Note: I haven't translated part I for you as it deals with specific Swiss journalism. However, should you wist to read it, remember Deepl is your friend.

 

On the art of deficient art judgements and cultural chatter

In the first part of this three-part essay, I pointed out the unfortunately declining status of art within our society (only available in German because it quotes directly from Swiss journalism, but remember Deepl is your friend ;-)

The main reason for this regrettable development is the lack of education about the nature and existence of art and its consequent low importance in school curricula and, remarkably, also in art academies. Both Peter Meyer and Gerhard Mack (both cultural journalists at the NZZ at different times) trace the beginnings of this decline in art education and the emergence of an almost arbitrary use of the term and understanding of ‘art’ to Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and his invention of the ‘ready-made.’ He presented this for the first time in 1917 at the exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York, where he signed a urinal. From the 1960s onwards, this developed into something of an anti-attitude towards the previous aesthetic criteria of artistic creation. A view that rapidly gained ground. This is precisely why I chose the example of the brochure with the quote by Norbert Kricke, who was director of the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1972 to 1981 (please see previous essay, part 1).

It should be noted here that, at least since Duchamp's ‘ready-mades,’ there has been a search in the United States for an American art and culture that is distinct from European models. It may sound cynical, but the exodus of European artists, humanities scholars and scientists during the Hitler era was helpful in this quest. Many of them fled to the USA to save their lives, including Max Beckmann, Stefan Zweig and Albert Einstein.

The German painter and art teacher Hans Hofmann (born 1880 in Weißenburg, Bavaria, died 1966 in New York) sensed the horrors to come early on and left Germany in 1932. After immigrating to the USA, he founded a private art school in New York, which he ran with great success. His teaching initially consisted of offering a synthesis of Fauvism and Cubism. Right from the start, he demonstrated his inadequate artistic ambition and ability: he taught ‘form change’. But great art first requires a new shift in consciousness, which can then lead to new forms. This was precisely what he lacked, and no one noticed or was bothered about it.

Nevertheless, detached from the European tradition, he succeeded in developing what he called ‘abstract expressionism.’ By this he meant a style clearly distinct from European representational expressionism. He called the works he now created ‘action painting,’ ‘art informel,’ or ‘tachism.’ What they have in common within abstract art is the primacy of so-called ‘aleatoric’ (Latin: alea = the dice). In other words, a kind of dice game that prioritised chance for the resulting flows of colour and form. He also called the random methods ‘dripping’ or ‘frottage,’ which determined the painterly process. Later, other random expressions such as ‘happenings’ and ‘performance’ were added. These were intended to be further developments...

He is considered an artist of the first generation, the so-called ‘New York School.’ I will return to him later.

For those of my readers who would like to deepen their understanding of the situation of art in the USA, I recommend two fundamental treatises on the subject:
Jed Pearl, ‘New Art City’ (Hanser Verlag, 2005)

Or Barbara Rose, ‘America's Way to Modern Art. From the Garbage Can School to Minimal Art’ (Dumont Verlag, 1969)

Hans Hofmann's career could be compared to that of Josef Albers (born 1888 Bottrop, Germany – died 1976 New Haven, USA), who cultivated geometric abstraction in the form of rows of coloured squares and wrote colour theories. It seems to me that he may have been a much better teacher than a good artist. His students often said so.

After the Second World War, it was hoped that the establishment of the Documenta exhibitions in Germany would finally make it possible to show works by artists who had been ostracized and murdered. However, by the second Documenta in 1959, ‘Art Informel’ (e.g. ‘Action Painting’) had already come to dominate the exhibition, backed by ample American dollars, and damaged this eminently necessary European idea of atonement.

Before I continue with my discussion on the teaching of art, it seems helpful to explain more about the significance of art within our world.

When we talk about the field of art, we are deliberately not talking about nature. If nature is what is given to us in its perfect form, what has been gifted to us, what has grown, then mankind contrasts this with what we have created ourselves. Through art, through artificial forms, humans represent the world they have created themselves. Our world, our culture. We place it above nature because we feel superior to nature through our predominantly intellectual personality. Through our ability to reflect, we can judge our own actions and are not bound by predetermined laws. In this world, humans always reflect themselves, as if in a mirror, as the highest form of perfection. However, this is far from being a work of art, but rather the ability to contrast the limited forms of nature with a boundless variety of free forms: the forms created by humans are truly unnatural and therefore completely free in their design. We alone determine their content and meaning.

We are enabled to do this by a special power within us, our artistic power, just as nature has its own natural power. This artistic power expresses itself as the will to create forms. In this way, art holds the realm of forms that do not yet have any semblance of artistic forms. At all levels of our mental and physical existence, we create useful forms in order to be able to live together in freedom and peace in this world. These are forms of communication, manners, spiritual and material formations, etc.

We humans built our own world from the beginning using our artistic power and only this! Unfortunately, this has been completely forgotten.

During the Middle Ages, we adopted the canon of the ‘Seven Liberal Arts’ that had already been established in ancient times, which provided a free man with the necessary education.

