Once again, I have received a communication from among you which I would like to discuss for two reasons: firstly, because it offers an opportunity to clarify certain things that may have remained too vague in the previous lectures, but also, secondly, because the questions posed to me lead into or belong to the context we are currently developing. This time, however, they are questions specifically about visual art, and I would like to take this opportunity to say that I naturally cannot pretend to speak with the same experience, namely the same technical experience, about visual art with which I can speak about musical or, I like to think, literary matters. I am aware that the problems in the different arts are by no means as directly identical as is generally claimed. I think I have occasionally said to you that the concept of the arts – or of art as a whole, as opposed to the individual arts – already contains an aspect of neutralization and reification. So it is quite clear to me that extrapolations from one area to another are problematic. On the other hand, however, it is unmistakable that, in a situation where the integration of everything spiritual has advanced so far, and where every art has ultimately become such a spokesperson or expression of certain historico-philosophical experiences, the differences between the artistic genres are reduced, even if they always remain insurmountable in the most radical sense. And after the very matter we are dealing with here was confirmed to me by someone I value a great deal, namely Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler in Paris,1 that the problems I examined in my study ‘The Aging of New Music’ in Dissonances have extremely precise analogues in visual art, and after also having the opportunity to pursue these things to a certain extent myself, I do not think I am especially guilty of overstepping any boundaries if I attempt to say something about visual art in relation to these matters. I think it would be best for me to take up a few points from this note and treat them consecutively, as the complexes are so interwoven that one can only address them if one accepts certain preconditions underlying the overall view. The author writes: ‘If the special meaning of a work of art is determined by the specific configuration of its elements, and if the meaning of visual art as such lies in the seeming and paradoxical individual and contentual realization of alienation suspended by the social possibilities of controlling nature’, and so forth. Let me begin by saying – and I hope the interpellant will forgive my slightly schoolmasterly tone – that the definitions to which he is referring were not intended as such. I did not say that art is only a contentual realization of alienation; rather, I highlighted an aspect that I feel has withered away in traditional art theory, and which I therefore felt a particular need to underline, all the more because it is decisive for our own art to express exactly this quality of alienation and to overcome it through its expression. But that is not everything, of course. In addition, I always tried to tell you about a different, very elusive aspect, namely the utopian aspect of art. I said to you time and again that, because the elements of the alienated are moved into a context of meaning, they are transparent and structured as alienated elements but at the same time transcend this state in a certain sense. And I think it would not be good, and would indeed fall short of what I was seeking to tell you, if you now thought that art should be confined to such a definition, and that this could provide a kind of yardstick which can be slapped onto any given work of art to indicate its quality. I would say, however, that the relationship between the categories that really determine the substance of a work of art varies considerably; but also that it is historico-philosophically predetermined which of these categories is foregrounded, and that one cannot measure a work of art by any such abstract demand. Otherwise one would truly be regressing to the level of Gottsched's aesthetics in the eighteenth century,2 which good old Lessing went to tremendous lengths to dethrone3 or would arrive at such definitions as Aristotle's notorious decree that tragedy must arouse ‘fear and pity’,4 whereas it is precisely the imposition of such norms on the work from without that I want to lead you beyond through our mode of investigation. The point of what I am telling you, from this perspective, is that I am attempting to hold on to the idea of the objectivity of artistic quality, the idea of wresting the observation of art from the clutches of that everyday relativism which still withdraws to the argument that art is a matter of taste; at the same time, however, I am trying to do so not by applying some fixed criteria to art from the outside but, rather, by developing this objectivity from the matter itself, the determinate and unique matter. And if you take anything away for your own relationship with art and understanding of art from the suggestions I am making here, then I would hope it is this: that you co-enact this peculiar movement of the idea but do not ascribe to any individual observations I have made the authority of a fixed standard; it does not exist in this form, as every work of art has such a measure only within itself and in its own movement.
