derek
h whitehead
Martin Heidegger's Technites, Paul Klee's Gestalt, and "starting
from the very beginning"
Key Words: Technitēs,
Technē,
Heidegger, Klee, modern art, artist, artwork, originary thinking, the gestalt, aesthetic perception,
contemporary art.
Introduction
This essay seeks to address
the relations between Modern art and Philosophy, and whether art is undermined
or reinforced by the exchange. Specifically, what does Martin Heidegger's
philosophy say about art? And from an art practice perspective, can philosophy say
what art actually is? In approaching such questions I propose a renewed focus on art's "in-visible
things" (things brought into visibility), as they show themselves in the painterly
vision of Paul Klee and in Martin Heidegger's concept of "the origin" in
relation to art. Here I consider the ways in which philosophy and art might
address each other's prerogatives and come to a mutual understanding. More
particularly, Heidegger's insights into art signal a formative re-engagement with art at the level of human
practices, and so I employ his notion of "originary beginnings" to intensify
what I call Klee's "practical-analytic" of art-making; for Klee clearly
testifies to a philosophic spirit of inquiry in searching out the circumstances
of creative life and action. In bringing the philosophic venture and the
artistic impulse closer together, we might become aware of the conceptual and
experiential possibilities of an uncommon enterprise: the attempt to articulate
art in praise of both mind and hand.
Heidegger never proposed a "philosophy
of art" in the accepted sense. In fact, he adopted almost a non-aesthetic stance in relation to art
and its history. I begin, therefore, with Heidegger's most individual reading
of the phenomenon of art. How does Heidegger conceive art? And what is his
response to vision and the visible, the primary perceptual modes of the artist? In short,
does Heidegger's philosophy have material valency for the modern artist?
To focus on these questions
we need a compendium of investigative tools. The philosophic tools employed by
Heidegger have an aletheic or "disclosive" character that, in conjunction with
the practical tools of Klee's praxis, have the potential to bring about a
deeper engagement with created realities. What we aspire to in this setting is
a counterpoint of philosophy and art. Here I examine Heidegger's concept of "the
origin" in relation to art and the "factual createdness" of the work of art. I
utilize the concepts of technitēs ("productive being") and technē ("knowledge" or "skill") to
evaluate Heidegger's reading of the Archaic Greek mythos of art, and I extrapolate
from this twofold sense of "skilful being" to demonstrate Klee's consciousness
of the artist as one who "starts from the very beginning" in a thoroughly
modern way. Finally, I argue that Klee's gestalt, his "form-giving," may be
seen as a distinct heuristics ("form-finding") which has the capacity to
enliven the perception of art in our times.
The Task of Thinking "at the beginning of art"
A close reading of Heidegger's
treatise, Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes - "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1935) -
reveals a unique perspective on the question of art, or "the riddle that art
itself is," as Heidegger puts it, and an implicit solution to the problem of
the essence of art. Heidegger begins with a beginning, an origin. For him the term origin
simply means "that from and by which something is what it is and as it is."[1]
Heidegger says that the question of the origin of a thing asks about the source of its nature. Heidegger
asks about the origin from which both artist and work are seen to derive: namely, art. That which takes its rise from
art is both
artist and work. And art itself, he asserts, is the source of artist and work. Heidegger generates a
tripartite relation between art, artist and work in an encompassing
hermeneutic. As Joseph Kockelmans has observed, "if art is the origin of the
work of art, art lets those who intimately belong together in regard to the
work, namely the one who artistically produces it and those who try to preserve
it artistically, each in his own essence, be what they are."[2]
Art lets those who belong to it be what they are.
The task that is reserved for
thinking at the beginning of art goes right to the heart of modernity's
aesthetic vocabulary. I am speaking of the kind of thinking that arises from a
particular state of consciousness, apperception: wherein we become conscious
of the visible phenomenon before us. Thinking and visualising are not
indistinct categories, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty reminds us: they are
constitutive powers in our understanding and seek a legitimate place in daily
life. The thinking that arises from the place of art in society is crucial to
the experience of art and its survival. Art's flourishing is proportionate to
its quality, and its quality is determined by the impact of its beginning. It
is by adherence to its beginnings in an origin, and not simply that of an
enjoined art historical tradition, that art gains its visible and social
legitimacy. Thinking through material means and events provides the basis for
an artist's practice. If the thinker thinks Being, and the poet names the sacred, as Kockelmans
suggests, then the task of the artist is to draw forth works from the wellsprings
of the in-visible.
Here thinking itself is in
question, for as Heidegger persuades us, we are capable of doing only what we are inclined to do.
We truly incline toward something, he says, "only when it in turn inclines
toward us, toward our essential being, by appealing to our essential being as
what holds us there."[3]
Thought is the gift given to us in thinking back toward that which in the first
place draws us toward itself, and thus holds us in the path of thinking. It is this
inclining of something toward our thought, as if the very thought of us were held within it, which
enables us to speak of thought at the beginning of art. The beginning of art may be
said to be the joyous enchantment of what is given to us to be and to
accomplish in the realm of the human.
Heidegger tries to argue for
an origin for art, which really means, as Walter Biemel has said, returning to
a source that makes a new origin possible. Heidegger argues for a return to the
source that would make a new origin possible. But it is impossible merely to
repeat a first origin. We must advert to something different. Something new must emerge
under the auspices of thinking. This origin waits for us to think toward it: not in order to repeat
it and thereby diminish our thinking and forming, but to draw on it in the
living and thinking present. But what kind of origin for art are we searching for in
modernist terms?
