery seem to accumulate in a certain place? Why is one 27

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house blessed and prosperous while another is pulled under? Who knows what has happened in a place! Who knows what lurks there! Today we can only talk of such things if we make absolutely clear that we do not actually believe in them. Ordinary mortals seldom have business with the great gods. This is reserved for kings and heroes, notorious criminals and priests; it is the stuff of myth. In addition to the Olympian gods and those worshipped in temples, however, there are also numerous minor spirits and deities, known primarily from ­stories. These are everywhere. They guard crossroads and thresholds, hide in solitary trees, near springs, on the wind and in wine; they tease people and torment them. To these may be added the souls of the dead who cannot find peace due to unfinished business, and thus return to meddle in the dreams and lives of their relatives. Thus, a house is never empty. These minor gods live under the roof, in the attics and cellars, under the stairs, by the fireplace, in the chimney. The penates live in the storerooms and the larders. Every housefather has his Odradek to reckon with. Aeneas, with his father on his back, left his wife behind in the chaos of burning Troy, but salvaged the tutelary deities – the Lares. It was their task to watch over the family and negotiate with the other genii loci or household gods of the place(s) where he settled. To live somewhere in peace, health and prosperity, so as to build a life and livelihood, it is necessary to satisfy several forces at once. Everyone could use a bit of supernatural help. (In a stunning scene from Wim Wenders’s Buena Vista Social Club Ibrahim Ferrer explains how he worships his own Saint Lazarus on the house altar on a board in the corner of the room – a replica of the Roman lararium – with incense, honey and libations; meanwhile, the camera keeps a view of Ibrahim’s wife, who looks on like a jealous and betrayed mother goddess.) Centuries of monotheism have wrought their destruction, first with the desacralisation of woman and nature, and then with the effacement of 28

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the rivalry between the gods. After the era of the mother goddess, and the period of many gods and spirits, where each village venerated its local saint, only one God and one Law were left. When it turned out that this God, too, was more of a Meaning than a Being, and did not ‘really’ exist, all that remained was a great, black Nothing. And that frightening ‘Absence’ was then profitably sliced up into so many cracks, holes and fractures in the construction of meaning, into so many slivers of otherness. That is the worst danger we face nowadays: not a threatening Presence but a ‘loss of meaning’. The ruse by which to lure and tame this massive, threatening presence of alien powers and extra-natural forces is storytelling. Everything that can be named, imagined or depicted is already reasonably under control. After all, knowing the names of the gods allows us to address them and attract their attention. Better yet, it enables us to tell stories about the gods. These stories no doubt serve, first and foremost, to give us a handle on things we cannot see or understand. But the telling and retelling slowly eats away at the subject, eventually turning the story into a repository of all that we no longer believe in and yet still fear too much simply to discard. What in recitation and ritual repetition is still incantation and belief is captured in narration and transferred to that special realm of fiction, parallel to the world, where memory and imagination merge indistinguishably. Who in that place can know what is real amid all that we think, remember and imagine? It is in that in-between, in that suspension, that the gods and the spirits now lead their half-existence. The ‘immortals’ survive as representations, as images, as stories, as names. Can things that seem past and gone surface once more – as a story a writer feels compelled to write, as a book people will soon cease to read – before fading forever into oblivion? The question, however, is what happens in the meantime, when the gods have withdrawn from the world and no longer mingle in it, but still live on, 29

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as though hidden, in language, imagination and memory. Some survive there, in the eternal present of ‘all that has ever happened’, along with a curious pantheon of deities, spirits and ancestors, each with a unique story, amid the thoughts and images that we ourselves, as modern people, have invented. In that promiscuous collection of everything that no longer finds a place in the world, the strangest things can happen. Certainly, their scale and impact is not comparable to those of the Titanomachy or the Resurrection. Yet it is not all peace and quiet there. What happens in that realm parallel to the ‘real world’ has consequences. Granted, it is not a cosmic conflict, but – owing to the suspension of disbelief – it is still more than a frivolous play of meanings. Literature and art are, after consciousness and memory, the third stomach of the ruminant that is man. There is no more fitting metaphor for the modus operandi of literature and images than the plot of Jean Ray’s Malpertuis: History of a Fantasy House, written in 1943.1 The labyrinthine mansion-drugstore of Uncle Cassave, in the gothic Ghent depicted by Albert Baertsoen and Jules De Bruycker, with ‘its enormous loggias and balconies, its steps flanked by massive stone railings, its cruciferous turrets, its double-glazed windows with latticework, its menacing/grimacing carvings of vipers and tarasques, its studded doors’,2 with its immense park garden with the ponds and the ruins of an old monastery, is a fold in space: a rare point where different realms or dimensions converge. Abbé Doucedame (literally, ‘sweet woman’) indeed speaks of ‘a fold in space’ to explain ‘the juxtaposition of two essentially different worlds of which Malpertuis would be an abominable place of contact’.3 Sometime around the beginning of the nineteenth century, Uncle Quentin Moretus Cassave had sent an expedition to the Cyclades, armed with ‘formidable spells’ (‘des formules formidables’), to magically capture the surviving Greek gods and bring them to Malpertuis. ‘Ah, how many deities have I 30

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reduced to a handy captivity and how the power that the great Cassave lent me made me able to make grains of sand out of a mountain?’4 He was able to erode mountains to dust: what keener way to formulate what literature does to the gods? But taking the gods of bygone days on board was not a risk-free proposition: ‘Let us flee on the great sea, before the world of darkness, enraged by the enormous plunder, persecutes in our wake.’5 What we think we are rid of, what we have banished to the unreality of fiction via literature, threatens to return from that realm with a vengeance. The old meanings creep in like stowaways, interfering with our thoughts and dreams and distorting our memories. ‘Cassave has taken delivery of our cargo. Cursed [. . .] a thousand times cursed, the house where he dared, with his terrible sacrilegious hand, to store it. It is called Malpertuis.’6 That is how Vulcan and Venus ended up in a cellar kitchen somewhere in Ghent, together with Schriek, the last of the titans, who cleans the house; the Cormelon sisters (the three Furies); the gorgeous Gorgon Euryale; Matthias Krook/Apollo, who runs the shop Lampernisse-Couleurs et Vernis; the demigoddess Nancy, granddaughter of expedition leader Anselme Grandsire; and an unknown goddess. Then there is the hero Prometheus – under the assumed name Lampernisse, after the medieval village – who, it turns out, is also alive, having been captured along with the gods. The narrative universe is further populated by a few characters who have become mixed up with the gods through their relationships with Cassave and end up paying for it with their lives: Charles Dideloo, who risks an affair with the youngest of the Furies (‘The gods regain a taste for life, but it is the detestable life of men and nothing more’7) and is severely punished; the erudite Dietterlin-specialist Doucedame-the-Younger; the taxidermist Philarète; and the demigod who narrates most of the story, Jean-Jacques Grandsire, brother of Nancy, grandson of adventurer-womaniser Anselme Grandsire, who – much 31

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to the delight of Uncle Cassave – apparently seduced a goddess during the expedition. Malpertuis does not tell a story so much as define a situation. The book opens with a description of the immense, mysterious, threatening interiors and surroundings of the Malpertuis house. This is followed by the narrative of the death of Uncle Cassave, the ‘author’ of the whole drama, whose will allows the other characters to live at Malpertuis. The plot then develops according to a clichéd gothic formula in which characters are violently eliminated, one after the other. Running through the story are dark conflicts between the ancient Greek gods and the newer religions – for instance, between the pagan Eisengott/Zeus, the only member of the group to come voluntarily, and the exorcism-performing ghosts of the Barbuskin monks from the monastery in the garden. No less noteworthy are the alliances – namely, those between Cassave and Eisengott, who is described as ‘terrible and yet [. . .] not malicious like many others’,8 and between the two patriarchs and the servant Philarète, who does their dirty work and cleans up the corpses. Philarète also stuffs the dead gods like animals, and even makes the dead Apollo sing the Song of Songs! Demigod Jiji has a special bond with the other demigod-hero Lampernisse/Prometheus, who stole fire and light from the gods, but now wanders the dark house, fearful of the Nameless One who steals the colours and extinguishes the lights. Even the eternally punished, it turns out, are afraid to die. What we want to leave behind and be rid of, what we want to forget, but also what we would keep if we could, lingers awhile as an after-image or a rumour. The old demons are reduced to meanings, the living houses to objects, the dark truths to parables. But it is as Abbé Doucedame says: ‘The light? [. . .] it is perfect and absolute only in the vicinity of God; in our miserable world, darkness sticks to it like an infernal suction cup.’9 Everything 32

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that lives on in the cellars and attics of the soul unknowingly forms strange and disturbing connections, and reason creates monsters. They exist, not enough to be believed in, but enough to pose a threat. After all, as Baudelaire writes, the gods are the only creatures that need not really exist to do great harm. Uncle Cassave (and literature) takes a risk by keeping them alive.

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4. On the Pleasure of Finding What Is Hidden (With Hidden Noise by Marcel Duchamp) Of course it was my intention that that would mean nothing, but in the end everything will get a meaning.1 Marcel Duchamp Once again, the traps of writing were set. Once again, I was like a child who plays hide-and-seek and who does not know what he fears or desires the most: to remain hidden or to be found.2 Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance 34

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Searching and finding is always exciting. Making something disappear (hiding, packing, covering up, burying, throwing in the water or into the abyss, storing in a box or a cupboard, etc.), together with discovering (unpacking, digging up, opening, unmasking, etc.), affords real pleasure, a peculiar satisfaction both dark and deep. The unknown, what we do not understand or do not (or no longer) remember, what is hidden or concealed, seems inherently interesting to us: ​​the ‘mysteries of the universe’, the location of Van Eyck’s panel of The Righteous Judges, the purpose of the statues on Easter Island, confessional and professional secrets, conspiracies and so on. This applies, above all, to people and their bodies. After all, people do not just hide and look for things but hide themselves. They use clothing and makeup, masks, shadows and the night, lies and silence, corners and rooms to dis­ appear from sight – at least at times – and exist unseen. Hiding touches on a cluster of fundamental images, diverse and conflicting interests, basic motivations and emotions. Sigmund Freud analyses its meaning in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Jenseits des Lustprinzips) (1920), partly by way of an anecdote. He describes how his grandson would constantly throw toys under the bed, each time uttering ‘o-o-o’ (‘Fort’) as he made them disappear. As Freud realised, little Ernst did not really want those things gone but was using them to play ‘ fortsein’. It was a game. Freud next noticed the child throwing out a spool tied to a piece of string until it disappeared, and then reeling it back with a joyful ‘Da!’. The game, it turned out, was not just ‘Fort’ but ‘Fort-Da’.3 It follows that Fort-Da and hide-and-seek are not just about throwing away or disappearing but also and above all about finding and coming back. And we know endless variants of this game where people themselves are the spools, making it all the more complex and charged with meaning. Fortsein, we thus learn, does not mean that something ceases to exist! The thing that disappeared is merely elsewhere and being absent does 35

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not preclude it from returning! It is not just about getting used to ‘absence’ or learning to endure the frustration of missing but also about getting used to the frustration of not being omnipresent, being elsewhere and alone oneself, being missed, searched for and found (again). No less essential than Fort-Da, therefore, is the scene from Ettore Scola’s film The Family (La Famiglia) where the uncle and other family members pretend to look for the toddler while acting as if they cannot see him, as if he were completely transparent and invisible, as if he does not exist; this continues until the little boy starts to panic – saying ‘Here I am, here I am, why don’t you see me?’ – and cries out for his mother.4 All lives are lived in semi-darkness: we live without knowing and understanding what and where we are. Humans live outside Truth. But this seems to be a good thing; it seems that we are better off not knowing everything. Knowledge, and making knowledge public, is strongly regulated and controlled in all societies, especially in archaic and traditional ones. After all, it is dangerous for people to discover what the gods have hidden. Revealing is a bold, sometimes prohibited move. Like the outer bounds of the human world, what is hidden is guarded by monsters.5 We note the many stories and fairy tales about the consequences of eating a forbidden fruit, entering a forbidden room, opening a forbidden box, discovering a secret and so on. Curiosity is transgressive; it is a vice.6 Men do not need to know everything women know, and vice versa; patients do not need to know everything doctors know; and children should not know too much too early. ‘Self-concealing’ (‘Sichverbergen’), writes Heidegger, is ‘sheltering concealing’ (‘bergendes Verbergen’): hiding and concealing is somehow also protecting. Precisely what is most essential, what people have most in common, is protected, not by exposing the sameness, but by hiding it. I become someone, not just or primarily by being someone and operating in the world but also 36

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by turning inward, by creating ‘an inner self ’. This can be accomplished thanks to clothing, but also thanks to places. The Latin noun cella means both ‘room’ and ‘storage’. It is derived from the verb celare, meaning ‘to hide’. A house is not, first and foremost, a source of shelter from inclement weather and wild animals; it is a means for us to hide and isolate ourselves, a space into which others are not allowed to peep or intrude. People and houses are secret.7 The social realm, which connects and separates people, exists by virtue of concern for what people hide, and therefore by virtue of ‘discretion’8 – of neither wanting to know nor disclosing more than the other wants known – and especially of ‘respect’. Re-spicere means to avert the eyes: to look away from the secret (the face, the body) of those we do not know. The social realm calls for modesty and decency – and for one to keep secret what may offend the other. Georg Simmel has shown at length how the social realm is made possible and organised by distance (regular degrees of proximity and exposure), according to the different spheres of life, which include designated spaces for the public, the private, the confidential, the intimate and so on. And yet the necessary complement of discretion and respect, of keeping the proper distance, is the urge and the desire to go beyond those boundaries; it is shamelessness, the urge to gossip, attraction to the secrets of others that do not concern us, voyeurism and fascination (whether or not under the guise of ‘the right to information’ etc.) with obscenity: with the moment when someone can no longer hide anything (sex and death), with total visibility. Playing hide-and-seek or Verschwinden und Wiederkommen in any form is always more than just playing a game: it is testing and acquiring familiarity with an existential mould that shapes experience. Learning hide-and-seek, with its modalities of absence and presence, leads to the realisation that the realm of our own existence is not yet ‘the world’. Hide-and-seek leads to an 37

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awareness that we invariably live with a great deal we do not know about or understand, and that, in short, we know precious little about the people with whom we share our lives. The world, it turns out, is not evenly illuminated, and is never clear; we learn to live in twilight, with many shady spots and dark corners and often blindly. To put it more philosophically: at the core of hide-and-seek lies the realisation that reality is never given in its entirety. It is never completely visible and available; it always exists as hidden. It never shows itself more than partially, and even that part is shown only superficially, as veiled or masked. Thinking starts with an acceptance that nothing may ever be exactly what it seems. And what we do not know and what remains hidden is not some peripheral matter but seems to be what is most important, what is most essential. Nature, says Heraclitus in Fragment 123, or ‘that which brings into existence, that which brings to light’, tends to hide. Philosophy and the sciences must ‘seek’ the Truth; knowledge is like a hidden treasure; life itself is (like) a search. Hide-and-seek means more than initiating and practising an elementary form of human experience. It is not played just by children. Human existence as such becomes possible by living hide-and-seek.9 Indeed, large domains of the social realm are fundamentally organised, not so much as separate language-games, but as ‘search games’.10 After all, search games create a direction and a finality – that is, meaningfulness – so that we can be sure of the object and of our ability to reach it, whereas in real life, reasons and outcomes are always uncertain, and ultimately everybody loses. Many religions interpret human existence as a search, as wandering and finding, and the religious experience as a game of hiding and revealing. The religious experience wavers between ignorance and insight; between the powers of mystery and revelation, of sacrifice and grace; between serving – as the two faces of Truth – a deus absconditus and a deus revelatus. The 38

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idea of life as a search and the desire to ‘live in the truth’, the mixing of knowledge and devotion into wisdom, have no doubt faded in late modern societies. Human existence does not seem to need a destination (any more) since the formula of happiness is known: safety, being well insured, health or wellness, comfort and social success. Truth has become a cognitive matter and has been handed off to the sciences. The ambiguity of the archaic riddle contests, the obscurity of oracles and the insolubility of neck riddles are unzeitgemäß; very few people nowadays would consider poetry an authentic form of knowledge. But the fascination with mystery, however stereotyped, lives on in esoteric practices, in (popular) culture, in gothic fantasy, in thrillers, in crime and detective films and so on. The Western knowledge tradition has assumed since the beginning that truth is something that must be sought and discovered. Nowadays, however, the prevailing view is that knowledge is not primarily for understanding but for use. Knowledge is supposed to be ‘applicable’, to make life safer and more comfortable, to lead to innovations that bring economic growth. But even with this as the obvious principle of science and knowledge policy, the awareness ultimately remains, even in academic circles, that the sciences really are about understanding the universe in which we wake up each morning. No doubt the most important field where the game of searching and finding is still fully played is eroticism. For the most part, sexuality is, at least for the time being, not yet a commodity, and still takes place largely outside the rules of trade and money. One does not buy but ‘finds’ the right partner. Western erotic culture attaches great importance to individuality and uniqueness. And against the obvious anonymity and sameness of the sexual, uniqueness is constructed not only by personalising one’s external appearance as ‘different’ and special but above all by keeping what is most ‘equal’ (i.e. the 39

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body, and in particular the face and the genitals) secret (initially), so that the naked body may later be intimately approached as a symbol of the secret – of what one hides and holds back – ‘playfully’ (and thus ‘only’ symbolically). Finally, we come to the arts. In the context of this chapter, two main categories stand out. We can first distinguish an art that shows what an artist has created, discovered or found. Here, the work is a completely new beginning; it is a revelation. Rubens’s The Descent from the Cross in Antwerp, Picasso’s Guernica and Cézanne’s landscapes are not mysterious, enigmatic or incomprehensible images. They command respect and call for a nearreligious admiration as instances of an unexpected ‘appearance’: the artwork shows previously unseen truths that can at times be astonishing, disturbing or challenging. The artwork may be stunning, but it is clear in itself. Nevertheless, insofar as the work shows something previously unseen and totally unexpected, the fact that someone was able to make or find ‘it’ almost defies comprehension; therein lies the mystery. It seems almost as though the artist has achieved the impossible. Not the image itself, then, but the artistic performance or the act of creation becomes incomprehensible and takes on mythical proportions. At the same time, however, there are images that are not so obvious: images that resist understanding, that seem to conceal something or that are merely suggestive. They are not whole, not complete, and yet they evoke or recall something beyond our grasp. The nature of what eludes us here ranges from a clear answer to a specific question (for instance, why is the Mona Lisa smiling?) to a poetic association that dissolves into vagueness. Some art, such

Figure 4.1  Walter Swennen, Stark wie ein Stier, 2008 – Courtesy of the artist and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels 40

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as the images of René Magritte, or even the clumsy works of René Heyvaert, captures in an enigmatic image what eludes us in reality. Works from the past – like those from exotic cultures whose languages we do not understand – also generate a special kind of enigma. Images such as Giorgione’s Storm and Vittore Carpaccio’s Young Knight in a Landscape have become mysterious in this way, just as buildings turn into picturesque ruins over time. But there are also many artists, past and present, who deliberately invent complex enigmatic works that are meant to resemble a ‘problema’ – that is, the profound but confusing oracular spell cast ‘from on high’ by the gods on humans. These artists pretend to be real magicians, though in reality they are more akin to illusionists. We note the many artistic images of dreams and nightmares, the excessive use of vaghezza, the genre of illegible signs and scribbles, the pseudo-primitivism and so on. Alongside these enigmatic images that parasitise the sacred remains of the riddle, however, is the artistic tradition that invents and treats enigmatic images openly as conversation pieces, as puzzles meant to hone the mind, from Albrecht Dürer to Walter Swennen. Treating the work of art as a puzzle stems from the mannerist and baroque traditions (which include the emblem, the capricci, the allegory, the double-speech, allusions, etc.). It is a kind of overtly artificial art, made of images that must be viewed and read at the same time, that invite interpre­ tation and discussion, that get us pleasantly lost in a labyrinth of meanings, allusions, references, as if in a hall of mirrors at the fair. There is a great deal of mediocre art that illustrates this effect. A case in point is the 1968 piece by Art & Language entitled Secret Painting (Ghost), which consists of a white monochrome canvas combined with a reflecting photostat print on wood, bearing the text: ‘The content of this painting is invisible; the character and dimension of the content are to be kept per­ manently secret, known only to the artist.’11 To hide and make secret is easy; 42

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to overcome hiddenness and secrecy is far less so.12 No doubt the artist who mounted the most consistent and prototypical resistance against the residual vestiges of Truth in art, and against the claims to false depths made there, is Marcel Duchamp. After losing his faith, Duchamp launched an artistic project to make shallow ‘after-art’ and live superficially as a ‘resigned artist’. His primary artistic strategy entailed turning all enigmas into riddles, and then trivialising the riddles and puncturing the pretensions of the answers. Shortly after arriving in the US, Duchamp wrote four postcards, Rendezvous du Dimanche 6 Février 1916 (Rendezvous of Sunday, 6 February 1916), addressed to his new friend and early collector Walter Arenberg, each with text intended to mean nothing – and especially, to refer to nothing, as it contained absolutely nothing that could be understood or interpreted and lacked any hint of poetic depth. These were incomprehensible texts that hid nothing,13 just as – in another example from Duchamp – the addition of even (‘même’) at the end of the title The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (La Mariée mise à nue par ses Célibataires, même) means nothing whatsoever. We can no doubt also question whether the intended aesthetic neutrality and pure objectivity of the ‘readymade’ – a meaningless art object – is viable. But it is certainly possible to fill the interpretive void opened by language – secretly or not – with a clearly defined meaning, such as an object. In fact, it is possible to fill this space with another word, thereby replacing the mystery with a key. For instance, Duchamp renders suddenly banal any curiosity about the Mona Lisa’s name, life story and intriguing, enigmatic faint smile, by literally overwriting her portrait with a riddle (which reads ‘LHOOQ’) that completely explains and neutralises the enigma. Duchamp’s masterpiece The Large Glass (Le Grand Verre) – The Illuminating Gas (Étant donnés) of course being another matter – also combines the literal transparency of the glass and the extreme reduction of pictorial materiality and image-character with 43

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a construction that is formal and whose content is unfinished: the result is a complex and layered work without solution, a lock without a key, a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing and others that do not fit. The main work from Duchamp’s oeuvre that interests us here, however, is With Hidden Noise. Produced on Easter Day 1916, the piece consists of a ball of string, wedged between two small metal plates with an inscription of mutilated words in mixed French and English that are easily readable but devoid of meaning. With Hidden Noise rattles: Walter Arenberg put something – which he himself called a ‘secret object’ – into the bulb cavity before screwing the plates. If a readymade is or aims to be the equivalent of a text that means (and therefore hides) nothing, then this semi-readymade exemplifies the literal opposite of that prospect, analogous to a text in which something is hidden, a text that should not be interpreted but can be solved like a riddle. Even Duchamp did not know what Arenberg’s secret object was – for instance, whether it was ‘a diamond or a coin’14 – and now nobody knows; everybody must guess. The work is about what is actually and literally hidden. But why would anyone want to know exactly what makes the noise here? Why does it matter? The solution is undoubtedly banal and irrelevant by any standard. And revealing Arenberg’s secret would make the thing instantly uninteresting and worthless. It would even cease to be art. The brilliant move of this piece is that the work is an enigma whose solution is the very demonstration of how enigmas work. Here, Duchamp demonstrates, and at the same time dismantles, a basic recipe of artmaking. With Hidden Noise is a ‘basic truth’, clear and irrefutable like an axiom. After centuries of art transforming horrifying sacred mysteries into aesthetic

Figure 4.2  Marcel Duchamp, With Hidden Noise, 1916 – © DACS 44

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sublimity and romantic poetry, Duchamp demonstrates with one small, inexpensive, banal, unattractive and unclassifiable object how the artificial poetic depth of art can be invalidated by a small-scale model showcasing the logic of enigmatic art. In this way, Duchamp demystifies art not by analysis and theoretical arguments but with a single work, a semi-readymade. It is not a work that claims to debunk the myth of art while at the same time continuing to use it; it is one that effectively punctures that myth. In With Hidden Noise – a ‘mystery’ whose ‘solution’ is totally irrelevant and meaningless, a problema that allows people to understand Duchamp completely and at the same time not know it – total transparency and full opacity coincide. With this work what we do not know no longer arouses any curiosity whatsoever; the ‘secret’ is preserved but remains logically shallow and uninteresting. Indeed, one might wish that all museum attendants, in walking the rooms, were permanently equipped with rattles like With Hidden Noise.

