Posts Tagged ‘Friedrich Schiller’

Oct
21
2011

“The Origin of German Tragic Drama,” 1925 by Walter Benjamin

Trauerspielbuch

(The Origin of German Tragic Drama), 1925

by Walter Benjamin 

Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des deutschenTrauerspiels utilized a thought floated by Marx, that all art would become “allegorical” as a result of commodification and of its transformation into a fetishistic object. In this notoriously difficult book, Benjamin foregrounded allegory as the structural underpinning of the Baroque épistemé.  Originally intended as his Habilitationsschrift, or an academic manuscript, submitted to the faculty of a German university as the necessary prelude for being accepted as a Privatdozent.  Once accepted into the university fold, the Privatdozent has the right to lecture on whatever topic s/he desires.  On the surface, the submission was exemplary.  Benjamin had made all the right moves: he found a long neglected area of culture to investigate—German Baroque tragic drama—-and analyzed this obscure topic with exemplary and labyrinthine thoroughness.

However, after being passed among departments, this complex tome was summarily rejected by the traditional academics at the university in Frankfurt.  The Ursprung was an uneasy but innovative work—ahead of its time in its willingness to combine exacting research with poetical interpretation.  The major complaint against this book from its main reader was that it is impossible to study the spirit of an age, but forty years later, Michel Foucault would do just that in his Archaeology of Knowledge (1969) when he studied the notion that each era had its own system or theory of knowledge.

But beyond the question of how or whether “knowledge” was a social construct, there were larger problems with the Ursprung.  In resurrecting an almost forgotten art form, Benjamin actually challenged the prevailing belief that the “Classical” was superior to the “Baroque.”  It seems clear that he had read or was familiar with the work of the art historian, Heinrich Wölfflin: Renaissance und Barock (Renaissance and Baroque) (1888), and Die klassische Kunst (Classic Art) (1898, and Kunstgeschichtliche Grundbegriffe (Principles of Art History) (1915). Wölfflin treated the Baroque as a co-equal of Classical, as simply another style and not as a “decline” from the Classical.  However, as the prompt rejection of Benjamin’s thought experiment on the Baroque would suggest, the ideas of Wölfflin were still not accepted among those favoring classicism as the epitome of any form of art.

For a century, Germans had preferred the “classical”, that which the poet Göethe had called “healthy” to the Baroque or the early version of the Romantic which was therefore “unhealthy.”  The Baroque had long been considered to be a decadent version of the pure Classical and its obscure manifestations in Germany were of little interest to anyone, but Benjamin, who revisited this manifestation for his Habilitationsschrift.  In a time when academics worked within disciplinary confines that were strictly limited and patrolled, Benjamin was writing an interdisciplinary work, crashing through the room divides between studies of German culture, art history and aesthetics. The writer looked through a prism that incorporated Jewish mysticism from the Kabbalah.

Of course art history is in many ways a Jewish discipline, a life-long Yeshiva school, where art is endlessly rewritten and debated.  However, art history, like any other religion or belief system, has its rules and its areas of conventional wisdom.  In his excellent introduction to the Ursprung, George Steiner noted that Benjamin’s manuscript found its way into the hands of Erwin Panofsky (1892-1968), author of Studies in Iconology in 1939. According to Steiner, Panofsky did not view Benjamin’s work favorably. Steiner posited that Benjamin could have found a home with the group of scholars in Hamburg, Panofsky and Ernst Cassirer, Neo-Kantians, and Aby Warburg, the cultural historian in what became the Warburg Institute.

But Benjamin was probably too eclectic in his methodology even for this group and the moment passed and Warburg was dead by 1929 and Panofsky in America by 1933.  Benjamin gave up on academics and spent the rest of his life as a free lance writer and radio broadcaster.  Here, in short articles and lectures on the radio, Benjamin could roam free, indulging his wide range of interests as a literary and cultural critic.  “Criticism,” he said, “should do nothing else than uncover the secret predisposition of the work itself, complete its hidden intentions…”

For Benjamin, the power of interpretation was the power of the idea and he sought a synthesis between philosophical abstraction and aesthetic concreteness.  Using the idea of the dialectic, he thought that the universal would be revealed through that which was particular or in comparing the overall structure to the insignificant detail.  Benjamin sought the detail, an element thought unworthy of intellectual effort.  In contrasting the Classical to the Baroque, Benjamin is able to isolate certain defining characteristics: the symbol is the characteristic property of the Classical mind and the allegory is the characteristic property of the Baroque way of thinking.

Allegory, like the Baroque, had been considered a decadent form of symbolism.  Symbolism, in its purity, idealized and subdues the material object, totalizes its meaning and signification. The allegory, in contrast, is a sheer hemorrhage of significations that disrupt meaning and coherence.  This surplus of signification called “écriture” by later French writers, contrasted the purity of speech (the Classical) to the impurity of writing (the Baroque).

For the modern reader The Origin of German Tragic Drama is a difficult slog and the best advice one can give to skip over the obscure theatrical productions that languish (deservedly) in obscurity and to seek the fragments of insight from Benjamin.  The writer contrasted the Classical Hero in Greek tragedy who is silent in his suffering, in his tragic and unspeakable fate.  In his inability of speak, this hero become superior to the gods and thus transcends not just the deities but also history itself.  But the Baroque hero is mired in history that is natural and not timeless.  This hero must be noble so that his fall will be from a high place, suggesting that his suffering is more of a social humiliation than a preordained tragedy from a fatal flaw.  The Classical tragic hero wrestles with the inextricable workings of Fate but the Baroque hero is but one character amid a larger cast who—not gods—are his fellow actors.

Therefore, according to Benjamin, “tragic drama” is not “tragedy.” Tragedy is about mourning.  Tragic drama is about melancholy.  as Like Sigmund Freud in a paper, On Mourning and Melancholia, which had been delivered in 1917,  Benjamin separated “mourning”—classical tragedy form “melancholia”—tragic drama.  Indeed, Benjamin identified Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, as melancholy.  If the Classical is that which is timeless and transcendent, then its eternal life must be contrasted to the historicism and decay of the Baroque. If the Classical is that which is whole, complete, and self-sufficient, the Baroque is a mere collection of those  left-behind details, fragments of a melancholy cult of decay.  Benjamin forces the reader to examine these fragments, these “found objects” of the Baroque allegory.