Modern Art and a Former Origin
The relation of modern art to a former
origin presupposes an awareness of art's historiographical past. As Heidegger
says: "after two and half thousand years, is art still claimed in the same
sense that it was in ancient Greece?" And if not, "from what domain does the
claim come to which modern art in all its areas co-responds?"[4]
As Biemel notes, the very framing of such questions indicates that art is, for
Heidegger, "no arbitrary production and creation."[5] In raising
this question Heidegger sees modernity as fundamentally determined by scientific
technology. His examination of technology, newly defined in its relation to
modern metaphysics, shows that everything is subject to a "thoroughgoing
calculability." The consequence is that "the world is available and can be
dominated by man."[6]
The springboard for Heidegger's
inquiry into the origin of art was Hegel's assertion that art is for us no longer the supreme
way in which truth comes to be; that art is no longer the highest aspiration of the human
spirit, and that art is, in terms of its loftiest vocation, something that is
now past. But Heidegger says a critical question nevertheless remains: "Is art
still an essential and necessary way in which truth happens which is decisive
for our historical existence, or is art no longer of this character?"[7]
And if this is the case, then there remains the question why this is so.
Heidegger reformulates what Hegel takes to be the limit of art: its material
determination.
Heidegger does this by situating the artwork's "thingly" nature in the matrix
of this determination: by emphasising a work's "work-being" rather than its "object-being."
Furthermore, Heidegger has an
ally in Maurice Blanchot who considers the work of art to be something
extremely ancient, "terrifyingly ancient, [and] lost in the night of time." It
is the origin that precedes us and is always given before us, he says, "for it
is the approach of what allows us to depart - a thing of the past, [but] in a
different sense from what Hegel said."[8] The approach
of what allows us to depart commits us to a departure that is never fully
realised. And Heidegger argues for his own times, that any decision about Hegel's
judgment will be made "from and about the truth of what is". The question of the
relation of modern art to its former origin remains implicit in Heidegger's
re-evaluation of two Greek concepts: technē, and technitēs. By examining these two
concepts we may more readily grasp art's origin for modernity, an origin which
lies in history and metaphysics.
Heidegger's Technē and Technitēs
Heidegger's treatise, Der
Ursprung des Kunstwerkes, articulates a role for technē (ή
τέχνη), and technitēs (ό
τεχνίτης:). Technē is a mode of "knowing"
or "seeing", and technitēs a mode of "being" or "productive being". As
Heidegger remarks, the technites is one "whose decisive deed is guided by an
understanding."[9]
Such understanding is designated technē. It becomes apparent that
technē is the kind of knowing or understanding that guides artistic
production. Technē is the knowledge that directs the activity of the
technitēs. For Heidegger, to know or to understand is "to have that in
view which is significant for the production of a structure and a work." Art is
conceived as technē, but not "technology," while the artist is
technitēs, but is neither a technician nor a handiworker.[10]
Technē is the knowledge which looks forward to what is to be fully
realised: an architect's plan for a building, a musician's sketch for a score, an artist's
preliminary drawing for a painting. Technē looks ahead, Heidegger says, to "what is
still invisible, what is first to be brought into the visibility and
perceptibility of the work"; such looking requires "sight and brightness in a
distinctive way."[11]
In short, forward-looking sight requires foresightedness.
Heidegger speaks of the "anticipated
look" of the thing to be produced. Such an anticipated or forward-looking
vision is what the Greeks understood by eidos and idea. John Sallis argues that
Heidegger ingeniously correlates Greek eidos as image with imagination. Heidegger himself writes: "The
anticipated look, the pre-image shows the thing as what it is before the
production and as it is supposed to look as a product. The anticipated look has
not yet been externalised as something formed, as actual, but rather is the
image of imagination of phantasia."[12]
Eidos is determined as the look of things prior to their actualisation; the
look anticipated in imagination. Imagination thus oversees production.
But the consequences for the
technitēs are critical at this point. Any notion which prejudges sight as
to its end - as it is supposed to look as a product - would seem to foreclose
its outcome. It is as if a pre-existing image in the phantasia so thoroughly
governs the productive process that the very plasticity of materials is forced
to undergo some inexorable law of articulation. For the technitēs as
artist it is not simply a matter of materialising some pre-existing image in
the mind. Rather, it is a venture toward the internal sighting of things
unformed in the imagination - the inward-turn of sight - in collaboration
with an artist's deft handling of materials. That which comes into visible
presence is a transmission of the anticipatory sighting of the formless eidos into something fully formed
in and of itself.
For Heidegger technē is
the art of "ontological disclosure." Indeed, for Michael Zimmerman the highest
form of technē is the artwork that "founds a world wherein things may
present themselves in a particular way." For Heidegger, Zimmerman continues, "the
work of art could refine our ontological understanding in such a way that we
could learn to free things from their captivity in the matrix of instrumental dealings
associated with the industrialism spawned by productionist metaphysics."[13]
Such a view has undoubted anthropocentric force in the context of modernist
practices. But it is an ambitious claim in any attempt to revitalize the
salvific power of art for contemporary times. There is a point at which the
technitēs" seeing is interior, and thus prior to external sensations: a
recognition of the eidos before its realization. But Heidegger reminds us that
we must seek art's nature "in the actual work."[14] For the
modern artist, it is in the nexus of "sensation-feeling" - in the expressivity
of his feeling sensation - that the where and how of art is found for his times.
Heidegger believes it is the
very
existence of humanity itself that incites us to ask about the origin of art - a
thinking that connects art with "the experience of beings." And what is central
to this experience of beings is Dasein, or "Being-there." And given Heidegger's
proposition that an origin is "the source of the nature in which the being of an entity is present", it
becomes possible to conceptualize the being of an artist as a significant
grounding instance of Dasein's historical emergence. Here Heidegger asserts a
foundational ontology: Dasein is being-in-the-world. The disclosure of
Being-in-the-world is states of mind and understanding. In such understanding
lies "the possibility of interpretation - of appropriating what is understood."[15]
Being-there understands and evokes the possibility of interpreting the world,
without which the world would be devoid of an interpreter or interpretation.
For Heidegger, interpretative understanding, by which human Dasein is in the
midst of things, comes closer to us when we think the Being of beings.