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5. Memoria: Memory Work and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’ Every society must guarantee a form of ‘ontological trust’ for its members. Each therefore safeguards its worldview and imposes an epistemic regime: a set of rules that determine and control how to deal with what it knows. Archaic or traditional societies do so by subdividing knowledge, regulating access to it and veiling it in secrecy. To protect the basic trust in life and ward off panic, these epistemic regimes stick to what they know. As the saying goes: ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Western epistemic culture, on the other hand, is characterised by two principles – intricately linked but with distinct histories – that oppose both conservatism and authority. 47

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The first principle, traceable to the Greeks, is our trust in reason, which has narrowed over the centuries into a trust in rationality and ‘scientificity’. Reason is believed to lead to truth: it provides insight into the way things really are. And the capacity to reason – says Aristotle – is also the ‘specific essence’ of the human: the human is defined as a ‘rational animal’, as a creature that naturally strives for comprehension. Curiosity, contemplation and understanding are essential to our being what we are. This is a basic value of Western culture. The second principle, which boasts an equally long and complex history, is the belief in the soul and inner life or – to use a more modern idiom – the emphasis on inwardness and subjectivity. Being somebody does not just – or even primarily – involve building a social persona and selfrealisation in the world, but above all, building an inner ‘self ’ that lives a spiritual life consisting of righteous, true and decent thoughts, feelings and desires. Malraux calls this second principle ‘the will to consciousness’ (‘la volonté de conscience’): the attempt to develop an attentive and composed life-of-the-mind.1 The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union proclaims that the arts and scientific research are free of constraint.2 The basic principles of reason and subjectivity create openness and uncertainty, as well as room for doubt, for the awareness of probability, for criticism and discussion. This ensures that technology and material culture, on the one hand, and the vocabulary, meanings and signs by which people live, on the other, are constantly developing and subject to continuous revision. Western knowledge culture is drawn to and fuelled by change and looks for what is new. But the presupposition that our worldview can be corrected and improved (and consequently shown to be somehow wrong), the individualism that goes with subjectivism and the irreverence and negativity inherent in dialectics are potentially threatening and destabilising, even for a ‘modern’ society. The 48

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long process of modernising Western culture was and is therefore corrected and slowed down by shielding from criticism and revision large segments of societal life, such as the representation and symbolisation of power, family relationships, sexuality and, more generally, everything that touches on intimacy and/or directly implicates the body. This is achieved by means of habits and traditions (including newly invented traditions), the inertia of language and body language, and silence.3 For the same reasons, even in modern, ‘open’ societies, the access to and use of knowledge is regulated and steered. The production of knowledge, free and autonomous in principle, is at the same time institutionalised, hierarchised and compartmentalised. This limits the scope of, and controls, enlightened thinking and criticism. Not only scholars and scientists but also the freischwebende intelligentsia and artists cannot simply investigate, write or make what they want. Their free thinking and their intellectual and artistic work have always been made possible and framed by institutions, from Plato’s Academy to the universities and art schools of today. ~ It is possible to characterise the diverse epistemic forms and research disciplines based on their fields of research or methods, but also based on their respective modes of preserving knowledge and making it available – that is, the kind of memory they create.4 Human memory, like that of all living beings, consists partly of genetic material transmitted biologically. Humans are unique, however, in that our memory also exists partly (indeed, largely) in external form: what we understand and know about humankind and nature, and about what we can make and do, is preserved and objectified as a material environment, on the one hand, and in the sum of representations or ‘culture(s)’ stored in language, on the other.5 A prodigious amount of tacit 49

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knowledge is stored in the instruments we use, in the fabric of cities, in tools and books, in the design of landscapes and in what we call culture (in the anthropological sense of the term): in signs and images, in mores and habits that are so familiar and self-evident that we use or perform them without thinking. Both are forms of collective memory. The collective is always – even in a ‘modern’ society – most concerned with preserving and passing on its own familiar world and culture. But externalisation and objectification create the possibility for distance-taking, individual appropriation, experimentation and change. It is this leeway, this variability, limited by archaic knowledge regimes, that is readily exploited in Western culture. ~ In understanding and evaluating the prevailing, late modern epistemic regime, it is crucial to distinguish between two types of knowledge disciplines: those that produce technology and those that study and make culture. Crucial for this distinction is each discipline’s respective relationship to attention – the active principle that creates and feeds the ‘inner self ’. Technology concerns the production of artefacts that can improve or perfect human actions or activities. The kind of knowledge that can be converted into technology is generally focused on improving health and/or safety and/or comfort, and results in the production of highly ingenious devices or products. It is important, however, that those devices, which are the result of the arduous work and inventiveness of highly intelligent people, can be used from the outside, with the help of an instruction manual, by a lay person who has no concept of the sophisticated knowledge invested in their making. One can drive a car without any knowledge of mechanics or use a computer without the slightest idea of how to write a program. One can take a pill and recover from an illness without knowing how the drug works. 50

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In fact, the more ingenious the device or product, and the more knowledge it contains, the less the user needs to know, to the point where the technology becomes imperceptible. The essence of technology is indeed that the user need not know or understand what is required for its making, that the machines work ‘by themselves’, automatically, without requiring attention, and thus free the mind for other things. It is true that some technology is extraordinarily complex and requires a range of skills to use properly. However, the user expertise developed through working with highly sophisticated devices is entirely different from the knowledge and understanding required to build the technology and make it work. The end goal of the technological sciences is not the acquisition and sharing of insights into the Nature of Things – scientific publications and peer communication during the production process being just a means – but the development of efficient (or marketable) technical instruments, devices and products. Technological innovation requires constant adaptation from the users, not only in industry and transport, but also in everyday life, in the completion of daily tasks (living, cooking, communicating). It is not always easy to give up old habits and acquire new skills. New technological developments, however, are rarely fundamentally threatening. They can exert a great impact on people and force them to change their habits without endangering their worldview or their conception of humanity. Anthony Giddens writes in ‘Living in a Post-Traditional Society’ that science has lost much authority because it failed to keep its promises.6 Let us consider what science has brought us: poison gas, the threat of nuclear war, environmental crises and so on. Furthermore, the philosophers of science, and notably, Karl Popper, have taught us that knowledge is never certain. The sciences are built not on rock soil but on quicksand. Now that the nuclear threat appears to be over, Giddens has been challenged and Popper all but forgotten. New technologies are not 51

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considered problematic; on the contrary, the single solution to all problems, including climate change, is further innovation and technology. Science is no longer called into question, and for that matter, hardly receives coverage in the media. It has been replaced with a steady stream of publicity and positive hype about new cameras and batteries, cars, apps and popular video games. Technological changes always aim at improvement. They improve health, safety or comfort, and is that not, in that order, what everyone needs and wants most? Science is the guarantee behind technology. To be sure, there is a growing risk awareness: we know that new techniques can always be used for the wrong purposes, and that accidents happen.7 But technology is trusted to assess and monitor the risks and undesirable collateral effects associated with the not-knowing-everything-yet and the not-controlling-everything-yet. It is therefore also perfectly possible to accept and assimilate technological modernity without in the least sharing the unsettling mix of detachment, scepticism and universalism inherent in the ethos of knowledge production. The acceptance and use of modern technology is perfectly consistent with a narrow religious or archaic authoritarian worldview. This is already apparent from the regressive utopias and futuristic imagery of the science fiction and fantasy entertainment industry, where the ideal of a perfect, flawlessly ordered and flawlessly performing society regularly turns up. Thanks to an almost perfect, and therefore an almost natural, technology, these fictional societies have reached a stage of overall comfort, health, safety, control and predictability. The total absence of cultural unrest and critical doubt is due to humans’ having become robots or insects: to a combination of high-tech life and labour with a hierarchical-militaristic and ritualised social organisation, archaic-religious symbolism, and the complete absence of art and individualism. But not only the inventors of these terrifying worlds, but also – in the real world, and on another scale – the Nazis, the authoritarian 52

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communist regimes and organisations such as ISIS have proved conclusively that exceptional and creative technological user expertise is perfectly compatible with barbarism and the obstruction of cultural modernity. What applies to technology users even proves valid for the scientists who develop that advanced technology. In rare cases, scientists who work at the heart of a technological discipline may realise the implications of their developments for how we see and understand nature and reality. But ‘normal science’ is mainly, without much thought, concerned with solving promising or lucrative ‘puzzles’ that have an application value; thus, it proceeds without asking too many questions.8 One can easily conduct excellent academic and scientific research, or design highly sophisticated and advanced technology, but at the same time remain completely outside the tradition of critical, free thinking. ~ Alongside the technological disciplines are the disciplines whose final product is ‘culture’ or ‘text’: knowledge disciplines that are essentially discursive, and in sum, produce nothing but thought – ideas, representations, insights and beliefs, stored as text and/or image. This understanding cannot be applied. Thoughts cannot be transformed into devices or products that work automatically; they cannot be operated or used from the outside. This kind of knowledge – crucially – requires attention. One must listen to what is said, read what is written, contemplate the image, and then either forget or remember it – that is, keep it in mind, pass it on, use it to write or speak oneself. This form of knowledge lingers in the mind, takes on a ‘mental life’ and constitutes what in the Middle Ages was called memoria. Innovation is not related to the use of technology the way writing is related to being read. Writing is also practical; it also provides a service: an article an author has worked on for six months can be read in half an hour. But 53

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reading that article still requires a full half-hour of attention and time out of life, which sets writing – considering, formulating and passing on experiences and insights – apart from designing efficient devices. The producer of tech­ nology stands in a completely different relation to the user than a writer does to a reader. Certainly, the writer is expected to know more, sometimes even far more, than the reader. Writing indeed presupposes authorship and a claim of ‘authority’. But the author, in principle, does not have a different kind of understanding. Since reading consists of understanding and grasping what somebody has written, reader and writer must have comparable intelligence. A scholar, therefore, is not a technical specialist. Gaining erudition is not specialising. Those working in the knowledge disciplines which produce nothing but texts and thoughts, cannot retreat into closed communication with only their fellow specialists. Whoever writes and publishes inevitably enters the public space, takes the floor and asks or expects others to read or listen, to pay attention. It is no small matter to take the floor, and thereby claim time out of other people’s lives. After all, people only have a limited amount of attention available each day and can only read one text at a time. Once again, this situation is different for technology scientists: they only use their own time for their research, and do not take time out of others’ lives; they do not expect others to listen. The value of their work lies in the usefulness and usability of what they make. By contrast, for those working in the ‘discursive fields’, which produce nothing practical, the value lies solely in what they have to say. Discursive knowledge calls for a sense of urgency: the primary consideration is what is worth talking about; what matters is whether something is interesting or relevant – whether it contributes to the conversation. The neo-Kantian philosophers have formulated this epistemologically as follows: 54

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the knowledge field of the discursive sciences is not Nature but, since not everything that exists or happens in the Universe can be studied, limited to Culture. Culture is everything that somehow ‘matters’ for humankind (and for scholars); everything humans, during the bit of time allotted to them in life, have given attention to; everything worth the effort of talking about. The object of the cultural fields is value-related – wertbezogen.9 ~ Even within the so-called post-traditional Western societies, most of the meanings by which one lives are lived as self-evident and beyond doubt. The ‘crisis of modernity’ cannot be but a surface phenomenon – something that occupies the mind, while basic and vital social and cultural processes continue subconsciously, underneath, in ‘long duration’. Yet individuals can get involved and question their ‘culture’ – at least in principle – quite publicly and freely. The worldviews and ideas with which we live are the subject of public debate, artistic experiment and academic research. The discursive space dedicated to culture is the virtual global conversation space open to every rational being, where we discuss what concerns us all: the ‘Republic of Letters’ (‘République des Lettres’), Michael Oakeshott’s ‘Conversation of Mankind’, Richard Rorty’s ‘Cosmopolitan Conversation of Mankind’ and Jürgen Habermas’s space of ‘domination-free communication’ (‘herrschaftsfreie Kommunikation’). By and large, everything that a human being has said or made, conceived or experienced – everything that was significant and important to someone at some point in time – is worth investigating, under­standing and preserving. Malraux writes in L’Homme et la culture artistique: ‘We have the unsettling privilege of wanting to inherit the whole past.’10 It goes without saying that it is de facto impossible – because of how exchanges work, and because of human finitude – to discuss and remember 55

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everything at the same time. One can only listen to one piece of music at a time, and one cannot study everything. We only have one life and all the decisions we make are paid for with time out of it. Thus, we must be selective; we must make choices. A day with an hour spent reading Ovid or Dostoevsky is not the same as a day spent reading tabloid stories or watching trashy sitcoms. Cultural studies de facto cannot study all cultural manifestations: the interplay of heterogeneous places where the conversation of mankind11 is conducted (newspapers, publications, radio and television broadcasts, lectures, political debates, exhibitions, performances, etc.) and the development of or shift in topics (the range of topics covered in the conversation) presupposes a selection. Its result can also be called culture, not in the broad anthropological sense, but in the more limited, romantic-modern sense of an ensemble of ideas – texts and images – that simultaneously express, condense and formulate the individual and collective experience. This culture is what one chooses to live with, to hold in memoria. The mandate of the discursive sciences consists primarily in keeping the rational conversation going, passing on the underlying ethos and thus protecting the institutional basis within which the conversation of mankind can take place: the cultural and academic institutions. The secondary mandate consists of collective memory work. Artists and intellectuals, rather than worrying too much about the future, should deal with the past, which returns and imposes itself each morning as ‘present’. What is worth the effort of speech does not coincide with what we invented today or yesterday. Intellectual and artistic memory work is about all that has already been said and made, about the history of culture and the history of that cultural history. Memory work explores what has already been said, and measures it against what is being said today, so that we can decide for ourselves what deserves attention now. History is indeed not merely a matter 56

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of accumulation. Intellectual and artistic memory work never yields a stable canon or tradition. What is important and urgent is never certain: it is the object of disagreement, an issue everybody must decide individually by engaging him or herself, by speaking and writing. And to participate in the conversation, one must always listen and read first, to be able to decide what is worthwhile and deserves attention. Artistic and intellectual work is intrinsically about transmission. What is passed on, however, is not something that is found ready-made but something that we ourselves must make continuously, by reading and writing, looking and creating. We inherit a past, but there is no testament. The material with which we have to work is that gigantic heap of rubbish called tradition or past or history that Walter Benjamin’s angel of history has before his eyes when, turned backward, he is blown into the future. The collective memory is created by individual appropriation, through study – by reading, speaking and writing. ~ The idea of the university, propounded by Kant, Schelling, Herder, Hegel and von Humboldt in Germany, and by Carlyle, Dewey and Newman in the AngloSaxon world, contains not just the principle of the public character of knowledge, the independence or autonomy of knowledge and the unity of the sciences, but also that of transfer or transmission. A university is a public institution that not only develops and safeguards knowledge on behalf of society but makes knowledge publicly available. The Charter of Bologna, signed by all European universities in 1988, reaffirmed that the university is an autonomous institution, and that research and teaching must be free and independent of all political authority and economic power, stressing that the universities should transmit the European humanist tradition. Since its origins in the Middle Ages, but especially since its refounding in the 57

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nineteenth century, the university has been one of the most important institutions where the conversation of mankind takes place. For this reason, the heart of the university is the library, and teaching and intellectual education is considered its essential task. The oldest disciplines – philosophy, arts, law – have been most important for organising the conversation about what we want to remember, for transmitting ideas and insights, together with the ethos of knowledge production. New developments in systematic research and academia, along with the current prevailing epistemic regime, tend to discredit the conversation about culture, however, and push it outside the university. The increasingly undecidable, open question of what it is that matters – in the light of man’s finitude – no longer seems to be part of what is officially considered ‘real’ knowledge. ~ A first factor has been the blind imposition of a paradigm of scientificity, scientific success and marketisation, modelled on the technical and medical sciences, on the ‘discursive disciplines’.12 This has led these disciplines into a mimetic adaptation, so as at least to look ‘scientific’ (with some subdisciplines that look ‘more exact’ clearly gaining prestige because they seem to study facts and figures). To a large extent, however, the outcome is some form of restyling or cosmetic surgery and an adoption of newspeak: one should not say ‘study’ but ‘research’; not ‘scholar’ but ‘specialist’; not ‘the author believes based on the following arguments’ but ‘scientific research has proven that’; not ‘my book’ but ‘my report’ or ‘my project’; and so on. But more worrisome is the discrediting of discursivity as such – conversation and argumentation, and developing, formulating, substantiating and exchanging thoughts and ideas. The idea of a global conversation gives way to an epistemic regime that revolves around methods or procedures and the correct application of theory 58

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to data. The neutral and correct application of procedures, which can be monitored and evaluated unambiguously and guarantee the comparability of research, aims at objectivity – which here means consensus without discussion. It is consensus without personally embodied knowledge, without a voice: not authorship but expertise. And yet the dissensus, inherent in the structure of the conversation of mankind about what deserves attention, implies that what we say cannot be accumulated, will not lead to stable conclusions and is not capable of being ‘applied’. The rationality model based on methods and on procedures neutralises the relationship of the researcher to the object of study: if scientificity is a matter of correctly applying a theory and respecting procedures, it no longer really matters what is being investigated. The question of what one has to say does not come up. The value of the research, then, lies exclusively in the innovative or non-innovative use of the methods or the conceptual apparatus, and in the quantity of results that one produces. A second factor explaining the marginalisation of the discursive dis­ ciplines is the rise within the humanities of new (sub)disciplines that do what the technological disciplines did with craftsmanship: they replace traditional, experience-based and memory-based skill and personalised know-how (in education, teaching, caretaking, social organisation, politics, etc.) with an ‘expertise’ based on applying abstract or theoretical knowledge. These new scientific disciplines do not forge concepts or ideas with the aim of understanding the complexity of social and human phenomena but of producing diagnoses, norms and rules that prescribe how organisations, enterprises, schools, politicians and decision-makers can act ‘scientifically’ and ‘based on research’ – for example, how to scientifically prevent young people from radicalising, how to recruit or fire personnel, how to teach, how to make people visit exhibitions or how to manage a museum. This kind of technology does 59

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not produce products or devices but nevertheless definitely aims at promoting safety, well-being and comfort with nothing but texts. The disciplines therefore always want others to pay attention and address them top-down: they expect others to read and listen, which here means doing as they are told. The outcomes of these new sciences are prescriptive texts: advice, rules, guidelines, procedures, regulations, training programmes and the like. Large areas of social life that until recently, in all societies, operated under a regime of ‘practical knowledge’ based on experience and habit – the phronesis or ‘wisdom’ of Aristotle – and were managed by discussion and exchanging views have increasingly come under the tutelage of specialists and experts. The authority of these often highly authoritarian forms of knowledge, which hide a great deal of pseudoscience, is owed largely to their semi-specialistic character and their technological appearance, which legitimise them in academia and in the eyes of the public. They seem applicable and useful. The applicability of social technology and the principles of the management sciences are increasingly being imposed on the study of culture. This is then measured not by the relevance of the memory work, or the spread of erudition and intellectual life in society, but by what one can get out of it. When, in addition, it turns out there is little demand for cultural researchers on the job market, the idea becomes to complete the ‘research-oriented’ profile of university curricula with a ‘practical component’ or an internship to perform better in the cultural sector, instead of using the few study years to prepare as much as possible to participate in the cultural conversation later. ~ The growing control of the discursive disciplines and their modelling according to the example of ‘social technology’ is only possible because – not only in official science policy, but also within the universities – a technological 60

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understanding of knowledge prevails. Both the fundamental-scientific interest and the sense of reflexivity are marginalised. The memory work, difficult to legitimise within the current knowledge regime, must hide or move elsewhere to survive. Universities are producing more and more science but less and less culture. One could argue that the conversation of mankind and the necessary memory work has been taken over by the internet. It is certainly true that in that virtual communication space everything – up to and including one’s personal search history – is preserved and is available in principle, so that one need no longer choose or select what is worth remembering. But the only thing to be found there is information linked to keywords, not thoughts. Scanning material and processing data or information is not the same as formulating and remembering thoughts or having ideas. And making a public speech is probably too easy on the internet. Everyone always has the floor. The accessibility of the web might guarantee that everyone can speak, and speak at the same time, but not that somebody can say something – that somebody listens. One can react, and count reactions, but not exchange ideas. The intellectual conversation about what is urgent and worth attention seems to have shifted, and now lives on in the arts. There, one can find examples of engaged speech and memory work that academia can now hardly tolerate. But whether, all in all, that is a good thing for art and society is up for debate.

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Part II Aspects of Artistry

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6. On Laughter, Opinions and Artistic Freedom We like neither the art nor the artists (Nous n’aimons ni l’art ni les artistes) Jacques Vaché The wise man does not laugh without trembling (Le Sage ne rit qu’en tremblant) Charles Baudelaire

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What Is There to Laugh About? What happens when people laugh? I will start from Baudelaire’s De l’essence du rire and draw in some basic ideas from anthropology and the theory and history of laughter.1 Laughter is a sudden, spontaneous, delightful, eruptive body reaction. It is not a reasoned, voluntary action. One can certainly control and moderate laughter, one can hide and even amplify it, but one cannot induce it at will. Laughter always needs a trigger. Laughter is provoked and released: there is something that ‘makes’ one laugh. People laugh at something – but do they also (always) laugh because of something? Does laughter always have a cause or a good reason behind it, an appropriate object, such as a joke or a funny situation in the world? (This is what Baudelaire calls ‘meaningful comedy’ (‘le comique significatif’) or ‘comedy of manners’ (‘le comique de mœurs’): a super­ ior laughter at what we consider ridiculous or comical.) There is such a thing as moderate, tame, civilised laughter as an appropriate response to the Witzigkeit of the joke or the comic content of what one sees or experiences. Sigmund Freud has shown, however, that even the pleasure taken in the seemingly refined Witz is not exclusively or primarily about laughing at the funniness; other mental mechanisms are at play. Humour is (also) a pretext to laugh. There is, indeed, something threatening and uncanny about laughter: the outburst always tends to outstrip its cause and cease to be proportionate to or motivated by that object. A wild joy, an irreverent and unlimited life force breaks through in laughter, ‘something terrible and irresistible’.2 The laughter,

Figure 6.1  Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman in an Inn, 1623, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 67

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which seems to ‘behave’ in refined Witzigkeit, becomes an uncontrolled physical eruption of mental energy that is experienced as a liberation, akin to a tension or pressure that has found a way to discharge itself. (Baudelaire links this ‘boundless laughter’ and the breaking through of this joyful, creative energy to a ‘fierce and absolute comedy’ (‘comique féroce’ and ‘absolu’).) In her study on laughter in the history of religion, Ingvild Gilhus characterises laughter as ‘a voluntary and extreme opening up of the human body’.3 People laugh with their mouths open. Laughter is therefore related to other ways in which the body suddenly opens up, such as when one cries or shouts, sings or yawns, during sex and while giving birth. Gilhus’s interpretation builds on a canonical article by Salomon Reinach, the noted archaeologist and anthropologist of Greek and Roman culture and mythology. Reinach writes in Le Rire rituel: ‘Laughter does not only mark life, but the intensity, the fullness of life.’ Laughter is experienced as ‘the manifestation of the presence of a god’.4 Laughter has an extraordinary, quasi-supernatural power. Similar cultural-philosophical ideas can be found in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches where Nietzsche describes what happens when people laugh. The anxious human being gets a boost and expands: ‘the cowering creature, trembling with fear, soars up, unfolds itself widely.’5 In laughter, the human’s state of mind shifts ‘from fear to a short-lived recklessness’, to an intoxication of liberation and to a ‘feeling of happiness’. These interpretations are examples of what is called the ‘relief hypothesis’ within the theory of laughter. To characterise laughter as Erleichterung and as liberation implies that it is caused by, or is a symptom of, the transgressing or disappearing of mandatory and oppressive limits or limitations. Laughter is therefore something other than a pure expression of joy: joy makes one smile but not burst into laughter. ‘In the garden of Eden, that is to say, in an environment where it seemed to man that all things created were good, the 68

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joy was not in laughter.’6 The human, writes Georg Simmel in his essay about caricature, is born a transgressor: This is the peculiar constellation of our being: that we are limited in our qualities and our thinking, in our positive and negative values, in our will and our strength – but at the same time able and encouraged to look beyond, to go beyond.7 Simmel specifies the limits within which the innate border-crosser is situated and lives: the human being stands between the gods and the animals. The gods never transgress because they know no boundaries. At most, they are called upon to legislate, but they themselves live without rules. They do as they please and live lightly. Animals, on the other hand, remain imperturbably what they are. They are natural, never worry about their ‘identity’ and do not laugh. Humans envy the gods and look down on animals; they clearly do not want to be apes. But when they overplay what they are, and step out of their bounds, it gives rise to ridicule and laughter. Laughter is satanic, so it is deeply human. It is the consequence in man of the idea of his own superiority; and, in fact, as laughter is essentially human, it is essentially contradictory, that is to say, it is both a sign of infinite greatness and of infinite misery. Infinite misery relative to the absolute Being of which he has the conception, infinite greatness 69

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relative to animals. It is the perpetual shock of these two infinites that provokes laughter.8 Laughter indeed always seems to imply a transgression. And yet the energy that breaks through in laughter is not directed against the limits and limitations in question. The transgression is not the kind of sacrilege or tragic error that calls for divine retribution, but a comical, non-threatening, almost accidental failure. The ridiculous failure, however, reveals that all these commandments and obligations to maintain our normality and support the framework and stable structure of life in society are artificial and conventional, and by no means solid and secure. This sudden realisation then (also) comes as a relief, an Erleichterung, which is a bit intoxicating, providing a sense of recklessness and freedom. In laughter the human tastes the joy of the gods (or at least of the gods of polytheism, who live happily and cheerfully; the monotheistic god, who dwells alone in the heavens and is primarily preoccupied with legislation, never laughs). As humans our laughter occurs at the expense of the codes and rules that ensure our human dignity. Everything we laugh at is, all things considered, not supposed to be laughed at. Laughter is structurally irreverent. And it is therefore always suspicious. The powerful have good reason not to trust it. But laughter does not really threaten the complex of rules and taboos that keep people under control and guarantee structure and safety. Nietzsche writes: ‘Upturning our experiences, reversing the useful into the useless, the necessary into random [. . .] delights, because it frees us.’ And yet it does so only momentarily, and on condition ‘that it does no harm and is done out of elation. We play and laugh when the expected (which is usually frightening and stressful) discharges without harm.’9 We laugh for fun. It is not a revolt. 70

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What is it in the joke or comic situation that sets one free and makes one laugh? According to Nietzsche, it is a reversal: turning things upside down, introducing the absurd and the nonsensical. It involves reversing what is obligatory and compelling into something playful and free. And in the first place, this entails stupidity. Stupidity is the common denominator of the many ways in which we mortals can fail in what we take as our source of humanity and pride: quick and successful thinking and acting. Causes for laughter include awkwardness, vulgarity, choppiness, automatisms, repetitions, misunderstandings, stumbling, falling or, in short, behaving not as a mature adult is expected to behave but as its opposite: as a child, an idiot, a robot, a monkey, a mirror and so on. This is the ‘comical’ as understood by Henri Bergson: a superior laughter at the failures of fellow humans.10 Besides stupidity there is foolishness. The human is an animal that wears a social mask – a persona – and dares to invent gods in its own image. The fool is not stupid but recalcitrant: he or she fails or refuses to maintain human ‘dignity’. Such a person plays games with language and logic (absurdity, paradoxes, etc.) that cause the rational ego to stumble and unmasks and undoes the difference between high and low, and especially between humanity and animality, by suddenly exhibiting the (functioning) body. The body resets all the distinctions and the dignity that humans have invented. The bathroom is the great equaliser. The sudden emergence of vulgarity and obscenity creates a fissure in the civilised life, through which the vital drive can erupt once more. The primal scene is Baubo suddenly lifting her skirt and causing the grief-stricken Demeter to burst out laughing. Demeter’s exuberant, ‘radiant’ outburst is caused by the provocatively exposed sex/face. Laughing with open mouth and exposed teeth unleashes nature and revives fertility. The cosmic, life-giving laughter is triggered by the sudden revelation that humans really are the animal they try so desperately not to be. 71

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Laughter is always risky because it exposes the weakness of taboos and rules, and unleashes an energy that is wild, unfocused and amoral, potentially stimulating but also destructive. All societies therefore control laughter, grant it a time and place and limit its scope.11 This occurs, first, by ritualisation, from the Greek and Roman religious festivals to the medieval carnival and the party culture and entertainment industry of today. Parties and feasts allow frantic dances, drunkenness, bawdy jokes, singing and shouting, insult tournaments, games of reversal and parody, masquerades and so on. But the party remains an exception: it has a beginning and an end and is meant – in principle – to have no real-world consequences. Carnival is not the beginning of a revolution; it makes one long for next year’s feast. The ritualisation of laughter is accompanied by a second precautionary measure: the tying of laughter, not to a specific context, but to a specific social group united by the understanding that a certain kind of excess is only for play, and that the joking and wild laughter is all in good fun. Group members share codes indicating how a statement is meant and how literally or seriously it should be taken. But despite all the pacts and precautions, things go wrong at parties. The civilised call for refined humour, ‘high-brow comedy’, polite exuberance and well-mannered exaggeration is constantly thwarted. Laughter is never facile and harmless. Exaggerations and teasing suddenly go too far; racy jokes make some laugh but offend others. What starts with playful scolding is likely to end in quarrels and fights. Whereas the sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury iconography of the ‘Merry Company’ shows how civil gatherings were supposed to be conducted, the countless ‘Peasant Dances’ show what really occurred: burlesque dancing and kissing, excessive drinking and eating, shouting and singing, pissing, shitting, puking, and indeed, in the end, some fighting.

