12

The Working of Art

What is the relation between the “objectivity” of an artwork, that is, its material being as an object, and its nature as an artwork?¹ The relation is surely not an irrelevant or contingent one, and yet its nature is not at all self-evident. Indeed, in the case of some artworks, namely those that fall within the category of certain forms of so-called conceptual art, it might seem as if the material objectivity of the work (where “objectivity” is taken to refer to what we might also call, a little awkwardly in English, the “thingness” of the work) is entirely incidental to the work as such—as if the artwork consists entirely in a certain idea, or perhaps nothing other than a certain shape or form. Yet even purely conceptual works still have to work through some medium or mode of presentation, and so through something that is materially given,² and the question then returns: what is the relation between that medium or mode of presentation—which now becomes another way of understanding the work in its material objectivity (and so also, one might say, in its singular placedness³)—and the work itself?

One might be tempted to say that the relation in question here, at least when understood as indeed a relation between the medium and the work, is, as the use of the term “medium” implies, just that—the material objectivity of the artwork is the medium for the work, which is to say that it is that through which the artwork works. As it happens, although too strong a distinction between the artwork and its “medium” or “mode of presentation” may itself mislead, the latter part of this answer—that the relation between the artwork and the medium is a relation of “working through”—while it may appear superficial, does indeed point in an important and fruitful direction. Yet it is not the direction taken by most answers to the question at issue. For the most part, rather than leading to an investigation of the way in which the artwork works, the question about the relation between the objectivity of the work and the work itself has often been treated as a question about the kind of thing an artwork is.

Many writers have argued, at least in the case of those works that depend on some form of “text” (a musical composition, a piece of choreography, a poem or a novel) that requires a performance or “reading” for its realization,⁴ that the work cannot be identical with its material or objective instantiations, since any one of those instantiations of the work can be destroyed without the work ceasing to exist, while the existence of a different reading or performance of the work need not imply the existence of a different work. Thus, were my copy of Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu to be destroyed, the work itself would remain unaffected, while if I listen now to Vaughn Williams’s The Lark Ascending, I am not hearing a different work, regardless of whether the performance is live or recorded, from that to which someone else may be listening in Melbourne or San Francisco. Moreover, some writers have suggested that the same is true even of artworks such as paintings. Peter Strawson writes, in a famous passage from Individuals, that “it is only because of the empirical deficiencies of reproductive techniques that we identify these [particular objects] with the works of art. Were it not for these deficiencies, the original of a painting would have only the interest which belongs to the original manuscript of a poem.”⁵ Similarly, some writers have emphasized the imaginative or expressive character of artworks. The work, therefore, cannot be the same as its objective or material realization alone, since the imaginative or expressive quality of the work is not the same as any merely objective or material quality. On such an account, artworks are properly imaginative or ideal (though not in the way claimed by those conceptual artists who identify the work with its idea), rather than objective or material entities.⁶

These latter accounts provide us with different ontologies of artworks, but they do so in a particular way, namely, by looking to specify the ontological class or category to which the artwork belongs—which is to say, as I indicated above, by determining the kind of thing with which the artwork can be identified. While such approaches provide one way of thematizing the question concerning the nature of artworks, they also tend toward an understanding of that question as one that concerns the conditions of identity for artworks and their individuation. But this is certainly not the only question that can be asked concerning the ontology of artworks, and perhaps it is not even the right question to ask when it is the nature of the artwork as an artwork that is at issue. Whether an artwork is or is not a certain kind of thing need not have any relevance to the question as to how the kind of thing that is the artwork works as art.

In addition to asking after the generic mode of existence of the artwork, then, we may also ask after the specific manner in which it exists as art; in so doing we focus, one might say, not on what an artwork is so much as on the way that it is. Such a focus directs attention to the character of the artwork as precisely a work, and so to its dynamic rather than static character. To focus on the work-character of the artwork is already to move away from the ontological question as a categorical question to one that prioritizes activity and process. In relation to the idea of objectivity, this means understanding the objectivity of the work (though this is to announce the idea in very preliminary fashion) as that in and through which the artwork articulates itself as a work. As Andrew Benjamin puts it: “While a work may be art, what is of central importance is the way that it is art. The move to activity means that priority is given to a conception of the object as articulated within a process.”⁷ Priority is given, in other words, to the artwork as a work.