The number seven originated in mythology when Mercury, the symbol of human intellect, married Philology, the symbol of the humanities, and they were given the ‘Seven Liberal Arts’ as bridesmaids: grammar, rhetoric, dialectics (or logic), arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

The linguistic block, known as the trivium, consisted of grammar, rhetoric and dialectics. The quadrivium consisted of arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music.

From the 13th century onwards, natural philosophy, ethics and metaphysics were taught in the arts faculty.

Today, we already speak of an Anthropocene, in which humans not only oppose nature in our world, but even penetrate the laws of nature in order to influence them.

From this culture, which is formed solely by us humans and which arises from the way we live our lives, we also developed forms that served no purpose but, completely free from useful intentions, gave rise to a completely different, purely spiritual creation of worlds. Through free art, we build a realm that transcends our earthly existence, in which we can feel at home and truly free. This is the fundamental movement of our will to create art. One could also say our will to freedom. This is what the creation of artworks is all about.

The philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) speaks in this context of ‘great art.’ It shows us what we have not seen before. This is the central question of the philosophy of art, the answer to which must be sought again and again.

In his work ‘The Origin of the Work of Art,’ he says that art ‘opens up the event of truth, the truth of being.’ This ‘event’ includes the opening up of the world and the revelation of the being of beings. Art enables us to look beyond what we are accustomed to and see the truth that is hidden in the world. Art is not only a way of expressing the truth of a culture, but also the means of creating it and providing a springboard from which ‘what is’ can be revealed.

Personally, I do not want to give the impression that I know exactly what a work of art is and that everyone else does not. I do, however, advocate a genuine effort to understand how aesthetic judgements – and that is what we are talking about here – must be constituted, or how they might be false judgements. When making judgements, rules and categories are necessary, just as a judge has law books to help him reach a verdict. I pointed this out in the first part of this essay (available only in German. I also discuss this on my YouTube channel). Fundamental knowledge about works of art consists of a set of rules that must be known. This is not a closed set of rules, but one that must always lead to freedom and openness, because art, like us, is determined by freedom.

I would like to quote from the diary of the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) dated 7 October 1916.

‘The work of art is the object seen sub specie eternitatis. That is, from the aspect of infinity. The usual way of looking at things is from their centre, as it were, whereas the sub spezie eternitatis view is from outside. In this way, they have the whole world as their background. Works of art therefore have the whole world as their background, and this is what gives them their true meaning. Texts, images or even sequences of sounds that merely represent an effect, express a subjective inner feeling or a political credo, do not deserve this name. They may deserve attention as historical documents or symptoms, but they are not works of art.’

Wittgenstein teaches us that works of art must always have the whole world as their background. Only something like this can appropriately be called a work of art. That is what it is all about. We must always strive for this understanding, just as we must strive for everything that is important to us. This requires a teaching that is like a friend at my side, leading me from experience to experience and helping me to understand what I have experienced. Unfortunately, this has hardly been the case for decades. Instead, the door is recklessly opened to false, deficient judgements of art, such as those found in the arts pages, in the art world and, sadly, also in school teaching. These are often nothing more than cultural chatter: empty judgements that have no meaning, cut off from tradition. Tradition not in the sense that everything was better in the past, not that the ashes should be cherished, but that the fire should be kept alive. To do this, we take what is still meaningful to us today from the past (e.g. Roman law) and combine it with what seems meaningful to us in the present. It is only from this combination that the living tradition we need emerges.

I would like to add a few examples to my explanations so far for a better understanding.

Example 1

Now I return to Hans Hofmann. He came up with the concept of the ‘open work of art.’ Apart from the fact that he is stating the obvious, because a work of art is always free and open to those who engage with it: the viewer or recipient. Without this inherent openness, it could not be a work of art. But this is not what Hofmann means, of course. For him, a work of art is something that is freely grasped out of thin air and declared to be a work of art without any reason. Joseph Beuys (1921–1986), for example, believes that his art can be declared a work of art without further ado because he starts from the absurd premise that not only he, but every human being is an artist. This is then represented in the media and ultimately leads to a kind of verbalised idea art, which no longer needs to be produced, but can simply be described conceptually in words. This is nonsense, of course. A work of art always wants to be made and is bound to material. This material even extends to instrumental material, as in music (sound).

Example 2

A flawed judgement of art that one encounters time and again is that of ‘raising awareness’: an artist wants to use his work to make people aware of something. For example, he paints a meadow full of flowers, preferably in a large format, in order to raise awareness of the importance of environmental conservation, even though everyone has known this for a long time. But he wants to bring everything back into consciousness and shed light on it.

If we seriously examine his purpose and desire, we encounter a Platonic theory of knowledge called maieutics (the art of midwifery). It is an enlightenment topos that something should be made conscious, for example, by Socrates asking questions to draw something out of people and thus lead them to consciousness. True art does the same: art uses signs and forms to question what is human in human beings. Unfortunately, some of our contemporary artists and authors have a somewhat simplistic idea of this kind of enlightenment, which is intended to have an appealing effect in a journalistic manner.