Although Benjamin used the Hegelian notion of the dialectic to study an obscure and devalued topic, Baroque theater in Germany, Benjamin’s thinking was greatly influenced by Surrealist strategies for discovering the “marvelous.”  The marvelous was a mental state that resulted from the isolation of the object, resulting in defamiliarization and the shock of defamiliarity on the part of the now-dazzled viewer.  The frozen object is estranged from context and is freed to take on new meanings.  Like the Marvelous, the allegorical discourse is characterized by doubleness; the object is expressionless and yet possesses unbridled expression.  The object is purged of mystified immanence and is capable of multiple uses.  In its plurality, the frozen object can contain and radiate a bricoulage of elements, and because the allegory lays bare its devices (demystifies), the visual figure defeats symbolism.  Symbolism, by its very nature, “disguises,” as Erwin Panofsky would say, but Allegory ostentatiously displays its construction.  But its meaning is de-centered and refuses to submit to the totality of structure.

Benjamin connected allegory to the death of symbol and to the decline of aura in commodity production.  He linked the atomizing of the objects to Baudelaire’s observation of commodity culture where objects become abstracted and acquire an arbitrary status.  The commodity exists as fragment, ambiguous and ephemeral, and becomes fetish.  The object become overwritten, a palimpsest bearing unconscious traces of its aura and authenticity, neither of which exist, except as trace.  The object is reinvented as an emblem by Renaissance scholars and became the stylistic principle of Baroque art.  Rather than symbol, the emblem is code, pictorial codes or “thing pictures” (dingbilder) or a rebus, as Freud would have expressed it.  The allegorical form, however, is capable of capturing historical experience, which is why Postmodern Critical Theory would be so interested in Allegory.

Art, for the Critical Theorist, must be grounded in history.  Aesthetics attempts to turn an object into radiance and to transform exaltation into transcendence.  This process of aestheticizing the object idealizes the work but in a negative fashion, for the memory or history of the object is transfigured into a “sentimental glow”.  Allegory, in contrast, is not radiant and extinguishes, along with light, the false glow of totality.  Allegory admits that history is ruins and acknowledges the transitory nature of things.  The allegory, lodged in history, is beyond (idealized) beauty.  The allegorical form is petrified and frozen in the landscape of history, destroying aesthetics.  The governing law of aesthetics is not totality but antinomy and the dialectic is used as a mechanism of reversal of extremes.

Allegory depends upon conventions, which may be cheapened and degraded.  Allegory is a gathering, a collection of things, a combination of references that are assembled through a law that combines scatteredness and collectedness.  The arrangement of these collections is slack.  The most important allegorical figure is the fragment, which is imaged by an architectural ruin, ravaged by time.  For Benjamin, it was important to acknowledge that history was a ruin, in a state of decay, for history could be appropriated and idealized or aestheticized.

The Origin of German Tragic Drama brings together a number of tendencies in Germany at the early stages of the Twentieth Century.  Benjamin noted that Göethe, the Classicist, rejected allegory.  In his epic essay, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry, German poet, Friedrich Schiller was correct in understanding his friend, Göethe, as being “naïve” in that the older poet was immune from history and created art from an internal force.  The “sentimental” artist, however, is more akin to Benjamin’s allegorical maker, who makes it very clear that an allegorical object is being put together through an act of bricolage.

It is important to note that the mechanics of the allegory are not concealed or, as Brecht would have it, “naturalized”.  The assemblage that is allegory is always grounded in the truth.  Schiller’s sentimental artist may have mourned the loss of innocence and may have suffered from alienation but this artist is deeply connected to the history of his/her period.  Karl Marx pointed out that in an era of commodification, it would be the fate of art to become allegory.  That is, art, in becoming commodified would loose its “halo” and in its unsacred condition could be appropriated and turned into a fetish.

Art as allegory is alienated art.  The allegorist is thus both elegiac and satirical, but Benjamin foregrounds the condition of mourning and melancholy, pictured in ruins.  And yet, like Charles Baudelaire, Benjamin is torn.  He mourns the loss of the Old Paris, but like a Baudelarian flâneur, strolls through time and collects fragments or “remnants” and recombines them into an excess of writing.  Benjamin’s writings were very metaphorical, as though he turned to the past to express the future.  He understood Baudelaire’s metropolis as a manifestation of space within which new technologies were displayed as spectacle.

In an age of secular spectacle, fashion would be king and anything could be fashion, which is the ultimate form of “false consciousness” and cultural distraction.  Benjamin is fascinated with death and that which is dead, the corpse.  Once the object becomes a fetish and is alienated from social production and social use, it becomes fashion and is worshiped as a commodity.  The fetish is inorganic as opposed the corpse, which is organic.

Feeling that European culture was in a condition of crisis, Benjamin’s gaze is Janus-like.  He understood the past could only exist as ruins and that its fragments would only be displaced into the present as fetishes.  The future was even more bleak and marked by a mourning for the past.  The future could never be authentic; art could only be allegorical; and Baudelaire as the quintessential poet-critic exemplified the only stance of the artist that of an observer of the spectacle, alienated and enlivened only by cynical commentary.  Although we can read his literary action as allegorist in The Arcades Project, the work of Benjamin was re-read by postmodern critics and philosophers as portents of Postmodernism.

The arbitrary and nostalgic piling on of historical traces torn from the fabric of time, decontextualized and overwritten by the present, while retaining the trace of the past would be the prime strategy of postmodernism.  The Frankfurt School philosopher, Theodor Adorno, who survived Benjamin, would complete the setting of the stage for Postmodernism.  Critical Theory would be developed in its contemporary form after the Second World War, in the wake of the Holocaust.  “There is no document of civilization, which is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” Walter Benjamin prophetically remarked in his essay On the Concept of History of 1937.