This way of refiguring the ontological question not only has affinities with Benjamin’s own approach to the artwork as articulated in Benjamin’s detailed engagements with specific works, but it is also close to that suggested by Jeffrey Maitland as part of an explicit argument for rethinking the ontology of the artwork.⁸ Rejecting the idea that the question concerning the nature of the artwork can adequately be addressed by focusing on the question of the kind of thing the artwork is (and rejecting, more specifically, the idea that the artwork can be understood as a type or token of a type—the view associated with, for instance, Strawson, and also Richard Wollheim, among others), Maitland argues for a focus on the way the artwork functions or works as an artwork. Yet whereas I have argued for retaining a focus on the objectivity of the artwork, Maitland argues that the ontological question must be reconfigured “in a way that will not prejudice us into thinking that the work of art is some sort of an object. Indeed, as long as we persist in viewing art as an object, we will fail to understand the nature of art.”⁹ In fact, it is precisely to preempt too ready an assumption that the question concerning the material objectivity of the artwork is indeed a matter of the kind of object that it is that I have so far talked of “objectivity” rather than, for instance, “objecthood.” As Maitland would certainly agree, the material objectivity of the artwork is at issue here. The point should not be to disregard such objectivity, but to understand it anew. Thus, rather than abandon the notion of the artwork in its material objectivity, my aim is to rethink that in which such objectivity consists. One way of doing this is precisely through emphasizing the character of the artwork as a work, something Maitland also does, and to emphasize, in a way that Maitland does not (though I would argue it is nevertheless present in his account), the way in which the work-character of the artwork does indeed operate only in and through the objectivity of the work.

The question of the relation between the artwork and its material objectivity is not a question about the relation between the artwork and the ontological kind to which it may belong, but rather is a question about how artworks work, and the role of their material objectivity in that working. Undoubtedly, any attempt to address this question must attend to the actual working of artworks, and so also to our engagement with them. This requires attending not only to our own experience of individual artworks, but also to the wider critical and interpretative reception of those works. Indeed, given the enormous diversity of artistic practice across not only different creative domains, modes, and genres, but also different media, styles, and methods of approach, it would seem foolish to suppose that one could provide a single account of the way artworks function as artworks that would address the character of their functioning in any detailed way. To this extent, an emphasis on the process or work character of the artwork already predisposes one toward a critical and interpretive practice in relation to art that is focused on individual works, rather than on artworks in general, and that sees the functioning of artworks as exhibited through the functioning of those individual works and our engagement with them—a point that is particularly well exemplified in Benjamin.¹⁰

Taken to its extreme, however, such a line of reasoning might be thought to amount to a claim that the process- or work-oriented character of the artwork means that there can be no real ontology of artworks as such—no general account of what an artwork is. Any philosophical encounter with art can only take the form of an engagement with particular works and never with the question of the artwork as such. Yet the claim that artworks can only be adequately understood as art through attending to their character as works, though it may be supported by reference to individual artworks while it also provides a way to ground a certain mode of engagement with individual works, cannot itself be substantiated without some more general level of argument. Moreover, there are also likely to be certain broader implications of such an approach that deserve recognition and elaboration inasmuch as they may direct or constrain our approach to individual works in specific ways. Recognizing the diversity of artistic practice, and the importance of attending to the actuality of that practice as evident in and through individual works, does not, then, invalidate any more general ontology of the artwork, and does in fact already presuppose such an ontology. Indeed, inasmuch as one may view the approach adopted here as an application of the phenomenological injunction to return “to the things themselves” to the particular case of the artwork (and, in this respect, the approach itself constitutes the application of a certain phenomenological mode of understanding to the artwork as such), then the fact that the focus on the artwork as a work does not imply the eschewal of any broader ontological commitment can be seen as reflecting something that is more generally true of phenomenology as such—the phenomenological approach is not intrinsically opposed to ontology, but should rather be seen as a particular mode of ontological inquiry. The particular phenomenological approach adopted here is one that is intended to allow the phenomenon of the artwork itself to come forth, thereby allowing the artwork to exhibit its own phenomenology—one that could be said also to underpin the more specific phenomenology that may be instantiated in any particular artwork. It is also, I might add, a mode of phenomenology that I would characterize as actually a form of topology, since it is a mode of attending to things that is also an attending to their proper topos.