Furthermore, Heidegger
conceives the work of art as technē in opening up and bringing into a clearing and gathering, and hence to a visionary seeing,
the Being of beings. He defines this opening up of the Being of beings as
occurring in the manner of a deconcealing: something that happens pre-eminently
in the work of art. And what is disclosed in the artwork is a totally new term:
"the truth of beings." This truth of beings has "set itself to work", and in
such a way that in the artwork the truth of what is has set itself to work. If
art is one privileged way in which truth - the truth of what is - sets itself
to work, then according to Christopher Fynsk, Heidegger's response to Hegel
entails defending the view that art "is for truth an exigency, inasmuch as truth has an
impulse toward the work of art and wills to be established in art."[16].
This surely constitutes a kind of metaphysical solace for the artist, in that
truth wills to be in the conduct of art.
In situating where and how
works of art, carry, disclose, or open up truth, we come to recognise that the
work of art posits the question of man. As Heidegger submits: "Being needs man and is
not without man."[17]
Such a question involves man with truth as the openness of the da or there.[18] For it is
through Dasein's sensuous feeling for life that truth - as the openness that breaches
- is broached.[19]
Any acceptance of the impetus of truth toward the sensuousness of life - toward
a grounding in art - is an occasion for deeper meditation on Dasein and its
questioning. It is a questioning which carries Dasein into the world, as Fynsk
declares, for the vision of things before our eyes.
Heidegger's Vision of the Visible
Heidegger's Seinsfrage, his "questioning of being",
needs to be thought about in relation to vision. For Heidegger, as David Levin
argues, the seinsfrage is a question addressed to us as human beings. And since
as human beings we are embodied and gifted with sight, the seinsfrage can be
conceived in terms of our seeing. Thus this questioning of being makes claims
on our vision, Levin submits; "it makes a claim on us as visionary beings;"
that is, a demand that calls forth from us a response. The claim that such
questioning makes on us in the domain of our vision touches upon the nature of our seeing. Indeed, "it
concerns our capacity to develop our vision further in the direction of its
openness," and is something for which we are responsible, "for our
response-ability as beings gifted with vision."[20] Heidegger
says explicitly that it is necessary for us "to show how this "there is" [of
being] can be experienced and seen." [21]
Looking ahead we become foresighted in still another sense. Our visual field is
disclosed, clarified and illumined by way of sightfulness: by what we experience and see. The
veracity of Heidegger's injunction comes from its practical bearing on us as
visionary beings within the existential circumstances of our seeing.[22]
Implicit in this sought-after
revision is
what Levin calls "the hints and traces of a different perceptual Gestalt, a different structuring
enactment of our capacity for seeing."[23] Heidegger
recognizes in the Gestell, "the enframing," something that proscribes, secures
and dominates by a technological rationalization of vision. Here he glimpses
the potential for overcoming the Gestell, and a new way of seeing which would
enable the gathering, clearing and lighting of a formerly pathological sight.
This movement toward a clearing and lighting of sight cannot be achieved by
thought alone. It must embrace the domain and activity of the technitēs -
the artist's productive being - and in such a way that the impulse of vision
towards technē - of seeing and knowing in its highest sense - is
accomplished through work. What, then, are the ontological and practical
features of this technitēs at work?
Prudential Ontology and "the hand"
For Heidegger the existence
of Dasein/human being is articulated through understanding. The understanding Heidegger
achieves in respect of the work of artistic production, removed from a
productionist metaphysics, is to insist that a work's "thingly nature" comes
closer to us when we think the Being of beings. The opening up of the Being of
beings occurs in the manner of a deconcealing which happens in creative or
productive work. It is in the very possibility of art that "the truth of what
is" sets itself to work. Truth is earthed-forth, as it were, as it arises in
the origin as art. Heidegger believes that truth - aletheia, "unhiddenness" - requires
the work of art for its happening, its deconcealing, its openness. Truth is
thus known by means of an opening-up and coming-forth in the work. But what is
truth, Heidegger asks, such "that it sometimes comes to pass as art?"[24]
Is truth some sensibility that comes to pass as art, or some indefinable aspect
of being that carries itself forth into art? Truth for art is the marking of
technitēs - the artist - with what I call "prudential being": with a circumspectly directed mode
of artistic being toward and for the world.
The question as to what art is, to which Heidegger
returns again and again as if to gain its confidence, reflects his belief that
art is, in its physical factualness, a pervasive power. Art at the level of the
technitēs has a hold on sight. And as H. W. Petzet declares, "the poetic character of every work of
art should never disappear from [our] field of vision." This serves Heidegger's
"root-unfolding of the work of art," as Petzet describes it. As Heidegger
himself says of this unfolding: "in its true character [art] is itself the
epiphany of the world, which is lit up by the work of art and preserved in it."[25]
Contrary to the enigmatic or mythical tag that might attach itself to Heidegger's
thinking about art, Petzet argues that Heidegger simply wants to provoke or
entice the observer "to think [more] deliberately by thinking with him."[26]
Heidegger testifies to what
he calls the basic state of sight: a state that "shows itself in a peculiar
tendency of Being which belongs to everydayness - the tendency towards seeing.
We designate this tendency by the term curiosity, which characteristically is
not confined to seeing," Heidegger says, "but expresses the tendency towards a
peculiar way of letting the world be encountered by us in perception."[27]
Martin Jay argues that the attitude or tendency of "letting things be" (of
circumspective vision), latent in the early Greek pre-Socratic attitude of wonder, eventually succumbs to
curiosity as the guiding element in the modern technological-scientific
world-view. Jay argues that Heidegger wants to stress vision's "positive
moments," and its "differentiated character," implicit in the term Zuhandenheit, "a readiness-to-hand"; a
term which means employing something practically, without first visualising it.[28]
Such readiness to hand brings into focus my notion of prudential being and its affiliations
with technitic practice: the practice of the artist and the means of productive
work - namely, the hand as the extra-organic organ of sight.