In addition, perhaps I can correct a small misunderstanding. It is always good when such interventions give cause to check how much of what one says during slightly difficult reflections is understood, and to explain it where necessary. I did not say that society's possibilities for controlling nature do away with alienation. On the contrary, it would be more accurate to say that control over nature, along with the associated forms of domination in society, has actually increased the alienation of humans from one another and from nature, and that art, at every level, has the task of revoking this process. First of all, however, I wish to emphasize that the other aspect, namely the creation of a context of meaning – in the sense I explained very precisely, I hope, in the last sessions – is, as the intention of the works of art, at least as much or inalienably the same as the other aspect which we discussed, namely the relationship with the alienated. Now the interpellant continues: if this precondition which he posited, and which I tried to show you cannot be posited as a precondition in the sense he thought, ‘would one of the preconditions for the possibility of this individuation not be the binding existence of a sensual materiality that we experience as identical, and which corresponds to the identity of the individual?’ If one puts these formulations and my own in slightly more down-to-earth5 terms, and strips away some of their highly cryptic terminological character which I was originally guilty of using, and which I undoubtedly seduced the interpellant into adopting, then they surely mean the following: that the aforementioned aspect of the expression of alienation – or the resistance to alienation posited in the work of art – is really one with a social resistance that the work must express, and whose fundamental conditions include the fact that it contains empirical reality more or less as directly as each individual does. So what lies behind this, if I may take the liberty of this interpretation, is something like the question of the work's commitment, which was read into the theory of the resistance towards alienation. And the question proceeds quite consistently from here: if the work of art necessarily adopts such a polemical stance towards empirical reality, then does what I have said not require that this empirical reality itself appear in the work in the same way as it is generally open to non-artistic experience among individual humans? That, at least, is how I understand what was said. I think there is actually a specific error at the heart of this. For this incorporation of immediate sensual materiality has two aspects that are really both irreconcilable with the things that have been considered fundamental in our deliberations so far. For if they genuinely sought to claim that they are commensurable with the aesthetic subject, and hence truly capable of carrying in the work of art itself those experiences which the work imposes on them, then they would indeed not be alienated; but the situation is that empirical reality itself faces us as something alienated. Here I would like to recall a very eloquent formulation by Helmuth Plessner, who once said that the defamiliarization [Verfremdung] of the work of art is a response to the alienation [Entfremdung] of the world.6 It is only because the alienated form in which we encounter the so-called natural world is suspended by the work of art itself and shifted into another form that it is likewise defined as alienated by the work, which thus teaches us, as it were, to look back with unfamiliar eyes at the world, which already forces us to look at it with unfamiliar eyes. And only thus, through this translation, can the groundwork be laid for us to experience the alienated after all. Owing to this experience of alienation, however, the empirical elements of reality that face us are heteronomous in relation to the formal law, and today – precisely because they are alienated, because in a sense they no longer reach our experience – in their present state, namely in their immediacy, they no longer enter the formal law and can no longer be mastered. [For] the formal law demands that all façades, all superficial connections that we experience as seemingly closed, be dissolved and replaced by a configuration that is both a critique of this alienated superficial form and an attempt to build a non-alienated reality, a reality in which we critically find ourselves, out of the elements of that same reality.
If the process of the history of visual art in the last centuries can accurately be described overall as a process of progressive subjectification, then this process of subjectification today – which cannot simply be halted by reflecting on collectives or objectivities, and cannot be sublated into a form of new objectivity through some arbitrary act – then this process means not only that the way things and objects are observed in art is changed and is subjectively shaped; it also means that the decisive rupture which has taken place is that the essential, the matter itself, continues to be the matter itself in art only if it is mediated, if it no longer faces us as something defined first of all for itself but, rather, contains all its defining attributes through the things we do with it. Any attitude that evades this mediation through the subject in art, and pretends that the work of art still knows anything about reality in an immediate sense, any such behaviour in art, however politically progressive it might consider itself, is in fact reactionary with regard to the immanent developmental process of productive forces in art and is therefore impossible. Art no longer interacts directly with reality, but only in the way in which it is filled with subjective experience, and only in the way that its elements then come together to create forms and constellations of forms. And that is precisely what leads to the circumstance that a consciousness which mistakenly considers itself socially correct by thinking that it can directly incorporate social aspects from reality is quite the opposite, namely the socially false consciousness, because it omits and undoes the very dialectical process that lies within the state of alienation between the subject and the object in society.