Allowing that an ontological approach is not ruled out by the focus on the artwork as work, the initial question with which I began can be put once more: What is the relation between the artwork and its material objectivity? The immediate inspiration for Maitland’s focus on the artwork in its character as a work is Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art.” There Heidegger begins with the question about the nature of art in a way that already brings to the fore the character of the artwork as a work, and yet also attends to the character of the artwork as a thing. Heidegger’s claim is that the being of the artwork as a thing, its being in terms of what I have here called its “objectivity,”¹¹ derives from its character as a work: “The thingly in the work should not be denied out of existence; rather given that it belongs already to the work-being of the work, it must be thought out of that work-being. If this is so, then the path to the determination of the thingly reality of the work runs not from thing to work but from work to thing.”¹² Heidegger’s point here is that we cannot understand the artwork through first trying to analyze what it is on the basis purely of its material “objectivity.”¹³ It is only when we comprehend the artwork’s character as a work that we can understand how its material objectivity stands in relation to its character as an artwork.

Figure 12.1

J. R. Cozens, The Two Great Temples at Paestum, circa. 1783. Watercolor, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Heidegger’s account of the artwork is centrally focused on the classical Greek temple—usually taken to be the second temple of Hera, originally thought to be of Poseidon, at Paestum, itself the subject of a number of works by artists, notably Piranesi and J. R. Cozens.¹⁴ His account emphasizes the way in which the artwork stands in a particular place and in specific relation to that which is configured around it. Thus Heidegger begins his description of the artwork that is the temple by stating that “A building, a Greek temple, portrays nothing. It simply stands there in the middle of the rocky fissured valley”; and in what follows, the character of the temple as “standing there” (“Er steht einfach da,” “Dastehend ruht das Bauwerk,” “Das temple gibt in seinem Dastehend”) is repeated again and again.¹⁵ What stands there is the artwork in its material objectivity, and in its standing-there (we may say its “being-there”) the objectivity of the work establishes itself in relation to that which also takes a stand around and in relation to it. The temple-work is not the instantiation of something ideal, nor is it a type or a token of a type—it is a singular thing that stands in its singular locatedness. Heidegger claims that the artwork that is the temple “opens up a world,” and it does so through freeing up a “space” in which “all things gain their lingering and hastening, their distance and proximity, their breadth and their limits.”¹⁶

Two elements play a role in this “spacing” or “opening up”: earth and world. In their most basic form (the terms have several dimensions¹⁷), “world” refers to that which the artwork opens up as the realm of relatedness in which things appear, and “earth” refers to the material objectivity of the artwork into which the work is set—what we might think of as its very “standing-there.”¹⁸ As world is essentially disclosure, so too is earth (as might be indicated by the impenetrability associated with the material and the particular) essentially concealing. Heidegger understands the way the artwork works as consisting in the opposition between these two elements:

World and earth are essentially different and yet never separated from one another. World is grounded on earth, and earth rises up through world. But the relation between world and earth never atrophies into the empty unity of opposites unconcerned with one another. In its resting upon earth the world strives to surmount it. As the self-opening it will tolerate nothing closed. As the sheltering and concealing, however, earth tends always to draw the world into itself and to keep it there.¹⁹

Although Heidegger describes the opposition between world and earth as “strife” (Streit),²⁰ he also emphasizes that it is not discordant or destructive, but rather an opposition in which the two elements come into their own.

It is in and through the artwork that world and earth are brought into productive opposition. Moreover, the opposition between world and earth is an opposition in which the material “objectivity” of the artwork plays a central role. The opposition in question is indeed one that occurs, in part, between the material objectivity of the work, and that which is opened up in relation to that material objectivity, which includes the material objectivity of the work itself (in the same way, earth appears as earth in the opening up of world), but which also includes its character as art. In a brief discussion of his own focus on the work character of art, Andrew Benjamin writes:

The term “work” opens up in two inter-related directions. On the one hand it announces the presence of the object—the object of interpretation or the object of criticism. The object is the work. Equally, however, there is the work’s activity. Its self-effectuation as an object. “Work” both as a named presence and as a conceptual motif dominates Heidegger’s approach to art . . . work has an active . . . disclosing . . . role. . . . The limit of Heidegger’s approach, however, is that disclosure always opens more than the work. In so doing the work has to open up beyond itself. As such the actual materiality of the work comes to be effaced in terms of what it shows.²¹

There are two points I would take from Benjamin’s comments here. The first, and perhaps most important, is the distinction he makes between the work as referring to the presence of the object (its material objectivity) and to the work’s activity—which Benjamin terms its “‘self-effectuation’ as an object.” We might think of this as a distinction between the being of the work “as object” and its coming-to-be “as object.” The distinction is one that Benjamin explicitly takes as moving toward an essential indeterminacy that belongs to the artwork—although the artwork is a material object, its materiality cannot be assumed, but is instead placed in question though the working of the work as art—its working is its appearing or coming-to-be, and this is never complete, never finished. The second point concerns Benjamin’s claim that Heidegger’s account leads toward the self-effacement of the objectivity of the artwork (this is specifically inasmuch as the artwork is understood as always opening itself up in a way that goes beyond the work itself—in the terms echoed by Maitland, the artwork opens up a world, and that world is more than just the artwork).