Moreover, Heidegger likens
the task of thinking to the workings of the hand. But the hand, he says, is a thing "altogether
peculiar." Commonly, the hand is considered a part of our bodily organism. But
its essence, Heidegger believes, "can never be determined, or explained, by its
being an organ that can grasp." The human hand is manifestly different from "all
the grasping organs - paws, claws, or fangs - different by an abyss of essence."
For it is only a being who can speak and think, who can have hands, who can
achieve works wrought by hands.[29]
To think thought is to think the work of
thought, and to work the work of thought is to employ the hands. The artistic or writerly hand
is immersed in work. It is through his/her hands that an artist or writer
establishes contact with "the austerity of thought," as Henri Focillon once
remarked. Such hands, he says, "quarry [thought"s] rough mass [and] upon it
they impose form, outline and, in the very act, of style."[30] The hand, as
Heidegger insists, "reaches and extends, receives and welcomes." The hand holds
and carries. But the hand also runs everywhere through language, and is "in
[its] most perfect purity precisely when man speaks by being silent." And so
for Heidegger, every movement of the hand carries itself through the element of
thinking, for "every bearing of the hand bears itself in that element." Indeed,
he submits, "thinking itself is man's simplest, and for that reason hardest
[handwork]."[31]
The hand and thinking share some mutual obligation: to think is to think and
work with the hand. The hand that is enmeshed in thinking is like a gestalt or figure earthed in its
ground.
Further, every bearing of the
hand bears itself in the element of a thinking that makes. The hand, in being capable
of multiple motion, inaugurates a profound simplicity in its makings. The hand
is an extra-organic implement of thought, but it is also the extra-organic
organ of sight. The hand is, in its dexterous motility, a handling of the things
imparted to it by the tactile senses of touch and sight. Hands thus gather and
comport themselves. And whether it consists in inscribing a line, throwing a
pot, gesturing with a brush, conducting an ensemble, holding one's companion or
soothing a child, our hands perform tasks of inspiring lucidity.
The artist sees the world
with a keener sense, Henri Focillon believes, and as his art is made by his
hands, so are his hands the instrument of creation. But before that, such hands
are an organ of knowledge; for the artist "starts from the very beginning."[32]
The hand as a principle of knowledge is closely aligned with the technitic hand
- and brings about a factual clearing of sight for creative action. The impulse
toward knowing and sightfulness is accomplished through the hand. But what bearings might this
have on an artist who is intent on originary beginnings in works of art?
Heidegger and Klee: "of one who originates"
In "The Origin of the Work of
Art" it is implied that the artist is somehow an instrument through which a
deconcealing takes place in the artwork. However, Heidegger does not cast the
artist in the role of a prime mover, so to speak; and this in marked contrast to his
later judgments concerning artists such as Paul Cezanne and Paul Klee, both of whom, he said,
were epoch-making artists. Here the artist is conceived as an originator or progenitor
who brings works from out of their origin. For example, it is compelling to
note that Heidegger himself, after long exposure to the work of Klee, found
embodied there the whole direction and consummation of modern art. In Klee,
Heidegger said, "something has happened that none of us as yet grasps."[33]
What scholarship on Klee has begun to grasp since this remark of Heidegger's is
the numinous quality of much of his work. Kathryn Kramer has identified what
she calls Klee's "crypto-mythic figuration", which is literally "an attempt at
the impossible - to depict/write a state of invisibility/indecipherability;"
the result being, Kramer claims, an "extremely private visual language. [34]
This may be a partial
explanation of Heidegger's comment that Klee has accomplished something which "none
of us as yet grasps". My own view is that Klee, through the invisibility
inherent in a private language, manages to convey an ineluctable horizon of transmutability which he
signals for us, and in such intimate details, as belonging inescapably to
Modernism's alchemical times, and as such, accounts for his idiosyncratic use
of pictorial strategies. As Petzet has argued, "hidden in the paintings of Klee
is the thorn of a claim that is not easy to satisfy."[35] And a claim
that is less easy to satisfy in relation to the art of our own day: not merely
to reproduce our thought of the visible, but to render thoughtful invisible things.
Heidegger did not overlook
his long encounters with Klee's art. He spoke of his work making moods and
feelings visible in paintings. The less Heidegger thought of Klee's pictures
presenting objects as such, the more did they seem "to appear", in the Greek
sense of: phainestai: "to bring to light", "to make clear." Heidegger's encounter with the
work of Klee is characterised in this potent example: Klee's Patientin ("The Woman Patient"). Heidegger is reported to
have said: "Our [medical] friend Nagel should see this painting. For no
clinical probing ever reaches as deeply into illness and suffering as this
painting does. A physician can learn more here than from medical textbooks."[36]
Something akin to this psychical exposure is apparent in Klee's Enfant sur
le Perron ("Child
on the Steps",
1923), a moon-faced child deployed in some dark reminiscence; or Pauvre Ange ("Poor Angel", 1939), a
bucolic angel caught in the happenstance of material emotion.
In Heidegger's account before
Klee's Patientin we see an affective pointer or cadence in the way his experience
influences his judgments about art's place in human affairs - in contrast to
his formal philosophic writings on the nature and destiny of art. In his
correspondence with artists, many of whom he knew personally, Heidegger
acknowledges the pivotal role of the artist in commissioning the transformative
powers of art, and which his sustained contact with the work of Picasso, Braque
and other moderns would seem to endorse. Insofar as the modern artist immerses
his subjectivity in creative acts, there resides the nature of production:
pro-ducere, "to
bring" or "to lead forward"; and of his ability to bring invisible things -
symbols, emotions, and psychic states - into visible life. Heidegger's
conception of the artist as technitiēs is fundamentally concerned with the
kind of making which brings into the light, or which shows forth in human existence. And thus
we see his philosophical justification for aligning production with craftsmanship:
with the artist's setting-forth of
work which causes things to first come forward in their appearing.
