What Does a Work of Art Do? or Everything I Ever Wanted to Know about Art I Learned from My Shoes

  

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 21^st , 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 19^th 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 5^th 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

Comments

[Adrian Nelson]

I read Tolstoy's "What is Art?" for Hum1, and some of his arguments for art are pretty similar to Heidegger's. One of his criteria for art is that it communicate the feelings of the artist to the audience, and the better the art, the more universal it is.
His argument for not understanding art of a bygone era is that their art celebrates the values of their time, and we have outgrown them--we have advanced and left their art behind. That in a way seems similar to what Heidegger is saying: that art becomes a thing when you can no longer connect to it.

[Piers]

I'm writing an essay at the moment concerning 'The Origin', titled, 'Is our appreciation of artworks subjective?'

I have studied the text but as with much of Heidegger the vagaries of his intentions can lie far from the direct translation of his philosophy. However, your blog has given me some ideas and it was well written.

Concerning your last question you should look up this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Art-Thought-New-Interventions-History/dp/0631227156/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1231349567&sr=8-5

Or rather, specifically the...penultimate essay i think it is where Diarmuid Costello explores the possibility of the Tate Modern being a modern/technological artwork, in a Heideggerian sense. Personally it seems she is fighting a losing battle from the start but it is still interesting.

[Julia]

I did art at school and high school here in Spain and I think that a big problem with the Art education is that all the teachers show you the same paintings or sculptures and tell you the same about it and don't motivate you to understand the creation or the author... and most of the people end up saying "I don't like art"

Too bad! People should leave the ordenador for a while and go out to some museum and get some culture... instead of spending so much time with their ordenadores and componentes pc. I'm thinking of puting a picture in my website like "the painting of the month" and make people look at it when they log in... maybe that's going to make a few of them to apreciate the art. Kisses from julia from my portatil