Benjamin’s insight that a dislocated history could be nostalgically fetishized for the Nazi cause, that art would become allegory and could be fetishized as propaganda seemed both prophetic and tragic.  All that he feared came true. Towards the end of what would turn out to be his only book, Walter Benjamin wrote,

Allegory goes away empty-handed. Evil as such, which it cherished as enduring profundity, exists only in allegory, is nothing other than allegory, and means something different from what it is.  It means precisely the non-existence of what it presents.  The absolute vices, as exemplified by tyrants and intriguers, are allegories.  They are not real and that which they represent, they possess only in the subjective view of melancholy; they are this view, which is destroyed by its own offspring because they only signify its blindness.

And then he concluded,

In the ruins of great buildings the idea of the plan speaks more impressively than in lesser buildings…Others may shine resplendently as on the first day; this form preserves the image of beauty to the very last.

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed. Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

 

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Aug
27
2010

Baudelaire and “The Painter of Modern Life”

THE PAINTER OF MODERN LIFE

Like many writers before and after him, Baudelaire wrote without specific commission, on “spec” as it were.  This essay on Constantin Guys, an illustrator for the Illustrated London News, was actually written in 1860 and would not be published until 1863 in installment form in Figaro.  The publication of the article coincided with the infamous Salon des Réfusés and the debut of Édouard Manet as an artist of scandal.  Suddenly, what had been a nebulous concern, about content and technique in art making, became urgent and topical.  Manet had presented a courtesan as a modern “Venus,” a prostitute as a modern “Nude,” and had quoted Renaissance artists, Raphael and Titian to do so.  In addition, the painter had eschewed “good” drawing and approved “finish” for a causal and notational manner of transcribing.  The Painter of Modern Life made sense of what Manet had done to art—made painting “modern.”

There is a real question as to whether or not the “painter” of whom Baudelaire wrote was less important than the essay itself.  While it is certainly true that any writer uses others as vehicles for his or her views, the selection of Constantin Guys was crucial to the main point of the essay.  Guys, who, according to Baudelaire, refused to be named in the essay, was an old soldier who had served in that most romantic of conflicts, the freedom of Greece. As widely traveled as the poet was provincial, Guys had spent years as a reporter and an war correspondence for the Illustrated London News during the Crimean War. The artist informed the English audience of the details of an unpopular war at a time where his pen was much quicker than the camera.  Born in 1802, Guys was far older than Baudelaire when he returned to live in Paris, and he lived much longer than the poet who suffered from syphilis and drug addiction. Guys died in a tragic traffic accident in 1892.

Baudelaire saw Guys as a bohemian hero, an outsider, the “observer, philosopher, flâneur” and as “the painter of the passing moment and of all the suggestions of eternity it contains.”  Like Baudelaire, he, a “man of the crowd,” was a journalist who was trained to watch and look carefully, especially at the details, or what the poet described as, “particular beauty, the beauty of circumstances and the sketch of manners.”  But Baudelaire drew a distinction between the dandy—Guys “has a horror of blasé people…” (like the dandy)—and the flâneur , or the “passionate spectator.”   Baudelaire made the point, over and over, that the flâneur was someone who is traveling “incognito” or, in other words, the flâneur fades into the crowd, unnoticed.  “…the crowd is his element,” Baudelaire said, “…the lover of universal life enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electric energy.”  “Monsieur Guys,” due to the necessary haste to record what he saw “drew like a barbarian, or a child,” producing “primitive scribbles,” was declared by Baudelaire to be “not precisely an artist, but rather a man of the world.”  “…the mainspring of his genius is curiosity.”  The working methods of the artist were traditional in that he looked, he saw, he scribbled and then, using his memory, completed his thought later in a sketch-like record.

Baudelaire stressed the “rights and privileges offered by circumstances…for almost all our originality comes from the seal which Time imprints on our sensations.”  Reaching back to Friedrich Schiller, perhaps, Baudelaire compares the artistic condition of Guys to be that of childhood, suggesting that the illustrator was an instinctive artist, from whom images simply flow, without hierarchy and without restraint.  Under the direction of no one, Guys simply sketched what he saw.  “But genius is nothing more not less than childhood recovered at will..,” Baudelaire stated.  So, it is implied, that only the “childlike artist,” who was Schiller’s “naïve artist,” is equipped to see and record the new world.  Baudelaire stated,

By ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and immutable…This transitory, fugitive element, whose metamorphoses are so rapid, must on no account be despised or dispensed with. By neglecting it, you cannot fail to tumble into the abyss of an abstract and indeterminate beauty, like that of the time the first woman before the fall of man.”

This is the founding definition of modernity, coined by a poet and evidenced by an illustrator of the “crowd.”

The salient quality of The Painter of Modern Life is what and whom Guys, the grown man, found interesting.  “Modern Life,” for Baudelaire, appeared to be located among la bohème, which, in itself, was a creation of the modern world.  First, there is the dandy.  The dandy is one of Baudelaire’s heroes and makes many appearances in the urban scenes captured by Guys.  “Dandyism,” the poet said, “borders upon the spiritual and stoical…Dandyism is the last spark of heroism amid decadence…Dandyism is a sunset; like the declining daystar, it is glorious, without heat and full of melancholy.  But alas, the rising tide of democracy, which invades and levels everything, is daily overwhelming these last representatives of human pride and pouring floods of oblivion upon the footprints of these stupendous warriors…” This man has “an air of coldness…a latent fire…(which) chooses not to burst into flames,” he concluded, alluding to the resigned cynicism of an endangered species in the face of unstoppable changes.

The female, in contrast to the male, is described, not in terms of character or psychology, but as a spectacle: “She is a kind of idol, stupid perhaps, but dazzling and bewitching.” But far from dismissing the female, Baudelaire continues for pages, focusing on cosmetics and fashion.  For Modernism, fashion is the leading indicator or the “ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent,” for nothing is more changeable than fashion.  Fashion stands for the new consumerism, showcased in the arcades, where commodities were protected in passages of iron and glass.  Positioned between the major avenues, the arcades were the domain of the flâneur, both male and female, and the precursors to the department stores.  Consumer capitalism needs to create desire to tempt the buyer to purchase, which meant the creation of products that, by their very nature, needed to be renewed.  Not food or another necessity, but an artificial desire for a non-necessity drove the economy.  The woman becomes the carrier of artificiality.