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Free Speech: Socrates and Antisthenes, Heraclitus and Democritus Philosophy and art have also granted a place to laughter. It seems that, in their respective ways, they have institutionalised laughter. The logos is a child of the polis. The Greeks invented arguing, and fighting with arguments, as a means of determining what was needed for the common good and of reaching decisions without violence. Voting is the process of ascertaining what the majority deems advisable after discussion. Political debate is indeed not about establishing with certainty what is just or true but about decision-making by the many in a public and democratic, as opposed to an authoritarian, fashion. Philosophy was born when this game of dia­ lectics was transferred from the political arena and law courts to the public discussion of society’s thoughts and beliefs. Democracy and philosophy are therefore allies: both put their trust in reason and argument.12 Philosophical discussion nevertheless certainly differs from political discussion. The rules of the game – the duty to speak clearly and to fight with arguments, the principle of equality among the participants – are the same, but philosophical discussion is not about decision-making. It aims at finding the Truth and relies on rational arguments and disagreements as the best means to do so. A philosophical discussion, however, never comes to an end. One cannot vote on the truth. The game of reason is demanding. Anyone entering the discussion must accept the following terms: that the strength of the argument is all that counts and that all participants are equal. This requires a bracketing of very real and socially relevant differences in status, position, gender, age and prestige. It does not matter who is speaking. Participating in the political discussion also presupposes that people understand and accept the difference between their private interests and the common good. Participating in 73

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the philosophical discussion further presupposes an acceptance that personally held beliefs and values, however sacred to the participant, may for the purposes of the discussion and for other participants be just an ‘opinion’. Everything is disputable; the discussion has no conclusion. The philosophical conversation of mankind presupposes methodical scepticism. Those who, moreover, also want to live a rational life and want to live as ‘truth seekers’ or philosophers must learn to live with existential uncertainty. They must internalise the tentative character and disputability of all opinions and values. In Western culture familiarity with the game of discussion and reason, and its associated mindset and attitudes, has gradually seeped into society. Over many centuries, this has led to the institutionalisation of a public tradition of knowledge based on rationality, and then, more slowly, to the institutionalisation of the public debate, to a culture of participation and equality in many areas, and to democratic decision-making in politics and in the organisation of the state and society. This has been accompanied by the acceptance, in both the philosophical-scientific and social-political realms, of the right to ‘free speech’. Everyone thereby has the right to his or her own opinions, and to his or her own conception of reality, as well as the right to participate in the public discussion – and notably, to share those opinions. It is evident that a familiarity with philosophy and an initiation into the Western knowledge tradition supports the political discussion: training in equality from an intellectual or a systematic-research standpoint – namely, training to respect all opinions, value disagreement and accept the provisional character of one’s own ‘culture’ – strengthens the basis of politics and democracy. Accepting the equality of all rational beings and the ability to distinguish personal opinions from the Truth are also part of an education in democracy. In fact, the political discussion and the philosophical-cultural discussion are intricately connected and difficult to distinguish. A political 74

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discussion is never purely political. In principle, the discussion is about dec­ isions and not about the truth or the correctness of views on people and life, but these views always play a role in formulating, evaluating and considering options, as well as in legitimising decisions. One can readily see that demo­ cracy and the game of politics is difficult in a social and cultural environment with little or no rational knowledge tradition. Of course, knowledge in Western culture is also an institutionalised practice where not all voices are treated equally, and research institutions grant a kind of authority. But the right and, as Kant surmises, the duty to think for oneself, freedom of opinion and freedom of speech, apply without restriction, both in politics and in knowledge. After all, an opinion can be proven foolish or irrelevant, contradicted or criticised only after being formulated in the first place. There is no way to know a priori what is justifiable or absurd from a research standpoint, what is rational or irrational, so as to preclude the expression of certain ideas. What one person finds relevant and interesting may seem foolish or untrue to another. And what is scandalous and insulting to some may be merely provocative to others. ‘The remedy for offensive speech’ is not to silence someone; it is ‘more speech’.13 Of course, not everything that is said deserves respect or should be considered equally noteworthy. Freedom of expression does not imply that everyone deserves equal attention. One always has the right not to listen, to reject opinions, to shoot them down and to reply frankly that this or that should not have been said or written. That, however, is only possible after the perceived inanities have first been said. In any case, the right to free expression and free speech does not amount to a right to say anything about anything. It is a right to express opinions. And what is an opinion? An opinion is a statement believed to be true or possibly true. But there is no doubt more at stake. Usually, in political debate, people do not 75

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just want to express their opinions; they want to convince and recruit supporters, elicit emotions and applause. Usually, in philosophical discussion, one not only formulates ideas but also hopes to impose personal views and values. Opinions are always wrapped in rhetoric, truths are dressed up to achieve something, people want to ‘win’. How much ‘opinion’ is hidden in an impassioned speech, a battle song, a caricature or a joke, a blasphemy or a curse – in ridicule, insults, provocations, threats? The fact that someone feels offended surely does not suffice for us to accept that he or she is offended. Even when an opinion contains an insult, this cannot automatic­ ally preclude its expression. Nor can the form and manner of expression in principle be restricted. (The way all this must be legally guaranteed – and therefore eventually restricted – for reasons of state security or professional secrecy, or the inadmissibility of defamation, cruelty and threats, is not considered here.) Freedom of speech means that people we hate are allowed to express the opinions we find despicable in ways that we abhor. The one exception is fundamentalism, which considers the very game of discussion and reason a scandal and a personal insult and believes that everyone who thinks differently should be silenced by force. But the principle of equality and the right to form and express one’s own opinions brings unexpected complications. Already in the early days of phil­ osophy, a different kind of philosopher turned up to give freedom of opinion and speech a radically different face. Antisthenes, the first ‘cynic’ and the teacher of Diogenes, started a tradition that has continued at the margins of the official history of philosophy but that is entirely part of the Western intellectual culture: the parrhesia, or the parler-franc, speaking frankly and bluntly.14 It may not be immediately clear how blunt and impudent speech relates to democracy and rationality, and to the political and intellectual debate. But what happens when the public space of ‘free expression’ and 76

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the public discussion is indeed used to say whatever one wants, to mock and to laugh? Frank speech plays the game of reason bête et méchant. It does not use the public space of political and philosophical debate to exchange ideas or formulate opinions, or to trouble people with unsettling remarks and questions as Socrates did, but merely to say publicly whatever one wants to say, however one wants to say it, and to behave indecently and offensively. All the while, the world runs on the restraint, reverence, white lies and silences of good, sparing people. It is evident that one should not just say whatever one wants, wherever and however one wants to say it. There are personal issues people do not discuss or discuss only reluctantly and indirectly. In general, we take the social position, authority and sensibilities of the people with whom we are dealing into account. The parrhesia, by contrast, uses the ‘democratic’ space to expressly say and do what does not fit: to be eccentric, provocative and transgressive. The cynic does not wash or shave; has long hair; does not work; is unconcerned with money, honour or the common good; wears worn-out clothes; lives in a barrel; declares that a corpse is just dirt; mocks the gods, the leaders of the people and the customs of the land; eats and masturbates in the street; and finally, tells the emperor to get out of his sun. Antisthenes is a walking parody of the philosopher: his teaching is that the ‘good life’ advocated by Socrates actually consists in a ‘natural’, uncivilised life, without cultural sophistication; in living like a street dog, like the beast that humans are but do not want to be; and so on. Parrhesia is not so much a matter of free thinking – after all, one cannot transgress in the mind – but of expressing publicly what is unsuitable and shocking. The cynical tradition is ambivalent and cunning because it intervenes and provokes publicly with the intention of challenging and affecting the underlying principle of the philosophical democratic space – the importance 77

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and value of rationality and of the logos as the specific essence of the human. To overact in such a way and still ‘say’ something with their mockery, however, cynics must not take themselves too seriously. After all, Antisthenes was not locked up as a dangerous rebel or a madman but was tolerated as an eccentric and somewhat ridiculous philosopher. His behaviour was viewed as a kind of joke. Plato calls Antisthenes ‘a Socrates who has gone mad’.15 The price one pays for the right to mock everything and everyone – guaranteed by the institution of rational discussion and philosophy – is that one makes a fool of oneself too. Socrates was taken seriously and brought to court, but Antisthenes was considered a jester – an artist. This was the condition for being able to say what he had to say, and it ensured that even Alexander the Great, who came to listen to Diogenes, endured his irreverent remarks. The cynical use of the space for free speech cannot but embarrass philosophy. Parrhesia is not philosophy; unmasking and laughing are not rational arguments; foolishness is not a kind of wisdom. But the two are somehow related, and philosophy cannot simply show its relative the door. Pascal writes: ‘To mock philosophy is to philosophize for real.’16 From Montaigne to Céline, from Rabelais to Houellebecq, frank speech and naysaying, like dialectics and the principle of equality, form an integral part of the Western intellectual and literary tradition. Insolent and impertinent speaking undoubtedly rests on the audacity and the anti-authoritarian attitude that characterise the game of reason as such. (Diogenes – aiming at Plato – rightly asks what purpose is served by philosophising for a lifetime if one has not annoyed anybody? And does Plato himself not compare Socrates to a hornet, a tricky insect?) Moreover, the strength of cynical laughter lies not in making an aberrant statement but rather in uncovering an irrefutable, outrageous truth. Laughter shows a truth the same way death 78

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Figure 6.2  Johannes Moreelse, Democritus, c. 1630, Centraal Museum Utrecht Figure 6.3  Johannes Moreelse, Heraclitus, c. 1630, Centraal Museum Utrecht

does: not by presenting a possibly true statement or idea for debate but by uncovering a fact. Beholding the great Weltspiel one can, quite rightly, become taciturn and serious, sigh and complain, and sink into deep melancholy, as did Heraclitus. But seeing the spectacle of all the to-do, the stupidity and vanity, one can also burst into wild laughter, as did Democritus and Antisthenes, and all the cynics before and after them. One can, like Heraclitus and his followers, devise plans for improving the world and seek consolation in philosophy, or one can, like Democritus and his followers, see the comical side of things, laugh thoroughly at human ‘reasons’ and sing the Praise of Folly. Obviously, as serious people and well-educated citizens, we cannot but agree with

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Heraclitus, suffer and complain along with humanity, acknowledge the suffering and the misery, yield respect and empathy and appreciate the sensibilities and efforts, habits, beliefs and traditions, and cultural identities of all human beings. But at the same time, we must admit that Antisthenes, Diogenes, Democritus and others in the cynical tradition had a point: humans are vain, and their self-esteem is dangerous, their gravity pathetic and ridiculous, and they are incorrigibly foolish, stubborn and credulous. Lucian had every right to make fun of the ridiculous religious beliefs and gods with animal heads that the Egyptians worshipped, and there is still a great deal to laugh about today. The key question is how parrhesia relates to democracy and politics, how the freedom to speak one’s mind relates to the right to freedom of opinion and what the cynical truth can mean for philosophy. For some the cynical truth implies that nothing should be taken as absolute and sacred as such. Laughing and deriding are then conceived of as a practical application of ‘free speech’, and the right to parrhesia is supposedly included in the idea of democracy itself. Parrhesia is then understood and legitimised based on its political character. It can claim to serve a pedagogical-political purpose: those whose beliefs or values are insulted or ridiculed must show that they can withstand it, to prove that they are well prepared and able to participate fully in the political and intellectual debate. To think and live rationally one should learn to laugh at everything, to take insults as jokes and even to ridicule oneself, as a means of training. The cynical truth spoken laughingly indeed has a kind of democratic effect. It reveals a comfortable ‘equality’: all humans are animals, after all. This insight entails something distinct from respecting the political principle of equality that underlies the game of reason. A person who enters that game is expected to practise a minimal ‘methodical scepticism’ and to 80

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accept, by and large, the preliminary nature of all knowledge during the game. But can one therefore also be expected to assent to laughing at everything, and above all, at everything that humankind has invented and relies upon to survive: ethics, family, tradition, law, religion? It is certain that irreverent speech, ridicule and laughter can reinforce the cause of reason, but only on condition that laughter succeeds. It does not work when the person who is supposed to laugh and self-relativise de facto feels insulted and threatened. When laughter fails, the offending statement or action no longer supports the political or philosophical culture, and possibly does more harm than good. (Sometimes, of course, it may be politically-strategically and morally justified or even appropriate to mock and insult and offend someone as much as possible, regardless of the consequences: with his Hitler parody, Charlie Chaplin certainly did not invite the Führer to laugh liberatingly – but that is another issue. À la guerre comme à la guerre.) In any case, the first safeguard against causing offence is ensuring that one’s interlocutors understand that the parrhesia (the cursing, the teasing, etc.) is meant in jest. The second important safeguard, which also follows from the cynical truth itself, is being aware that one always belongs to the ridiculous species oneself. Artistic Freedom How does the right to freedom of opinion and the practice of parrhesia relate to so-called ‘artistic freedom’? Gilles Lipovetsky almost assumes an idée reçue when he links the radicality of modern art to politics: ‘Modern art prolongs the democratic revolution.’17 Modern and contemporary art is indeed, from the criticism of the Salons to the critical art of today, connected to the philosophical ideals of the Enlightenment and democratisation. 81

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Artistic modernism and equality, far from being incongruous, are an integral part of the same democratic and individualistic culture [. . .] Modernism is only one side of the vast secular process leading to the emergence of democratic societies founded on the sovereignty of the individual and the people, societies liberated from submission to the gods, hereditary hierarchies and the grip of tradition [. . .] Henceforth society is doomed to construct itself through and through according to human reason, not according to the heritage of the collective past, nothing is sacrosanct [. . .]18 Lipovetsky and related thinkers point to a continuity and understand the critical, iconoclastic and revolutionary nature of (modern) art as a conscious political commitment. This suggests an assimilation of artistic freedom with the right to freedom of expression: the artist has the right to make and exhibit what he or she wants, just as every citizen has the right to have his or her own opinions and to say publicly what he or she thinks. Should the limiting of artistic freedom not then be regarded – and indicted – as censorship and a curtailment of political freedom? It is important to specify further the kind of artistic ‘negativity’ at issue and to elucidate the relationship between the cultural and the political, between the artistic work and demo­ cratisation. Opinions or beliefs can indeed not only be expressed and formulated in words or in a text but also be drawn, sung, portrayed or symbolised. One can express a thought by demonstrating and burning flags, singing battle songs, devising emblems and drawing caricatures or cartoons. 82

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We might question, however, whether a work of art can express an opinion, or whether it is possible to intervene artistically in a political discussion the same way one might do with a newspaper article or a public statement, or even with a cartoon or a joke. To express an opinion, the slogan, performance or drawing must, after all, say and mean something specific, something that can be understood correctly – and be right or wrong. A work containing such an opinion must be clear and may not be misunderstood. Such a work is therefore not a work of art. Whatever sends a clear message, fights prejudices or expresses a position – especially an offensive one – fails as a work of art. A depicted or visual ‘message’ is not art but communication, advertisement or propaganda. The total freedom of expression obviously also applies to ‘visual opinions’ (including vulgar images, silly caricatures and vicious cartoons). That, again, certainly does not mean that all caricatures must be equally respected and valued. But it implies that they must be published before one can appreciate or criticise their contribution to the political debate or the conversation of mankind. The medium in which an opinion is formulated is certainly not neutral or innocent. It makes a major difference whether an idea is communicated by speech or acted out, whether something is said or shown. The image has its own power and limits. The specificity of the medium and the way in which it exerts impact must be considered when creating and evaluating. But one can appreciate the professionalism and skill with which an image is made without thereby declaring or implying that it has an artistic value, or that it is art. A caricature or cartoon must first and foremost be evaluated as a political or intellectual statement, based on its intelligence and relevance to the political debate. It could be that the creative caricature expresses a completely superfluous and foolish opinion and the cartoonist would have been better off drawing something different, because the ‘frank’ 83

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work is received as an insult or it ridicules something but takes itself (too) seriously and thus fails. One cannot legitimise a failed and unproductive contribution to the political debate by invoking artistic freedom. Artistic freedom is the freedom to make the art that artists believe they should make, and not an escape route for irresponsible and stupid political statements. In Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, Nietzsche complains that the art of his time is mired in feeling and lacks strength and decisiveness. In the twentieth century many agreed and wanted to turn art into ‘action’. Art is supposed to surprise aggressively, provoke and shock the audience. For this, art has reclaimed the space and the tradition of parrhesia. The tradition of ‘impudent images’ – the comical, parody, the grotesque, pornography – indeed has a long history in (the margins of) Western art. The artist’s traditional melancholic persona, up to today, is largely modelled on the figure of the ancient cynic. In addition to the traditional provocative non-conformism and eccentricity of artists, a significant portion of art starting with dada and the futurists has declared open war on the bourgeoisie, on bourgeois culture and its aesthetic values, and even on art itself, using Publikumsbeschimpfung as a weapon. One can doubt whether such art has had much revolutionary or political impact, although it certainly left a significant mark on the intellectual and philosophical debate of the twentieth century, comparable to the sardonic interventions of Antisthenes and the cynics in the history of philosophy. Accepting artistic provocation, to the point where the art public expects to be misled, laughed at and shocked, certainly helps uphold a general openmindedness and tolerance, and thus yields an indirect political or democratising effect. But it is important to realise that no sooner is this ‘transgression’ accomplished than it is quickly disarmed again, not because ‘it’s all in jest’, but here because it is (only) art. Since the art institution has to safeguard both the artists and the public, the ‘real’, direct political or 84

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revolutionary effect of the artistic transgressions must by necessity be quite limited. That is why, in 1946, Magritte proposed to his fellow artists to give up that kind of provocation and make happy art: ‘This disarray, this panic that surrealism wanted to create, so as to call everything into question, was achieved by some Nazi idiots much better than by us, and there was no question of avoiding it.’19 The fact that artworks rarely contribute to the political debate, and that the spectacular provocations and attacks on taboos end up being virtually neutralised by habituation, however, does not prevent art from being effectively subversive. The fact that art’s impact is confined to its well-secured institutional playing field is not simply a weakness. The specific and lasting subversive effect of art, and its secret, real solidarity with the cause of rationality and democracy, is not based on the radicality of artistically packaged political ‘opinions’, on the radical views of artists or on the cynical laughter or transgressive content of the artwork but on the fact that art is art. Art has done its work in secret, by detaching all these archaic images, words, objects and rituals – all developed within social and mostly religious contexts, linked to traditions and habits, and invested with meanings and special powers – from their original contexts, and treating them as ‘representations’. As such, they can be appreciated and judged artistically-aesthetically, as poems, drawings, paintings, sculptures, installations and so on. And when several pictures of Christ on the Cross are hung together, different ways of telling the same story are juxtaposed, rituals and sacred dances performed on a stage, or a requiem sung in a concert hall, what matters is the picture or performance. The ritual turns into theatre, the requiem just music. The onlookers begin to appreciate the text, image or performance artistically and aesthetically. This inevitably, even unintentionally and perhaps unnoticeably, erodes the sacra­ lity of the content. It gradually weakens the violent and dangerous archaic 85

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forces and drives at work in the souls of humans and society and relieves the pressure of the prohibitions and prescriptions they dictate. The artwork does not have to be extreme, provocative or offensive to achieve this effect. (The ‘gothic’ works by Wim Delvoye are probably more subversive than his cloacas or tattooed pigs.) Mainstream, even conventional art, including rather stereo­ typical v­ersions of well-known motifs, can steadily perform the same subversive wear-work. A quite unoriginal picture of the Final Judgement already desacralises, simply by being another representation. A lone, unique statue of the Madonna, isolated in a dark chapel, might appear as a revelation, and inspire awe. But when we see a series of M ­ adonnas, one next to the other, some clearly more beautiful and skilfully painted than others, we stop praying and start comparing. Nietzsche rightly observes in Artistische Erziehung des ­Publikums: ‘If the same motif is not dealt with a hundred times by different masters, the audience will not learn to go beyond an interest in the content.’20 That is what an image tradition does: the many variations put the content in perspective. Just as the institution of the rational discussion automatically turns traditional and archaic truths into disputable opinions, so the art institution turns all sacred images into paintings. (Paintings that focus exclusively on content or are used to provoke or insult become cheap or sentimental and no longer qualify as art.) Nietzsche’s complaint about art’s lack of direct agency grossly underestimates the erosion it has caused over the centuries, by turning myths into literature, rituals into theatre and music, and sacred images and idols into paintings and sculptures. It is impossible to overstate art’s importance in laying the groundwork for a culture of reason and politics.

Figure 6.4  Wim Delvoye, Ring Corpus Inside, 2011 – Courtesy of the artist 86

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The most important area in which art has laid and continues to lay this groundwork is undoubtedly the body. Archaic societies regarded the human body, and in particular the female body, as the most sacred, mysterious thing. The body provokes the strongest fears and desires and is thus the object of all-encompassing rules and taboos, which have the farthestreaching impact on social organisation and on people’s lives. Even for the most modern, free-thinking, secular, scientific and democratic societies, the body – the body of desire, the dead body – is never the ordinary object that Antisthenes and the cynics wanted it to be. But Western culture now deals with the body more freely, less anxiously, and this has consequences in many domains – for example, in the relations between men and women. The increasing equality between man and woman is probably due less to moral and political ideas, or to the fact that modern medicine can now explain the body, and more to the secularisation of the body through artistic and aestheticised images. (Iconoclasm is the taboo against portraying, not (the monotheistic) God, but what Baubo used to make Demeter laugh; it is forbidden to portray the mother goddess who was discarded by monotheism and forbidden to play with images.) Centuries upon centuries of artistic portraiture and the artistic nude, first in antiquity, and then from the late Renaissance on, buttressed by the scientific-medical point of view, have gradually weakened the shock and awe inspired by the body, and in so doing, loosened the grip of the traditional religions. There is thus a strong, if not self-evident, link between the traditions of portraiture and artistic nudity, on the one hand, and democracy, on the other. The German idealists understood well that art has succeeded religion, and they grasped the ambiguities entailed in this transition. But the fact that art is nothing but art, and not a means of changing the world, does not prevent it from working subversively – by constantly reclaiming, (re)processing and 88

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Figure 6.5  Baubo / Putta di Porta Tosa, twelfth century, Museo Sforzesco, Milan 89

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overwriting things we thought we already ‘understood’ and therefore consigned to oblivion. Indeed, art, by isolating and unleashing the aesthetic sense and the sense of beauty, ‘secretly mined the world, reducing what then took all importance to a ridiculous scale, profaning everything in its path’.21 In the end even art itself was reduced. Artists typically have little understanding of politics. Art does not build the future, nor does it discover much. But it ‘processes’ culture: art digests what is already there; it performs memory work. To be able to bring Erleichterung, Nietzsche writes, the artists themselves must be, ‘in many respects, beings turned backward: so that they can be used as bridges to very distant times and ideas, to dying or dead religions and cultures’.22 Artistic freedom, therefore, is not about the freedom of opinion; it is about the freedom to make art. It amounts to reclaiming culture for the present, putting it in play and thereby lightening its load for every­ one, while salvaging its potential to be meaningful and operate in the world.

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7. Notes on the Work of Art as a Gift As I say, everybody has to like something, some people like to eat, some people like to drink, some people like to make money, some like to spend money, some like the theatre, some even like sculpture, some like gardening, some like dogs, some like cats, some people like to look at things, some people like to look at everything. Anyway someone is almost sure to really like something outside of their real occupation. I have not mentioned games indoor and out, and birds and crime and politics and photography, 91

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but anybody can go on, and I, personally, I like all these things well enough but they do not hold my attention long enough. The only thing, funnily enough, that I never get tired of doing is looking at pictures. There is no reason for it, but for some reason anything reproduced by paint, I may even say certainly, by oil paints on a flat surface holds my attention. Gertrude Stein The vital principle of all art: to bring us closer to things by placing us at a distance from them . . . (Diesem Lebensprinzip aller Kunst: uns den Dingen dadurch näher zu bringen, dass sie uns in eine Distanz von ihnen stellt . . .) Georg Simmel A work of art deserves attention and comment. It is meant to be noticed and to acquire a place in the world. A script that stays on the shelf, a story that is neither published nor read, a score that no one plays and a painting left in the studio are all failures. We believe that good art – art that is valuable and important – has a right to be displayed publicly. And everyone has the right to know and live with the art that carries such meaning. Good (not to mention great) art should be accessible to the public. In the civic society of the West this public openness and accessibility has been guaranteed by institutions such as the public library, the civic theatre and the museum, as well as by art history. According to this view, the artwork begins its career in the private 92

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space of personal creation: the desk, the workshop, the studio. From there it finds its way, via the small-scale public exposure of art galleries, small-time publishers, backroom theatres and the in-crowd of supporters and friends, colleagues and critics, to the attention of the general public. The work then, in proportion to its proven importance, garners recognition by the major cultural organisations, whereupon it comes to occupy a place in the canon, the repertoire, museums and art history surveys. The museum is the final destination: art comes home to the museum. A work of significance and value, however, requires more than just public recognition and appreciation. Art requires a response, and thus individual and private appropriation. But it is true that such outcomes are always mediated by art’s ‘publicness’. Since a work of art is a bearer of meaning and value, the art experience is never purely a matter of personal likes and dislikes. It is never solely about what we ourselves can appreciate or find beautiful or moving. The subjective aesthetic experience of a work of art is always related to a meaning and a value that comes into being, that is confirmed and that is disputed in a public arena. The relationship between the public nature of an artwork and the individual experience is extremely complex. The canon needs to be complemented and confirmed by the intensely felt, individual experience of art. But this individual, immediate aesthetic experience always relates to a judgement and to the discussion or the consensus on the position of the artist or of the work. As everyone knows, the museum is a problem; it is the end of art.1 The museum is a storehouse for death-masks, a prison, a mausoleum. It evokes boredom and fatigue, the melancholy of the long corridors and rooms with their rows of works, the bleak official respect and the clichés told about the works, the cult of names, the loneliness of these objects at night and so on. A painting that hangs in a museum belongs not to everyone but to no one. 93

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The visitor has no choice but to submit to the authority of the museum logic and agree to its decisions. After all, once the museum exists, one is no longer free to voice contrary views – for example, that El Greco is a worthless painter. But no matter how impressive the museum architecture, how persuasive its collection, how perfect the hanging or how convincing the captions, one realises that one must put up a fight and reclaim the art from the museum. Private appropriation must always somehow counter canon and consensus. When the visitors think and feel exactly what the guide tells them, and their experience and personal judgement aligns entirely with the canon, the admiration becomes too academic, impersonal and implausible. The visitor who appreciates and devotes attention to all the works in accordance with their art-historical merit and fame is a victim, pure and simple. To survive the museum, one must be able to walk past El Greco and experience rapture, for example, before an unknown master who, according to art history, is a mere foot soldier in the infantry of art. Thus, art is always a private matter (too). For some types of art, the poles of public availability and private appropriation can be easily reconciled by reproduction: books, records, DVDs and so on. The reproduction frees the work from its material support and from its uniqueness. To experience images, poems, songs and films, one no longer needs public museums, concert halls and libraries. The art has become ‘portable’, and thus capable of intervening violently and unexpectedly in highly specific – and private – situations and places. One can listen to Wagner during a helicopter attack or watch Apocalypse Now while in the bathtub. Some artistic genres, however, including theatre, dance and opera, are more difficult to reproduce, and this applies to the visual arts as well. Of course, most of our knowledge of art comes from reproductions whose originals we may or may not have seen. Often books afford better circumstances for viewing a painting than the context of the original’s display. And sometimes 94

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a piece of music indeed turns out better in recording than in any actual performance or concert. But these considerations notwithstanding, the repro­duction is still primarily recognised for its documentary value and use as a memory aid. An art object remains a unique piece and should be seen or experienced ‘in reality’. And the appropriation of a unique artwork by a collector de facto makes it virtually inaccessible to other people. Privately owned works are exhibited only rarely and/or may have whereabouts unknown; in some cases, their very existence may be unknown. Good-­ quality reproductions are often lacking. Where such works are mediocre, we may have little cause for regret; more difficult to accept is the prospect of important artworks remaining in private ownership forever. This much is apparent from laws preventing the removal of artistic heritage pieces from countries, encouraging long-term loans to public collections and so on. What matters, therefore, is that the most important artworks be ‘public property’, or at least that public collections possess a representative selection of that art considered great. In a remarkable article from 1919 entitled ‘Richtlinien für ein Kunstamt’, Adolf Loos formulates the complex relationship between private ownership and the public significance of art. In what is essentially a blueprint for a cultural policy, Loos states, on the one hand, that concern for (contemporary) art production should be left entirely to private responsibility: ‘The state should not buy art; it is the duty of the citizens to take care of the collections of the future.’2 The state is certainly responsible for setting up and administering museums, which must represent objective cultural value. But a work of art can only be admitted into the museum collection after a consensus has been formed. On the other hand, Loos writes that private collectors should be obliged to loan ‘all objects enlisted as heritage’ – of public value – for exhibition in museums.3 Loos’s basic idea is clear: private art ownership is in 95