Now the interpellant, whose interpellation deals essentially with the question of so-called abstract painting, continues as follows. I would, incidentally, like to take this opportunity to say that the term ‘abstract painting’ is an especially foolish one, simply because a work of art, if it is indeed a work of art, is concrete: the picture I am dealing with is concrete in the highest sense, and if it is abstract then it is a bad picture. One must not confuse the question of a work's concreteness, which is one of the first demands levelled at a work of art, with the question of how far the work is identical to an objective materiality facing it, or how far it abstracts from this materiality. I think this term has contributed inestimably to the general confusion, almost as much as the word ‘atonal’, and the only positive thing about it that I can think of is that it at least has a certain shock value, a certain polemical force which has to a certain extent given it something good, something powerful at times, although today, in the state of general neutralization in which everything is swallowed up, this polemical blessing is also a thing of the past. The question posed here by the interpellant is this: ‘Would the dissolution of these topoi of sensual experience’ – more crudely put, that of the concrete world – ‘which already seems technologically complete through the possibility of an unlimited manipulation and variability of this experience, which can be carried out beyond the sensitivity threshold’ – he is thinking of the objective construction, in contrast with the construction mediated by the subjective sensorium – ‘and the consequence of this arbitrariness of the individual experiential world in the realm of visual art, namely abstract constructivism, reduce the idea of visual art to absurdity, as one can no longer speak of a particular, specific content here of aesthetic experience, as the individual sensual element of the aggregate system, the picture, entirely becomes a function of the respective arbitrary construction principle?’ At this point I would like to anticipate something we will address in earnest only in the next sessions, namely that the true criteria for what we are discussing lie not in the subjective experience of works of art but, rather, in the nature of the work itself. And here I would mitigate the objection raised by the interpellant to the lecture – and, I would almost say, to his own artistic intentions as well – by saying that, in so far as we are dealing with the mere subjective modes of experience or reaction in relation to works of art, this aspect of randomness which he criticizes in ‘abstract art’ is found everywhere. The seemingly established nature of reactions based on certain given objects is itself a superficial matter. And if one were examining subjective experiences of works of art, one would find exactly the same arbitrariness in traditional art that becomes apparent here in modern art. Indeed, it is generally the case – I am almost embarrassed to repeat this, but I keep returning to this one point – that modern art may be something different from traditional art, but it is simultaneously identical to it; the difference is that all the problems and difficulties which were previously subcutaneous, concealed by the closed surface of communication, now emerge actually and substantially. Aside from that, I think that the charge of arbitrariness in the constellations and the arbitrariness of their connection to the concrete world does not really bear scrutiny. I will deliberately pass over literature where the conceptual element, which it necessarily uses even in the most extreme manifestations, always draws a certain degree of determinate concreteness into the work of art. Here I will genuinely try to keep to visual art in the strictest sense, for it seems to me that so-called abstraction has certain boundaries. It is an error in artists’ conception of themselves – a very widespread error for which I do not hold the artists responsible, as they are not inherently obliged to have a philosophical, theoretical awareness of what they do – that they keep thinking that the categories they employ, or the forms on which they base their construction, come from nature. That was the error made to a particular degree by cubism, for example, which genuinely believed that the reduction to geometric figures constituted a reduction to certain very simple natural phenomena; in fact, contexts of the kind created by cubist painters are found not in nature but far more readily – to the extent that there are any models – in a landscape such as that of Spain and the Moroccan cultural landscape, whose effect on Picasso can hardly be overestimated. But, quite aside from that, even in its so-called natural material, even where it comes as close to nature and circles, cubes and geometric