These two points are connected, since the tendency toward the self-effacement of the objectivity of the work is itself connected with the character of the work as objective and as active or disclosive. What is suggested here is, in fact, a tension or opposition within the character of the work that is identical to that which appears, at least in part, in Heidegger’s emphasis on the strife that the artwork sets up between world and earth. But in that case, we ought to view the tendency toward the effacement of the objectivity of the work as something that is not peculiar to Heidegger’s account (although there may still be elements in that account that are idiosyncratic to it), but rather part of the way in which the artwork itself works. Indeed, one may argue that such self-effacement is possible because of the essential indeterminacy that belongs to the artwork and that arises out of its character as both being and coming-to-be. If the artwork is disclosive, then independently of whether it discloses anything beyond itself, what it must also disclose is its own twofold character as both object and work. This is certainly true of the artwork in Heidegger’s account, in which the material objectivity of the artwork, its character as earth, is itself disclosed in the opening up of world. Indeed, the very resistance of earth itself to such opening up (the tendency of earth to concealment) is only evident in that disclosedness. Yet the opening up of world, since it also involves a certain transcendence of the material objectivity of the work through which such opening up is realized, also tends inevitably toward an effacing of that objectivity. Thus, the disclosedness that occurs in the artwork tends to be understood as moving one away from the material objectivity of the work, and so also away from the work in its disclosive role. However much some such effacement of objectivity may occur in Heidegger, the latter shift seems most evident in the common tendency to view artworks as actually constituted by some meaning, content, or idea that the artwork is intended to disclose, embody, or express.

The key idea in Heidegger’s account of the nature of the artwork, and in Benjamin’s, regardless of the difference that may also obtain, is the idea that the artwork contains or gives rise to a certain tension between the objectivity of the work and its active or disclosive character. But how does this tension arise? It seems, in fact, that we should distinguish between two moments in the disclosedness that belongs to world and that is opened up through earth. The setting of the artwork in its locatedness, its standing forth in its material objectivity, already places the artwork in relation to a context, already brings it into a certain minimal relatedness with that which surrounds it (and that relatedness may, of course, change as the manner of the setting of the artwork into place may change²²). Yet while the artwork already stands in relation to that context, it also retains its own material objectivity in a way that, in various respects, conflicts with that context. The temple thus does not simply lose itself in the rocky plain in which it is set, but stands out on the plain, already stands in a certain way that is counter to it.²³ We might say that the strife between world and earth thus already occurs in the incipient emergence of the artwork as art, at the very point at which it is first set into and so stands out against its world. It is not simply the tension between the objectivity of the artwork and its disclosive character as a work that is operative in the artwork, but a tension within the objectivity of the work itself. The objectivity of the work both closes off, that is, remains resistant to any disclosure, but it also opens up. The latter occurs through the very way in which the artwork, in its objectivity, places itself within a setting, so that both its own objectivity and the setting of that objectivity become evident, and so that the work in its setting are together opened up as a new space of possibilities. It is this new space of possibilities, open, yet also constrained, that then opens out into what Heidegger calls “world.” In its openness and its concomitant constraint, the establishing of that space of possibilities is also the establishing of a certain topos—a place.

On this account, it is in and through the material objectivity of the artwork that the disclosedness of the artwork occurs. Since this disclosedness, whatever else it might be, is itself a disclosedness of the artwork, so it is also a form of self-disclosure. Moreover, inasmuch as the self-disclosure of the artwork works through the way in which the artwork, like the metaphor, resists and at the same invokes its own setting, so the self-disclosure of the artwork is both a disclosure of the work in its material objectivity and yet also a disclosure that goes beyond that material objectivity. In summary, we may say that the manner in which the artwork works is through the self-disclosedness of the material objectivity of the work, a self-disclosedness in which that material objectivity constantly transcends itself. This self-transcendence does not mean that the artwork transcends itself in the direction of something other than itself; instead it transcends itself in the direction of the possibilities that the artwork itself enables and that belong to it.