Example 3

This concerns a very widespread misconception about works of art: there is talk of ‘authenticity.’ The artist has created an authentic work! Here, something authentic is to be extolled from a random state or mood of the artist, elevated to a strong artistic desire and even to a work of art. To do this, the artist must remain true to themselves. That sounds good! However, the fact that this removes the communicative element of authenticity seems to be irrelevant. For I am authentic only when I remain true to others. If you remain true to yourself, as is popular today, then that is a misuse of the concept of loyalty: you only refer to yourself. This kind of self-experience, which never leads to art, is completely impossible, because art always seeks the other. Moreover, I can never discover who I am from myself alone. Unfortunately, this self-centredness leads to isolation and loneliness. The opposite of art. I can only get to know who I am in relation to other people and through my actions. Authenticity as a kind of self-loyalty is a revaluation of the classical understanding of loyalty, which is fundamentally a high good, diluted to a poor self-relationship. This is a distortion that has no place in aesthetics, but is apparently successfully cultivated.

Example 4

Another popular example is that ‘an artist must have the right consciousness.’ Then you can appreciate him/her. Who can judge that, and how? This is pure aesthetic sentimentality and has nothing to do with aesthetic categories of art; it belongs to general cultural chatter.

What distinguishes the consciousness of a philosopher from that of an artist, for example? The philosopher strives to gain wisdom about a given creation. He devotes himself to what has become. He seeks knowledge of the absolutely real.

The artist cannot proceed in this way. As an artist, I must first find what belongs to art and what does not! Nature cannot show me that, of course. In this respect, the artist seeks to find awareness of what is becoming, of what is to come. As an artist, I have a completely different understanding of consciousness and ‘seek the new creation of a concrete reality in which the connections between ideas are better, more perfect, more pure than in the world of natural perception.’ (Max Scheler, Schriften aus dem Nachlass, Leipzig, 1933).

Example 5

I would like to give you another example that you may find very difficult to agree with. It concerns the concept of the ‘creative and inventive artist.’ I would like to briefly explain where the word ‘creative’ comes from and then show how we almost always use it incorrectly today. I think this is important because this word is often used incorrectly in art journalism.

The word ‘creative’ in relation to artistic creation was first used by the philosopher Nicolaus von Cues, known as Cusanus (1401 - 1464), at the beginning of the modern era in his work ‘De Docta Ignorantia’ (On Learned Ignorance). He distinguished between microcosm and macrocosm, a concept he adopted from the Greek philosopher Plato: the world as the great creation and the world in miniature. Just as God, the ‘Creator’, created the world as a whole, so now mankind, as an artist, limited by earthly constraints, should create new worlds in miniature, namely through works of art. By becoming creative, we fulfil our likeness to God. To be creative means to act analogously to God; just as God acts in the big picture, so must the artist create the world in miniature. This analogy was originally understood as ‘creative,’ and thus, according to tradition – from which we are unfortunately increasingly separated – the word creative also makes sense. When someone today says they are creative, they do not intend to act like God or the divine. Artists today increasingly rarely produce works that reveal a whole world in motion. That is why I strive for this in my artistic practice, though not always successfully, of course. However, I often find this aspiration lacking in my colleagues and in the art world. It is hardly to be expected that the artist is someone who creates something similar to a god as creator. It would be much better to say: ‘an artist produces.’ That doesn't sound as chic, but it would be more accurate. Incidentally, the correct term for practical and theoretical action comes from ancient Greek and means ‘poiesis’ = self-creative action.

We have given you examples from art philosophy to provide you with a certain basis for critically assessing texts in cultural journalism. In the next and final essay on this topic, we will discuss and examine a few examples from Swiss newspapers (mainly the NZZ). I hope that after reading this, you will be better able to evaluate texts about art and take them more seriously. As always, I look forward to your feedback – or a visit to my studio to discuss what I have written here.

One person who has carried out outstanding research on the aesthetics and history of the media is the Basel art historian Beat Wyss (born 1947). I would like to conclude this second part with a quote from his book “Die Welt als T-Shirt” (The World as a T-Shirt, 1997, Verlag Dumont, Cologne).

‘The idealisation of the artist as a ‘noble savage’ devalues his activity to shamanistic folklore. Art thus drives itself into a musical dead end with dilettantism and bricolage. The exaltation of – supposedly – creative individuality and primitivism is either a naive overestimation of artistic incompetence or a cynical calculation based on the incompetence of the art viewer, allowing the avant-garde forms to be plundered without any knowledge of their individual ideas. Without the intellectual background of classical modernism, however, art degenerates into painting therapy and musical pedagogy. Tinkering at one's own expense with the visual waste of civilisation no longer brings any gain in knowledge. Not everyone is an artist! The competition from the mass media is too overwhelming for the art of amateur magic to be left to creative handiwork. The art profession and its training should be restored to the high technical and intellectual profile it enjoyed during the Renaissance.’

© Martin Rabe & Sibylle Laubscher