Baudelaire, a city dweller, is no nature lover:  “I ask you to review an scrutinize whatever is natural—all the actions and desires of the purely natural man: you will find nothing but frightfulness.  Everything beautiful and noble is the result of reason and calculation.”  And cosmetics.  “Fashion should thus be considered as a symptom of the taste for the ideal which floats on the surface of all the crude, terrestrial and loathsome bric-à-brac that the natural life accumulates in the human brain:  as a sublime subordination of Nature, or rather a permanent and repeated attempt at her redemption.”  There is a slippage in Baudelaire’s writings from “women” to “prostitutes,” as if, for the poet there is no divide.  It is known that his only relationship was with a prostitute, but that kind of connection was not uncommon, in an age where marriage was often a financial alliance.  Baudelaire seemed to have no interest in the so-called respectable woman, who reflected her husband’s position and the values of the bourgeois society.  The prostitute is a free and liberated woman, from the poet’s perspective and thus wears modernity as cosmetics and fashion, proclaiming the artificial.  Indeed, the poet compares the application of make up to the creation of a work of art:  “Maquillage has no need to hide itself or to shrink from being suspected.  On the contrary, let it display itself, at least if it does so with frankness and honesty.”

Gradually, as the essay draws to a conclusion, Guys, the “painter of modern life,” has become less important that the social conditions he observed and recorded.  Modern life, fueled by commodities and their artificial manufacture of artificial desires, is defined by a new and bewildering urban environment, populated by new kinds of people, the demimonde.  Nothing is real and everything changes and, above all, nothing is natural.  Baudelaire understands that art is not a copy of nature.  Art is inherently and definitionally artificial, as artificial as fashion, as ephemeral as a fad.  The role of the artist is not to re-imagine the “eternal” or the antique but to seize upon the passing fancy, that salient detail that captures the mood of the moment.

The Painter of Modern Life predicts the paintings of Manet, such as The Street Singer of the same year—-a grisette (low level prostitute), or street entertainer, strides past the flâneur.  She is eating cherries and glances briefly at the spectator and is caught in a brief instant of time, and quickly moves on, her wide skirts embellished in the latest fashionable embellishments.   The idea of the passive observer who merely records, the demand that that watcher react quickly to what the photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, would call “the decisive moment,” looks forward to the Impressionist artists who were much less cynical and sophisticated than the art writer.  Baudelaire did not live long enough to see a group of painters embrace the sketch-like approach of “the painter of modern life,” but his essay became foundational in its description of modernity: all that is “transitory” and “fugitive.”   It has been a hundred and fifty years since The Painter of Modern Life was published and with the benefit of hindsight one can only marvel at how much our world resembles that of the poet.

See also “Baudelaire as Art Critic” and Baudelaire and Modernity”

If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette and Art History Unstuffed.  Thank you.

info@arthistoryunstuffed.com

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Aug
13
2010

Charles Baudelaire and Art Criticism

BAUDELAIRE AS ART CRITIC

“We are going to be impartial.  We have no friends—that is a great thing—and no enemies.”  Thus Charles Baudelaire began his career as an art critic with the Salon of 1845.  With a tone we suspect to be sardonic, the young writer addressed himself to the bourgeoisie, “a very respectable personage; for one must please those at whose expanse one means to live.”  The poet completed his introduction, which is his manifesto of art writing, by saying, “We shall speak about anything that attracts the eye of the crowd and of the artists; our professional conscience obliges us to do so.  Everything that pleases has a reason for pleasing, and to scorn the throngs of those that have gone astray is no way to bring them back to where they ought to be.”  In the Salon of 1846, the writer again targets the middle class art audience, stating that, “…any book which is not addressed to the majority—in number and intelligence—is a stupid book.”  In other words, Baudelaire, a member of la bohème, would not be writing to the artistic reader but to those who were woefully in need of education, the middle classes.

Baudelaire followed the traditional format of the art critic, a walk through a huge salon exhibition, pausing here and there, giving some artists an entire page and others a mere sentence.  Interspersed were pages of commentary on the state of the arts, which, combined over time, created a description of the culture of two decades in Paris.  The art writer was a product of the Romantic period.  Reading his reviews of the Salons, it is plain that he was imbued with the tenants of Romantic thought, but by the time his career began, Romanticism was on the wane and new ways of thinking about art were being developed.  Although Eugène Delacroix was making official art for the establishment, Baudelaire worshiped him and despised his great rival, Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres.  “M. Delacroix is decidedly the most original painter of ancient or of modern times…M. Delacroix is not yet a member of the Academy, but morally he belongs to it.”  Baudelaire refers to the painter as “a genius who is ceaselessly in search of the new.”

In The Salon of 1846, Baudelaire wrote some of the most definitive words on Romanticism.  “…if, by romanticism, you are prepared to understand the most recent, most modern expression of beauty—then…the great artist will be he who will combine with the condition required above—that of the quality of naïveté—the greatest possible amount of romanticism.”  As will pointed out in the text, “Baudelaire and Modernité” (Art History Unstuffed), the writer was obviously familiar with Friedrich Schiller’s “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry,” in which the poet compared two artistic types.  Schiller’s “naïve” poet (artist) who was “childlike,” and allowed nature to flow through spontaneously creating art through an individual sensibility was the precursor to artistic individualists like Delacroix.  “Romanticism,” Baudelaire echoed, “is precisely situated neither in choice of subjects nor in exact truth, but in a mode of feeling.  They looked for it outside themselves, but it was only to be found within.  For me, Romanticism is the most recent, the latest expression of the beautiful.”