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principle (only) justified during that phase of a work’s career in which the significance and value are still uncertain or disputed. Ideally the stay in private ownership is temporary, for it is the task of the museum to rescue the most important art – which as such, in theory, belongs to everyone – from private ownership, and to make it public. In this way the collector’s keenness and passion are instrumental for the common good. The private collector’s passion ultimately fits with the logic of art as an essentially public matter. No doubt collectors’ motives are always mixed and impure, and their willingness to loan works is often driven by speculation. But these ulterior motives dissolve in the role of explorer and trendsetter that (some) collectors take on themselves. Collectors are trailblazers who risk their own time and money by opting to buy recent art or old art that is out of favour. Collectors fulfil a critical function. Just as critics stake their attention and reputations by deciding in favour of specific oeuvres or artists and mediate between artists’ studios and art history, collectors operate in the space between the studios and the museum. New art must first prove itself by gaining notice in circles not connected to the artist. Value judgements by enlightened collectors are a step prior to the consensus needed for the museum institution. Many private collectors themselves do in fact treat collecting as more than a purely private affair, and buy art not based on personal taste alone but with an eye to what may prove important for everyone. A private collection anticipates the museum but is free to deviate from consensus and can wait to be proved right. In this way private collections are a kind of insurance against collective mistakes. The collector is not a curator, and the critic is neither a historian nor an academic. The critic’s understanding is experimental and subjective in the sense that critics use their own experience as a laboratory to find out what a work can bring about in a life. Critics have to interpret their own experience 96

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as ‘generic’. Personal experience provides the proof of a possible experience and a possible understanding, which critics articulate effectively, and thus make accessible to others. The value of their critique is a function of their experience. However, working generically with one’s experience and vision – with what the work brings about or conjures up in someone – is entirely different from formulating personalised or intimate preferences or associ­ ations. What an artwork means for someone is by definition distinct from what an artwork means for me. Therefore, the collector’s private passion, though partaking structurally in the public endeavour called art, does more than engage in public debate. The collector wants to possess (and to live with) artworks – sometimes one work in particular – him or herself. The argument that, contrary to appearances, private art collectors nevertheless work for the art institution overlooks older and more primitive considerations about what ownership implies for the human’s relation to things. What does it imply that (some) works of art belong to the category of things that people want, and are able, to possess? Things that lose their value after being used are fundamentally distinct from things that keep their value – or even gain in value – under the same conditions. When food is consumed, it is gone; but jewels do not fade when worn, nor are paintings worn out by being looked at. Consumables differ from valuables. They have distinct meanings and functions: a mass of consumable goods forms a stock; valuables form a treasure. A stock is not a treasure; building up a stock does not constitute collecting. In archaic societies, valuables were the first means of exchange and the first sign of wealth, precisely because they retained their value. Affluence, in those contexts, amounted to possessing – and living surrounded by – this specific kind of object. In modern societies money has replaced valuables as a means of exchange. Wealth and ownership are measured in terms of money and/or the potential 97

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for buying goods. Wealth equals purchasing power. What it costs to buy something determines its value and meaning. Consuming and possessing goods shows that one can afford them. Nowadays, being rich no longer requires collecting and looking after precious things. And yet the principle that everything is exchangeable has not entirely eliminated that older relation to things. ‘Expensive’ is not equivalent to ‘precious’. Just as, even in our society regulated by contracts and exchange, old-fashioned social ties still govern the private circle of close family and friends, so – also in the private sphere – old meanings and premodern relationships with objects live on. Although social relations are no longer regulated by the principles of gift exchange, the latter do survive as a special practice. Everybody is familiar with the traditional codes determining the nature of gifts and how to give and receive them. We know, for example, that a gift should not consist of consumables or money (there are, of course, exceptions, which are also subject to codes). A present should have value: it should be something that can be kept and preserved. The donor is supposed to choose the gift and present it him or herself. The recipient cannot refuse a present; he or she is obliged to keep and take proper care of it. Losing or breaking a gift can lead to problems. It is forbidden to pass on a gift to another, and even more so to sell one. And, above all, a gift creates a debt repayable only by means of a comparable gift. At the very least, the recipient is expected to render thanks. The gift calls for reciprocity. It thus entails an exchange. This exchange nevertheless differs completely from a purchase or an exchange for money. Paying money comes down to exchanging without consequence, without the implied obligations of the gift economy: the payment immediately annuls the debt incurred by receiving something and dissolves the expectation of mutual dependence.4 The payer does not owe thanks to the person paid – although a word of thanks may be said out of politeness after the sale, 98

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precisely to cover up the scandalously impersonal and noncommittal nature of the transaction. The exchange of presents, by contrast, creates a lasting connection: the gift is meant to become part of the recipient’s ‘treasure’, and thus part of his or her home and life forever. The game of gift and countergift, of reciprocal receiving, thus creates strong and compelling social ties. A gift always imposes itself on the recipient’s life. Receiving an inheritance is no doubt one of the most basic ways of receiving gifts with an obligation. In his essay ‘The Gift’ (‘Essai sur le don’) Marcel Mauss justly remarks that ‘a given thing is not lifeless’.5 A gift is animate: ‘Souls are mingled with objects; objects are mingled with souls. Lives are mingled, and this is how the intermingled people and things transcend their spheres and mingle together.’6 When the value of a thing is not its monetary worth but its preciousness, wealth does not lie simply in the quantity of riches possessed. It is the collection of presents given and received that dictates social status and prestige. The person who receives the most gifts, and is therefore the wealthiest, is also obliged to be the most princely, and manifest his power through generosity. In this sense, wealth is meant not only to be preserved but to be exhibited. It is something with which one must live. Even the more ordinary households often contain a ‘best room’ or a showcase, or else entertain guests at special times to display the precious objects owned. In my view, the gift’s ontological status as an ‘animate object’ offers an important reference point for the peculiar status of the artwork.7 The gift is the prototype of an object that is socially charged and forever connected to a person. The vase will always be Aunt Violet’s vase. The present thereby falls into the class of objects that, for various reasons, are considered animate. Heirlooms are deemed animate, as are portraits: whoever the legal owner of a painting or photo may be, the portrayed person always possesses the portrait. This principle extends to all artworks, and to everything that is 99

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crafted by someone. (This is the source of the taboo on throwing away or selling gifts and the spirit behind the droit de suite for works by living artists sold at auction.) The enduring presence of the maker in his or her creation can be explained in various ways. Theories of artistic expression attempt to distinguish between natural objects that ‘say’ nothing, on the one hand, and made objects that express a feeling or a thought, on the other. The issue of ‘expression’ is theoretically complicated and many of its romantic premises are now highly disputed. It seems noteworthy, however, that the concept of expression is not needed to affirm the ontologically specific nature of the artwork, and of the artist’s presence therein. The ontologically specific nature of the artwork lies in its quasi-archaic status, comparable to that of the precious gift. It is considered animate because it is donated, and not because it expresses something. And, like all gifts, it always establishes a personal and therefore private relationship with the onlooker, and even more directly, with the collector. A characteristic of modern utility objects is that they are mechanically fabricated and sold and bought several times before reaching the end user. These objects come into being and exist without an origin. They are made by ‘no one’ and are thus inanimate. They do not have a soul and therefore do not create a bond between the user and a maker. Artworks, on the contrary, are not treated as ordinary things. They are exceptions to the rule of the soullessness of mechanisation and reproduction. They carry a signature. (It goes without saying that the ‘signature’ can be simulated; there may be parallels here with the way a brand name gives a mythical pseudo-origin to industrial design products, which can be artistically personalised by a signature.) But even hypermodern works of art (and perhaps also some design objects) nevertheless are and remain valuable in a decidedly old-fashioned way, akin to how furniture made by a traditional craftsman retains its value 100

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and preciousness. There is something mysterious about making things; anything ‘made’ by someone is precious. A first sign of this preciousness is durability: things that are quickly used and consumed may be essential but are not precious. Additionally, there is an obligation to preserve made objects because they somehow never stop being the (intellectual, artistic, etc.) property of their maker. Indeed, what someone else has made can never be owned in the full sense of the term and is therefore always somehow ‘received’ as a gift – even when it is paid for. Like the gift, an artwork stands out from the mass of objects in the world; it can be deemed precious just as a person can be held dear. The fact that a collector buys and pays for art does not contradict but rather supports this. Notwithstanding the art market and problematic speculation, the fact of the matter is that a collector does not buy an artwork to resell it. It is precisely the collector who saves a work from the market, in order to possess it forever, to bequeath it to his or her heirs or to donate it to a museum at a later time. The purchase is not a transaction but a commitment. The price of a work is the ticket to exiting the generalised system of exchange. It is akin to buying the artwork’s freedom. For the collector it is a way to regain an archaic relationship with things, where money does not yet exist but where wealth – the passion to possess, as well as envy, meanness and egotism – indeed plays a part. An art collection, therefore, is a form of ‘archaic wealth’: a set of possessions whose required care slows the pace of existence, and that, like a large family or group of friends, fixes and defines a life. Gifts must be kept close. For an artwork to survive, though, it must eschew the interior and the domestic or homelike. It would seem inappropriate to fit art into an interior. Then again, this inappropriateness might unexpectedly present a chance to live with art in the proper way. The idea is not to create a stylish interior but to host a petulant precious object that does not fit 101

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anywhere. It is like something that belongs to someone else but that one nevertheless wants to possess and live with forever, out of an outmoded sort of ‘fidelity to the things that have crossed our life path’, to quote Benjamin. In these late modern times everything is for sale, everything is exchangeable, and yet one can live secretly with what one considers precious and significant.

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8. Being an Artist Is an Art in Itself: On the ‘First Work’ and the Notion of ‘Oeuvre’ It seems unlikely that a society would be able to free itself completely from myth. (Il paraît improbable qu’une société puisse s’affranchir complètement du mythe.) Mircea Eliade

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Within the romantic myth of art, the artwork is presented as something that is not made with (and cannot be understood by) known, generally available means and methods. What is finished and perfect appears as if coming out of nowhere. Nietzsche writes: ‘The perfect shall not have become.’1 This is so because everything whose origin we know and whose making we understand ipso facto seems ‘normal’. It does not come as a surprise; it cannot amaze. When one knows how something came about ‘one will be a little bit off ’.2 As Nietzsche further states: ‘The accomplished art of representation rejects the idea of becoming; it tyrannises as instant perfection.’3 But understanding and explaining how things come into being is precisely the aim of the sciences. And the study of the arts, accordingly, is about understanding how a work of art was created. It seeks to elucidate (so as to normalise) and unmask the myth of inspiration and genius. Insiders know that the whole trope of ‘inspiration’ is indeed a fabrication; they know well that the artistic imagination produces as many mediocre and bad ideas as good ones, and that in reality everything depends on the craftsmanship and critical sense of the artist, who chooses raw materials, selects and deletes, arranges and so on. But artists benefit from the widely held notion that an artwork ‘falls from heaven’.4 Aside perhaps from a few good-looking references made publicly, artists do not allow viewers behind the scenes of their work and take special care to conceal its real origins. It is always after the fact that a work turns out to be an artist’s ‘first work’, and thus, a beginning. Beginnings are always significant: the first of a series, an opening sentence, the first time. A beginning is indeed seen as the origin, the source of everything that follows, the seed (germ, embryo, etc.) out of which everything has grown. The beginning is – in hindsight – the clue to reading what comes afterwards, and the basis on which every­thing could have been predicted. Every beginning is the manifestation of an exceptional, 104

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unusual force. Gods and ghosts alike watch over beginnings. To tell a beginning is therefore always to retell an old story; it is a myth. When we speak of an artwork as a ‘first work’, we tap into an ancient set of overlapping and intertwining meanings. It must be noted, first and foremost, that my aim is not to demythologise. For what is the use of doing so if the meaning of first works lies precisely in their relation to that origin myth, which is the very thing that needs explaining? The notions of creativity and originality are certainly part of the ‘diffuse mythology of modern man’, and it is indeed important to detect and to point out the persistence of old meanings: ‘laicised, degraded, camouflaged, myths and mythical images are everywhere: one has only to recognise them.’5 The notion of the ‘first work’ is not just permeated by mythical meaning. It is – to use a psychoanalytic term – overdetermined: covered over with multiple layers of meaning that are not logically interconnected or linked in a narrative, and that may even be incompatible or in conflict with one another. Meanings are stacked one on top of the other or merged to the point of rendering the whole unintelligible. I will highlight two layers of meaning that determine the notion and interpretation of the first work. One is the first work as evidence of authentic artistry; the other is the first work as the origin of an oeuvre. The institutional art theory is one of the major accomplishments of art criticism and art theory of the last decades. This theory, artistically tested by artists from Duchamp to Warhol and the conceptual artists and by art phil­ osophers such as Arthur Danto before being fully developed in art sociology and critical theory, argues that something counts as art if a person, who holds the position of artist (or curator) within the institutional field of art, has baptised it as such.6 The artistic status of a work hinges on a performative – and thus an institutionally framed – statement. Art comes into being when 105

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an artist makes something, does something or says something that he or she succeeds in calling art. As a result, the concept of art is separated from that of craftsmanship, from material and techniques and from so-called aesthetic qualities or beauty. A work of art can be mediocre and uninteresting without being less artistic on that account. At the same time somebody may be making incredibly beautiful things that do not count as art, simply because they are produced outside the art institution by someone not considered an artist. The importance of the institutional art theory lies not only in its lucid and adequate description of the specific conditions of contemporary art practice but also in its contribution to a self-conscious artistic production, which integrates a sharp and critical awareness of its institutional context, and often intends to change the workings of the art institution itself. Indeed, it is impossible to make art today without realising that artistry implies a social and intellectual position or that each work necessarily constitutes institutionalised art. Aside from a specific understanding of art’s context, the institutional theory also contains a theory of artistry: an artist is a person who succeeds in taking up the institutional position of the artist. In that sense all known artists – good, bad or mediocre, interesting or not – are successful by ­defin­ition. Artistry does not, after all, require exceptional skills or char­ acteristics, nor does it presuppose any special background or education. Theoretically, anyone can operate as an artist. Being accepted as such – the mere fact that one seems capable of holding the position – seems ­s ufficient. Here, however, the institutional art(ist) theory betrays a significant blind spot, which may prove relatively unproblematic, since it does not affect the functioning of art and artist, but which still bears existential consequences. The theory effectively explains how art functions and how artists are 106

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recognised but sheds little light on what it entails to be an artist, how artistry begins or how someone becomes an artist. By its definition, an artist is just someone who can operate successfully within the institutional field of art and/or who successfully performs as an artist. Who can claim artistry when such a claim – or so it seems – can only be justified by the actual assumption of and success in that position? I do not mean to contest the position of established artists but simply to make the point that none of the pretexts with which they once sneaked into the art institution – such as being able to draw well, having attended art school, being exceptional personalities and so on – were valid. Those who begin to self-identify as artists and want to convince others that they make art are usurpers and they know it. These hopefuls are frauds pretending to be artists, whose ruse must last until they have produced enough art – that is, convincing evidence of a bona fide artistry. The beginning of the artistic trajectory is fraught with fears of being unmasked and insecurities about one’s own artistry. Such doubt is structural and authentic. When artistry is (nothing more than) an institutional position, one can indeed never really, fully, simply be an artist for oneself. There are many ways of dealing with being an artist. One is to make art out of this doubt itself, using it as a kind of step stool, which can be knocked away once the artist is safely ‘inside’. Immendorff, for instance, made a painting in 1971 with the following message: ‘I wanted to be an artist: I dreamed of being in the newspaper, of many exhibitions, and of course I wanted to do something “new” in art. My guiding principle was selfishness.’ (‘Ich wollte Künstler werden: Ich träumte davon, in der Zeitung zu stehen, von vielen Ausstellungen, und natürlich wollte ich etwas “Neues” in der Kunst machen. Mein Leitfaden war der Egoismus.’) The young Jan Fabre made a video of forty Flemish artists, each reading a few lines of the story ‘The 107

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Emperor’s New Clothes’. And one of his first theatrical performances, The Power of Theatrical Madness (De macht der theaterlijke dwaasheden) (1984), has two naked emperors dancing a duet. Like the emperor in the story, the artist is always naked. I believe that in art history and art criticism, up to the present day, the first work functions as a fig leaf covering this primordial ‘nudity’ of the artist. It is owing to the lack of justification for the beginning of (modern or contemporary) artistry that a regressive romantic artist theory, which naturalises artistry, remains accepted and widespread today. Where the institutional theory fails plausibly to address a question, the romantic theory supplies an answer, and the very availability of the latter seems adequate compensation for its naivety and contradictions. The romantic conception holds that artistry is not predicated on successfully playing the part of or pretending to be an artist but, on the contrary, that successfully playing the artist is predicated on already being an artist – that is, on being one ‘by nature’. An innate quality or predisposition is what ultimately legitimises taking the position. Being such by nature means that one is an artist regardless of the game and regardless of the institution – that one was already an artist before participating in the game. The first work marks this artistry-before-the-art: it is a premonition. It reveals a destiny. It is a work that pre-dates any knowledge of what ‘art’ is. The first work therefore constitutes an origin, a new beginning: it is the repetition of a founding gesture, which preceded the ‘history of art’. It affirms that there is art because there are artists, not vice versa. If art had not yet existed, then this artist would have invented it.

Figure 8.1  Jorg Immendorff, Ich wollte Künstler werden, 1971 – Courtesy Galerie Michael Werner 108

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The myth of artistry dates to antiquity, was reinvented in the Renaissance by Vasari in his Vite and (in the Low Countries) by Van Mander, De Bie and Houbraken, and survives into the present day in the traditional life-­andoeuvre-monographs about artists.7 Telling the story of art and artistry always requires a beginning. All artists’ biographies draw on a limited stock of triedand-true topoi, which includes the story of ‘how it all began’. From Giotto to Picasso we find variations on a common formula: a boy with precocious natural talent, who draws beautifully, all by himself, until he is discovered ‘by chance’ by a teacher-painter, who realises he has nothing more to teach his pupil, and is so overwhelmed that he gives up making art himself.8 At the age of sixteen, Picasso already painted at least as well as his father, a profess­ ional academic painter, who humbly acknowledged the boy’s talent and laid down his own brush. The anecdote of the miraculous first work, recognised by a peer, from which the future vocation of the artist can be divined, is a staple of many artists’ biographies. With the advent of modern art, however, and its view of artistry as a matter no longer of possessing exceptional abilities or craftsmanship but of judging relevance within an institutional and discursive context, these stories lose their cogency. The mythical first work can indeed never be a ‘conceptual’ work, as this would presuppose the existence of the art institution. The first work is naive by definition; it can never be ‘modern’ or ‘contemporary’. What is specific to biographies of modern and contemporary artists is that this first work, made before the artist knew what art was, must immediately be filtered out (only to crop up later in retrospective exhibitions and publications). This is necessarily the case because the first work proves that the artist has/had the ability to make good ‘traditional’ art effortlessly, before finding his or her own way in art. The first work thus shows what someone is capable of. It shows talent, quality, commitment: ‘an indication of his future accomplishments [. . .] evidence of 110

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the early completion of uniqueness’.9 (Someone whose first work is a conceptual piece may be clever, and have a knack for playing the institutional game, but is not a ‘real’ artist.) In this way the first work detaches itself from the oeuvre; it stands out. It precedes an oeuvre and shows what the artist brings with him or her from the time before art. Let us consider, for instance, ­Warhol’s paintings of interiors from the 1940s, before he was ‘Warhol’. Other cases in point are Giacometti’s first classical self-portraits and Marcel Duchamp’s ‘youthful works’. What good paintings these are! Indeed, how well they painted! A modern artist does not just make works: he or she creates an oeuvre whose significance as a whole exceeds the sum of its individual parts. An oeuvre, in its primary definition, refers to the totality of the material production by an artist. These are the works he or she has exhibited or sold, as well as all so-called side-works, such as preparatory sketches, studies and try-outs. To the art historian and critic, these are equally a part of the oeuvre: the oeuvre is the artist’s total creative output. This notion of oeuvre is linked to the evolution of nineteenth-century art history and its methods, and especially to the development of various techniques of reproduction. Considering and critically evaluating an oeuvre indeed presupposes an inventory and/or an overview. The inventory assumes a basic systematic infrastructure for research and publication. The overview requires tools for virtually collecting artworks scattered throughout the world. The oeuvre becomes visible and exists (only) in catalogues, documentation and retrospective publi­ cations. Typically, few people have seen an artist’s entire oeuvre. But an artist’s name and reputation, and the understanding of that artist’s works, has depended since the nineteenth century on the (entire) oeuvre, ordered chronologically, structured as a ‘development’ and explained in relation to a biography. 111

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With the notion of the oeuvre, art history and criticism adopted a perspective unfamiliar to the old masters. The reputations of the latter did not rest on their ‘oeuvre’ but always on ‘masterpieces’, representative of the kind of work or genre at which they excelled. Of course, the old masters also had ways of keeping track of their own work, including studies and sketches. Print production was an important medium for making artists, and works, known. But the works themselves disappeared, spread throughout the world. An artist had no way to oversee the sum of his accomplishments, let alone imagine that his fame and success would depend on a ‘God’s eye’ view of his oeuvre. Only rarely were artists able to view their oeuvres in a format akin to the now-customary retrospective exhibition. Still, they did develop certain kinds of oeuvre consciousness. One of the most wellknown early examples is Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis, an album in which the painter meticulously redrew all the paintings that left his atelier, kept track of the buyers and so on. The book, which ended up in the Queen of England’s collection, provided Lorrain with an overview of his life’s work. One can only speculate how he viewed it and what it meant for him. But the fact remains that here, as in similar early examples of self-archived oeuvres, the view afforded was a private and secret one. Such an imaginary overview and confrontation of dispersed works is fascinating and revealing but cannot be compared to an artistic production as it exists publicly in the world today, where it invites interpretation and critical response. The oeuvre is indeed made visible, but it is not made public. The practice of keeping a Liber Veritatis does not anticipate the (modern) idea that the proper object of understanding and appreciation in art is the oeuvre as a whole. Faced with the historicising approach to art, artists from the nineteenth century on have gradually adopted into their practice the notion of the oeuvre 112

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from art-historical analysis and art criticism. They have internalised it and taken it as a reference point. In realising that everything they make will someday become part of their oeuvre, artists have developed a modern oeuvre consciousness, and started to manage and conceive of their artistic production in these terms. This includes controlling their material production, destroying works that are inconsistent with the oeuvre, and carefully managing the public dissemination of information and works, to the point of taking over, from art studies, the task of documenting. Artists now make their own inventories and catalogues, keep their own records and publicise their oeuvres themselves. But the catch is that the artist always undertakes this project too late, after the fact. The artist starts constructing his or her oeuvre only after attaining a certain renown and determining where he or she wants (or, better still, is able) to go with the work. The oeuvre as a construct here differs from the basic notion of the oeuvre as the totality of material production. It is thus that the ‘beginning’ arises as a particular problem to be resolved. The beginning needs to fit – that is, it must present a convincing starting point to a coherent and logically built oeuvre. And yet the first work is always selected after the fact, just as the first stone of a building is always laid after construction has begun. In selecting the first work, the artist must dismiss as an ‘early mistake’ those initial works secretly held on to or left behind in the world where they might one day resurface; this is imperative, for such works do not correctly anticipate what follows and thus threaten the integrity of the oeuvre. Magritte, for instance, by indicating his own beginning, or the moment in which he ‘found himself ’, banished previously painted works – including academic pieces and cubist-like experiments – from his oeuvre. If we were to ask an artist explicitly about his or her first work, the response would surely be made up – that is, it would consist of what he or 113

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she considers the best possible answer. The answer would be one that ‘fits’. The task would then be to interpret the strategy adopted by the artist to deflect this trick question. Of such strategies, which range from presenting proof of a natural artistry to indicating the beginning of the oeuvre, perhaps the most tempting, albeit the trickiest, is to let the beginning of the oeuvre coincide with the first work in the totality of material production. The ambitious implicit claim is then that the oeuvre, which must necessarily be interesting for and relevant to a modern and/or contemporary art practice, was already present in nucleo in a piece the artist created early on, even as a child, completely by him or herself, before knowing the ‘art world’ existed. In this way not only artistry but also the (contemporary) oeuvre is naturalised, or as Roland Barthes might say, mythologised. An artist’s artistry and his or her oeuvre are then indeed not institutionally framed, constructed and arbitrary; they originate in an inside, where the artist is completely him or herself. This means that the most cunning artists are those who succeed in providing, with a single first work, two answers at once: ‘Look how well I could draw when I was still young and innocent and ignorant!’; and, with that same drawing: ‘Look how all I have done and proven so far was already present in nucleo in this child’s work!’ Being an artist is an art in itself. All this explains why the artist is structurally unreliable as a ‘researcher’: he or she has different, more vital interests than Truth. Nietzsche writes that, when it comes to Truth, the artist has a ‘weaker morality’: ‘He apparently fights for the Higher Values and Meanings, but in reality he does not want to give up the foundations for his success.’10 What matters for artists is never the Truth in se but success as an artist and the realisation of an oeuvre. And the artist will say and do whatever it takes to achieve these goals. Thus, it seems that, in the end, art works more for building 114

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collective memory than for research. The kind of work that art performs is not aimed at progress and the development of new knowledge but at bringing back and ruminating on what we have forgotten or understood but not yet ­processed.

