Present-day aesthetics needs no trees, and that suits its airports and high-rise cities. It needs no roots in the homeland, since quick and comfortable strips of time and place may be alternated. It needs no details of historical art from Chartres or Sainte-Chapelle, as the neo-Gothic churches between the skyscrapers of New York will be equally effective in the film or photograph. And no old rose with hanging head, which blooms only once and only in the second year, and which became immortal in the Waldmüller pictures,93 is to be bought in any shop.
Distant is that beauty which belonged to the essence of art as a portrayal of an archetype that lives within all of us, distant that disinterested pleasure, distant that harmony of the parts in the whole or that regularity of the sensuousness of the appearance, especially in the sublime as the opposite of the hatred-evoking shamelessness of the trivial selfishness of the ugly. Distant the sensuous semblance of the ideal or the freedom of appearance, where the imitation of nature became a rule of thought. Nothing hand-made is needed, and certainly not that which grows and lasts for a long time, but we need to buy and replace machines quickly and cheaply — and therefore ensuring jobs, jobs for the machine builders who have exploited the countryside, have sacrificed nature and the handicraft and daily labor of those who cultivated this country.
As art was, for a while, identical to the beauty of nature, which was understood as such in knowledge and conception and which, as the performance of man, is certain of its depths, it was conscious of its irrationality, of its secrets, its elusiveness, in which the world and art originally resides as a fate in between the pictures that the eyes behold, and in tones that are recordable and through thoughts that were representable. Our world necessarily acted in a hostile way when art was used as material for interpretations, or in the markets for the traders in ideology, instead of for the philosophies of pure idealism.
Like mice they sit before the snake, trembling in the fear of their smallness being recognized. And so there entered, instead of the earlier lack of emotion and a disinterested existence, that will to stimulate and exhaust, the interest in always wanting to sell something, completely intentionally and in the conscious shamelessness of harming those who take part in it.
Beuys spoke of the liberation from art towards the core of things, with new rules, where everything from the past is used up and laid bare, even up to the heart of the wounds — and that would be the head?
Where the senses of stimulation come together, and associate together, where everybody is at home, and can participate, where the original flashes of experience on the soil of the new world, an encounter beyond the Earth — the Earth on which we move and came to have effect — begins, in the flight of feelings and thoughts, in cataracts of rapid weightlessness, of pictures and tones. It would be another world beyond the elements, free as planes fly, a fulfillment of dreams, a nightmare of nature, of meanings, ethics, of centuries-old thoughts, grown too, today here and tomorrow there, then really liberated, and more quickly thought than expensively bought, and to call up Mozart and Leonardo as mere substitute pieces of one’s own montage on apparatuses, accessible and determinable. Even that would be an archetypal experience after having swept away the previously existing worlds, after the abdication of the previous taboos, beyond art, like photography and pornography and film, at the end of the impotence of complicated old music, made by hand, to build again for posterity, beyond this Earth.
They discovered the use, nature and culture of the tree in the exploited faces of their cities, when, shaved around the eyes and lids, these withered and were given face lifts so that they could not age, and when these trees died and facial art became incapable of regenerating itself.