Since the disclosedness that is essential to the artwork is only possible in and through the material objectivity of the work, so in any engagement with the work all that there is to be attended to is given in the objectivity of the work as such. For this reason, one might say that to engage with an artwork as an artwork is always to engage phenomenologically and also topologically—it is to allow oneself to be drawn into the working of the work as it works in and through the work’s objective character, and so in and through a particular topos—similarly, every artwork can also be said to constitute a form of phenomenology and a form of topology in its very working as an artwork and so as a working of topos. Yet as we have already seen, what counts as that in which the objectivity of the work consists is itself indeterminate. This means that the phenomenological process of self-disclosure that occurs in the artwork can never be conceived as operating at any one level or in terms of just one set of elements. Indeed, the material objectivity of the work, that in and by means of which it first and most immediately presents itself, is never just a matter of any one mode of presentation or, indeed, any one medium. The painting presents itself as paint on canvas, as an array of light and surface, as a certain history. Indeed, it is important to note that the material objectivity of the work may indeed be construed, so long as it is not separated from the other modes of its presentation, as including the way in which the artwork already presents itself within a tradition, a history, a culture. Robert Rauschenberg claims that “All material has history. All material has its own history built into it,”²⁴ and even material may present itself in terms of its history. This occurs most obviously in the case of works that operate through concrete linguistic forms, especially poetry and metaphor, since the very appearance of certain sounds as having a particular linguistic meaning, to say nothing of their appearing as words, is already for those sounds to embody a historicality, a conventionality, and an intentionality.²⁵

The focus on the material objectivity of an artwork does not mean, then, that the character of the work as something made, and so as standing within a human frame of significance, is rendered irrelevant. But the human significance of the work, its significance as an artwork, has to be grounded in the material objectivity of the work—there can be no appeal to anything that is extraneous to that objectivity. The historicality, conventionality, and intentionality of the work can only be given in the work’s material objectivity—in what appears in the artwork. This automatically rules out certain approaches to artworks as constituting real engagements with those works in their character as works. For instance, I would argue that certain so-called metaphorical readings of artworks, in which the viewer looks to find in the artwork a metaphor for an aspect of the viewer’s life or experience, often import into the work something that may not properly belong to it. Our personal reactions to works are not always to be construed as part of the work itself, and there must always be a question as to whether some reaction is a function of the artwork, or is rather a matter of our own construction of the work in a particular and perhaps idiosyncratic way that is only incidentally connected with the work as such. This applies no less to the artist than to the viewer in the sense that the intentions of the artist are relevant to the artwork just inasmuch as they are expressed in and evident through the artwork itself. What an artist may tell us about the work apart from the work—for instance, the artist’s own post facto explanations of the work—has no privileged status in determining the character of the work. Once the work has been set into its own space, it is the work itself that is authoritative, in its objectivity, and nothing else. Since the artwork works only through its objectivity, so the artwork exhibits an autonomy that resides in its objectivity.

The autonomy of the artwork is nicely demonstrated in relation to one of Rauschenberg’s works. In 1955, Rauschenberg took a quilt, a pillow, and part of a sheet, and, fixing them to a stretcher, proceeded to apply paint of various colors to the cloth surfaces. The resulting work, entitled Bed, has been described by Rauschenberg as “one of the friendliest pictures I’ve ever painted. My fear has always been that someone would want to crawl into it.”²⁶ Most viewers of the work saw it very differently, however, with the almost universal tendency being to see it as a bed in which some horrible crime had been committed—the bed was thus taken as an image of violence and murder. Does Rauschenberg’s rejection of the violent reading of Bed count against that reading? Only to the extent that it can be grounded in the objectivity of the work itself, and not merely because the rejection is Rauschenberg’s.²⁷ Significantly, the point at issue here is exactly analogous to one found in Donald Davidson’s work concerning a more general autonomy of linguistic meaning. Although the meaning of an utterance is dependent, according to Davidson, on the speaker’s intentions in the act of utterance, speakers have no authority over the meanings of their utterances beyond that original act of saying. Meaning is given in what is said, in the words as uttered in a specific situation, not in some additional act of meaning or intending.²⁸ This does not make the intention of the speaker irrelevant to meaning, but it does mean that we have to be clear as to exactly what intention is relevant—it can only be the intention of the speaker as expressed in the utterance itself. Similarly, although the intention of the artist in the work is a key consideration in the interpretation of the artwork, it can be construed as determinative only as it is expressed in the artwork itself. There is thus no special significance that can be accorded to an artist’s reading of their own work as that is given independently of the work.²⁹

