Describing Art

Revue des Pratiques Langagières, 2014

My present study puts under light the intrinsic tie that connects self, history and art. This triad enhances me to raise the following questions: How do we write? What do we write? Are we only containers within/through which thoughts think and express themselves? Or, are we conscious of what we write, and therefore, what is outlined and reproduced is no more than a presentation of history, and one’s history in art?

مجلة الممارسات اللغوية, 2014

Martina Wagner-Egelhaaf (Ed.), Handbook of Autobiography/Autofiction, 3 Bde., Berlin und Boston: De Gruyter 2019, Bd. 1: Theory and Concepts, p. 82–94 , 2019

Published by the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts Leiden University, 2022

This article was written as a lecture for the emeritus celebration of prof. Janneke Wesseling (Leiden University) in June 2022 One must distinguish between asking 'what a work (does or does not) say' (= its 'meaning') and asking 'what the work is about' (= its aboutness). The subject or issue of a work, what it is about, is not a 'message' that is said. Art is always about something, and that means that it presents something, raises something, talks about something, opens a conversation... One cannot limit the 'aboutness' of art and inscribe it in an essentialist definition of what art is. But art is indeed - retrospectively, historically and therefore factually - mainly about certain issues. History has excavated a bed in which art flows today, and which serves as a frame of reference for what art can be and can possibly do. Art concerns issues that every society faces because, anthropologically speaking, they concern basic facts of human existence and the human condition. This historical ‘aboutness’ of art concerns, schematically, three issues. First of all: art is about the image. Art still remains the only or most important place where the understanding, production and use of the image can be historically and critically framed, and discussed. Art is therefore relevant and potentially interesting, when it deals with what an image is and does. Secondly: Art is about the aesthetic gaze and the aesthetic approach of the world: that special, artificial kind of attention to the way in which reality immediately presents itself, and isolates it, abstracts it from the meaning, use and value of things. The exclusive focus on 'first appearance' places this basic condition in brackets, and places us in a hazardous and potentially dangerous relationship to things can be socially very disrespectful, cruel and disruptive. In Western culture, the aesthetic gaze has its own well-defined place and play field in the arts. Within art, it is then possible to experiment fairly freely, without great danger, with the appearance of things, and to test the elasticity of the aesthetic approach. Finally: art deals with the 'poetic'. The poetic is the effect of meaning that comes with the failure, with the not immediate succeding, of ‘reading’ the work of art, when this is experienced as an obstacle and a riddle. The poetic is in the language what the distance is in the landscape. Riddle games exercise in enduring and mastering incomprehensibility. Art is interesting when it is, in some way, about what images are and do, and thus contributes to the 'taming' of the image; when it is about experimenting with the 'aesthetic'; when it varies on reenacting the confrontation of the profoundly incomprehensible.

2006

The aim of the abstract is to debate whether the categories of symbol and symptom imply different determinations when it comes to art. We shall also look into clarifying the difference between the perception of the artistic symbol (through artistic images) and the work of art that manifests itself visually through the symptom and try to reach a conclusion, based on these two perspectives, about the characteristics of the art terrain, within the triangular framework author-work of art-spectator Viewing the symbol from its Greek derivation (symbolon) and the renascence, as a means of interpretation associated to the artistic (as one of the parts of the division, the symbol maintains the receptor out of the work of art) and the symptom as a reference to the work of art – art as a manifestation of the symptom emphasises the process bringing the receptor into the work of art. Can we consider the artistic as a domain of the images (symbolic) and the art as a domain of the objects (symptom)? The symbol as a’ divine’ entity that implies the pure form, the symbol interpreted in light of its linguistic Greek origin as one of the parts of the split object, stimulating interpretation, the symbol as an autonomy identity whose result is simulacrum [Volli in Melotti, p.73-87], or the symbol as an operative moment [Boidi in Melotti, p.102], it will always implicate an entity in the artistic image, whereas in the work of art remains the implication of the symptom that manifests the action that gives rise to art itself? At its limit the images of art become hyperbolic « symbolising» the symptom. Renouncing to the possibility of being simulacrum or phantasmagoria, they symbolise each thing and their contrary, introducing the “presence in the representation” [Didi-Huberman, 1990, p195]. Within this limit the images do not satisfy or symbolise , as objects of desire, but as a need to liberate which edges the non-representation of the manifestation of the symptom of art, and in this aspect the symbol is integrated by the symptom. Let us taking into consideration the triad figure IRS, real-imaginary-symbolic [Žižek, 2004, p98]. Symbolic real imaginary Imaginary Real symbolic Nucleus of the non-representation From the vertices of the triangle, real-imaginary-symbolic we can establish an infinite network as the constellation space of movement of the individual, thus forming successive triangles (infinitively) that personify in themselves the different territories of what is real, symbolic or imaginary. Each of these territories is subject to the domain of the different images. These domains, however, are not fixed; on the contrary they exist as if limited by porous membrane. The nucleus of this corresponds to the non-representation, banning the image. In this nucleus the existence of images would prove to be self-destructive. The images of art manifest themselves as symptoms of the work of art itself, as loose ends of the system of art; the are presented by the gaps- in the aesthetic domain, where the symbolic manifests itself as being insufficient. In this abstract we intended to demonstrate that the objects of art distance themselves from the artistic images via the symptom as an inclusive possibility of a demonstration of art. The objects of art renouncing the external symbolic interpretation include the viewer as a constituent of the work of art, placing emphasis the procedural unity. As a limit the symbol becomes part of the symptom in art, becoming the referent that recuperates the gaps of the artistic past2. By emphasising the process, the object of art (the symptom) reveals itself as the designator of the unity and thus contradicting the artistic images that represent symbolically what is still disassociated. Nevertheless, the objects of art which are still subject to the domain of representation3 can only gain a unity that is revealed in its disconnection from desire, thus allowing the artistic image to be interpreted in the object of art. In the full text version there will examples taken from the history of art to illustrate these arguments.

Marburger Jahrbuch der Kunstgeschichte 35, 2008