figures, art is always dealing with something that is already eminently historical. This means that these cubes actually contain the history of all art, just as Picasso once said that Cézanne is ‘the father of us all’, and that all this had in fact come from Cézanne.7 It is not my task to describe in detail the historical process that led from impressionism via pointillism on the one hand and on the other hand via Cézanne to cubism and finally to abstract painting; there are more competent people who can do a better job. All I wish to say is that this historical process is nothing external to the works of art, for everything that happens in these works is a testimony, a trace, a monument to this historical process, and I would almost presume to indulge in a speculation that is not so far-fetched in relation to what I intend to tell you about these matters in other contexts: that the force, the substantiality, of modern art depends very significantly on how far it embodies this historical experience through its own forms – how far the forms it uses express this historical aspect even as they are objectified. The phenomena of loss of tension, on the other hand, which occupy us all and also worry the interpellant, are evidently very closely connected to the moment at which the materials and forms become so independent that the same historical experiences they document can no longer be felt but, rather, disappear from them. I think you need only look at pictures from Max Ernst's so-called abstract period – I mention a surrealist here simply because his name occurred to me in this context – and you will see to what an eminent degree the so-called abstract forms in his work all stem from the Jugendstil ornament. Here I can note only in passing that the significance of Jugendstil's repertoire of forms is incomparably greater than we admit. Indeed, Jugendstil is one of those phenomena that are subject to a sort of process of suppression. People think they can deal with this very strange, traumatic phenomenon by smiling, but, in reality, this smiling shows precisely that one has not dealt with it.8
There are really – if I may take this opportunity to formulate this as dogmatically, as starkly, as I possibly can – no so-called formal aspects in art which are not themselves sedimented content, which were not once contentual, just as it has been shown that, with the everyday objects we use, the ornamentations are usually rudiments or residues of necessities from earlier phases of production that have survived. The ornament, as it were, is the scar that appeared on a vase at the point where it could not be made at the potter's wheel without such an interruption. So, following this analogy, it should be the case for all so-called artistic forms that they were once content and, through a process of sublimation, of spiritualization – which is after all the process of artistic development as such – took on that peculiar independence. And I would say it is virtually the central criterion for any non-representational art, or any that rejects the harmony of the surface, that, by going through this process – this process of the content's sedimentation, or the sublimation of the content to become form – it still senses some of the power of that content in the form itself. When we artists speak of a sense of form, a feeling for form, that is what we really mean: we want to express that, in the use of formal means, we still register, realize and take into account whatever contentual impulses once resided in them. And higher forms of critique, critiques of works of art that do not follow abstract rules, only their immanent necessity, almost always end up asking for the hidden contentual justification for whatever seems to be purely formal about them.9 So what I mean is that the interpellant definitely pointed out a danger, one that I had by no means hidden from you, namely that of a loss of tension, which appears wherever the aspects I have attempted to describe to you are truly forgotten, where they no longer assert themselves, or, in popular parlance, where art turns into decorative art, or where what I have called the ‘danger of the dangerless’10 holds sway – where alienation from the concrete world becomes a wallpaper pattern. But I think we should be aware that all this is not something that can simply be attributed to the process of abstraction, and that could even be eliminated, as the Sedlmayrs11 and totalitarian guardians of culture12 would like, by returning to the ‘centre’, the concrete object or some such thing. For, in reality, we are dealing here with aspects within so-called abstract works of art that can very much be named by critique, primarily a certain lack of the power to create a true context of meaning between the elements instead of applying construction principles only mechanically and externally.