Heidegger affirms that the
artist, because he is also a craftsman, is essentially a technitēs; but
not a "technician" in the modern scientific sense. The artist is one whose
whole demeanour is a presencing: one which brings forth things in their present
appearing: beings, works, which assume an appearance. But all this happens in the midst
of phusis
("nature"), Heidegger insists; that is, phusis is known by the rising of
natural entities to a self-emergence and a resting-in-themselves; for instance,
the way a plant emerges and grows under the influence of light and warmth into
a formative whole; and in the order of created things, how artworks constitute
themselves through the agency of an artist's sighted hand.
Klee's Gestalt and Existential
Composition
One of my concerns in this
article has been to identify the perceptual conditions that distinguish art as art. We must now recognize
that conceptual and practical processes are powers of existential composition.
Such powers may elude exhaustive analysis, but works of art hold within
themselves their own objective forces; it is the compositional character of works of art
which disclose the temporal and spatial indices of their own form-language
whereby the observer receives their objecthood. This is achieved through a work's
coming to a cohesion and centrality as a created thing - a gestalt. The gestalt concept is something which
Heidegger employed as a means of articulating the relation of what he called a "self-disclosing
world" and a "self-secluding earth": the gestalt taken as that form, shape, or
figure which is fixed in the conflict between world and earth; a necessary
conflict, as he saw it, in order that truth might be fashioned. But here, and
from an artistic perspective, I take the gestalt to mean a formational figure, in contrast to
something fully formed. That is to say, a formational gestalt takes place in
the creative tensions of art making.
We might say that for Klee
the notion of gestalt is a counter-foil to a purely analytical modelling of form. Within his
theoretical teaching program, the so-called Weimar Preliminary Course of 1924/25, Klee is
concerned with the nature and function of the gestalt. His study of the gestalt
treats of "the
ways that lead to form", and thus emphasises the paths to form rather than the form
itself. The word gestaltung - a forming or arranging - suggests as much. Klee
says that the Theory of Form, Formlehre, does not give due emphasis to the necessary
principles and approaches to form. And any Theory of Formation remains too unfamiliar. He
writes, "Gestaltung in its broader sense clearly contains the idea of an underlying
mobility, and is therefore preferable." Klee argues that gestalt, over against
form, is something more alive. "Gestalt is in a manner of speaking a form with an
undercurrent of living functions. A function made of functions," he says. These
functions are purely intellectual, and a need for expression undergirds them.
And every functional expression must be properly grounded. Thus Klee argues
there will be a binding relation between the beginning, middle and end of a
created thing.[37]
Creative possibilities
suggest themselves to the artist who wants to draw together a sequence of
living functions in the beginning, middle and end of a thing's production. The
formal basis of these reflections is found in Klee's "theory of pictorial means":
a theory in which, as Juerg Spiller describes it, "abstract thought and form
models alternate with the immediacy of new points of departure that are close
to nature." Close to nature in the sense that Klee's practice-based theories draw
inspiration from the motive forces of the natural world - the natural order in
a state of dynamic rest. For example, Klee speaks of the snail "joined to [its]
growing shelter", and the apple, "from blossom to fruit", activated in an
essential and ceaseless construction. [38]
Klee's approach to form, and
the underlying functional motility that belongs to form, is essential to
generating a living gestalt. Functional gestalt figuration has its own mode of
kinetic expression: the gestalt as vital and alive within phenomena. Moreover,
expressive ideas must be "cogently grounded," Klee says; only so will the
crafting of works be open to intelligibility. Here we have the preliminary
stirrings of creativity. Such stirrings, Klee suggests, are "our craftman's
propensity directed towards the actual work and our transmission of this
involvement to others, its beholders - these are the main components of the
creative totality - pre-creation, creation and post-creation." Indeed, the
artist's inner impulse, Klee reports, "is the urge that leads to production."[39]
As with nature, so with us, he says. Nature is creative, and so we are
creative. Under nature's inspiration, Klee believes, we learn of our own
creativity; just as we are brought to recognize the pre-creative, creative, and
post-creative conditions of our own work.
We see in the natural order
the phenomenon of form-giving and its relation with "the basic urge", as Klee
calls it; for what we sense is "a way of life developing from a mysterious
motivation towards purposive action."[40] Klee points
out to his students that this phenomenon of form-giving was discernible in
their initial practical work when form-structure "began to take care of itself
on the smallest scale." He says that the relation between form and form-giving,
acknowledged and learned on that scale, retains its significance throughout the
later stages of production: such a relation of form and form-giving being the
productive combination of principle (form) and (form-giving) technique.
Here Klee lays down what I would
call a genetic approach to form, where the path to form is directed by "inner or outer
necessity", and as such, is more significant than the goal itself. [41]
In stressing the importance of the inward impulse over its particular artistic
goal, Klee reinforces the significance of form-in-process, or form-becoming, as
something grounded in its own right. Klee says as much: "Form is set by a
process of giving form"; form not as an end, but as genesis, growth, and
essence. This approach determines the character of the work before us, a
character which can be determined only once. Whereas form-giving is motion,
movement, action, and life; what is unacceptable by contrast is form "as
immobility, as an end, as something that has been tolerated and got rid of."
Form as an end is "the end", "death".[42]
The character of a work's
essential dimension must be refined, Klee submits; it must "develop interesting
offshoots, rise, fall, dodge, become more or less clearly marked, grow wider or
narrower, easier or harder."[43]
And as Klee has rightly argued, theories of creativity, of proportion, of
pictorial means, and theories of style, really have no independent existence;
they are valid only where they become integrated into a single and indivisible
whole. Such a totality, he says, "embraces a very large number of things, each
in its place." [44]
Hence Klee's adoption of the analytical approach; but analysis put at the
service of free-flowing experimentation - one given over to the task at hand.