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9. Double-Speak We cannot think without assuming that reality is different than we thought. Cornelis Verhoeven, De symboliek van de sluier All: Lights, lights, lights! Shakespeare, Hamlet Roland Barthes states: ‘[The] sort of distortion caused by the time between writing and reading is the very challenge of what we call literature: the work read is anachronistic.’1 It is true that reading comes after writing, and that one can contemplate a painting only after it is finished. The reader or onlooker arrives too late, after the fact. Understanding a work, then, seems to require 116

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going back in time. But Barthes’s statement needs to be completed. His claim about time must also be rendered in spatial metaphors. The reading not only comes ‘afterwards’ but also happens ‘elsewhere’, in a different context. Understanding a work seems to require returning to the place where it originates, to its source. Barthes’s statement, moreover, needs to be amended. The shift in time and place does not simply coincide with the shift or turn from writing to reading. The ‘distortion’ caused by time and relocation primarily concerns the difference between two quite different forms of reading. What is lost in the distortion is not so much, or not only, ‘l’écriture’ (or what some may call authorial intent) but the possibility of reading at the place of writing: an intimate or first reading, set in the context of personal or intimate relationships and the exchange between specific people. Paul Valéry states that writing is not about expressing meanings but about choosing words carefully. An author never controls the meaning of what he or she writes, and the interpretation, therefore, should not try to get into the author’s head. Understanding the meaning of a text is not about guessing intentions; what an author or artist intended is never decisive. Let us, indeed, agree that the endless drift of interpretation cannot be halted by appealing to the author’s authority. But even so, the interpretation (or what has been termed ‘theory’) maintains an awkward, ambivalent relation to a kind of clarity and distinctiveness that precedes it. The interpretation is always preceded by (the possibility of) a particular reading or understanding that is not just one of the many possible, competing interpretations. While we may accept that authors do not have privileged access to what their texts mean, we must also concede that authors and their intimates do have privileged access to what the texts mean for them (or to their private circle), for they are able to read from the place of writing. That private meaning certainly differs from the literary meaning but is still more than just a confusing homonym. 117

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The question is, how does the literary meaning of a text relate to what that text can mean for ‘somebody’? A passage in Paul Valéry’s pseudo-Platonic dialogue ‘Eupalinos ou l’arch­ itecte’ presents the problem. Socrates’ interlocutor, Phaedrus, recalls a conversation in which Eupalinos told him the following: Look, Phaedrus [. . .], this little temple that I built for Hermes, a few steps from here, if you knew what it means for me! Where the passer-by sees only an elegant chapel – it is [a small thing]: four columns, a quite simple style – I remembered a bright day in my life. O sweet metamorphosis! This delicate temple, no one knows, is the mathematical image of a girl from Corinth whom I happily loved. It faithfully reproduces her particular proportions. For me it is alive! It gives me back what I gave.2 Valéry shows how a work can carry a private meaning for the author and a few initiates, and how this possibility can be precisely what the work is ‘really’ about: a private meaning hidden in a work. This secret (which ‘no one knows’, ‘where the passer-by sees only an elegant chapel’) makes the work double. To the passer-by and the architecture critic the little temple is probably ‘a small thing’, but to the author it is a memorial to bygone happiness. A piece of architecture – which, after all, involves the least mimetic and communicative of the arts – can therefore carry, at its point of origin, a highly specific or precise meaning that explains essential characteristics of the work but completely eludes later readers (who may not even suspect that something 118

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eludes them, or that such a different, intimate reading is possible). How does such a theoretical or critical reading or interpretation relate to Eupalinos’ understanding? Let us consider the well-known case of Gustave Courbet’s Wounded Man (Portrait de l’artiste or L’Homme blessé).3 The painting depicts a mortally wounded man leaning against a tree trunk with a dagger beside him. Radiography has revealed that the left arm and the hand grasping the mantle were painted over an image of a woman resting on the shoulder of her lover. It is clear from this discovery that Courbet, in altering the painting, intended to overlay an image of happiness with the tragic end of a love story. Time and a personal experience – Courbet himself endured a tragic rupture – led to his adding a ‘second layer’ to the painting, literally covering up the past. What is the status of the reading of that picture by Courbet and his intimates, who were privy to these events and knew what the dark scene of the wounded man concealed? And what is the status of every contemporary interpretation that opts to deal with the ‘work itself ’ and/or is not informed of what the image hides? Solving the problem of interpretation by appealing to ‘the maker’s intent’ is too easy: to do so presupposes a continuity between the reading here and now and the writing then, as if the two were complementary and parallel positions. It is obvious that in the cases of Eupalinos and Courbet – and in the myriad other examples that could be adduced – what precedes the interpretation is not an authorial intention or understanding of the work but a preliterary knowledge of a private context where the text or work was used to speak indirectly. There is no continuity between this original, private context and the literary or artistic context that supersedes it. And yet the ‘literary reading’ still reaches for, and succeeds in touching, that ‘first reading’ in certain ways. 119

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A dedication offers an initial hint. It makes explicit that the dedicated work, despite being printed for the public and read by the-author-will-neverknow-who, has a first, ‘privileged’ reader designated by the author. The dedication, however, does not turn the book into a letter or a private message; a text is subject to infinite reinterpretation: ‘it has a meaning (or meanings) that goes far beyond his address; however much I write your name on my work, it is for “them” that it was written (others, the readers).’4 Strictly speaking, it is impossible to reserve a work for someone; the real gift is limited to the dedication itself. But this does not prevent the dedication from notifying ordinary literary readers that not all readings and readers are equal. The author of the novel I am reading writes for me-as-reader, of course, but not for me as me. The general reader can never embody the position suggested by the dedication. His or her specific reading is not foreseen or anticipated in the book; he or she is confined to producing one of the many possible readings or interpretations. A dedication suggests that the author or artist already had a particular reader or onlooker in mind during the writing or making. Even the practice of addressing or directing a work or text can be undertaken covertly, so that ‘no one [else] knows’ that it was written for (or against) its addressee. The text then secretly functions in a double mode. Eupalinos used the little temple in a private context, for himself, without hindering its autonomous function as a piece of architecture and a genuine object of architectural criticism. What he designed as a public building was simultaneously marked as a place, known only to him and perhaps a few intimates, for stashing away his secret. But this secret meaning hidden in the work differs essentially from what Eupalinos could write to or ‘tell’ his lover or friends, just as a love poem Figure 9.1  Gustave Courbet, L’Homme blessé, 1844–54, Musée d’Orsay, Paris 120

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differs from a love letter. Art and literature consist in a ‘meaning’ that is not ‘said’ but ‘made’; writing a poem or making an artwork creates the possibility of oblique speech, of speaking indirectly via the writing, of secretly exposing a private message. Indeed, in addition to having multiple meanings, a text can function in several modes at once, and these cannot always be kept separate. It is thus rather difficult to isolate a pure literary reading. The back channel of the work creates the unique possibility of speaking without being heard; it opens an avenue for intimacy and private interaction, including the complicit exchange of coded messages and secrets. The text or work exposes and hides, and hides by exposing. The writing establishes a secure, free space where the author is present but shielded from responsibility and incapable of being addressed: I never say what I made. The relation of a text or work to the act of saying is thus that of a pseudonym to a real name or of a mask or veil to a face.5 The work inserts itself, and ensures a disconnect, between the author and the reader. The literary reading always comes too late and always registers – even without a dedication – (the possibility of) that ‘first’ reading. It is aware of being excluded: the author’s connection with the literary reader is imaginary; it is never the real connection enjoyed by the first reader(s). (This probably leads to, not a definition, but a criterion of recognition of art and literature: a study on amino acids or on concrete structures may be dedicated to the author’s parents or beloved, but the scientific text cannot overtly be addressed to peers and, at the same time, secretly convey a hidden meaning to intimates. A literary text, by contrast, is a text that can always (also) be used and function (as a literary text) in a non-literary way, and for that matter, probably never be read as purely literary – that is, without the reader somehow being aware of a lost ‘secret’/origin.) It is one thing to comment generally on the possible double use of a text or work; it is another to determine the exact relevance of that first reading in 122

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a specific case. Literary and art theorists and scholars are typically not keen on the snooping around done by the historians in their respective fields. A reader who deliberately eschews interpretation based on the author’s life or intentions will dismiss the first biographical reading as preliterary and anecdotal, or at most accept it as one of many readings, relevant only for understanding the history of the work. But granted that the first private reading cannot take precedence over the literary interpretation, the first context is nevertheless not just one of many, equal to all the others. Similarly, historians cannot simply say what follows from the discovery that Valéry, when writing the Eupalinos, was engaged in a complicated love affair with Catherine Pozzi (and that ‘Moderne’ is also the name of a hotel in Paris), or from the discovery of the underpainting in The Wounded Man. The original context stands apart from all other interpretations because it signals an instance where the text was used differently. And it appears that this meaning of the text as (secretly) addressed to a specific person – someone whose (anticipated) reading was considered in the writing – haunts the subsequent literary readings. The truth in question here, although certainly not that sought by the interpretation, nevertheless disrupts the latter. First of all, it appears that no interpretation, no matter how methodically and theoretically grounded, can avoid contamination by external or incidental facts, details and circumstances, including biographical elements. This is so because every theoretically based interpretation of an autonomous work of art, insofar as it concerns an artefact with an origin, and therefore the product of a series of (conscious or unconscious) decisions, will leave an unexplained remainder that must be accounted for somehow. It is difficult to discard a concrete, biographical reference or an external or private circumstance that explains exactly why the work is one way and not another. Thus, although architectural theory and history no doubt have meaningful and interesting 123

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things to say about Eupalinos’ little temple, whereas the elements introduced in his confession about the origin of the monument’s proportions seem theoretically irrelevant, the latter, once known, are difficult to ignore in the interpretation of the work. Similarly, we can draw meaningful conclusions about Courbet’s picture based solely on the romantic codes of portraiture and landscape painting, without knowledge of the underpainting. But how can we dismiss the given that the overpainted work explains the wounded man’s pose and facial expression (e.g. his closed eyes)? A text or artwork is not a smoothly polished, autonomous meaning construct, fit to be read and inter­ preted in isolation. There is more. The awareness of the lost possibility of a first reading exposes the structural weakness of any interpretation. There is no doubt a pleasure in invention and creativity, in exploring a text through different theoretical lenses, in trying out diverse perspectives. But the obverse of this principle underscoring the richness of multiple meanings, whereby every intelligent interpretation is interesting and adds to the pleasure of variety, is that no single interpretation can be ‘right’. The first reading, on the other hand, fascinates with its promise of directness and clarity. The undecidable, playful nature of every interpretation thus not only affords a feeling of freedom and intellectual pleasure but also stirs rivalry in the face of the crude ‘biographical’ reading that it holds in such low esteem (but that has the advantage of knowing ‘this’ means ‘that’). Knowing what the little temple meant for Eupalinos does not make for just another interesting interpretation or possible perspective on his work, much less offer the kind of insights sought by architectural theorists and critics. And yet his private reading holds a privileged status. We are familiar with the ‘pleasure of the text’, the play of meaning and signifiers outside a compelling pragmatic or political or moral context. But 124

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the literary reading and the contemplation of art, even to the most deeply engaged and serious-minded reader or onlooker, is far removed from life itself. The capacity for a literary or aesthetic experience to put someone at risk, or become part of someone’s life, can never match the intensity of its preliterary origin. How did Catherine Pozzi read the Eupalinos? How would Beatrice have read Dante’s poems? How would Kafka’s father have read the letter from his son? No doubt these readings would not be considered genuine literary interpretations, nor could they function as exemplars, and yet their significance would gloriously outstrip that of any literary, respectful, ‘correct’ approach to the texts. The attraction of the first reading as an impossible, forbidden model and a challenge to every interpretation finds its mirror image in the literary reading that seeks no longer to interpret but to appropriate the text or work for private use. Here, again, the practice of dedication is illustrative: the dedicatee will succeed in detecting, behind any ‘general’ understanding of the text or image, a clear and precise message. Unlike a literary interpretation, such a private reading, in which ‘this’ simply means ‘that’, can give the work an intense agency in life. The appeal of this scandalous abuse of literature and art, comparable to the pornographic use of the artistic nude, is evidenced by its frequent enactment – for example, by romantic couples reading love poetry – and depiction – for example, in the play-within-the-play in Hamlet. Hamlet, in the closing soliloquy of Act II, complains about the players, who are able to make themselves weep, ‘but in a fiction, in a dream of passion’, for a fictional character, ‘all for nothing’, while all he himself feels, in the midst of a real drama, is an unwillingness and an inability to speak: ‘And (I) can say nothing.’6 This gives him the idea to speak ‘indirectly’, through the fiction of the theatre. The play about the murder of the Duke of Gonzaga in Vienna is slightly modified at his request and staged before the court. The 125

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play-within-the-play exposes – or rather, transposes – the murder of Hamlet’s father and the betrayal by his mother. It is only a play, of course, ‘a knavish piece of work’ – ‘the story is extant, and writ in choice Italian’ – and since Hamlet and the king ‘are free souls, it touches [them] not’.7 Nevertheless, Shakespeare’s play illustrates a particular use of the stage: for Hamlet and the king, the performance is not a theatre piece that invites ‘interpretation’ but a mask that hides a private space in which meaning is clearly governed by intentions. And this clarity can trigger a real drama. This kind of appropriation and shameless abuse of literature, like the circumstances of the writing and the first reading, makes us realise the artificiality and frivolity of every ‘pure’ literary reading. For these reasons, the biography remains both a perennial source of temptation and a trap. The structural weakness of interpretation, the irresistible draw of fact-based meaning and the fascination with how the text can be used are all factors that encourage non-literary readings. Such readings, however, tend to undo the works they read. The directness of the explanation (e.g. via formulas such as ‘this is really about that’) hinders the text’s or artwork’s ability to exist as such; it parasitises and squanders the space and possibilities inherent to these kinds of creation. Writing produces texts, but reading is what resists unmasking and insists that meaning be re-elaborated out of the work itself – a dynamic that is fundamental for literature and art. What gives rise to the linguistic object that is a literary text, as distinct from a letter or a private or public message, is the ‘late reading’, along with writing directed toward this kind of reading. The literary text is a written text, but a text said by no one, not even by its ‘author’. That is why interpretation never comes to an end. Despite being a thing unto itself, the text or artwork never gains the autonomy and independence ascribed to it in principle by the interpretation; it can never quite fulfil the reasonable expectation of meaning 126

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something specific. Yet it seems to come close to doing so when biographical elements are at stake. The structure of literary reading, therefore, calls for ‘respect’: re-spicere, looking away. To respect is to avert one’s eyes from what is exposed and excessively visible – although the ability to do so is predicated on first seeing too much. This looking away occurs in the belief that the thing hidden, contrary to what the fact of hiding might suggest, is not some key to fixing meaning in the text. A literary reading, consequently, is never more than a dynamic, corrective movement toward a full literary interpretation, and as such, is always impure. As Phaedrus tells it, he did not reply to Eupalinos’ confession by further questioning either the girl and her proportions or his interlocutor’s memories. He ‘respected’ what he was told – that is, he looked away – and steered the conversation back to the architecture and how it was supposed to be experienced. ‘So, this is why it is inexplicably graceful,’ I said to him. ‘You can clearly sense the presence of a person, the first flower of a woman, the harmony of a charming being [. . .] it vaguely awakens a memory that cannot come to an end and this beginning of an image that you possess in perfection does not fail to touch the soul and confuse it. Do you know that whenever I sink in thought, I will compare it to some nuptial song mixed with flutes, which I feel coming up in me.’ 8 The peculiarity of the temple (i.e. what makes it not just a building but a real work of architecture), and by analogy, of the literary text, is that it evokes only the beginning of the image proper to the first reading. The peculiarity of the 127

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genuine literary reading, in turn, is that the reader does not possess this image. The induced awareness of a vague recollection, coupled with Phaedrus’ ‘turning away’ (and not an accurate reconstruction by him of what the temple might mean for its creator), led Eupalinos to exclaim: ‘You were meant to understand me! No one has come closer to my daemon than you.’9 The literary text or the artwork establishes a cross-link between the scandalous agency of the work in real life and the opposite movement of the dissolution or transformation of what is existentially real and intimate in or behind invented meaning. This is why it is no more possible to target a literary text or an artwork with a pure and adequate interpretation than it is to ride a bicycle sitting upright. The reader, like the cyclist, must wobble back and forth, passing continuously through the imaginary axis of balance.

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Part III Elementary Aesthetics

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10. On Splendour and Modern Beauty Whether you come from heaven or from hell, who cares, O Beauty! Huge, fearful, ingenuous monster! If your regard, your smile, your foot, open for me An Infinite I love but have not ever known? From God or Satan, who cares? Angel or Siren, Who cares, if you make, – fay with the velvet eyes, Rhythm, perfume, glimmer; my one and only queen! The world less hideous, the minutes less leaden?

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(Que tu viennes du ciel ou de l’enfer, qu’importe, Ô Beauté! monstre énorme, effrayant, ingénu! Si ton œil, ton souris, ton pied, m’ouvrent la porte D’un Infini que j’aime et n’ai jamais connu? De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirène, Qu’importe, si tu rends – fée aux yeux de velours, Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! – L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?) Charles Baudelaire, ‘Hymne à la Beauté’ Beauty is the key word of Western aesthetics. Beyond the aesthetic gaze admiring ‘autonomous beauty’, however, it is possible to detect other, archaic forms or ways of relating to the striking ‘first appearance’ of things – for example, ‘splendour’ or ‘brilliance’. Splendour stands for a surplus in the presence of things. This surplus resides in the fact that something ‘shows itself ’, as if bearing in itself the condition of becoming visible. Splendour transforms and elevates the beautiful thing into an ‘appearance’ that detaches itself from its environment and stands out against the everyday. It sparkles or shines and is a source of light. Its glare is not a light that falls on things. It radiates from the inside out; it is not only seen but almost felt: it implies an aura. Splendour glorifies; it transforms an object into a sun, a source of light, and makes the beautiful magnificent: grand and rich, independent and sovereign.1 The beautiful radiates; it reaches beyond itself, and thereby intensifies its presence. All premodern and traditional cultures use splendour as a sign and as an instrument of power. Mightiness cannot hide; being mighty requires making 132

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one’s existence tangible where one is absent. Power must impose its presence by controlling and displaying force but also by displaying fullness and abundance, by showing off.2 Radiance, spreading and wasting light, is not simply a conventional symbol but a manifestation of overflow and dissipation, and therefore a privileged means of making power felt. The king is a source of light and loves fireworks. A source of light does not look: the king radiates before he watches. The oldest figure of the visual rhetoric of power is therefore not the perspectivist, ordering royal eye, but, more primitively, radiance and the theology and metaphysics of light.3 There is a second, premodern kind of splendour, whereby the power of brilliance is deployed within a self-defensive strategy: splendour protects by dazzling and covering. In that context, the presumption is the dangerous, ambiguous power of the gaze.4 The human gaze pierces forward, makes contact and penetrates. Looking is a kind of touching and it appropriates what is looked at. The gaze transforms what it sees. All cultures consider the ‘first glance’ in particular to be extremely powerful and dangerous. That is why the human body and in particular the face – where the person is most exposed and most vulnerable – is protected from being looked at. It has, first and foremost, the ability to look back, and so to chase the hostile gaze away. But to do so is risky because the gaze always contradicts itself as well: an eye is not just a black hole, but at the same time a shining and sparkling and therefore fascinating object, which attracts and holds looks. Returning a glance, and looking the other in the eyes, is a risky defensive strategy! Consequently, all societies cover and protect faces and bodies – especially those of their defenceless women – with splendour. The dangerous first glance is thus caught, scattered and deflected by shiny hairstyles, glimmering and scintillating earrings and necklaces, rings and bracelets on the hands and arms, glittery clothing, labyrinthine lace veils, weird sunglasses and so 133

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on. The magical origin of beautification is most evident in objects with an obvious symbolic charge: pearls or shells, jewellery in the form of phalluses and vulva figurines, decorations with spirals and labyrinth motifs. But, inevitably, what is used for protection also activates the power inherent in the splendour: the finery also intensifies presence. In any case, the appearance is made to stand out for a reason: splendour is not meant to be enjoyed gratuitously, purely aesthetically. Whether to dominate or to defend, splendour strengthens the existence and presence of something considered valuable and important. Medieval philosophy and theology integrated the notion of splendour into metaphysics and mysticism: the good, the true and the beautiful are thus ontologically linked. All that is good and true cannot but exist in glory and beauty. Goodness and Truth radiate Beauty. The insight that the reverse is not true is thematised in moral literature but not in medieval aesthetics. It is a matter of experience: not everything (or everybody) that looks wonderful and gorgeous is good and true. Looks can be deceiving: beauty is superficial and does not last long; it covers up the monstrous and the horrific. ‘Do you come from Heaven or rise from the abyss, Beauty? [. . .] Do you come from the stars or rise from the black pit?’5 Catholic mannerist and baroque aesthetics and Protestant iconoclasm both recognise this ambiv­ alence; however, only the former takes the risk of legitimising an edifying use of beauty and splendour. But even a perspective like the latter, that mistrusts beauty still sees it as related to the way things are, and thus as related to truth. In the history of Western culture, the matter has been neutralised and settled by a double movement associated – pour faire vite – with Immanuel Kant and the tradition of academicism. From the growing conviction that the beauty experience was disinterested and autonomous came the idea 134

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that art was autonomous and should be made for its own sake. Beauty is not supposed to mean something or serve a purpose or yield a profit. Beauty does not reveal how things are in themselves, and thus cannot be onto­ l­ogically true or false, and is not necessarily related to the realm of values and morals. This subjectivisation and autonomisation of beauty, however, coincided with the introduction of a new aesthetic category that became highly popular in theory in the 1990s: the sublime.6 The sublime, theorised by Edmund Burke and Kant, took over the truth claims now denied to beauty. Burke characterises the sublime as the odd, delightful shudder felt by the indifferent, inhuman presence of the ocean, the starry sky, high mountains and so on, which dwarf us and instil a sense of menace. The sublime appeals to the primitive drive for self-preservation, which runs deeper than the social passions triggered by attractiveness. For Kant the experience of the sublime indicates a failure and an inability: when the imagination fails to come up with a synthesising form, this inability summons the (incomprehensible) idea of what lies beyond the imaginable: the infinite. In this way, the thinking itself reveals a gap, and contains an experience of groundlessness, which is as sublime as a view of the Alps. Kant promoted a notion of the sublime as the cognitive experience of running into the limits of the imaginable, the limits of representation. His thought influenced the post-­ structuralist sublime, which became the dominant aesthetic category of the late twentieth century. Humans themselves, and the things they make, can be beautiful, perhaps, but not sublime. How could we think that what we make ourselves is ‘true’? The aesthetic category of the sublime, by contrast, when transferred from high mountains and the endless night to the silence and gaps in language, to the undecidability of meaning, to the cracks in representation, to traumatic wordlessness, to the otherness in the self and so on, is upheld by 135

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an experiential reality of the mind. We make meaning ourselves, but do we not make the limits and flaws ourselves? Thus, it seems that at the edges of our representations and meaning constructions, we ‘touch’ a (sublime) ‘beyond’. The experience of thinking produces an index veri, a point of contact with the real. Lyotard, who has furthered the case of the sublime in philosophy and the arts, writes that the sublime ‘reveals another way of coming into contact with thoughts, a way of letting oneself be touched by reality as by something that is always given without ever giving oneself ’.7 Modern thought, and especially theory in artistic interpretation and cultural criticism, has re-enacted this failure of thinking in various ways. It has thereby turned the flaws and structural failures of representation into a truth, just as medieval aesthetics found truth in beauty. Authentic thinking, Lyotard says, is thinking differently, ‘letting oneself be touched by being’ (‘se laisser toucher par l’être’). Only waiting and watching at the limits of language, risking the loss of meaning, and embracing perplexity and muteness can do justice to the otherness and respect the ‘absence’ (‘l’absence’) . . . Most of the basic metaphors that underlie deconstructionist and post-structuralist thought are variations on this category of the sublime. When the sublime self-heroisation of thinking proves too obvious, it might be interesting to return to the category of beauty, and to reconsider its premodern ambiguity. The Kantian notion of beauty as attractiveness and the object of disinterested aesthetic pleasure may well be too simple. There are indeed several ways to have a stake in or be involved with beauty. Just as we never have a neutral, objective relationship with truth, and truth is never just or primarily an epistemological issue but also a matter of authenticity and of being true, so it makes sense to think of our relationship with beauty as complex and existentially charged. And of 136

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course, we cannot forget the nexus of beauty with attraction, eros and desire. But Baudelaire suggests yet another, related, principle: that of ­curiosity (curiosité).8 Baudelaire did not develop a systematic aesthetic theory, but in a few pages of his articles on the Paris salons, and in ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, he outlines a concept of beauty: beauty contains ‘something eternal and perishable, something absolute and particular at the same time’.9 The particular, contingent moment is related to ‘our passions’: ‘just as we have our particular passions, we have our own beauty.’10 Baudelaire’s attention to ‘particular beauty’ (‘la beauté particulière’) is no doubt a variant of the romantic subjectivisation of the academic concept of beauty. He does not, however, link ‘circumstantial beauty’ (‘beauté de circonstance’) with the romantic cult of localism and the picturesque but with a modern aesthesis. Baudelaire’s rational and historical doctrine assumes that beauty is not natural but always artificial and composed – ‘of a dual composition’11 – and he even compares its two components with the eternal soul and a perishable body: Beauty is made of an eternal element, unchangeable, the proportion of which is very difficult to determine, and of a relative element, of circumstances, which in turn or together are formed by time, fashion, morality or passion. Without this second element, which is the amusing, tingling, flavourful packaging of the divine cake, the first element would be indigestible and untastable, because not adapted or suitable for human nature.12 137

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‘Modernity is the transient, the fugitive, the contingent, as the first half of art, the other half of which is the eternal and the unchanging.’13 Interestingly, Baudelaire writes that the artist who has a sense of modern beauty can extract the eternal from the transient. Thus, when it comes to modern beauty, Baudelaire does not simply seek to determine the proportion of fashion and the circumstances that, merged with the eternal ‘classical’ component, would yield the modern blend. Constantin Guys, the ‘painter of modern life’, finds the poetical in fashion, the poetical in the temporary, the eternal in the passing: ‘to extract from fashion what it may contain of the poetical in the historical’ or ‘to draw the eternal out of the transient’.14 But what is eternal in the passing? The moment of eternity of modern beauty is not added to the transient (transitoire), but – as Baudelaire writes – drawn out of it. And elsewhere he writes that the painter becomes a poet when he paints ‘something eternal circumstance seems to hint at’.15 Modern beauty is therefore not the essential or eternal dressed in the stylistic conventions or the spirit of the time. It is not about hectic trends and styles that follow and quickly displace one another. The ephemeral half of modern beauty has no classical, eternal half to mix with or to base itself upon. Baudelaire here introduces a new concept of beauty, which can be found in many variations in contemporary aesthetics and characterises the beauty experience in terms of time. The beautiful is then not an objective property of things, nor what is subjectively appreciated or tasted in them. The beautiful is something that happens, and it marks a life: it appears at a point in time. Beauty has its Moment; what is beautiful is therefore New. The new is the eternal moment in the transitory, and the beautiful always (re)appears at the same point in time – a ‘now’. Baudelaire’s concept of beauty, therefore, does not conceptualise beauty but locates it. 138

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The sense of modern beauty and the passion of the painter of modern life is curiosity. In ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’ Baudelaire describes Constantin Guys’s curiosity as ‘a fatal passion’ and links this passionate involvement with a ‘first look’ at the world. The perspectives he cites by way of example – those of the innocent child and of the person ‘reborn’ after a near-fatal illness – have emerged as topoi of literary modernity. The child sees everything as new; it is always drunk. Nothing is more like what is called ‘inspiration’ than the joy with which a child absorbs shapes and colours [. . .] It is this deep and joyful curiosity that explains children’s fixed and animal-ecstatic regard for the new, whatever it is – a face or landscape, light, gilding, colours, shiny fabrics or of beauty enchanted by getting dressed up.16 These references show that for Baudelaire newness is not a culturally relative value determined by comparing phenomena or works. The new is not original; it is not measured by the current state of a culture, nor is it what fits the current times or anticipates the future. The new is not avant-garde or revolutionary or critical. The new characterises the ‘appearance’ as such. Beauty appears and, as such, is structurally new: it irrupts into the ordinary world from the outside, as a surprise, and manifests itself as if existing entirely on its own. Beauty, by being new and exceptional and appearing unexpectedly, makes a mystery of its own existence. It discloses its own amazing possibility by being undeniably present and real, while at the same time hiding its origin. With the question ‘Do you come from Heaven or rise 139

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from the abyss, Beauty?’ Baudelaire reformulates the premodern ambivalent attitude toward beauty. What is decisive, however, for understanding beauty is not the answer to this question, but the fact that Baudelaire asks it repeatedly, that he addresses beauty, asking: ‘Who are you?’ – that is, ‘Where do you come from?’ – as if to say: ‘How is it possible that you are here?’ (Modern) beauty is always ‘new’; we always see it as if for the first time, and our surprise at the inexplicable fact of its being here, its ‘essential quality of present’,17 is expressed by interrogating the reality – and thus also, the meaning – of beauty. Is it not, after all, unthinkable that beauty should not also compel us to think? (For (modern) beauty to be essentially ‘new’ also means that beauty is not something that can be made, nor is it a matter of preference (‘liking’) and taste. Beauty is something that happens (and marks a life). Artists do not make beauty; they make art – which of course can be about beauty but does not have to be beautiful on that account.) Beauty exists but is not a characteristic of objects. It occupies things only briefly, fleetingly. Nothing possesses beauty. Beauty is never intrin­ sically linked with objective qualities, value or meaning. Beauty, which always manifests itself as a surprising interruption, prompts Baudelaire’s question, to which no answer is possible: ‘From God or Satan, who cares? Angel or Siren, / Who cares, if you make, – fay with the velvet eyes, / Rhythm, perfume, glimmer; my one and only queen! / The world less hideous, the minutes less leaden?’18 The positive sublimity of a miraculous presence that has no proper place in this hideous universe can only – as Paul Valéry writes – cause despair. Ovid tells how, when Orpheus sings in the underworld to soften Hades and secure Eurydice’s release, Sisyphus stops labouring for a moment in eternity, sits down on his rock and listens. What

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can he do from here? He must go on rolling his rock up the hill, forever, now both comforted and in deep despair, in the certainty that beauty truly exists and that a song can redeem a moment entirely while leaving the world untouched.