And yet, in the same Salon, Baudelaire acknowledges the pressing conditions of the urban present.  For him, and for many artists, Romanticism was the very expression of all that was modern: artistic freedom and the expression of individuality. But in the writer’s section “Of the Heroism of Modern Life,”  there are passages that prefigure The Painter of Modern Life. In order to understand the importance of Baudelaire’s writing at this point, it is necessary to remember that the Romantic artists, especially during the time of this Salon, were often involved in historical subjects.  Unknowingly working against waning Romanticism and predicting Realism, Baudelaire made a case for modern subject matter.

Before trying to distinguish the epic side of modern life, and before bringing examples to prove that our age is no less fertile in sublime themes than past ages, we may assert that since all centuries and all people have had their own form of beauty, so inevitably we have ours…

All forms of beauty,” the writer continued, “…contain an element of the eternal and an element of the transitory—of the absolute and the particular.  Absolute and eternal beauty does not exist, or rather it is only an abstraction skimmed from the general surface of different beauties.  The particular element in each manifestation comes from the emotions; and just as we have our own particular emotions, so we have our own beauty.

The notion of “beauty” is already an old fashioned one, inherited from the Ancients, would will soon be replaced by a bracing does of realism and the introduction of “ugliness.”  Here we see the appearance of Baudelaire’s fascination with fashion that would emerge in The Painter of Modern Life.  In contrast to the colorful attire of the past, contemporary fashion for men had become democratized by the uniform of the black suit, which, according to Baudelaire, “…not only posses their political beauty, which is an expression of universal equality.”  After reassuring the reader that artists were capable of capturing shades of blacks and grays, something Èdouard Manet would excel at, he continued, “…our principal and essential problem, which is to discover whether we possess a specific beauty, intrinsic to our new emotions…” and urges the artists to look away from “public and official subjects” to “private subjects which are very much more heroic than these.”

Indeed, Baudelaire moved directly to the world he knew best, the world inhabited by the disenfranchised, including artists and writers, “the pageant of fashionable life and the thousands of floating existences—criminals and kept women—which drift about in the underworld of a great city….all prove to us that we have only to open our eyes to recognize our heroism.”  It is in this underworld where modern life existed.  Indeed, as Baudelaire pointed out, the comfortable bourgeoisie cannot be a hero; that status is reserved for those who deserve it—those of  “floating existences,” the men and women struggling to keep alive in a hostile city.  The need for this new kind of heroism intensified, for the gaps that appear in his art writing coincide with the Revolution of 1848 and the establishment of the Second Empire, events that brought about the very “modern life” he predicted.  For years, Baudelaire the art writer went dark, while he translated the American poet Edgar Allan Poe and wrote his ill-fated book of poetry Les Fleurs du Mal (1857).

Baudelaire’s silence and withdrawal are interesting.  On one hand, one could speculate that the writer was confounded by the death of Romanticism, but, on the other hand, he had been on the cutting edge by predicting the coming of an art that demanded contemporary subjects.  But the kind of realism that developed after the Revolution of 1848 was based upon observation of the base and the banal, the ordinary world according to Gustave Courbet.  The natural world of the petit bourgeoisie did not appeal to Baudelaire, who, according to Jean-Paul Sartre, “hated and regretted”  “naturalness.”  “Baudelaire’s profound singularity,” Sartre wrote, “lay in the fact that he was the man without ‘immediacy.’”  The art critic is silent during the first decade of the Second Empire until the occasion of the Exposition Universelle in 1855.  Picking up his earlier thoughts, Baudelaire returns to the subject of beauty.  “The Beautiful is always strange,” he said in one of his most famous statements.  “…it always contains a touch of strangeness, of simple, unpremeditated and unconscious strangeness, and it is that touch of strangeness that gives it its particular quality as Beauty.”

Oddly Baudelaire devotes his review of the Exposition to the dialectic of the display of Ingres and Delacroix as the official artists representing France, ignoring the outsider Courbet, his Realist Manifesto, his innovative Pavilion of Realism, and the two decades of works it contained.  Halfway into the Second Empire, Baudelaire wrote of “The Modern Artist” and “The Modern Public and Photography” in The Salon of 1859.  In writing of photography, Baudelaire also expresses his horror of the new tendencies towards objectivity and of scientific observation.  “Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.” “…it is happiness to dream,” the poet protested and, in the next section, wrote on Imagination, “The Queen of the Faculties.”  Once again, Baudelaire uses the opportunity to repudiate Realism.

In recent years we have heard it said in a thousand and different ways, “Copy nature; just copy nature. There is no greater delight, no finer triumph than an excellent copy of nature.” And this doctrine (the enemy of art) was alleged to apply not only to painting but to all the arts, even to the novel and to poetry.  To these doctrinaires, who were so completely satisfied by Nature, a man of imagination would certainly have the right to reply: “I consider it useless and tedious to represent what exists, because nothing that exists satisfies me.  Nature is ugly, and I prefer the monsters of my fantasy to what is positively trivial.

Baudelaire dismissed the realists, “…let us simply believe that they mean to say, ‘We have no imagination, and we decree that no one else is to have any.’ He continued, “How mysterious is Imagination, that Queen of the Faculties! It touches all the others’ it rouses them and sends them into combat.” “…Without imagination, all the faculties, however sound or sharpened they may be, are as though they did not exist…” Speaking of Delacroix (without naming him), Baudelaire elaborated upon the painter’s dictate, “Nature is but a dictionary,” in order to compare the artist to the realists. Earlier the art critic had written of Delacroix that, for the painter, “The entire universe is only a dictionary of images and signs.”  “Painters who are obedient to the imagination seek in their dictionary for which the whole visible universe is but a storehouse of images and signs to which the imagination will give a relative place and value; it is a sort of pasture which the imagination must digest and transform…”

The concept that nature was a dictionary, seen by the artist as a symbolic, not literal, source for ideas was echoed in his poem, “Correspondences” in Les Fleurs du Mal (1857):

La Nature est un temple oû de vivants piliers

Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles;

L’homme y passé à travers des forêts de symbols

Qui l’observent avec des regards familiers.