Klee's Practical-Analytic and "the Whole"
Of fundamental importance to
the organic growth of form-giving is the interrelation of the component parts
in a proportional whole. Klee says that there is an infinite scope for
variation in the advent of a whole, and that to begin with, we are faced with a
relatively undeveloped sense of proportion, such that "even as we exercise our
ingenuity, we should vary but one element at a time." In so doing, he says, "we
identify with our material, impart a rhythm to it, make it rise to the first
stage above its imperceptible structure - and not much more." In such a
situation we must keep our eye on the higher governing proportions of
individual structure, because it is from these that form-determination comes.
Such recognition governs the conduct of form, while structure simply
lends support "as a pliable material aspect." These governing proportions "characterize
the ultimate form, [and] the structures make possible their realisation." Klee
argues that only form-determination and form-realization taken together can
yield the sought-after "higher configuration."[45]
These governing proportions
are living and breathing things, he says, because as human beings we have them
within us and about us. That they are within us fits us for creative work. [46]
The intradynamics of a material rhythm and its supportive structure, the
determination and realization of form taken together, constitute a perceptible
enrichment of the whole. We could thus say that creative work becomes the
pursuit of higher order objects in phenomenal form. Moreover, Klee's ideas and
analysis may yet contribute to the development of a contemporary form-giving episteme, especially his concept of "the
energy-charged creative force" which animates all natural things. The
contemporary artistic opportunity is somehow to harness this motive energy for creative
thought and productive capacity.
Klee is an artist who works
from "a beginning", bringing imperceptible things into visibility, supernal
things into consciousness. Klee's gestalt of form-giving draws on those forces
which act as a conduit for some creative possibility; so that at the end of the
artistic process, as Will Grohmann has said, "all forces merge and crystallize."
What emerges here is a parallel between universal forces and the artist. The
guiding principle for Klee is, just as "analogies with the totality of laws are
reproduced exactly in the tiniest leaf," so are the laws governing universal
processes reproduced in the artist himself;[47]
laws and forces, that is, which achieve their earthing in human artistry.
But what connections can be
drawn between a beginning for art and the forces of art-making? And how does
Heidegger's thinking address art's evident materiality?
Materiality and Art-Making's "thingly character"
I argued earlier that the
beginning of art is the joyous enchantment of what is given to us to be and to
accomplish in the realm of the human. And I said that "thought" is the gift
given to us in thinking back toward what in the first place draws us toward
itself and holds us in the path of thinking. But if contemporary culture, with
its fluid entities, has refused the restoration of things to their origin, then
it forfeits its claim to hold us in the abiding path of thinking, as Heidegger
conceives it. As noted, Heidegger's major concern is with the historical
disclosure of the artwork as a vehicle for aletheia, truth: "as a happening of
truth as having happened" (so Fynsk)[48] in the
artwork itself. In a very considered way, therefore, Heidegger's meditations on
art, artist and artwork assume a hermeneutic role in his project of the epochal
disclosure of Being.
What, then, do we encounter
with the originary beginnings of art? At the outset, we encounter an Ursprung: "a primal leap", and a Vorsprung: "a forward leap". Here an
origin is envisaged as a primal leap taking a forward leap into some
intelligible form, shape, or idea. We recall that Heidegger says "to originate
something by a leap, to bring something into being from out of the source of
its nature in a founding leap - this is what the word origin means." Heidegger
recognizes that art can only exist because of the actuality of artists and works. Art
must be given a determination in a specific context - one that serves the
activity of artist and work. To see the character of the art in a work we must go to the
actual work, Heidegger believes, and ask the question of the work: "what and
how it is." This is a crucial question. The work's response, so to speak, is to show
itself from itself: to show what and how it is.
Works of art are "as
naturally present as are things," Heidegger says. Works of art have a thingly character. It is the element upon which Heidegger's
vision of art as "allegory" and "symbol" depends. A work of art draws our
attention to its thingly nature, so that even "the much vaunted aesthetic
experience cannot get around the thingly aspect of the work of art." [49]
However, the thingly aspect or the "thing-being" of the work must not obstruct
our reception of its "work-being", its workly nature. And here we do not simply
take a work's work-being for mere equipment. A work is not simply a piece of
equipment that is fitted out with an aesthetic value attached to it. Such a
work is "worked out, brought about, effected," Heidegger writes. One thing
distinguishes a work: it is something created. A work is a created
actuality. And to such a degree, Heidegger claims that "all art, as the letting-happen of the advent of the truth of
what is, is, as such, essentially poetry."[50]
The role of the poet is to search after ineffable beginnings by way of the
logos or "word."
The role of an artist is to image-forth some affective response to life's
origins and demands - through the poverty of artistic materials. Consequently, "the
truth of what is" has revelatory force for the artist - not least for its
problematic placement in a world of creaturely values and finite creations.
Can such a knowing and
handling of art, endorsed by Heidegger and Klee, come to pass in our time? Can
it support the claims of theoretical discourse in the highly charged atmosphere
of contemporary art? Can we, in our world, legitimately speak about origins for anything at all,
given that multiple production and commodified reduplication appear the order
of the day? And can arts practice, in its plastic, literary, and performative
making, not only survive in such a climate, but enhance the significance of meaningful beginnings?
The Aleatoric Aesthetic: Some
Implications for Contemporary Art
In the 1980s Craig Owens asserted
that the postmodern artwork unsettled the stability of "the modernist mastering
position", whereby the authority of an artwork was not based on its uniqueness
or singularity but on "the universality modern aesthetics attributes to the
forms utilized for the representation of vision";[51] and this
beyond any differences in content due to the production of works in actual
historical conditions. Not only does postmodernist work claim no such
authority, Owens argues; it is intent on undermining it - hence "its generally
deconstructive thrust."[52]
However, contemporary art now claims another index of authority for itself: an aleatoric or "random" character; so
that what is introduced is a disruptive or discordant mechanism, the aesthetic
effects of which postpone or cancel judgment along modernist lines.