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11. Fatal Truths: Notes on the Beauty Experience When what I see exalts my sight, and when what I hold is desired . . . (Quand ce que je vois exalte ma vue, et quand ce que je tiens se fait désirer . . .) Paul Valéry Twentieth-century art has taught us that ‘something can be good art without being beautiful’.1 Art is not about a refinement of the senses, about decorating or about making beautiful things. What makes a work a work of art is not a 142

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set of aesthetic properties but the aboutness or ‘embodied meaning’ of an action or object in a specific institutional and discursive context. Much of twentieth-century art is still about beauty. Indeed, beauty has traditionally been, and according to the expectations of many up to today, remains, a theme or subject for art. But beauty does not matter and the value of the artwork does not depend on its ‘aesthetic qualities’. On the contrary, the being-beautiful stands in the way: ‘Beauty trivializes that which possesses it.’2 Beauty makes art easy. So much for Arthur Danto’s idea of the beautiful in modern art. Danto has analysed the conceptual operations behind modern art and formulated its institutional assumptions. But stating that art is not expected to be beautiful does not mean that the signification of that art is solely based on its relevance or its content’s greater or lesser degree of provocativeness. Much avant-garde art de facto derives support from a different aesthetic, with its own long history in art: the fascination with the ugly, the monstrous and the disgusting. An ugly thing does not just represent an absence of beauty; it is a useful resource for making the ‘conceptual’, provocative negation of artistic beauty poignant and convincing. It is therefore highly questionable whether modernist art, as Danto conceives of it – from Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain to Andy Warhol’s Brillo Boxes – really does away with the primacy of the aesthetic and the ‘retinal’ when it detaches art from beauty. But instead of discussing that here, I will concentrate on the underlying issue of the nature and role of aes­ thetic judge­ment and the beauty experience. I will dispute that an aesthetic judgement as such expresses or presupposes a beauty experience and argue that such an experience does not in itself constitute a value judgement. This should make it possible to articulate the relationship between beauty and art. 143

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I first want to distinguish between the appreciation of an aesthetic object, on the one hand, and a taste judgement, on the other. Both operations may conclude that ‘x is beautiful’. But this homonymy covers up an important conceptual distinction, which can be clarified via an analogy. We distinguish the proposition that a dish constitutes good food from a statement that we ourselves like it. Both statements consist of subjective judgements. Something is edible or becomes food in relation to the specific conditions of a living species. Moreover, we do not consider everything that is digestible or objectively nutritious to be food. Actual edibleness is a matter of cooking methods, of the right smells and colours and sometimes of temperature, not to mention eating habits, food laws and so on. Furthermore, every culture uses the category of ‘non-food’: substances that are perfectly digestible and nutritious but nevertheless cannot be eaten, such as human flesh, certain animals and certain animal parts, vomit and so on. The specifics and limitations of the human organism, its physiological conditions and the laws of digestion are here inexorably bound up with cultural rules and traditions. What counts as food, consequently, is no doubt culturally determined and changeable, but that does not mean it depends on a taste judgement or on personal appreciation. For those living within a culture, the category is fixed and not subject to change on arbitrary, individual grounds. The judgement that a meal is ‘good’ or ‘OK’, therefore, is not a taste judgement. The ‘basis’ (‘Bestimmungsgrund’) of the judgement is not an individual liking but the knowledge and recognition of what is edible (for ‘us’). Within the category of the edible, individuals still have their own preferences. But it is possible to agree that something is ‘good food’, and at the same time, not to like it at all. Generalising from this example, I assume that all cultures recognise a category of ‘aesthetic objects’. This category encompasses the culturally 144

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determined and variable but (within that culture) objectively given class of things deemed fit to receive an aesthetic qualification, whether assenting or rejecting. Here, too, the characteristics of things, and the means and codes of perception, which are inextricably bound up with culture and tradition, determine the scope of the category. These objects can be qualified as beautiful or ugly without provoking amazement. Something can be an aesthetic object to a greater or lesser degree: a painting, a landscape or a double rainbow is more genuinely aesthetic than a car, and a car more so than a bread bag. (One may find the bread wrapper ‘beautiful’, or at least ‘not ugly’, but should not make too much of it; a full beauty experience, in this case, would generally be considered odd and whimsical.) It is hard to pin down precisely what makes something an aesthetic object, although it would seem a posteriori that places, objects, gestures and sounds fit the category, whereas smells, flavours, events and meanings do not. Environments, houses, words and bodies may be beautiful or ugly to a greater or lesser degree. But one cannot say the same of, for example, an iconographic motif. The ‘Flight into Egypt’ can be a rich and interesting motif but not more beautiful than the ‘Massacre of the Innocents’. All societies also designate certain objects as non-aesthetic – that is, disgusting things that would never be suitable as objects of aesthetic appreciation. (The disgust that emerges from the body overwhelms perception and impedes aesthetic appreciation.) Theorists have tried to isolate precisely what is appreciated in the appearance of aesthetic objects, in order to account for the selection criteria and the way these objects affect people. In so doing, they have identified a series of relevant elements: shape and colour, variation and regularity, symmetry, balance, movement and rest, integration and aggregation, simplicity and infinity, radiance and introvertedness, and so on. This helps explain why events, 145

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which can have a ‘structure’ but do not possess shapes or contours, are not aesthetic objects, and cannot be judged beautiful, whereas a story or a film representing those events can be. It is certainly true that cultures can undergo major shifts in taste, and that what is ‘ugly’ for a classical aesthetic – asymmetry, fragmentation, formlessness, grubbiness, extravagance and so on – can nevertheless become aesthetically acceptable. The history of twentieth-century art proves that art can be made with just about anything, including disgusting things, concepts, and noises and odours. The question, however, is whether radical shifts in artistic taste, the artistic use of the disgusting and the emergence of conceptual art indeed significantly broaden the cultural category of aesthetic objects. Brillo boxes, garbage trucks and faeces can certainly make for interesting artworks, but that does not turn them into aesthetic objects, and their artistic value teaches us little about beauty. It is important, in any case, not to confuse the broadening of the concept of art, or a shift in artistic production, with an expansion of the category of aesthetic objects. To function socially in (one’s own environment within) a community requires an awareness of aesthetic value, a sense of the concept’s scope, the ability to identify and classify aesthetic objects, and a familiarity with the codes and models dictating acceptable individual (non-)preferences. Basic social skills subsume a recognition that bodies and clothing are aesthetically evaluated and that the value assigned to them matters. One is expected to be able to recognise ‘a beautiful appearance’ in a certain milieu and, moreover, to be able to deal with the diversity of individual preferences. The conventional aesthetic value is therefore also a social value. It is necessary to internalise the aesthetic gaze in order to understand the ordinary behaviour of others and to engage in appropriate and successful interactions. Successfully identifying an aesthetic object, however, is not the same as 146

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determining one’s own preferences. Recognising something as an aesthetic object always already implies that it is appropriate for that object to be liked by someone. To be sure, this successful recognition, as such, is not yet an actual beauty experience. But it does imply that the object in question could be the appropriate object of a (and therefore not yet my) beauty experience. How does the beauty experience relate to aesthetic judgement – first, with respect to the recognition and proper qualification of an aesthetic object, and second, with respect to a taste judgement or to personal appreciation? Classifying an object as aesthetic is clearly linked to the beauty experience: in successfully classifying an object as beautiful, I ipso facto acknowledge that a beauty experience is possible for someone – including, in theory, for me. Conversely, it is conceivable for a beauty experience to happen in the presence of something not considered an aesthetic object: a mathematical formula, a bread bag or the way sunlight flickers in the window of a passing garbage truck. This is conceivable but certainly not evident. The relationship between the personal preference (‘I like it’) and the beauty experience is complicated. After all, an aesthetic judgement based on taste relies on comparison, and can even rely exclusively on the preferences and choices of others. It is expected, however, that a taste judgement (also) be backed by the individual’s (own) beauty experience(s). The (memories of) personal beauty experiences should serve as a standard point of reference. However, when an aesthetic proposition does not simply rely on but expresses such a beauty experience, the proposition ceases to be a pure judgement. It then acquires a performative character and becomes a confession or a witness declaration. The beauty experience does not arise bottom-up, ‘from the inside’. It is not the experiential side of an insight that has slowly matured internally. 147

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The beauty experience has the structure of a striking, moving event. The content is the disclosure or discovery that something exists in the world. And this discovery reveals with intense certainty that this ‘something’ is beautiful. The basis of this judgement is therefore not a subjective feeling or a conviction but the discovery of a fact. The beauty experience is not about liking something, or finding something beautiful, but about ascertaining that something really is beautiful. It does not tolerate nuance, reserve or gradation. It is not a matter of ‘being nicer than’. Beauty is ‘total’; it is absolute. A beauty experience, therefore, not only reveals something about the (aesthetic) object in question but at once exemplifies and conveys what beauty is as such. The number of full beauty experiences that occur in a lifetime is probably limited. But by virtue of containing something eternal or essential, they always reveal the same truth. The content of all beauty experiences is the same, and every new beauty experience amounts to a repetition, a new proof of the same – the newness. (In this respect, we may note an analogy with happiness, as distinct from satisfaction. We live, at all times, in a state of greater or lesser satisfaction or contentment, but the experiences of delight or rapture always bring the same ‘full happiness’ or the same fulfilment. There is also a parallel with being in love – each time, we learn that love really exists, and what it is as such.) It is important here to characterise accurately the so-called subjective character of the beauty experience. The proposition ‘x is beautiful’ is not equivalent to ‘I like x’ or ‘x seems nice’. The beauty experience is certainly highly personal or even intimate, but the being personal does not imply epistemological solipsism. It indicates the privileged nature of the discovery: I am certain x is ‘absolutely beautiful’ because I was in the right place at the right time and witnessed the disclosure. The beauty experience is not part 148

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of a stream of consciousness or of inner feelings or of thoughts or of mental states; it qualifies as something that happens in the world. One ascertains that something is absolutely beautiful the way one may witness a rare occurrence or discover a secret. The beauty experience is therefore not bound to a peculiar perspective or a subjective view but to a chance encounter or a special occurrence – a ‘touch that brings in an unpredictable movement’.3 The beauty experience thus differs from the experience of reaching a conviction and that of developing a sensibility, insofar as it is situated and contingent – that is, tied to an encounter with an object, a landscape or a person at a given place and time. The beauty experience as such is structurally personal and intimate. After all, an event may occur before many people, and all those present might see what there is to see, but not everyone can be in the same place at the same time, and it happens that the witness is me. The beauty experience thus bears a reality value – it is entirely distinct from what goes on in a stream of consciousness, which never constitutes an event in the world. The beauty experience, for the same reasons, has an existential value: it becomes part of what makes up a life; it becomes part of a person’s memoria and intimate history. It ties a life to an object, an image, a building or a face forever. In other words, the beauty experience marks a life and is fatal. Paul Valéry characterises this property of the beauty experience as ‘seizing what is beyond us, and this seizing us in return’.4 Multiple people can share a beauty experience, such as when they have attended the same concert or admired a painting or a landscape together. The microsociology of the shared beauty experience is complex but entirely distinct from that of reaching a consensus or sharing a belief. It amounts to sharing a piece of life, and this results in a particular form of complicity and intimacy. 149

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The object of a beauty experience is always and necessarily present and occupies the attention totally. The beauty experience therefore always comes as an interruption, even when sought after or expected – for instance, in the museum, during a walk or during a concert. The beauty experience suspends ordinary life. It stands on its own. Moral, political and religious beliefs, business interests and personal concerns are (equally) disregarded. They may be valid but do not matter here and now because, for the length of its duration, this prevails. The beauty experience is therefore accompanied by a slight shock. One is, writes Valéry, ‘surprised by what one expects’.5 The beauty exper­ ience fills the moment and is therefore, contrary to what some say, not a promise or an anticipation. Better yet, it fulfils a promise because this (i.e. beauty) is present and therefore really exists. However, this ‘total’ claim and accompanying surprise cannot last. After a moment’s ‘standstill’ (‘Bleibe doch’) the World returns, as if in a kind of awakening, given that it follows a complete experience. Afterwards, the beauty experience seems to stand out and is remembered as an exception. The beauty experience is not expandable and does not yield utopian aspirations or a political programme: on the contrary, it prompts a desire for standstill and/or repetition – for more of the same. (The conditions of the beauty experience dictate that certain objects – those that are remarkable or rare, or that exist in isolation – are more apt than others to trigger such an effect. For example, an object, a body or a framed view can be more readily aestheticised than an environment, a theatre performance more so than a street event, a portrait more so than a person, a dance more so than the bustle at the airport, a pure colour more so than a chaotic blend, a melody more so than a buzzing or a street noise, etc.) The beauty experience combines absolute certainty with total astonishment. The criteria of aesthetic appreciation, whereby we determine our 150

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relative preference for something, are overruled by an absolute experience that impedes the understanding. ‘This is beautiful’ always means that ‘beauty = here/now’ exists, and that this existence is at once clear and distinct, and completely unlikely and bewildering. (After all, it is impossible to understand ‘existence’ theoretically: one can learn that something exists but never understand its existence.) Valéry writes: ‘A thing of beauty is incredible – and exists’; beauty is ‘obscure as a wonder’.6 It is not difficult to understand what Beauty is like. We can talk about what we find beautiful and why. Miraculous and obscure, however, is that beauty exists. The specificity of artistic beauty, as distinct from the beauty of nature, lies in the miracle of its existence (and therefore the incomprehensibility of its origin), which stems from the fact that someone made it. But also, in artistic beauty, the ‘content’ or ‘aboutness’ of the work, and the evaluation of its quality as an aesthetic object, are completely overwhelmed by an excess of inexplicable existence. The beautiful object transfigures into an instance of an ‘essence’. The beauty experience reveals that there is Beauty, and that something can be absolutely beautiful, not just attractive or likeable to a greater or lesser degree. The aesthetic judgement calls for and anticipates confirmation by the beauty experience. Aesthetics takes the beauty experience as proof of aesthetic value and of the aesthetic judgement. The beauty experience is then linked to the (always relative) taste judgement, and to the correct recognition of aesthetic objects. (The fact that I am not moved while listening to Mozart now does not imply anything about the music or prevent me from valuing Mozart anyway. At the same time, to undergo a beauty experience while listening to that piece of music would provide irrefutable support for its status as an aesthetic object, as well as for my appreciation of Mozart.) The personal and intimate beauty experience can therefore be socially 151

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appropriate and become meaningful as such. The experience is then incorporated into the aesthetic judgement. At the same time, the beauty experience remains intrinsically suspicious and scandalous. For one, it partakes only reluctantly in the socially regulated dealing with aesthetic objects. The self-confidence and absoluteness of the beauty experience does not allow for nuance or relativising. It is not dependent on reasons and opinions that convince us to a greater or lesser degree and that can be shared or adjusted but on a statement of fact. It moreover does not rely on other values and often negates them. A beauty experience does not imply moral value or political correctness: what is beautiful is not necessarily morally good. Nor does it guarantee artistic value at all. After all, a beauty experience can be artistically mistaken – for example, when it admires kitsch or when it aestheticises a conceptual or a political artwork. The beauty experience can support aesthetic judgement and criticism but does not in itself make an argument. What is more, from a structural standpoint, the beauty experience is dangerously unreliable. Being meaningful implies somehow being integrated in a whole, and therefore being corroborated and controlled at the same time. The aesthetic judgement and even a personal, subjective taste judgement contribute to a social practice and participate in the collective ordering of value and meaning. In the beauty experience, by contrast, all meaning is absorbed by the name indicating that excess of reality or incomprehensible existence witnessed. ‘[This] makes you think of nothing else; and then instead of becoming clear by the thinking about it – shines on it: This is beautiful, by its mere presence.’7 The beauty experience breaks open the ordinary world we share, abruptly widens reality, and imposes an amazing ownness, but without adding or suggesting further meaning. (The beautiful differs entirely from the poetical here.) In this way, the beauty 152

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experience can have a strong existential impact but also cause quite a bit of collateral damage in a life or in the world. But as it is based on a fact and is certain, its claims are non-negotiable, and one cannot discard it without losing oneself.

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12. On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Sources of Ugliness Do you know any means of suppressing what arises from the things you see? 1 Paul Valéry Beauty, in all its forms, was a central topic in literature and philosophy until the end of the eighteenth century. Ugliness, by contrast, was seldom written about, and even then, only incidentally and indirectly. The puzzling thing about ugliness, as Aristotle had already noted, was that even the banal or ‘ugly’ can be rendered interesting or beautiful through artful depiction. There is ‘beautiful’ and ‘beautifully-ugly’; but the artfully-ugly is not the same as 154

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ugly art. When it came to the philosophy of art, this insight fostered an appreciation of beauty’s magical, and above all, deceptive, power. Comparatively little thought, however, was devoted to a precise formulation of what ugliness might signify. The theories of the sublime, the picturesque and the fantastic, which originated in the eighteenth century, generally follow the same trajectory: they analyse how something initially perceived (or sensed) as possessing a ‘negative’ aesthetic value can nevertheless, quite unexpectedly, be experienced as ‘positive’. Everything that is menacing and dangerous, with the power to annihilate our very existence, seems to send a pleasant shiver down our spines. The irregular, the rough or the weathered, the incomplete, the immature or the anecdotal might also – contrary to all classical standards of beauty – be regarded as charming. And the forced, the whimsical and the bizarre can prove oddly entertaining. The (theoretical) interest in ugliness first emerged at the beginning of the nineteenth century, mainly among the German idealist thinkers and literati, and reached an early pinnacle in The Aesthetics of Ugliness (1853) by Karl Rosenkranz.2 But these authors also looked more deeply, in a Hegelian sense, into the way ugliness – understood as the opposite or negation of the various forms of beauty – can be aestheticised and idealised through artistic representation. Moreover, they assessed how variants of ugliness can be integrated into a broader and more complex notion of beauty: ‘[Art] must show us ugliness in the full compass of its mischief, but it must do this nevertheless with the ideality with which it handles the beautiful.’3 The great Enlightenment thinkers analysed the concept of beauty from the perspective of aesthetic judgement, which they considered to be a statement about an object’s inherent nature. At the heart of all subsequent discussions lay the question of whether beauty was intrinsic – because of an object’s appearance and/or its excellent realisation and/or how well form follows 155

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function – or a matter of taste. The ‘basis’ (‘Bestimmungsgrund’) of aesthetic judgement lies either in the object itself, or in the subject. Yet this question is based on the premise that an aesthetic experience bears a ‘natural’ correlation to reality. In other words, it is assumed that the aesthetic gaze is perpetually and universally accessible to mankind, and that ‘aesthetic judgement’ is simply a specific form of general human cognition. Now, the appearance of things – for example, form, patterns, colour and luminosity – undoubtedly influences everything that we perceive and experience, feel and do. We are all responsive to shapes and can recognise rhythms and colour combinations. The awareness of form can, however, be discounted in many practices and modes of experience. It has no independent existence per se, as ‘the aesthetic experience’. The aesthetic gaze implies an appreciation of ‘pure appearances’, whereby the aspect of an object is somewhat disconnected from its function, value and meaning. The aesthetic experience presupposes that an object’s appearance is isolated and given independent consideration. This bears an extraordinary, sophisticated and profoundly artificial relationship to reality. In any case, the locus and importance of the aesthetic experience, and more fundamentally, its availability, are far from evident. A society/ culture must permit and tolerate this abstraction: focusing exclusively on appearances while disregarding an object’s value and function is often considered ‘inappropriate’ and can, on occasion, be downright disrespectful or outrageous. An aesthetically abstracting attitude can offend multiple kinds of political, moral or religious engagements with the subject matter. Isolating and appreciating appearances, regardless of their moral value or usefulness, is therefore a cultural issue. And even when aesthetic detachment is developed as a possibility within a culture, it inevitably remains a question of individual attainment. It is also a social or ‘class’ issue. The concrete manner through which this disinterested gaze is made possible and accessible – the codes and 156

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settings that people use, in various contexts, to look with a disinterested and dispassionate eye – varies. But this does not mean that the logic and conditions of the aesthetic gaze and experience cannot be discussed in general terms. The aesthetic gaze or approach is related to, and supported by, the specific way in which the object presents itself: the circumstances pertaining to its perceptual presence. It implies that the senses of smell, taste and touch are circumvented by physical distance, altitude or obstacles, and that perception and attention are channelled toward ‘pure visuality’ or sound. An object will often be coded as a ‘spectacle’ or ‘performance’, and thus as something enacted or played, which implies that it is somehow ‘not real’ or belongs to an alternative reality. The apparatus of showing and exhibiting focuses the attention, and both frames and isolates an object and detaches it from the world. This has the effect of neutralising the involvement that is automatically engendered by physical proximity. ‘Showing’ or ‘exhibiting’ might range from simply pointing at something to labelling it ‘art’. The codes and/or physical distance can be communicated and imposed by a wide range of devices, including shop windows, plinths, dishes, frames or windows, glass plates and viewpoints; or, in the theatre, the proscenium that separates the audience from the ‘unreal’ space of the performance. The most important means of establishing aesthetic distance – so that we are confronted with pure visuality and, at the same time, a form of ‘unreality’ – is, and always will be, the image: representation by similitude. Both performances and images readily lend themselves to aesthetic appreciation. Anyone who has internalised the aesthetic approach will find him or herself able to look at almost anything as if it were a performance or picture – just as one can listen to ambient noise as if it were a kind of music. The distance that allows one to see something ‘aesthetically’ might only be a question of attitude and perspective, therefore, which makes it unique to the eye of the beholder. Taking this to a logical 157

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conclusion, one might, in principle, assess everything from an ‘aesthetic’ perspective. But it would still seem that this form of appreciation, whether rightly or wrongly, requires too many ‘technical’ conditions, and we tend to concur that it is wrong or inappropriate to treat everything as an aesthetic object. ‘This is beautiful’ and ‘that is ugly’ are not opposites, nor are they the two extremes of a continuum. To say that something is ‘not beautiful’ does not automatically mean it is ugly, and to pronounce something as ‘not ugly’ does not equate to it being beautiful. To declare something ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ is to deploy one of two distinct forms of aesthetic appreciation, each of which similarly privileges and isolates an object, thereby setting it at an aesthetic distance. It becomes an opposite, therefore, of all that is normal. Or, in other words, it differs from the myriad aesthetically neutral objects that sink without a trace in the quagmire of unobtrusiveness. The ‘not-ugly’ and ‘not-beautiful’ can thus be classified as ‘ordinary’. Aesthetic appreciation – whether positive or negative – is a form of individualisation: both appraisals accord the object a status that transcends the ordinary or normal. 4 The beautiful and the ugly are therefore both outstanding, albeit in vastly divergent ways and on disparate grounds. Experiencing beauty or confronting ugliness are two completely distinct things, with quite different issues at stake. The aesthetic experience is oriented toward immediate impressions and presupposes that the act of contemplation detaches the appearance from the object, and hence the latter’s existence and agency in the world from its origin, meaning, value, function, purpose and so on. Experiencing a spring day or a landscape, a melody or a physique as ‘beautiful’, and expressing this perception, implies that one is impressed by the mere appearance or (visual) inexhaustibility of what is seen or heard, devoid of vested interests or intention to profit, and without any comparative assessment against established criteria 158

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(such as the idea of perfection or a moral consideration). I would argue, however, that this ‘disinterested pleasure’, as Kant terms it, is structurally associated with another element. This is our surprise that beauty does, in fact, exist: ‘A thing of beauty is incredible – and exists.’5 Crucially, beauty is always ‘new’ and exceptional, a ‘cosa nova’, and therefore unexpected. It takes us by surprise, and this because of its incomprehensibility and deviation from our expectations of ‘normality’. Consequently, a thing of beauty always seems improbable. The Kantian ‘subjective universality’ that characterises aesthetic judgement thus expresses the claim that something is, in fact, genuinely beautiful – that is, it goes beyond individual preferences or taste. A beauty experience is akin to a broadening of reality. And because the manifestation of beauty presents a paradox – being both implausible and yet irrefutable – the implication is that a new reality outshines the one we already know. The beauty experience, therefore, entails far more than a simple delight in the appearance of something: it always involves a discovery. Beauty functions as an ontological threshold. But the discovery is made through a coincidental, fortunate encounter: one needs to be present at that specific time and place for it to be seen or heard. The certainty that beauty ‘has happened’ is only given through a subjective, personal and unique experience. It privileges both a moment and an individual. Beauty is thus existentially anchored and can mark someone’s life. The so-called judgement of beauty, therefore, does not articulate a verifiable opinion on a situation. It does not aim at a scientific description of reality, which relates to the objective properties of objects. It belongs to a language-game of a completely different order. To judge something to be beautiful, therefore, is to bear witness: it is the statement of a universal truth as revealed to one person via a unique experience. Classical aesthetics posited ugliness as a negative principle and examined whether it might ‘dissolve’ within something beautiful (and thus lend beauty 159

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a specific ‘colouring’) – and if so, by what means. Twentieth-century philosophical reflections on themes such as the formless and the abject, concomitant with developments in modern and contemporary art, have contributed to the insight that ugliness cannot only be defined in negative terms, or merely reduced to an absence of beauty. Ugliness is a thing unto itself; it has an independent status. Beauty triumphs over the ordinary and augments what already exists. The ‘aesthetic pleasure’ (‘Wohlgefallen’) is coupled with the affirmation of this surprising enrichment of reality. Ugliness, in contrast, is not ‘new’. It does not amaze or surprise; it does not come on top of what exists but, instead, cleaves into the ‘normal world’, and is immediately recognised. Ugliness is a revenant: it is permeated by a resistance or force that precedes normality. Enlightenment theories of aesthetics assumed that ugliness and the sense of something being ugly – like the notion of beauty – was ‘natural’, a primary mode of being (for objects) or of experience (for humans). Everything in existence was believed to be either beautiful or ugly to a greater or lesser extent, and thus experienced as such, with the many guises of ugliness, like those of beauty, individually linked to specific feelings and emotions. Attempts were made to identify and classify these many kinds of ugliness and to correlate them with the responses they engendered. The ‘experience of ugliness’, however, is even more specific and quite distinct from that of beauty. It is not ugliness as such that elicits rejection or disgust. Aesthetic appreciation – the ability to apprehend something as ugly and give it a name – already involves the processing and mastery of primary emotions and reactions that precede the aesthetic. ‘Ugliness’ is the aesthetic mode of appearance for everything that erupts ‘from below’ to disrupt the ordinary or normal or, in short, our whole, life-sustaining environment. With ugliness, the threat of the monstrous and a risk of contamination by the formless emerges. 160