This point also has relevance to the dispute over Heidegger’s reading, in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” of one of Van Gogh’s still-life paintings of a pair of shoes (since Van Gogh painted several works that appear to fit the description Heidegger offers, it is unclear which painting Heidegger had in mind—or whether he had a specific picture in mind at all).³⁰ Meyer Schapiro claimed that Heidegger simply got the painting wrong since he treated the shoes depicted as belonging to a peasant woman whereas the shoes actually belonged to Van Gogh himself.³¹ Part of the problem in adjudicating in this dispute is that it is not at all obvious that the identity of the actual shoes that figured as the models is relevant to the reading of the work. One may argue that the identity of the shoes forms part of the context in which the artwork sits, but this is by no means self-evident. In fact, one might say that the essential point that is in dispute between Schapiro and Heidegger is exactly how the objectivity of the Van Gogh painting should be construed. What is in question is not, contrary to appearances, the actual history of the objects depicted (as if, contra Schapiro, the matter could be resolved by methods of historical inquiry), but rather the history of the artwork in which those objects figure. Inasmuch as Schapiro views the matter as indeed a matter of the history of the depicted objects, one might argue that Schapiro fails to address the artwork itself (in which case one might argue that the dispute actually serves not to discredit Heidegger, but to demonstrate the limitations in Schapiro’s own “empiricist” approach to art history). On the other hand, inasmuch as one may take the dispute to originate in the irresolvable indeterminacy that attaches to the objectivity of the work, the dispute may be taken as a simple illustration of the way in which the objectivity of the work will always support multiple readings.

The relation between the objectivity of an artwork, that is, its material being as an object, and its nature as an artwork is not a relation between two different things—there is only the artwork, and the artwork is given in its material objectivity. This means that talk of the objectivity of the work as the medium or mode of presentation of the work—of the sort to which I alluded at the start of this discussion—is limited, though not inappropriate, since the objectivity of the artwork is not separable from the artwork in the way in which it may be assumed that a medium or mode of presentation is separable (and which allows talk of the same thing being given in more than one medium or mode of presentation). The material objectivity of the artwork is the “medium” for the work in that it is that in which the working of the artwork—its self-articulation, its self-disclosure, its self-transcendence—occurs, but what occurs is also the working of that very objectivity and nothing else. The understanding of the material objectivity of the artwork is itself transformed here. The material objectivity of the artwork is not its “stuff,” not merely some inert “material,” but its own dynamic self-disclosure as that occurs in a singular, placed occurrence. In this sense, the artwork is identical with its objectivity, but with its objectivity as this self-disclosing, self-transcending occurrence or placing. Yet as the objectivity of the artwork is its own self-disclosing, so one might also say that the artwork is never simply identical with itself, and so never simply identical with its objectivity either, since it is always in the process of self-disclosure, always in the process of its own self-transcendence.

The tension that is evident here is the underlying source of the dynamism that is essential to the way the artwork is art, and so to what Benjamin refers to as the artwork’s own self-articulation as object, to its own “becoming-object,” its own coming to presence. Especially significant, given the Heideggerian reading of the artwork, however, is the fact that the artwork never comes to a presence that is not also unfolding toward such presence. The artwork is thus a constant self-presencing. This is what I take properly to lie behind Maitland’s rejection of the idea that the artwork can be understood as an object. Benjamin argues that the artwork need not disclose anything other than itself, and this I take also to point toward the character of the artwork as self-presencing or self-disclosing. Yet precisely in this, the artwork also discloses something that is of ontological significance, independently of the artwork itself, for it discloses something of the nature of objectivity or thingliness—of material presence—as such. While it is displayed in a particularly significant and self-evident way in the artwork, the self-presenting that occurs in and through the material objectivity of the work is characteristic of such material objectivity as such—no matter whether in art or elsewhere. What appears as material and objective, what appears in its “standing there/here,” never appears as a final, complete, or immediate presence, but is instead a constant unfolding and opening up, a constant self-presencing.³² Yet this self-presencing is itself a self-presencing that occurs in and through that which is materially and objectively given. To attend to things in their self-presencing is thus not to abandon or efface the material objectivity of things, but is instead to understand that material objectivity as itself given only in and through the self-presencing of the thing, and to understand that self-presencing to be a self-presencing as given in and through the material and the objective—in and through the taking place of things there/here, in the place that is itself unfolded in that same presencing.³³