Contemporary art has moved
away from a determined conceptual stance to one of interactivity. Contemporary artists have
been induced to leave the solitude of the studio and engage with the social
order. Such artists now deal with a demanding repertoire of social tools and
art institutional prerogatives in exhibiting their work. Definable public space
has now become the artist's studio en plein-air - an overt mode of being and
making. Contemporary art and its diverse applications - vis a vis computer and video art,
installation or assemblage art, audio art and certain modes of performance art
- now seems largely determined by some interactive mechanism. Here we need a
discourse that recognizes the artist's perception as mover and shaper of his/her creations.
Inasmuch as discourse is the articulation of social and cultural forces as they
find expression in individual practices, then discourse constitutes a critique
of power, whether of art or life. The evident materiality of an artist's
discourse must be allowed to forge open-handed aesthetic values, so that we
learn to interrogate those practices which are at odds with themselves or with
the world.[53]
A Heideggerian intuition
could influence contemporary art practice if it were to insist on the
restitution of a work's "work-being" transmogrifying sensory things into visionary
engagement. And so whether it is of a plastic, literary, or performative nature
such work should assume its own ontic weight in the perceptual field, and be
open to humanizing critical reflection. Whereas our contemporary historical
moment is one of conflicted truth and heterogeneous appearances, the artist is
one who remains to mould this world's latent meanings and undisclosed truths.
If contemporary art appears overburdened with self-proclamation, then originary
thinking may
offer a corrective: a speech of encounter with art which mirrors back to
ourselves something of Heidegger's sense of a work's "coming-to-presence" and "abiding";
and of an earthing of discourse amidst the competing forces of politicized
visualities.[54]
Here the contemporary artist can begin to work within freely chosen parameters
only by occupying some outpost of thought and practice which portends a clearer
view. For it is what remains unthought for art that poses an existential challenge to
art.
Finally, what are the
repercussions of such thinking? Can we accommodate the approach to art's
appearings and its knowing-handling which Heidegger and Klee differentially
enjoin?
Conclusion: Art's "appearings" and Knowing-Handling
Historically, what began as a
desire for
originality in modern art and discourse can be used as a medium or technique
for interpreting the impasse between a dematerialised hyperculture (an uncritical
virtual reality), and the kind of artist who seeks an authentic utterance over
against a pervading societal unoriginality. Here we can begin to establish a gestalt-like pattern at the heart of
creative thought and practice; for only where perception and experience meet do
we invest ourselves wholeheartedly in cultural meaning. And we may yet come to
a deeper awareness of some Heideggerian appearing: a kind of in-sight that is
granted to us that we may see what we do not ordinarily see. The theme of appearing
proposes a guiding premise or intuition for carrying out works of art; but one
which as Jean Francois Lyotard tells us, "is still limpid for thought."[55]
Any limpidity for thought is a metier born of seer and seen: a testing yet solicitous communication between
art and its recipients through the expressive range which the enigma of appearing opens up.
What are the lessons to be
drawn from philosophy's engagement with modern art? And has art gained from the
exchange? Firstly, I would suggest that both Heidegger's originary
truth-telling and Klee's materialising gestalt can activate, even refine and
redirect, the appreciative faculties: our aesthetic senses. Secondly, Klee
encourages artistic createdness to be exuberant in its reach and scope, thus
making available a working consciousness at once self-corrective and
self-assertive. This is a labouring aesthetic born of the body-constant: a
silent discourse of arousal wherein an artist's judgment freewheels as to
technical means and compositional ends. Thirdly, just as Paul Klee's graphic
and painterly vision marks out our humanity at some secret scale, inscribing a
life-image of itself in our retinal memory, even so does Martin Heidegger's mythos of art and truth infuse our
imagination with the wonder of being. Indeed, here we contemplate the very
possibility of seeing itself: for through the evocation of Klee's supernal
world and Heidegger's originary world we glimpse art's appearing and inner
knowing-handling as a vital actuality addressed to our lives.
Derek
Whitehead has a background in the visual arts, Classical languages, and
Continental philosophy. He holds a PhD from Sydney University, Australia, and
is a practicing artist, independent researcher and writer in the areas of
aesthetics, aesthetic education, and varying themes in art research from
historical and contemporary perspectives.
Contact email
address: dhw@acay.com.au
[1]Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work
of Art", (OWA), in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter, (London and
Toronto: Harper and Row, 1935/1975), p. 17
[2]Joseph Kockelmans, Heidegger on Art and
Artworks,
(Dordrecht and Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1985), p. 209
[3]Martin
Heidegger, "What Calls for Thinking," in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. D. F. Krell, (San
Francisco: Harper, 1964/1993), pp. 369-370
[4]
Martin Heidegger, "On the Origin of Art and the Destination of
Thinking", cited in Reading Heidegger, Commemorations, ed. John Sallis,
(Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1972/1993), p. 140
[6]
Walter Biemel, "Elucidations ...", in Reading Heidegger,
Commemorations,
ed. John Sallis, (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1972/1993), pp. 374-375
[8]
Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature, trans. Ann Smock, (Lincoln, Nebraska:
University of Nebrasks Press, 1955/1982), p. 229
[12]
John Sallis, "Imagination and the Meaning of Being", in Heidegger
et l"idee de la Phenomenologie, (The Netherlands: Kluwer, 1988), p. 130
[13]
Michael Zimmerman, "Authentic Production; Techne as the Art of Ontological
Disclosure", in Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity: Technology,
Politics, and Art, (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 223
[15]
Heidegger, 1962, Being and Time, trans. John Maquarrie and Edward Robinson, (New
York: Harper and Row, 1927/1962), section 34
[16]
Christopher Fynsk, "The Work of Art and the Question of Man", in Heidegger,
Thought and Historicity, (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1993), p. 132
[18]
Robert
Bernasconi, "The Greatness of the Work of Art", in Heidegger in Question: The
Art of Existing, (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1993), p. 108
Bernasconi remarks:"because truth is essentially
earthy, then the work, that is art, is necessary for the happening of
truth". Truth is earthed-forth as it arises in the origin as art; thus the
work is perhaps a projection or an offering of truth. Here truth requires the
work for its happening, its deconcealing, its openness. The work is offered to
truth - a self-offering - by which a work becomes truth's address.