Writing in 1990, the critic, Jonathan Culler, translates Baudelaire’s “forest of signs” as a doctrine of Correspondences in which the poet “seems to disrupt the one-to-one correspondence between natural sign and spiritual meaning that the others promote.”  In other words, Baudelaire caused a rupture between the word and the thing, between the act of transcribing and the object recorded.  The so-called “correspondences” are arbitrary, making the signs into symbolic substitutes that do not name but suggest.  By continuing to insist upon the primacy of the imagination, Baudelaire founded a modern poetry of nuance.

Baudelaire ends his work as an art critic by paying homage to his friend Courbet, “we must do Courbet this justice—that he contributed not a little to the re-establishment of a taste for simplicity and honesty, and of a disinterested, absolute love of painting.” And Baudelaire included a nod to Manet who had yet to become the artist he would be.  And so, with the Salon of 1859, Baudelaire moves on to other forms of writing.  Somewhere along the way, Baudelaire seemed to find a balance between poetry and prose with his “prose poems” in Paris Spleen in 1869.  Waiting almost a decade after his last Salon, Baudelaire seemed to come to terms with Realism, but not in terms of “simplicity and honesty,” but in terms of the artificiality that Sartre insisted Baudelaire preferred.  The poet realized that the next life for art would be not in the country scenes of the painters of the lower classes but in the interpretation of “the heroism of modern life” he discussed in The Painter of Modern Life.

See also “Baudelaire and Modernity” and “Baudelaire and The Painter of Modern Life”

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May
21
2010

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Marx, Engels and Alienation

Aware of Friedrich Schiller, Karl Marx was concerned with alienation and recognized the connection between the estrangement of human beings from themselves and from nature and the Industrial Revolution.  Marx re-wrote Schiller’s psychological alienation, as the estrangement of workers in industrial capitalist society from the products of their labor.  Capitalism is based upon money and money is abstract.  If money is abstract, then value is abstract.  Barter for goods and services ceases to exist and is replaced by exchange of money and thus the value of both labor and goods become arbitrary.  Once the worker is alienated from the product produced then the value of his or her labor is rendered arbitrary.  According to Marx,

“…devaluation of human world increases in direct relation with the increase in value of the world of things…” and “…labor does not only create goods’ it also produces itself and the worker as a commodity…” therefore  “…his labor becomes an object…”

Marx’s concept of alienation was worked out in his 1844 essay, “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” which set up a triad of alienation: the state is an alienated form of social life, social life is an alienation of labor, and the wage laborer is alienated from the product of his/her labor.  The cause of the alienation of the worker is the unfortunate discovery of surplus value.  As Marx’s writing partner, Friedrich Engels, stated,  “…the appropriation of unpaid labor is the basis of capitalist mode of production and the exploitation of the worker…” Surplus values pocketed by the owner as profit.  What the owner refers to, as “profit” is also, according to Marxist theory, the fundamental incompatibility between mode of production and mode of appropriation.  When the worker was in control of his/her own product, all such “surplus value”, or “profit” accrued directly and only to him/her.

But, as Marx pointed out, surplus labor creates surplus value,  and surplus labor allows exploitation.  Surplus labor is the result of two major factors: an increase in population and the development and use of labor saving machinery increases profits for the owner of the mode of production.  Although the initial capital investment in the machinery was substantial, this investment was finite, compared to ongoing or infinite costs of hiring extra workers.

Under capitalism, the product belongs to the capitalist, not to the worker.  The worker is alienated from the product because his/her actions are performed in relation to the desires of the capitalist.  The laborer becomes a “tool” for the owner and is robbed of “humanity” or of the potential for human development.  Working in a state of “illiteracy”, the wage laborer is trained in one operation and cannot participate in the benefits and achievement of society that is progressing…but only for the middle class.  The products are objects of desire, which the laborer must labor to purchase in a viscous circle of desire and debt and powerlessness.  All workers are competitors with each other because their choice is between work and starvation.  Thus all workers are alienated from each other.

These are the facts of productive life, the fundamental factors that influence the ways in which all other aspects of all human affairs will develop. The question is why are the workers complicit with a system that enslaves them?  The answer is that their consciousness has been determined by the economic system.  Ideology or the belief system put forward by the ruling classes teaches the laborers to work on employer’s premises and on employer’s terms.

Ideology is a powerful mixture of truth and lies.  Capitalism requires capital or money to invest in a business.  A laboring family may take generations to accumulate the capital necessary to become bourgeoisie. A person from the working class encounters a system that is monopolistic and works to eliminate or bar competitors. The workers are made to believe that their alternative is no job and no wages, and they are made to hope that some day their condition will improve if they are cooperative.

The laborers believe the dreams of success and wealth that capitalism keeps alive and count on the positive effects of social mobility.  The owners of the mode of production, after all, were once lower class people who were rewarded for their hard work.  Surely, the worker thinks, me and my family will also receive the benefits of capitalism.  Laborers labor on, not realizing that fortunes are made within a network of privileges, invisible to the workers, and not upon merit.  Because the workers are in the thrall of an ideology of social and economic improvement, the owners of the mode of production are able to buy labor cheaply and sell goods dearly.

But Marx predicted that the consciousness of the workers will be “raised” and they will see past the veil of ideology, or “false consciousness,” and the proletariat will become aware of itself.  The workers will rise up against the owners and the two classes, the thesis, and the anti-thesis will clash.  The destiny of the proletariat is the truth of dialectical materialism and destruction of capitalism.  The class revolution is inevitable when “false consciousness” is dispelled and proletariat recognizes the exploitation and recaptures its own labor from the masters and institutes a classless society that Marx called the “Dictatorship of the proletariat.” Marx’s dialectical model of change is the revolution and the destruction of one class by another.  According to this model, violence and conflict between classes are fundamental.

Although he understood that the economic system determined human consciousness, Marx could not predict is how deeply ideology was embedded in society.  The lower classes continued to reinforce the needs and the dominance of the upper classes who proved to be adept at misleading the workers through misinformation and gaining their cooperation to work against their own interests.  The consciousness of the lower classes was structured to obey the dominant class and no amount of information could release or “raise” the consciousness of the exploited class.  Those who attempted to advise the workers of the “truth” were rejected as elitist oppressors and the familiar and real owners of the mode of production were embraced and defended.  Labor unions could easily be co-opted by management be entangling the worker with the fate and profit of a company.  The poor would reject the very social policies designed to aid them, preferring the known and the familiar, no matter how badly they were treated.