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Normality is threatened, disturbed or ruptured in two radically different ways: by the monstrous or terrifying – Rosenkranz uses the word ‘deformity’ (‘Abform’); or by the formless or disgusting – which he called ‘formlessness’ (‘Ungestalt’).6 One can, admittedly, easily conjure up disgusting monsters. But the monstrous, as such, is not disgusting, and the formless, as such, is not terrible. The monstrous is ‘a deviation from nature’, the fruit of ‘an efficient cause that claims omnipotence, a will that strives to compete with nature and a tortured and dominant matter’; the monstrous is ‘uncanny’.7 It proves the fragility of form and the uncertainty of order. The monstrous is the un­ controlled, the disorganised and the deformed; it engenders and encourages caprice and excess; it is the advent of chaos. Or, as Lucretius describes it, monsters are primordial remnants that lurk beneath the wafer-thin crust of what we call nature and of the man-made order and normality. And the ultimate example of monstrosity is clearly the deformity-humanity (Rosenkranz calls it ‘the ugliest ugly’).8 Deformity threatens ruin and destruction. It is dangerous, spreads panic, paralyses or petrifies and causes all in its path to flee. The triad of monstrous, grey Graeae – the triplet sisters of the fearsome Gorgons Medusa, Scylla and Echidna – are Horror (Enyo), Terror (Deino) and Destruction (Persis).9 Formlessness, on the other hand, is vague, viscous and glutinous, weak, decayed, diseased and rotten, with the most pungent variant being bodily secretions (the ‘abject’) – Georges Bataille’s squashed spider or worm. At its core is ‘putrefaction’ (‘Verwesen’), or organic decay: not dying or dead but ‘the decomposition of the already dead’ (‘das Entwerden des schon Toten’). The human body reverts to waste or remains. It is teeming, nameless, soulless life: ‘we are more disgusted and repulsed by the appearance of life in what is already itself dead.’10 A lack of form radiates negativity; an encounter 161

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with the formless is contagious, sticky and contaminating: it attacks the Gestalt and identity,11 provokes revulsion and disgust, makes one recoil and retch; it must be kept at bay, and all contact immediately remedied through purification, cleansing, ‘disengaging’ and vomiting, or through (ritual) laughter. A direct confrontation with the monstrous or the formless invokes archaic and automatic responses that precede every possible form of aestheticisation or experience of ugliness: the actual confrontation with a heinous creature, or pus, for example, never directly inspires aesthetic appreciation, or even a ‘judgement of ugliness’. Rather, they provoke the primary reactions and operations that neutralise the imminent threat. All societies develop a ‘culture’ to deal with these things. Religions in particular offer many solutions, including myths and a whole host of ceremonies and magical practices, from exorcisms, ritual insults and cursing to sacrifices, purification and simply ‘laughing it off ’. It took centuries of arduous effort to wrest theatrical and visual forms of representation from their original religious contexts and, furthermore, to divest them sufficiently of their magical aspects. In so doing, performances and images could finally be put to ‘artistic’ use – not only as a way of ‘playing’ with meaning (probably the first and ultimate type of artistic ‘work’) but also as a method of isolating appearances and offering them up for aesthetic appreciation. The difficult and profoundly artificial base operation of aestheticisation does not, contrary to expectation, primarily preclude the finding of beauty in ugliness. What it does imply is that everything monstrous or disgusting can successfully be kept at arm’s length and subjected to scrutiny,

Figure 12.1  Stephanie Kiwitt, from the Wondelgemse Meersen, 2012 – Courtesy of the artist 163

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whereupon it becomes innocuous, or merely ugly – that is, practically harmless, and perhaps even ridiculous. The sight of what is effectively monstrous or disgusting therefore becomes, in the worst case, merely ‘unpleasant’ – a ‘lingering emotion’ associated with the origin of this ‘ugly appearance’. Rosenkranz notes that a painting of the Raising of Lazarus is powerless to convey the human stench of death: the viewer ‘is only forced to think of the superficial beginning of decay’.12 Elsewhere, he refers to the fresco of the Triumph of Death in the Campo Santo of Pisa, a detail of which depicts a noble hunting party pinching their noses as they ride past a corpse in an open grave: ‘we see this well enough, but we do not smell it.’13 Indeed, to find something ‘hideously ugly’ already presupposes an aesthetic distance, one that has terminated the primary automatic reactions. The detachment implied by an ‘experience of ugliness’, therefore, is far more complicated, ambiguous and tainted than an ‘encounter with beauty’. It conceals a greater involvement and deeper significance than is associated with the latter, whereby the engagement follows disinterested contemplation and is related to the existential meaning of a life-changing moment and unexpected discovery. It is possible, just as with beauty, that the isolation and contemplation of ugliness occurs through the eye of the beholder. Yet because the experience of ugliness does not commence with ‘disinterest’ but with a primary, pre-­ aesthetic engagement, it is far more problematic. A specific ‘disposition’ of the attention rarely suffices. Special resources and specific contexts, such as the arts, seem necessary to the successful neutralisation and reduction of impending monstrosity or invading formlessness. Once distilled to a mere ‘image’ or appearance – reduced to pure visuality and unreality – it can be

Figure 12.2  Stephanie Kiwitt, CHOCO CHOCO, Hand 6, 2015 – Courtesy of the artist 165

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‘aesthetically appreciated’ and be deemed (merely) ugly. Here, the effective medium par excellence is undoubtedly representation, or the image/ likeness. Perhaps the paralysing, lethal or contagious potency of the monstrous and disgusting can never be fully neutralised, but an image can tone it down, just enough for it to be ‘viewed’. Their powers can be captured and imprisoned when ‘reflected’ in a picture or performance. This is the ‘medusa strategy’. Rationalist and ahistorical aesthetic theories mistakenly interpret the emotions involved in disliking an unpleasant picture as a response (or reaction) to ugliness itself. The aesthetically distant relationship with the ugly always cloaks a specific stance toward the monstrous and/or disgusting. Our dealings with ugliness – the ‘aesthetic’ rejection – are always existentially charged, motivated by other concerns and somewhat archaic. Our familiarity with ugliness means that we view it as par for the course. ‘The intricate, the contradictory, the amphibious and therefore even the unnatural, the criminal, the strange, even the mad’ is always interesting.14 It can even fascinate: something of the ancient and well-known shines through but must remain suppressed and concealed. A hint of obscenity hangs over the ugly. (And the reverse might also be true. Rosenkranz was probably right to say that everything phallic, though venerated by religion, is ugly when viewed aesthetically and so cannot be idealised/aestheticised: ‘All phallic gods are ugly.’15) It is not a question, therefore, of whether something ugly can still be regarded as ‘beautiful’. Ugliness, as such, is the result of the aestheticisation of the monstrous or the disgusting. But it can also lend a frisson to works of art when added in small doses. The different and more primal level at which this engagement occurs is the very reason that its (carefully controlled) ‘appearance’ in art can be far more gripping and intense than the presence of beauty. The ever-ambiguous 166

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satisfaction that one feels at the sight of (a successful artistic representation of) ugliness – for example, in one of the variations of the sublime, or as an ingredient of the picturesque or the fantastic – is not derived from the pleasantness of its pure appearance but from the realisation that a risky enterprise has succeeded. It is not the appearance, as such, that we admire, but the triumph of the depiction: we are amazed that the hideous-­monstrous and/or the disgusting – which we would never dare confront – has been tamed through visualisation and can now be viewed with detachment. Artworks can, it would seem, keep the monster in check and produce complex, equivocal experiences in which unease at the recognition of a dangerous enemy is mingled with gratitude at its imprisonment, as well as a sense of elation. This is the satisfaction that comes with ‘surveying a dead monster’ that Joseph Addison writes about at length in ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’ in The Spectator from 1712: But how comes it to pass, that we should take delight in being terrified or dejected by a Description, when we find so much Uneasiness in the Fear of Grief which we receive from any other Occasion? If we consider, therefore, the Nature of this Pleasure, we shall find that it does not arise so properly from the Description of what is terrible, as from the Reflection we make on ourselves at the time of reading it. When we look on such hideous Objects, we are not a little pleased to think we are in no danger of them. We consider them at the same time as 167

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Dreadful and Harmless; so that the more frightful Appearance they make, the greater is the Pleasure we receive from the Sense of our own safety. In short, we look upon the Terrors of a Description, with the same Curiosity and Satisfaction that we survey a dead Monster.16 The same is true, for Addison, ‘when we read of Torments, Wounds, Deaths, and the like dismal Accidents’. Such Representations teach us to set a just Value upon our own Condition, and make us prize our good Fortune, which exempts us from the like Calamities. This is, however, such a kind of Pleasure as we are not capable of receiving, when we see a Person actually lying under the Tortures that we meet with in the Description; because in this case, the Object presses too close upon our Senses, and bears so hard upon us, that it does not give us Time or Leisure to reflect on our selves.17 To illustrate how the aesthetic dispositif can neutralise the monstrous and the disgusting and, furthermore, lend meaning and value to ugliness, I would like to cite the ‘Inspirations méditerranéennes’ by Paul Valéry.18 In this lecture text Valéry describes how the Mediterranean Sea formed his personal ‘sensibility’ (‘sensibilité’). He illustrates his point via two ‘impressions’, both of which had a decisive, profound and lasting impact on him. These did not 168

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stem from the beautiful, or from a pure appearance, but from the successful way in which, by quasi-artistic strategies, the terrible and, quite exceptionally, even the disgusting became visual. The first of these is a consummate and classic example of the sublime vista and the power of the romantic ‘landscape gaze’.19 In describing a panoramic view of the harbour and sea from the courtyard of his former school, Valéry writes: ‘for me there is no spectacle to compare with what can be seen from a terrace or a balcony pleasantly situated above a harbour.’20 The view combined the ‘uniform simplicity of the sea’ with ‘closer by, the lives and industry of humans, those who traffic, build, manoeuvre’.21 On one side is the sea, the eternal, natural, unchangeable primordial source, ‘a nature eternally prim­ itive, untouched, unchangeable by man’. On the other is the coastline, where the sea and the earth collide and the passage of time is revealed, ‘the erratic work of time, continually reshaping the shore’.22 And on the shoreline are the trifling works of humans that are accorded such significance: ‘the reciprocal work of man – the accumulation of constructions with their geometric forms, straight lines, planes and arcs – contrasting with the disorder and accidents of natural forms’.23 The blind, irregular effects, the dangerous natural ‘dis­ order’ that cannot be conquered or regulated, are encapsulated within an image of the world, positioned alongside and among the perfect man-made chaos. In a parallel passage from a different text, ‘Regards sur la mer’, Valéry places greater emphasis on the inhuman and ‘monstrous’ aspect of the sea and natural time, and the genuine disparity in which humans set up their insignificant history: For is this not the exact frontier at which the eternally wild, brute physical nature, the unfailing primitive, the ever-virginal, meet face 169

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to face the works of the hands of man, the earth arranged, symmetries ordained, solids drawn up in ranks, energies directed and opposed and the whole apparatus of an effort of which the evident principle is finality, economy, the appropriate, foresight, hope.24 The coast is where Nature confronts ‘the contrary will of edification, voluntary labour and the rebelliousness’ of humans.25 The truth, though, is that ‘these peaceful depths’ can stir at any moment, such that the sea ‘suddenly crashes upon the monstrous pedestals of emerging lands, assails, crushes, devastates the populated continents, ruins cultures, buildings and all of life’.26 From the appropriate distance and height of the school courtyard, therefore, we are both cognisant of the danger and in thrall to its magnificence: ‘the gaze enfolds the human and inhuman at a sweep.’27 The impending monstrosity, the eternal and irreconcilable battle between nature’s indifference and its animalism, which comprises the truth of human existence, is here aestheticised and ‘resolved’ into the sublime – but only in an image, and only as long as it lasts. (Therefore, when the horror of the monstrous is entirely neutralised and the threat no longer recognised, the sublime or the downright ugly becomes ridiculous: the monster is caricatured and/or becomes comical: a big friendly giant.) The category of the sublime has been applied since the eighteenth century, from Burke to Kant and German idealism, to describe the successful artistic aestheticisation of the monstrous-terrible or the inhuman-unnatural. It was only much later, principally in the field of late-twentieth-century French philosophy, that the category also became linked to the formless-disgusting. The sight of mountains from an aeroplane window, the raging sea crashing 170

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against the rocks, the vast, thousand-year-old vault of the Pantheon suspended in the air: all induce an involuntary shudder born of a real but distant threat of annihilation. But does this really equate to the ‘safe’ contemplation (for example, in an art gallery or museum context) of the disappearance and dissolution of form? Valéry does not characterise his second impression as sublime but uses the word ‘beauty’ – a ‘hideous beauty’ (‘d’une affreuse beauté’). Before presenting his account, he even apologises for any offence he might cause. As a young boy, the author decided to take a swim in the harbour. On the day in question, the local fishermen had landed huge catches of tuna. Before diving from the jetty, Valéry gazed into the water: Looking down all at once, I saw only a few feet away, in the marvellously still and transparent water, a hideous and resplendent chaos that made me shudder. Things of nauseating red, masses of a delicate pink or of a deep and sinister purple, lay there.28 What Valéry saw, just before jumping, were the red, pink and purple guts that the fishermen, as was customary, had thrown back into the sea: I recognised with horror the dreadful heap of viscera and entrails; I could neither flee nor endure what I saw, for the disgust caused by the charnel house struggled in me against my sense of the real and exceptional beauty of that confusion.29 171

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Valéry goes on to give an elaborate, colourful description of the ‘disorder’. He provides a masterful summary of the ambiguous and paradoxical nature of the experience, in which he was ‘torn between repugnance and interest, between flight and analysis’. And he correctly pinpoints the locus of the conflict in the difference between the primary, total, gut reaction (l’âme, or the soul) and the aestheticising detachment (l’œil, or the eye): ‘the eye admired what the soul abhorred.’30 What Valéry’s description illuminates, in my view, is the gulf between the sublime (in which the monstrous is recognisable and the danger alive and still palpable) and the disgusting that (in the spectacle above, at least) is completely overruled and unexpectedly gives way to a vision of ‘hideous beauty’ (‘affreuse beauté’), or even ‘actual beauty’ (‘d’une beauté réelle’). What might be regarded as repulsive certainly can, with a kind of artistic pirouette, also be aestheticised and linked to the sublime as, for example, in one of the many kinds of Theatre of Orgies (Orgientheater). With the sublime, however, the threat of the monstrous is merely curbed: the danger is ever present. By contrast, the ‘disgusting’ vision in Valéry’s second impression is real and only ‘artistically’ neutralised by the eye of the beholder in conjunction with the sea. Here, the aestheticisation is brought about by literally disabling the senses of touch, taste and smell – through which the ‘impure contact’ is either made impossible or perfectly harmless – thus reducing the formless-disgusting tuna entrails to an almost abstract spectacle of free and random shapes and colours that can be regarded as ‘pleasant’, while they might never be sublime. This is the case, of course, unless, along with Lyotard and other deconstructionist thinkers, that term is extended to encompass every philosophical collision with the other or the ‘strange’, every ‘margin’ of the understanding, or is even used to orchestrate the ‘écriture’ itself into a ‘terrifying threat’. (When the 172

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turbulence that emanates from the formless-disgusting is completely neutralised, but not transformed artistically into the ‘abstract-beautiful’, and the origin of the image remains recognisable, it transforms into the gross, the vulgar and the scabrous-comic.) The wonder of Valéry’s narrative lies in his discovery of the power of the aesthetic gaze before he even knew that such a thing as ‘art’ existed. Art produces an identical effect to that of the harbour water upon the entrails. The blue sea acted as a transparent ‘medium’ that eliminated the smell (and ‘taste’) and the possibility of contact and, in so doing, transformed the entrails into a purely visual apparition and spectacle: ‘But art is comparable to that limpid and crystalline depth through which I saw those hideous things.’ 31 The disgusting pertains to the mouth, nose, stomach and fingers, not the eyes or the mind. For nothing is disgusting to the faculty of sight. But we need art to glimpse what we dare not, or cannot, look in the eye.

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First Publication 1. First Ideas on Art, Being Moved and Criticism ‘Over kunst, ontroering en kritiek’, De Witte Raaf, no. 60 (1996). 2. Critical?Art ‘Kritische?Kunst’ and ‘Wat weet de kunst?’, in De Zaak van de Kunst (Ghent: A&S/ books, 2011). 3. What Art Can Do (Malpertuis by Jean Ray) ‘Over goden gesproken’, DWB, vol. 153, no. 3 (2008). 4. On the Pleasure of Finding What Is Hidden (With Hidden Noise by Marcel Duchamp) ‘De Rammelaar van Duchamp’, De Witte Raaf, no. 201 (2019). 175

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5.  Memoria: Memory Work and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’ ‘Memoria: over geheugenarbeid’, De Witte Raaf, no. 177 (2015). 6. On Laughter, Opinions and Artistic Freedom ‘Vrank en vrij? Over lachen, meningen, en artistieke vrijheid’, De Witte Raaf, no. 175 (2015). 7. Notes on the Work of Art as a Gift ‘Privaat kunstbezit: notities over het kunstwerk als “geschenk” en het probleem van het interieur’, De Witte Raaf, no. 121 (2006). 8.  Being an Artist Is an Art in Itself: On the ‘First Work’ and the Notion of ‘Oeuvre’ ‘Kunstenaar zijn is ook een kunst. Over het “eerste werk” en het “oeuvre”’, De Witte Raaf, no. 140 (2009). 9. Double-Speak ‘Douce métamorphose. Over gemaskerd spreken en het respect voor de tekst’, Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 60–1 (1998). 10. On Splendour and Modern Beauty ‘Over pracht en moderne schoonheid’, De Witte Raaf, no. 102 (2003). 11. Fatal Truths: Notes on the Beauty Experience ‘Fatale waarheid. Bemerkingen bij het esthetisch oordeel en de schoonheidservaring’, in Marc Verminck (ed.), Over Schoonheid (Ghent: A&S/books, 2008). 12. On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Sources of Ugliness ‘On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Sources of Ugliness’, in Jane Forsey and Lars Aagaard-Mogensen (eds), On the Ugly: Aesthetic Exchanges (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017).

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Notes

Preface 1. A collection of essays on architecture was published in Dutch: Van Hermes en Hestia. Over Architectuur (second expanded edition), Ghent, 2010.

1. First Ideas on Art, Being Moved and Criticism 1. Roland Barthes, ‘Racine est Racine’, in Mythologies (Paris: Seuil, 1957), p. 97: ‘On connaît la scie: trop d’intelligence nuit, la philosophie est un jargon inutile, il faut 177

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réserver la place du sentiment, de l’intuition, de l’innocence, de la simplicité, l’art meurt de trop d’intellectualité, l’intelligence n’est pas un qualité d’artiste, les créateurs puissants sont des empiriques, en bref la cérébralité est stérile.’

2. Critical?Art 1. François Lyotard, ‘Domus et la mégapole’, in L’inhumain: causeries sur le temps (Paris: Galilée, 1988). 2. Theodor Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1973), p. 66: ‘Um inmitten des Äußersten und Finstersten der Realität zu bestehen, müssen die Kunstwerke, die nicht als Zuspruch sich verkaufen wollen, jedem sich gleichmachen. Radikale Kunst heute heißt soviel wie finstere, von der Grundfarbe schwarz.’ 3. Ibid. p. 66: ‘In der Verarmung der Mittel, welche das Ideal der Schwärze, wenn nicht jegliche Sachlichkeit mit sich führt, verarmt auch das Gedichtete, Gemalte, Kompon­ ierte; die fortgeschrittensten Künste innervieren das am Rande des Verstummens.’ 4. Ibid. p. 122.

3. What Art Can Do (Malpertuis by Jean Ray) 1. Jean Ray (Raymond Jean-Marie de Kremer), Malpertuis. Histoire d’une maison fantastique (Brussels: Labor, 1999). 2. Ibid. p. 52: ‘ses énormes loges et balcons, ses perrons flanqués de massives rampes de pierre, ses tourelles crucifères, ses fenêtres géminées à croisillons, ses sculptures menaçantes/grimaçantes de guivres et de tarasques, ses portes cloutées’. 3. Ibid. p. 88: ‘un certain “pli dans l’espace”’; ‘la juxtaposition de deux mondes d’essence différente dont Malpertuis serait un abominable lieu de contact’. 4. Ibid. p. 137: ‘Ah, que de divinités j’ai réduites à une maniable captivité et comme le pouvoir que me prêta le grand Cassave s’entendait à faire des grains de sable d’une montagne?’ 178

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5. Ibid. p. 138: ‘Fuyons sur la mer grande, de peur que le monde des ténèbres, rendu furieux par l’énorme spoliation, ne se jette dans notre sillage.’ 6. Ibid. p. 138: ‘Cassave a pris livraison de notre cargaison. Maudite [. . .] mille fois maudite, la maison où il osa, de sa main terrible sacrilège, l’entreposer. Malpertuis est son nom.’ 7. Ibid. p. 111: ‘Les dieux reprennent goût à la vie, mais c’est la détestable vie des hommes et rien de plus.’ 8. Ibid. p. 172: ‘terrible et pourtant [. . .] pas méchant comme bien d’autres’. 9. Ibid. p. 183: ‘La lumière? [. . .] elle n’est parfaite et absolue que dans le voisinage de Dieu; en notre triste monde, les ténèbres s’y collent comme d’infernales ventouses.’

4. On the Pleasure of Finding What Is Hidden (With Hidden Noise by Marcel Duchamp) 1. Pierre Cabanne, Entretiens avec Marcel Duchamp (Paris: Éditions Belfond, 1967), p. 73. 2. Georges Perec, W ou le souvenir d’enfance (Paris: Denoël, 1975), p. 18: ‘Une fois de plus, les pièges de l’écriture se mirent en place. Une fois de plus, je fus comme un enfant qui joue à cache-cache et qui ne sait pas ce qu’il craint ou désire le plus: rester caché, être découvert.’ 3. Sigmund Freud, Jenseits des Lustprinzips (1920), in Studienausgabe, vol. 3: Psychologie des Unbewussten (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2000). 4. Ettore Scola, La Famiglia, 1987: ‘Sono qui, sono qui, perché non mi vedi?’ 5. See, among many others, Eleanor Cook, Enigmas and Riddles in Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 6. Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit, vol. 3 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996). 7. Georg Simmel, ‘Das Geheimnis und die geheime Gesellschaft’, in Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1908), pp. 256–304. 179

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8. Georg Simmel, Psychologie der Diskretion (1906), in Schriften zur Soziologie (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983), pp. 151–8. 9. See Johan Huizinga, ‘Spel en wijsheid’, in Homo Ludens. Proeve eener bepaling van het spel-element der cultuur (Haarlem: Willink, 1938), pp. 151–69. Huizinga does discuss riddle games, but remarkably, does not comment on searching or the search as a game. See also Roger Caillois, Les Jeux et les hommes. Le masque et le vertige (Paris: Gallimard, 1992 [1958]). 10. See contests or ‘antithetical games’, and all games of chance, which create the thrill of a possible win, and where ‘victory is pleasant, not only to those who love to conquer, but to all’. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1370b 32–4. 11. Berardo Collection Museum, Lisbon. 12. For an interesting analysis, based on the early discussions on iconoclasm, of how the image awakens the passion for seeing naked truth while essentially veiling it, see Marie-José Mondzain, Le Commerce des regards (Paris: Seuil, 2003). 13. See Arturo Schwarz, The Complete Works of Marcel Duchamp, vol. 1: text (New York: Delano Greenidge Editions, 1997), pp. 190–6. 14. Marcel Duchamp in conversation with James Johnson Sweeney in 1965 (television interview).

5. Memoria: Memory Work and the ‘Conversation of Mankind’ 1. André Malraux, L’Homme et la culture artistique, in Écrits sur l’art (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), p. 1215. 2. Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (2007), II, art. 13. 3. The term ‘invented tradition’ has been successfully introduced by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger in the introduction to the collection The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 180

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4. The sciences can be organised and classified from various points of view. I do not use an epistemological criterion here but start from an anthropological position of sorts, focused on the way knowledge fits into human existence. 5. See the classic formulation of this idea by André Leroi-Gourhan in the part on ‘Technique et langage’ in Le Geste et la parole (Paris: Albin Michel, 1964). See also Gilbert Simondon, Du mode d’existence des objets techniques (Paris: Aubier, 1989 [1958]); Andrew Feenberg, Questioning Technology (Abingdon: Routledge, 1999). The first classic on ‘tacit knowledge’ was Michael Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966). 6. Anthony Giddens, ‘Living in a Post-Traditional Society’, in Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 87–8. 7. The basic argument of the critical philosophy of technology is that new technology develops in a wild and unbridled way, not according to human efficiency, and without considering the social and ecological effects (Martin Heidegger, Jacques Ellul, Langdon Winner, Bernard Stiegler, etc.). The critical thinkers who focus on the risks of new technologies express differing views on the matter. Compared with the confidence science and technology still inspire, however, their reservations seem quite marginal. 8. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010 [1972]). 9. See Heinrich Rickert, Kulturwissenschaft und Naturwissenschaft (1899); Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Wissenschaftslehre, ed. Johannes Winckelmann (1922). 10. Malraux, L’Homme et la culture artistique, p. 1213: ‘Nous avons l’inquiétant privilège de nous vouloir héritiers de tout le passé.’ 11. The expression is coined by Michael Oakeshott, in The Voice of Poetry in the Conversation of Mankind: An Essay (London: Bowes & Bowes, 1959). 181

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12. See, among many others, Hans Radder (ed.), The Commodification of Academic Research: Science and the Modern University (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2010); Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, Academic Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).