[19]
W. S. Di Piero, Out of Eden, Essays on Modern Art, (Berkeley and London:
University of California Pres, 1991), p. 63
For example, Di Piero makes the observation that
Vincent Van Gogh's life and work was "the fluid, [and] harmonious exercise
of an existence, [which] took as its subject the fullness of existence".
Art "does not redeem existence or set itself at some invulnerable, ironic
point apart from it". Rather, Van Gogh's "painterly gestures were, in
what he himself felt to be unequivocally moral terms, acts of driven reciprocity".
It is these acts of driven reciprocity which solicit us in Van Gogh's work. Such
work may be interpreted as the giving-back to existence, by the painterly gestures of the
technites, of
a wholeness or happening of truth without which human Dasein remains
unquestioned and incomplete. And if truth is essentially earthy, then art can
be thought of as the conduit for some presencing of truth's accessibility, in that truth releases
itself through human feeling and judgment in the form of created work and thus
exposes itself to the rawness of our questioning.
[20]
David M. Levin, "Decline and Fall: Ocularcentrism in Heidegger's Reading
of the History of Metaphysics", in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. D M Levin, (Berkeley and
London: University of California Press, 1993), p. 207
[21]
Heidegger, On Time and Being, trans. Joan Stambaugh, (New York: Harper and Row,
1969/1972), p. 5
[22]
Levin, "Decline
and Fall ...", pp. 208-212
Levin poses a question which, he claims, remains unthought in Heidegger's writings:
"For the vision of our eyes, what is being? How does being presence?" Indeed,
"our eyes are given something to see, they are given the lighting, the openness of a field of
illumination, within which seeing first becomes a possibility." And
"as beings of vision, we are claimed by being: our being is questioned;
the character, the ethos of our vision is called into question." Levin stresses that being
is: that
being is the lighting and clearing - both Heideggerian terms. Being is that "which lights and
illumines, that for which all beings present and absent, visible and invisible,
opens up and inaugurates a visual field, a matrix open in its reach and range,
its dimensionality, its possibilities, its prospects and promise." Levin
proposes that our vision can make an historical difference, but only if it were
to become ontologically responsive - if our vision were to become a recollection of being.
[25]
quoted in H. W. Petzet, "Heidegger's Association with Art", in Encounters
and Dialogues with Martin Heidegger: 1929-1976, ( Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 134-135
[28]
Martin Jay, Vision in Context: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on
Sight, (New
York and London: Routledge, 1996), p. 271
[30]
Henri Focillon, "In Praise of Hands", in The Life of Forms in Art, (New York: Zone Books,
1934/1989), p. 157
[32]
Focillon, "In Praise of Hands", pp. 157-158; 162; 166-167
We who see "also need our hands to see with, to
complete the perception of appearances by touching and holding," Focillon declares.
The hand at times "would seem even to think." Indeed, "in
repose, the hand is not a soulless tool lying on the table or hanging beside
the body." Moreover, "habit, instinct and the will to action are all
stored in it, and no long practice is needed to learn what gesture it is about
to make." Further, "all great artists have paid close attention to
the study of hands. Since more than other men they live by their hands, they
sense the peculiar power that lies in them." And in such wise that all
things are "but the occasion for the work of hands ... they are the goal
of an experiment that neither sight nor mind can conduct alone."
[34]Kathryn
E. Kramer, "Myth, Invisibility, and Politics in the Late Work of Paul Klee", in
Languages of Visuality, ed. Beate Allert, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991), p.
182
[37]
Paul Klee, Notebooks, Volume 2, The Nature of Nature, ed. Juerg Spiller, (London:
Lund Humphries, 1973), p. 47
[51]
Craig Owens, "The Discourse of Others ...", in Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster, (United
Kingdom: Pluto Press, 1988), p. 58
[53]
D. N. Rodowick, "Impure Mimesis or the Ends of the Aesthetic", in Deconstruction
and the Visual Arts, eds. Peter Brunette and David Wills, (Cambridge and New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 96-97.
The postmodern aesthetic arguably has its origins in
the modern idea of the aesthetic; something which, as Rodowick claims, took its
rise from "the systematic retreat in philosophy from understanding the
social and historical meanings of representational practices." He locates
a certain interiorizing of subjectivity which identifies discourse with
"speech and pure thought, as distinguished from external perceptions
derived from nature"; which is to say, a certain privileging of discourse
over the senses occurs in accounting for the subjective aspects of our
experience of the world.
[54] David Farrell Krell,
"Art and Truth in Raging Discord: Heidegger and Nietzsche on the Will to
Power", in Martin
Heidegger and the Question of Literature: Toward a Postmodern Literary Hermeneutics, ed. William V. Spanos,
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), pp. 40-41.
Exposing a Nietzschean proposition that art is the
fundamental occurrence of all being, and that being is "a self-creating," the artist
remains, according to Krell, one in whom the struggle against "atomistic
experience" can only be by way of indirection. For since "the artist's
creative life [is] ruled by a yes-saying response to the chaos of Becoming ...
the achievement of art shatters the subject-object relation, [and thus fuses]
worker and work." Such is an artist's self-production, Krell declares.
[55] Jean Francois Lyotard,
"Fait Pictural", in Abstraction: Journal of Philosophy and the
Visual Arts,
ed Andrew Benjamin, (Great Britain: Academy Editions, 1995), pp. 9-15.