For Marx, ideas and theories are epiphenomena or byproducts of economic forces, which are the real determinants of change.  Marx stated that “Consciousness does not determine life; life determines consciousness…” and that “…man makes religion, religion does no make man…” Although these statements sound idealist, they are actually materialist.  Yes, Marx understood and accepted that the mind constructs reality, and he asserted that social relations are bound up in material production, which become forms of perception or particular ways of seeing the world related to dominant way of seeing or social mentality.  Marx remarked,

“In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.  The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which rises on a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.  The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political, and intellectual life processes in general.  It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness…”

The ideology of the age is the product of concrete social relations, in other words, materialism.  Actual lived class relations are experienced, legitimized and become perpetuated.  The dialectical method accommodates itself to fundamental changes of reality due to constant change, resulting from oppositional forces. Marx was opposed to the formalism of Kant who sought the transcendental.  According to Marx, it is life that determines consciousness and the resulting consciousness is understood as “natural.” This unseen set of beliefs is unrealized or so accepted the ideology is invisible.  The lower classes are trained to believe in an ideology of inferiority, which is internalized and forces them to accept their lower status in society.   They are poor because they “deserve” to be poor.  The poor are poor, not because the system is designed to work against success for the many, but because they lost out in the Darwinian struggle for survival.  Ideology is the ultimate form of alienation because the workers will work against themselves.

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Mar
26
2010

Schiller: Naive and Sentimental Poetry

Schiller’s “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”

“Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”, published in the journal, Die Horen, seems to pit Göethe, the naïve poet, against Schiller, the sentimental poet.  The essay is an early and influential effort to sort out types of artists, as makers and as psychologies.  Naïve and Sentimental” refers to both poets and to poetry, not to themes, subject matter, or content, and are seen by Schiller as opposites, somewhat like Kant’s antinomies—a way of organizing the world in terms of contrasts.  It is here that the famous “compare and contrast” methodology of art historical discourse begins, for Schiller’s comparative pairing of poets will be copied by the early Twentieth Century art historian, Aby Warburg, who was also fascinated by psychological themes.  That being said, Schiller’s ultimate purpose goes beyond his purpose of understanding two kinds of genius and two means of artistic creation.  He analyzes modes of perception, ways of being, and ways of living in the world, ways of relating and responding, not only to nature itself but also to one’s own inner nature, to the structure of one’s own mind.

In establishing between psychological types, Schiller paved the way for later thinkers, such as Freud and Jung, Nietzsche and Dilthey, and James, as the originator of the notion of psychological types.  But Schiller’s aesthetic is also a moral philosophy.  It was an examination of the human being and the human condition in a world that is so modern it had yet to be defined, discussed or understood.  Schiller’s predecessor in grappling with the new place of nature in the newly industrialized society would be René Descartes who advocated a turning away from the artificiality of French society to the simplicity of nature to rediscover the “natural” human being, free of civilization and its “discontents”, as Freud would express it later.  Schiller leads the way to the Nineteenth Century and to Modernism, for his world is far more “civilized” than that of Rousseau.  Both philosophers (who would influence Freud on this point) understood civilization to be necessary and inevitable and unavoidable, the result of Rousseau’s “Social Contract”, but the social system has built a wall of rules, regulations, and conventions that is entirely artificial.  Trapped in the social system, blindly following its customs and mores, we are alienated from nature and the natural.  We have lost our sense of oneness, our feelings of harmony with our world.  Worse yet, we are alienated from ourselves, divided within our own minds, disconnected from the totality of our own being.

Responding to a system that purports to be “rational”, we struggle with our irrational side, repressing it until we are alienated not only from it but also from a part of our selves.  Thus we, as humans in the modern world, are alienated from nature itself, which is neither rational nor irrational.  Nature simply exists in a state of pure being which we, in our divided state, can no longer comprehend or connect with.  In our alienated condition—alienated from ourselves and from our fellow human beings—we can only respond to nature through the distorting filters of civilization.  Our varying modes of perception—“Naïve“ or “Sentimental”—can never encounter nature, the pure state of being.  Such unity must wait until we reach our own natural state of harmony within ourselves and our natural environment.

Like Rousseau, Schiller does not present “Natural Man” as a lost state but a goal we must aim for.  This goal cannot be reached in an individual’s lifetime but can be achieved only through successive generations, which must struggle to regain wholeness, harmony, and unity, both internally, within the individual, and externally, with nature.  This modern concept of the alienated human being seeking a lost unity would be of great consequence to Nineteenth and Twentieth Century thought. The author of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, writing somewhat later than Schiller, warned that we have become estranged and alienated from ourselves and from nature. As the allegory of the creation of Frankenstein’s monster shows, we have become deluded into playing God through the misuse of technology.  G. W. F. Hegel will write of “thesis”, “antithesis”, and “synthesis”, the ultimate Absolute unity.  Karl Marx will write of “alienation” of the working class from industrial products and will warn that humans have become so alienated that we are no longer aware of it and exist in a state of “false consciousness”.  Marx’s “alienation” was sociological due to economic causes.  Jacques Lacan will write of Lack, resulting from the human’s entry into society and the severing of the child from its mother (loss of unity and wholeness).  Alienation will be come a major theme and perhaps the definition of the condition of Modernity itself.

Thus aesthetic philosophy becomes a moral philosophy and art becomes an arena for self-actualization, a way of thought to counter the evils of artificiality and civilization. For Schiller, in “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry”, all art is inferior to nature but all art must begin with nature. Art becomes a way of reacting to ourselves and a means of responding to nature.  Nature takes on a dual meaning: nature is the world surrounding us and our own individual personalities.  Art also seems to assume duality, being equated at times with that which is artificial, in other words with a wide range of artifacts, works and activities, while, at other times, art is the natural product of a creative process.  Art was a means of restoring a natural balance in personality.  Art was a journey towards a purer morality and an exposition of the nature of artistic genius that rises above artificial rules and ideas on morality.  The role of free play of imagination in art and the artist as a genius is indebted to Kant.  Six decades later, perhaps thinking of Schiller, Emil Zola famously wrote of “nature seen through a corner of a temperament” to define art, which is, in those terms, a response to nature shaped by the personality of the artist.

