This week I've been reading
an essay by Martin Heidegger for my Oxford tutorial on Aesthetics and
Critical Theory. In the essay, Heidegger asks a deceptively simple
question: what does a work of art do? As Heidegger sees it, art work
is about more than making something beautiful to hang on the wall. In
fact as Heidegger contends, art does nothing short of creating our
world. At first this sounds like quite a stretch—how can art create
a world? Heidegger holds up the example of a Greek temple as a kind
of art work to make this point. For the ancient Greeks, a temple was
not about its beauty; instead, the work of building and
consecrating a temple is about opening up a space for a collective
understanding of all the ups and downs of existence. In this sense,
the term “art work” has a kind of active connotation; it is a
process of making the world meaningful, of figuring out what it means
to be human in the context of other people and things at a given
time. The up shot of all of this (at least as I plan to argue to my
tutor) is that Heidegger presents us with a startling reversal of the
conventional wisdom that a given culture produce art. Instead, what
this essays seems to tell us is that it is in art work that we find
the positive enactment of a community. (I feel the jargon coming on,
so I'll stop with the bit about the temple.)
All of this becomes a little
bit more clear when Heidegger give us another gives us another
example by way of a painting of a peasant woman's shoes by Vincent Van Gogh.
On one level, Heidegger tells us that the shoes are merely
things—mute objects that don't hold any meaning. On another level,
the shoes mean something to the peasant they belong to—they are
every day things that are useful for walking around and keeping warm,
but she never really gives them a second thought. But here is the
important part: in the work of art, the shoes reveal the truth of not
just their own existence, but that of their surroundings, their
owner, and, as I think as Heidegger might argue, even us. Heidegger
unpacks all of this in a stunning passage.
From the dark opening of
the worn insides of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares
forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the
accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and
ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather
lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the
loneliness of the field-path as evening falls. In the shoes vibrates
the silent call of the earth , its quiet gift of the ripening grain
and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the
wintry fields.
Wow...
As much
as I like Heidegger's exegesis of the Van Gogh, it would be
disingenuous of me, looking at the painting in the 21st ,
to say that I see everything that Heidegger sees in the shoes. I have
a feeling that this is because I grew up in Chicago in the 1980's and
90's and, frankly, have had little experience “trudging in furrows”
or “toiling with ripening grain.” In short, I come from a
different world than the peasant woman implied by the painting. But
what happens in this case? What happens when we lose contact with the
context of the world and the community that art belongs to? I think
that Heidegger would say that when art stops being something that
makes sense of existence and no longer unites a community it becomes
a mere thing. In the paper I am writing for my tutorial I argue that
it is at this point—when we become disconnected from the world that
art creates—that we start to talk about beauty, aesthetics, and art
for art's sake. For an excellent example, I don't need to look too
far from Oxford. I'm thinking of the Elgin marbles, which were
removed from the Parthenon in Athens and brought to the British
Gallery in London in the 19th century.
When I
visit them in London, removed as they are from their context, I can
appreciate their form, their symmetry, their repose, but they will
never have the dynamic, living meaning for me as they would have for
Pericles gazing up on them from the Acropolis in the 5th
century BC. That deeper meaning of these works of art is lost to me.
They may be beautiful, but in many ways they are just dead stone,
just plain things.
This
reduction of art to its “thing” quality is also something I have
been exploring in my tutorial. The Van Gogh painting or the Elgin
marbles seem like “things” or plain old objects to me now, but
this is because the worlds they conjure up are alien as a result of
distances in space and the passing of time. But many recent critics
contend that even contemporary art works fails to go beyond being
merely things to reveal truths about the world. Many of these kinds
of claims cite Karl Marx and his work Capital. There Marx
argues that modern economies are able to exchange goods and labor by
thinking about everything in terms of equivalent things or, in
short, by objectifying everything into the form of commodities. Many
Marxist thinkers I have read in this term argue that this way of
thinking has penetrated almost every aspect of our consciousness,
including our art. The cultural critic Fredric Jameson does an
excellent job of illustrating this point by comparing Heidegger's
reading of Van Gogh's shoes to Diamond Dust Shoes, a painting
by Andy Warhol.
Unlike the Van Gogh, which conjures up a whole lived
experience, Jameson says that Warhol's shoes are a “random
collection of dead objects hanging together on the canvas like so
many turnips, [...] shorn of their earlier life.” The Warhol shoes
exist superficially and we can't imagine them being worn or revealing
any profound truths about their world in the way that the peasant's
shoes do. Here, like in his famous soup can paintings, Warhol seems
to be examining the effects of commodification on works art.
All of
this is, of course, fascinating and, as any good set of readings
should, it leaves me with more questions than answers. Of few of them
being:
If
Heidegger is right and art really does “set up a world,” what are
the responsibilities of the artist? (This question seems even more
pressing when we consider the aestheticization of politics carried
out by the Nazis, with whom Heidegger was complicit)
Can we
ever truly understand the art of a bygone world? Do art works offer a
way to empathize with others from different times and places? And if
so couldn't this kind of empathy be counted among arts beautiful
qualities?
Has the
commodification of our modern (or postmodern world) eliminated the
possibility of authentic art as Heidegger sees it? If not what might
be some examples of authentic contemporary art works?
Heath
Oxford,
12/8/08