6. On Laughter, Opinions and Artistic Freedom 1. Charles Baudelaire, De l’essence du rire et généralement du comique dans les art plastiques (1868). The bibliography on laughter is extensive. I have used Scott Cutler Shershow, Laughing Matters: The Paradox of Comedy (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986); Ingvild Saelid Gilhus, Laughing Gods, Weeping Virgins: Laughter in the History of Religion (London: Routledge, 2009 [1997]); Peter Berger, Redeeming Laughter: The Comic Dimension of Human Experience (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1997); Georges Minois, Histoire du rire et de la dérision (Paris: Fayard, 2000); Stephen Halliwell, Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Anton Zijderveld, Waarom wij lachen: over de grap, de spot en de oorsprong van humor (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Cossee, 2011). 2. Baudelaire, De l’essence du rire, chapter 6: ‘quelque chose de terrible et d’irrésistible’. 3. Gilhus, Laughing Gods, p. 3. 4. Salomon Reinach, Le Rire rituel (1911), in Cultes, Mythes et Religions (Paris: Robert Laffont, 2000), pp. 145–58, here p. 147: ‘Le rire ne marque pas seulement la vie, mais l’intensité, la plénitude de la vie’; ‘la manifestation bruyante de la présence d’un dieu’. 5. Friedrich Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches. Ein Buch für freie Geister (1878), §169 (Herkunft des Komischen): ‘das vor Angst zitternde, zusammengekrümmte Wesen schnellt empor, entfaltet sich weit.’ 182

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6. Baudelaire, De l’essence du rire, chapter 2: ‘Dans le paradis terrestre, c’est-à-dire dans le milieu où il semblait à l’homme que toutes les choses créées étaient bonnes, la joie n’était pas dans le rire.’ 7. Georg Simmel, ‘Über die Karikatur’, first edition in Der Tag, no. 105, 27 February 1917: ‘Dies ist die eigentümliche Konstellation unseres Wesens: dass wir uns zwar begrenzt wissen, in unseren Eigenschaften und unserem Denken, in unserem positiven wie negativen Wert, in unserem Willen und unserer Kraft – zugleich aber fähig und aufgefordert, darüber hinauszusehen, hinauszugehen.’ 8. Baudelaire, De l’essence du rire, chapter 4: ‘Le rire est satanique, il est donc pro­ fondément humain. Il est dans l’homme la conséquence de l’idée de sa propre supériorité; et, en effet, comme le rire est essentiellement humain, il est essentiellement contradictoire, c’est-à-dire qu’il est à la fois signe d’une grandeur infinie et d’une misère infinie, misère infinie relativement à l’Etre absolu dont il possède la conception, grandeur infinie relativement aux animaux. C’est du choc perpétuel de ces deux infinis que se dégage le rire.’ 9. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §213 (Freude am Unsinn): ‘Das Umwerfen der Erfahrung ins Gegenteil, des Zweckmäßigen ins Zwecklose, des Notwendigen ins Beliebige [. . .] ergötzt, denn es befreit uns’; ‘dass dieser Vorgang keinen Schaden macht und nur einmal aus Übermut vorgestellt wird. Wir spielen und lachen dann, wenn das Erwartete (das gewöhnlich bange macht und spannt) sich ohne zu schädigen entladet.’ 10. Henri Bergson, Le Rire. Essai sur la signification du comique (1900), in Henri Bergson, Œuvres (Paris: PUF, 1970), pp. 383–485. 11. See Mikhail Bakhtin, L’Œuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Âge et sous la Renaissance (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), and Paul Vandenbroeck, Jheronimus Bosch. Tussen volksleven en stadscultuur (Antwerp: EPO, 1987), particularly chapter 11 on ‘hekelspreken’. See also Walter Gibson, Pieter Bruegel and the Art of Laughter (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 2006). 183

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12. I have used Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘Les Origines de la pensée grecque’, in Œuvres I (Paris: Seuil, 2007), pp. 155–240, and Giorgio Colli, La nascita della filosofia (Milan: Adelphi, 1975). 13. See the interesting study by Jerome Neu, Sticks and Stones: The Philosophy of Insults (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 14. I have used the book by Léonce Paquet, Les Cyniques grecs. Fragments et témoignages (Paris: Librairie Générale Française, 1992), and R. Bracht Branham and Marie-Odile Goulet-Cazé (eds), The Cynics: The Cynic Movement in Antiquity and its Legacy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 15. Diogenes Laertius, VI, 54; Paquet, Les Cyniques grecs, p. 88. 16. Blaise Pascal, Pensées (texte établi par Louis Lafuma) (Paris: Seuil, 1973), no. 513, p. 285: ‘Se moquer de la philosophie, c’est vraiment philosopher.’ 17. Gilles Lipovetsky, L’Ere du vide. Essais sur l’individualisme contemporain (Paris: Gallimard, 1983), p. 126: ‘L’art moderne prolonge la révolution démocratique.’ 18. Ibid. p. 124: ‘Modernisme artistique et égalité, loin d’être discordants, font parti intégrante d’une même culture démocratique et individualiste [. . .] Le modernisme n’est qu’une face du vaste processus séculaire conduisant à l’avènement des sociétés démocratiques fondées sur la souveraineté de l’individu et du peuple, sociétés libérées de la soumission aux dieux, des hiérarchies héréditaires et de l’emprise de la tradition [. . .] Désormais la société est vouée à s’inventer de part en part selon la raison humaine, non selon l’héritage du passé collectif, plus rien n’est intangible [. . .]’ 19. René Magritte in a letter to André Breton, 24 June 1946, in René Magritte, Écrits complets (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), p. 200: ‘Ce désarroi, cette panique que le surréalisme voulait susciter pour que tout soit remis en question, les crétins nazis les ont obtenu beaucoup mieux que nous et il n’était pas question de s’y dérober.’ See my article ‘Peinture vache, peinture métaphysique? René Magritte en het sublieme’, in De Witte Raaf, vol. 9, no. 50 (July–August 1994), pp. 19–21.

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20. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §167 (Artistische Erziehung des Publikums): ‘Wenn dasselbe Motiv nicht hundertfältig durch verschiedene Meister behandelt wird, lernt das Publikum nicht über das Interesse des Stoffes hinauskommen.’ 21. This is how André Breton characterises the oeuvre and artistic project of the poet Jacques Vaché. André Breton, Entretiens 1913–1952 (Paris: NRF, 1952), pp. 26–7: ‘en grand secret, minait le monde, réduisant ce qui prenait alors toute importance à une échelle dérisoire, désacralisant tout sur son chemin’. 22. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §148 (Dichter als Erleichterer des Lebens): ‘in manchen Hinsichten rückwärts gewendete Wesen (sein): so dass man sie als Brücken zu ganz fernen Zeiten und Vorstellungen, zu absterbenden oder abgestorbenen Religionen und Kulturen gebrauchen kann’.

7. Notes on the Work of Art as a Gift 1. The classic text is Paul Valéry, ‘Le Problème des musées’, in Œuvres II (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 1290–3. See also Douglas Crimp, On the Museum’s Ruins (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), and Jean Clair, ‘Du musée comme élevage de poussière (pensées impies’), in L’Arc, no. 63, Beaubourg et le musée de demain (1975), pp. 47–54. For a survey of the traditional view of the museum and the critiques of the museum, based on the most important written sources, see Kristina Kratz-Kessemeier et al., Museumgeschichte. Kommentierte Quellentexte 1750–1950 (Berlin: Reimer Verlag, 2010). See also Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago (eds), Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004). 2. Adolf Loos, ‘Richtlinien für ein Kunstamt’, in Die Potemkinsche Stadt. Verschollene Schriften 1897–1933 (Vienna: Prachner, 1997), p. 155: ‘Der Staat hat keine Ankäufe zu machen, der Bürger hat für den zukünftigen Bestand an Kunstwerken zu sorgen.’ 185

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3. Ibid. p. 153: ‘alle vom Denkmalsamte inventarisierten Gegenstände’. 4. Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, 3rd enlarged edn, trans. Tom Bottemore and David Frisby (London: Routledge, 2004). 5. Marcel Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don. Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques’, in Sociologie et anthropologie (Paris: PUF, 1983), p. 159: ‘La chose reçue n’est pas inerte’; see Barry Schwartz, ‘The Social Psychology of the Gift’, in The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 73, no. 1 (July 1967), pp. 1–11. See also the collection of classical texts and essays: Aafke E. Komter (ed.), The Gift: An Interdisciplinary Perspective (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1996). 6. Mauss, ‘Essai sur le don’, p. 174: ‘On mêle les âmes dans les choses; on mêle les choses dans les âmes. On mêle les vies et voilà comment les personnes et les choses mêlées sortent chacune de sa sphère et se mêlent.’ 7. After the writing and translation of the present chapter, I discovered the article by Andrew Wernick, ‘The Work of Art as Gift and Commodity’, in Susan M. Pearce (ed.), Experiencing Material Culture in the Western World (London and Washington: Leicester University Press, 1997), and a rather poorly organised book by Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property (New York: Vintage, 1983), republished in 2007 with the subtitle Art, Imagination, and the Power of the Creative Spirit.

8. Being an Artist Is an Art in Itself 1. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §145: ‘Das Vollkommene soll nicht geworden sein.’ 2. Ibid. §162: ‘wird man etwas abgekühlt’. 3. Ibid. §162: ‘Die vollendete Kunst der Darstellung weist alles Denken an das Werden ab; es tyrannisiert als gegenwärtige Vollkommenheit.’ 4. Ibid. §155: ‘wie ein Gnadenschein vom Himmel herableuchte’. 186

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5. Mircea Eliade, ‘Les Mythes du monde moderne’, in Mythes, rêves et mystères (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 33: ‘la mythologie diffuse de l’homme moderne’; ‘laïcisés, dégradés, camouflés, les mythes et images mythiques se rencontrent partout: il n’est que de les reconnaître.’ 6. See, among others, Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of Commonplace (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). 7. See, for primary references, among others, the classical studies of Julius Sillig, Dictionary of the Artists of Antiquity: Architects, Carvers, Engravers, Modellers, Painters . . . (London: Black and Armstrong, 1837 [1827]); Ernst Kris and Otto Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic in the Image of the Artist (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979 [1934]); Rudolf Wittkower and Margot Wittkower, Born Under Saturn: The Character and Conduct of Artists (New York: Random House, 1963). See also Catherine M. Soussloff, The Absolute Artist: The Historiography of a Concept (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997). 8. Picasso in the Nineteenth Century: Youth in Spain I, 1889–1897, Malaga, Corunna and Barcelona (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, 2007). 9. Kris and Kurz, Legend, Myth, and Magic, p. 13. 10. Nietzsche, Menschliches, Allzumenschliches, §146: ‘schwächere Moralität’; ‘Scheinbar kämpft er für die höhere Würde und Bedeutung des Menschen; in Wahrheit will er die für seine Kunst wirkungsvollsten Voraussetzungen nicht aufgeben’.

9. Double-Speak 1. Roland Barthes, ‘Preface’, in François-René de Chateaubriand, La Vie de Rancé (Paris: Union générale d’éditions, 1965), p. 9: ‘Cette sorte de distorsion posée par le temps entre l’écriture et la lecture est le défi même de ce que nous appelons littérature: l’œuvre lue est anachronique.’ 187

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2. Paul Valéry, ‘Eupalinos ou l’architecte’, in Œuvres II (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), pp. 79–147, here p. 92: ‘Ecoute, Phèdre [. . .], ce petit temple que j’ai bâti pour Hermès, à quelques pas d’ici, si tu savais ce qu’il est pour moi! – Où le passant ne voit qu’une élégante chapelle, – c’est peu de chose: quatre colonnes, un style très simple, – j’ai mis le souvenir d’un clair jour de ma vie. O douce métamorphose! Ce temple délicat, nul ne le sait, est l’image mathématique d’une fille de Corinthe que j’ai heureusement aimée. Il en reproduit fidèlement les proportions particulières. Il vit pour moi! Il me rend ce que je lui ai donné.’ 3. The painting, dated 1844–54, is in the Louvre collection. For the Portrait de l’artiste, dit L’Homme blessé, see Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) (Grand Palais, 1977/78) (Paris, 1977), pp. 122–4 and 224–5. 4. Roland Barthes, keyword ‘Dédicace’, in Fragments d’un discours amoureux (Paris: Seuil, 1977), pp. 89–94: ‘il a un sens (des sens) qui déborde de beaucoup son adresse; j’ai beau écrire ton nom sur mon ouvrage, c’est pour “eux” qu’il a été écrit (autres, les lecteurs).’ 5. See Jean Starobinski, ‘Stendhal pseudonyme’ (1951), in L’Œil vivant (Paris: Gallimard, 1961), pp. 187–240; Cornelis Verhoeven, De symboliek van de sluier (Antwerp: Standaard, 1961), chapter 3: ‘Sluier en masker’. 6. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2.2. 7. Ibid. 3.2. 8. Valéry, ‘Eupalinos ou l’architecte’, pp. 92–3: ‘C’est donc pourquoi il est d’une grâce inexplicable, lui dis-je. On y sent bien la présence d’une personne, la première f leur d’une femme, l’harmonie d’un être charmant [. . .] Il éveille vaguement un souvenir qui ne peut pas arriver à son terme et ce commencement d’une image dont tu possèdes la perfection, ne laisse pas de poindre l’âme et de la confondre. Sais-tu bien que si je m’abandonne à ma pensée, je vais le comparer à quelque chant nuptial mêlé de f lûtes, que je sens naître de moi-même.’ 188

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9. Ibid. p. 93: ‘tu es fait pour me comprendre! Nul plus que toi ne s’est approché de mon démon.’

10. On Splendour and Modern Beauty 1. Johann Georg Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie der schönen Künste in einzeln: nach alphabetischer Ordnung der Kunstwörter aufeinanderfolgenden, Artikeln abgehandelt (1771) (G. Olms Verlag, 1967), on ‘Pracht’ (splendour): ‘Ursprünglich bedeutet das Wort ein starkes Geräusch; deswegen man in dem eigentlichsten Sinn dem Donner einer sehr stark besetzten und feierlichen Musik, Pracht zuschreiben würde [. . .] Es scheint also, dass man jetzt überhaupt durch Pracht mannigfaltigen Reichtum mit Größe verstehe, insofern sie in einem einzigen Gegenstand vereinigt sind; eine Mannigfaltigkeit solcher Dinge, die die Sinnen oder die Einbildungskraft durch ihre Größe stark einnehmen.’ 2. Ibid.: ‘Die unmittelbarste Wirkung der Pracht ist Ehrfurcht, Bewunderung und Erstaunen [. . .] Bei wichtigen, politischen und gottesdienstlichen Feierlichkeiten, ist die Pracht notwendig; weil es wichtig ist, dass das Volk nie ohne Ehrfurcht und Vergnügen an die Gegenstände gedenke, wodurch jene Feierlichkeiten veranlasst werden.’ 3. The fundamental text on the subject in Western aesthetics is Abbot Suger’s commentary on the construction of the Saint-Denis choir. See Abbot Suger on the Abbey Church of St.-Denis and its Art Treasures (edited, translated and annotated by Erwin Panofsky) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979). 4. See Frederick T. Elworthy, The Evil Eye: The Origins and Practices of Superstition (New York: Julian Press, 1958); see also Joost Meerloo, Intuition and the Evil Eye: The Natural History of a Superstition (Wassenaar: Servire Publishers, 1971), and Jean Clair, Méduse. Contribution à une anthropologie des arts du visuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). I have discussed aspects of this theme in an article on the portrait 189

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and the ‘portrait situation’: ‘Small Theory of the Portrait’, in De Witte Raaf, no. 81 (1999). 5. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Hymne à la Beauté’ (Les Fleurs du Mal, XXI), in Œuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), vol. 1, pp. 24–5: ‘Viens-tu du ciel ou sors tu de l’abîme / Ô Beauté? [. . .] Sors-tu du gouffre noir ou descends-tu des astres?’ 6. The recent literature on the sublime is almost unmanageable. For a useful introduction to Kant, see Christian Helmut Wenzel, ‘Kant’s Aesthetics: Overview and Recent Literature’, in Philosophy Compass, no. 4/3 (2009), pp. 380–406. See also Jean-François Courtine (ed.), Of the Sublime: Presence in Question (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993); Jean-François Lyotard, Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Jean-François Lyotard, ‘The Sublime and the Avant-Garde’, Artforum, vol. 22, no. 8 (April 1984), pp. 36–43. 7. Jean-François Lyotard, Pérégrinations. Loi, forme, événement (Paris: Galilée, 1990), pp. 79–80: ‘découvre une autre manière de venir au contact des pensées, une manière de se laisser toucher par l’être comme par ce qui se donne toujours sans jamais se donner’. 8. Affirming the curiositas does not mean developing a scientific interest in know­ ledge, but, on the contrary, being absorbed non-devoutly by what presents itself: curiosus is the opposite of attentus. For the medieval concept of curiositas, see Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images 400–1200 (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 82 et seq. For the history of curiositas, see the third part of Hans Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1996). Cf. Charles Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, in Œuvres complètes (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), vol. 2, p. 689. 9. Charles Baudelaire, ‘De l’héroïsme de la vie moderne’, in ‘Salon de 1846’, Œuvres complètes (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), vol. 2, p. 493: ‘quelque chose d’éternel et quelque chose de transitoire, – d’absolu et de particulier’. 190

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10. Ibid. p. 493: ‘et comme nous avons nos passions particulières, nous avons notre beauté.’ 11. Baudelaire, ‘Le Peintre de la vie moderne’, p. 685: ‘d’une composition double’. 12. Ibid. p. 685: ‘Le beau est fait d’un élément éternel, invariable, dont la quantité est excessivement difficile à déterminer, et d’un élément relatif, circonstanciel, qui sera, si l’on veut, tour à tour ou tout ensemble, l’époque, la mode, la morale, la passion. Sans ce second élément, qui est comme l’enveloppe amusante, tintillante, apéritive, du divin gâteau, le premier élément serait indigestible, inappréciable, non adapté et non approprié à la nature humaine.’ 13. Ibid. p. 695: ‘La modernité, c’est le transitoire, le fugitif, le contingent, la moitié de l’art, dont l’autre moitié est l’éternel et l’immuable.’ 14. Ibid. p. 694: ‘dégager de la mode ce qu’elle peut contenir de poétique dans l’historique’; ‘tirer l’éternel du transitoire’. 15. Ibid. p. 687: ‘Il est le peintre de la circonstance et de tout ce qu’elle suggère d’éternel.’ 16. Ibid. p. 690: ‘L’enfant voit tout en nouveauté; il est toujours ivre. Rien ne ressemble plus à ce qu’on appelle l’inspiration que la joie avec laquelle l’enfant absorbe la forme et la couleur [. . .] C’est à cette curiosité profonde et joyeuse qu’il faut attribuer l’œil fixe et animalement extatique des enfants devant le nouveau, quel qu’il soit, visage ou paysage, lumière, dorure, couleurs, étoffes chatoyantes, enchantement de la beauté embellie par la toilette.’ 17. Ibid. p. 684: ‘qualité essentielle de présent’. 18. Baudelaire, ‘Hymne à la Beauté’, pp. 24–5: ‘De Satan ou de Dieu, qu’importe? Ange ou Sirène, / Qu’importe, si tu rends – fée aux yeux de velours, / Rythme, parfum, lueur, ô mon unique reine! – / L’univers moins hideux et les instants moins lourds?’ Charles Baudelaire, ‘Hymn to Beauty’, in The Flowers of Evil, trans. William Aggeler (Fresno, CA: Academy Library Guild, 1954).

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11. Fatal Truths: Notes on the Beauty Experience 1. Arthur Danto, The Abuse of Beauty: Aesthetics and the Concept of Art (Chicago: Open Court Publishing, 2003), p. 58. 2. Ibid. p. 27. 3. Dirk Lauwaert, ‘Hedendaags sofisme en de arme ervaring’, in Artikels (Brussels: De Gelaarsde Kat, 1996), p. 211. 4. Paul Valéry, Cahiers II (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 962: ‘possession de ce qui nous passe, et ceci nous possédant en retour’. 5. Ibid. p. 953: ‘surpris par l’attendu’. 6. Ibid. p. 962 and p. 944: ‘La belle chose est incroyable – et est’; ‘obscur[e] en tant que merveille’. 7. Ibid. p. 935: ‘Ce qui ne fait penser à nulle autre chose; et puis au lieu de s’éclairer par la pensée, – l’éclaire, cela est beau, et par sa seule présence.’

1 2. On the Aesthetic Gaze, Beauty and the Two Sources of Ugliness 1. Paul Valéry, Œuvres I (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), p. 328: ‘Sais-tu quelque moyen de réprimer ce qui surgit de la vue des choses?’ 2. Karl Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2007). For the German language contributions to the theory of ugliness I have used Werner Jung, Schöner Schein der Hässlichkeit oder Hässlichkeit des schönen Scheins. Ästhetik und Geschichtsphilosophie im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987). 3. Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen, p. 47: ‘[Die Kunst] muss uns das Hässliche in der ganzen Schärfe seines Unwesens vorführen, aber sie muss dies dennoch mit derjenigen Idealität tun, mit der sie auch das Schöne behandelt.’ 4. Ibid. p. 190ff. 192

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5. Paul Valéry, Cahiers II (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p. 962: ‘La belle chose est incroyable – et est.’ 6. Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen, p. 12. 7. Gilbert Lascault, Le Monstre dans l’art occidental. Un problème esthétique (Paris: Klincksieck, 2004), pp. 21, 24–5: ‘un écart par rapport à la nature’; ‘une cause efficiente qui se veut tout puissante, d’une volonté qui veut rivaliser avec la nature et d’une matière torturée et dominée’; ‘inquiétante étrangeté’. 8. Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen, p. 12: ‘das hässlichste hässliche’. 9. For the literature on the monstrous see, in addition to Lascault (with extensive bibliography), David Leeming, Medusa in the Mirror of Time (London: Reaktion Books, 2013), and Jean Clair, Méduse. Contribution à une anthropologie des arts du visuel (Paris: Gallimard, 1989). 10. Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen, p. 294: ‘Der Schein des Lebens im an sich Toten ist das unendlich Widrige im Ekelhaften.’ 11. The writings of Georges Bataille were essential to the introduction of the formless (and the disgusting) as a theme in art and art theory. He, in turn, drew upon anthropological studies of primitive religions and rituals, especially on the subject of ‘purity’ (Mary Douglas, Emile Durkheim, Mircea Eliade, Roger Caillois). The most important overview and first conceptualisation of the ‘formless’ in art, before it became focused on the physical and the abject, is the exhibition catalogue L’Informe. Mode d’emploi, curated by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss (Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1996): Formless: A User’s Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997). The brief pages by Rosenkranz on the subject are certainly fundamental: see Ästhetik des Hässlichen, pp. 293–303, about ‘the disgusting’ (‘Das Ekelhafte’). For a recent survey, see Winfried Menninghaus, Ekel: Theorie und Geschichte einer starken Empfindung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2011). 12. Rosenkranz, Ästhetik des Hässlichen, p. 297: ‘doch eben nur an einen oberfläch­ lichen Beginn der Verwesung zu denken hat’. 193

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13. Ibid. p. 295: ‘Wir sehen dies wohl, aber wir riechen es nicht.’ 14. Ibid. p. 104: ‘[d]as Verwickelte, das Widerspruchvolle, das Amphibolische und daher selbst das Unnatürliche, das Verbrecherische, das Seltsame, ja Wahnsinnige’. 15. Ibid. p. 223: ‘Alles Phallische, obwohl in den Religionen heilig, ist doch ästhetisch genommen häßlich. Alle phallischen Götter sind häßlich.’ 16. Joseph Addison, ‘The Pleasures of the Imagination’, in The Spectator, vol. 6, 10th edn (London, 1729), p. 89 (no. 418, 1712). 17. Ibid. p. 90. 18. Paul Valéry, ‘Inspirations méditerranéennes’, in Essais quasi politiques, Œuvres I (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1957), pp. 1084–98. 19. For an interesting series of essays on the sublime landscape, see the catalogue Le Paysage et la question de sublime, Musée de Valence, 1997. 20. Valéry, ‘Inspirations méditerranéennes’, p. 1084: ‘ce que l’on voit d’une terrasse ou d’un balcon bien placé au-dessus d’un port’. 21. Ibid. p. 1085: ‘la simplicité générale de la mer’; ‘la vie et l’industrie humaines, qui trafiquent, construisent, manœuvrent tout auprès’. 22. Ibid. p. 1085: ‘une nature éternellement primitive, intacte, inaltérable par l’homme’; ‘l’œuvre irrégulier du temps qui façonne indéfiniment le ravage’. 23. Ibid. p. 1085: ‘l’œuvre réciproque des hommes, dont les constructions accumulées, les formes géométriques qu’ils emploient, la ligne droite, les plans ou les arcs s’opposent aux désordre et aux accidents des formes naturelles.’ 24. Paul Valéry, ‘Regards sur la mer’, in Pièces sur l’art, Œuvres II (Pléiade) (Paris: Gallimard, 1960), p. 1340: ‘N’est-ce point ici la frontière même où se rencontrent éternellement sauvage, la nature physique brute, la présence toujours primitive et la réalité toute vierge, avec l’œuvre des mains de l’homme, avec la terre modifiée, les symétries imposés, les solides rangés et dressés, l’énergie déplacée et contrariée, et tout l’appareil d’un effort dont la loi évidente est finalité, économie, appropri­ ation, prévision, espérance.’ 194

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25. Valéry, ‘Inspirations méditerranéennes’, p. 1085: ‘la volonté contraire d’édification, le travail volontaire, et comme rebelle’. 26. Valéry, ‘Regards sur la mer’, p. 1336: ‘se heurte tout à coup au socle monstrueux des terres émergées, assaille, écrase, dévaste les plates-formes populeuses, ruine les cultures, les demeures et toute vie’. 27. Valéry, ‘Inspirations méditerranéennes’, p. 1085: ‘L’œil ainsi embrasse à la fois l’humain et l’inhumain.’ 28. Ibid. p. 1088: ‘Tout à coup, abaissant le regard, j’aperçus à quelques pas de moi, sous l’eau merveilleusement plane et transparente, un horrible et splendide chaos qui me fit frémir. Des choses d’une rougeur écœurante, des masses d’un rose délicat ou d’une pourpre profonde et sinistre, gisaient là.’ 29. Ibid. p. 1089: ‘Je reconnus avec horreur l’affreux amas des viscères et des entrailles [. . .] Je ne pouvais ni fuir ni supporter ce que je voyais, car le dégoût que ce charnier me causait le disputait en moi à la sensation de beauté réelle et singulière de ce désordre.’ 30. Ibid. p. 1089: ‘divisé entre la répugnance et l’intérêt, entre la fuite et l’analyse [. . .] L’œil aimait ce que l’âme abhorrait.’ 31. Ibid. p. 1089: ‘Mais l’art est comparable à cette limpide et cristalline épaisseur à travers laquelle je voyais ces choses atroces: il nous fait des regards qui peuvent tout considérer.’

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Index Addison, Joseph, 167–8 aesthetic appreciation, 158–9 aesthetic object, 144–7, 158 Antisthenes see free speech Art, 32–3, 88–90, 115, 163, 173 art collecting, 95–7, 101 art critcism, 16–18, 25, 92–3 art work, 99–101, 142–3 institutional theory of, 105–7, 143

‘the first work’, 104–5 and secrecy, 40–2, 127 and ugliness, 166–7 artist, 106–15 artistic freedom, 81–4 Barthes, Roland, 16, 116–17 Baudelaire, Charles, 67, 69–70, 132, 137–40 beauty, 137–41, 142–3 197

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beauty experience, 147–53, 159 splendour, 132–4 Courbet, Gustave, 119 criticality, 19–25 culture, 23–5, 55–7, 146 Danto, Arthur, 105, 143 dedication, 120 Duchamp, Marcel, 43–6, 105, 143 eroticism (body), 39–40, 88, 133–4 fear, 27–30, 161 foolishness, 71, 78 free speech (parrhesia), 73–81 and philosophy, 78–9 Freud, Sigmund, 35, 67 gaze, 133 aesthetic gaze, 146, 156–8 gift, 98–9 Greek cynics see free speech

Kant, Immanuel see sublime knowledge, 13–5, 38–9, 47–9 and awareness, 15 curiosity, 36, 48, 138–9 discursive knowledge, 53–7 discussion, 73–4 interpretation, 117–28 memory, 49–50 opinion, 83 rationality, 48, 73 scepticism, 74, 80 scientificity, 48–9, 58–61 laughter, 67–72, 80–1 Lipovetsky, Gilles, 82 Loos, Adolf, see art collecting Lyotard, Jean-François, 136 Malpertuis, 30–3 modernity, 19–21, 123 museum, 93–4

Hamlet, 125–6 hide-and-seek, 35–40

negativity, 19–22, 78, 82, 84–90 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 68, 70, 71, 84, 86, 90, 104, 114

image, 24–5, 40–1, 83, 86, 163, 165–6

oeuvre, 111–14

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politics (democracy), 73–4, 84–5 privacy, 37 Ray, Jean see Malpertuis religion, 163 and art, 27–30, 32–3, 38–9, 88–9 Rosenkranz, Karl, 155, 165 stupidity, 71 Scola, Ettore, 36 Simmel, Georg, 37, 69 splendour, 132–4 sublime, 21–2, 135–6, 155, 168–73

technology, 50–3 ugliness, 160–7 monstruosity, 161 the abject, 161, 171–3 university, 57–8, 61 Valéry, Paul, 117, 127, 149, 150, 151, 168–73 Warhol, Andy, 105, 143 With Hidden Noise, 44–6

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