Here, however, we reach the point at which I must confess to my technical incompetence in matters of painting. All I can do is to tell you that, where I feel most at home in terms of my skills, namely in music, I can point out very precisely those elements where the construction has been slapped on from the outside rather than developed from the matter itself, and that the same structures which exhibit this are also those that give the impression of lacking any tension. In addition, there is the aspect that those so-called abstract constructs in which we observe the loss of tension are generally those that have been removed from the dialectical relationship with tradition. Today I can give you only an intimation of this. To me, the great products of the new art almost always seem to have been those which still had tradition as an essential force within them and then negated it on their own strength. The great revolutionary artists of the period – such as Picasso, such as Braque,13 such as Schoenberg and so forth – were all within tradition, and, by locking horns with it, they essentially brought about something like an induction of tension. The loss of tension and the problems we are discussing here – and this is very closely connected to the lack of historical experience in the matters themselves, in the forms – appear wherever this resistance is no longer enacted and instead, in what Kafka calls the ‘gay empty ride’,14 one truly has at one's disposal those things that gain their meaning only within tension, in the act of art repelling themselves from tradition. Where tradition no longer exists as an aspect, however sublimated, the power of true revolutionary art does not really exist. But I can only hint at this. I would just like to note in passing, without drawing any grandiloquent conclusions, how thought-provoking it is that – let me be very cautious – precisely the most significant of modern painters stopped short of complete abstraction, of severing all connections to concrete representation, Klee as much as Picasso. And it seems to me that, in Klee's late period, when that decreased, but most of all in Kandinsky's development, this progression would not necessarily have been a blessing. This hesitation is not, as some of my Darmstadt friends occasionally charge, a hesitation out of cowardice or weakness or inconsistency; rather, these great artists were evidently driven by the knowledge that it requires a kind of resistance to the heteronomous to make the concept of autonomy meaningful in the first place. This means that, at the moment when the autonomy of creation becomes absolute and idles, as it were, it cancels itself out and no longer becomes freedom if this freedom cannot exert itself in relation to something from which it differs.
The interpellant finally emphasizes, very rightly in my opinion – and this is probably where he gets to what he really means: ‘It seems to me today that a striving in visual art to advocate the demand for specific representation, in whatever manner, amounts to a reversal of the orientation towards the future, towards utopian possibility that is actually native to the realm of art, in memory of historically past experiences.’ I think that the antinomy he mentioned in his interpellation can actually be resolved in the sense I attempted to show you in this session, and that then this utopian intention – and with it the positive attitude towards a radically advanced art – is justified after all. Finally he asks whether the truth of abstract works of art or radically constructivistic works is possible without the support of the viewer. This question is extremely difficult to answer, as it really depends on one's technical specialization. But in a certain sense, I would say, all art actually requires the assistance of theoretical insight. Here too, as I have pointed out so often, the difference is that something becomes explicit in modern art which remains hidden in traditional art. It is one of the superstitions of the typical approach to art, which makes art pure intuitive observation and nature something immediate, that the work of art acts purely from within itself, with no preconditions. This precondition is certainly untenable. There is probably no work of art at all that does not have specific preconditions, starting with the preconditions of the so-called cultural setting, if we accept such a term, in which a work is embedded – for example, it is barely possible for us to listen to, understand or realize Chinese music in any remotely adequate sense – but also in the sense that, in order to understand a work of art at all, we must speak its idiom, its language. If we do not, it will simply slide away from us. And finally, to understand a work, we must in a certain sense already know where it is located. Benjamin once formulated this very provocatively when he said that he could only really evaluate a picture if he knew who had created it.15 This is naturally a slap in the face of the usual notion that quality acts purely from within itself, but it points exactly to what we are dealing with, namely that a plethora of theoretical preconditions of all kinds – I do not mean historical, but genuinely theoretical preconditions – necessarily contribute to the experience of any work of art so that we can understand this work at all. If we do not know something, however second-hand, about the concept of the human being, the concept of humanity, the concept of autonomy and freedom and such categories, then we can register all manner of sensual things in Beethoven's music, but it is completely out of the question that we might understand a piece of his. And just as we must say of this art, which is viewed within the pantheon as particularly vivid, that it has implicit theoretical preconditions, so too does this apply to all art. In that sense, modern art simply takes the bull by the horns – or embraces an otherwise ideologically concealed situation – by not being entirely vivid but also, as a spiritual thing, by having spiritual preconditions. I would therefore say the following: we should not find it daunting that one needs more than merely one's eyes and ears to understand modern art, for we cannot understand any art at all purely with our eyes or our ears.