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Mar
19
2010

Friedrich Schiller

Friedrich Schiller (1759 – 1805)

“Art” and what the term means and how the object is apprehended and the discourse that surrounds its objects emanates out of aesthetics, which is a branch of philosophy.  The discourse about art, art criticism, art history, and art theory all are variations on philosophy.  Kant’s use of aesthetics was to establish the grounds for the viewing of art—disinterestedness—the grounds for beauty—necessity—and absolute universality of aesthetic criteria.  In many ways, his philosophy is divided.  On one hand, there is absoluteness and rules of judging; but, on the other hand, there is the new Romantic artist who is called upon to “play” and to create new “rules” for art by breaking rules through creative invention.  It will be up to Friedrich Schiller to expound upon this gap in Kantian philosophy by concentrating on the artist.

Schiller was writing his essays at a pivotal moment in time.  Germany was not yet a unified or modern country, nor did it have a powerful middle class.  As a nation it had yet to be industrialized and faced another century and a half of autocratic rule, and, yet Romanticism with its emphasis on the individual somehow managed to thrive in artistic circles.  Schiller died four decades before Marx would re-define alienation but the poet foresaw what the philosopher would witness, the splitting of the modern personality, rent between intellect and emotion.  Schiller’s stress on the emotional aspects of alienation is best understood in response to the subjectivism of the Romantic era and as an answer to the highly artificial age of the Enlightenment, which stressed reason and rationality in the name of nature, creating an overly mannered society through rules.  Acutely aware of the modern agony of alienation, Schiller sought to lead humans towards wholeness through art, where intellect and emotions could be resolved into a healthy and united whole.  Art allows all aspects of the mind to indulge in “free play” and creates a place where reason and passion can become balanced into a perfected form.

If Kant is the “head” or “intellect” of aesthetics, then Schiller is the “heart” of art philosophy.  While Kant’s discussion of art was strictly conceptual and abstract, Schiller was a poet himself and knew of the problems and rewards of creation.  But Schiller was also a playwright and a philosopher who was aware of his condition as a “hermaphrodite” or a hybrid creature: the artist who was also a philosopher.  But Schiller the artist appeared in his philosophical writings only in his poetic and rhetorical tone, for he rarely wrote on art itself.  Schiller followed not just the lead of Kant but also the lead of Baumgarten in writing aesthetics for the Romantic period.  Kant wrote of the abstract arabesque as his ideal form of the beautiful, but Baumgarten had envisioned art as having a more central role in human life and so did Schiller.  “On the Aesthetic Education of Man”, 1795, concerns itself with the importance of the “aesthetic” that is the sensuous as a counterpoint to the intellectual for the development of the human being.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment was the capstone of his epistemological theory, but Schiller was concerned less with theory and more with the predicament of modern life.

“On the Aesthetic Education of Man” was written as a series of letters to the Duke of Augustenburg and was published in 1795 and 1801.  “Naïve and Sentimental Poetry” was also written in 1795 as a response to his friendship with Germany’s most celebrated Romantic poet, Göethe, comparing himself as a poet to his friend as a poet.  Johann Wolfgang von Göethe had written the quintessential work of German Romanticism, the rather overwrought, Sorrows of Young Werther, the fictional version of many youthful love affairs.  However, as he matured, Göethe assumed a mantle of dignity, of near-Olympian calm, and repudiated Romanticism as “sick” and extolled (neo) Classicism as “healthy”.  The famous friendship got off to a rocky start.  Göethe spurned the advances of the younger poet whose dramatic plays were associated with Romanticism.  And Schiller, for his part, viewed Göethe with antipathy, distrusting the apparent ease with which poetry apparently flowed from this distinguished inhabitant of Olympia.  Nevertheless, the younger poet who experienced creative agonies and self-doubts was driven by a need to understand Göethe and pursued the poet.  The two men eventually succeeded in achieving a meeting of the minds and their consequent correspondence and collaboration is of great importance to German literature.

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Feb
19
2010

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

Kant and Aesthetic Theory

 

While Kant was writing the Critique of Judgment, 1790, the answer of the role of the artist in society was increasingly unclear, and the social and cultural situation was increasingly unstable.  The artist was looking at an abyss, gazing into the unknown of a new era, when Kant solved the problem of art and shaped its definition for the next two centuries.  Kant began with assumptions common to his time: we can recognize “art” and we know what “art” is and that “art” is something we can see.  He also assumes “beauty” and its existence. Kant never dealt with specific works of art and thus was removed from the current taste and vogue for classical art.  Neo-classicism was the new art in Kant’s time, and it was, briefly, a revolutionary art movement denoting (Greek) freedom and democracy and the promise of individuality, along with (Roman) gravitas and stability.  But Neoclassicism was quickly co-opted by post-Revolutionary Academicism.  A once-revolutionary movement became a forced and regulated status quo.  The Neo-Classical ideal of beauty, before the ideals became rules, was associated with the art of ancient Athens, considered eternal and transcendent.  As Keats best expressed it, in Ode on a Grecian Urn:

….

When old age shall this generation waste,

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st

“Beauty is truth, truth beauty”—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

John Keats (1795 – 1821)

Although Emmanuel Kant did not invent aesthetics, he formalized the philosophical concept and elaborated aesthetics into a new notion of art that turned out to be uniquely suited to the new century.  “Aesthetics” was that which is sensuous or the perception of sense data.  Aesthetics has evolved into a more inclusionary definition that is applied to the arts but in the middle of the Eighteenth Century when A. G. Baumgarten founded a “new science” and published Aesthetica in 1750, aesthetics connected art to life.  For the first time “art” became a distinctive value in life and was considered a mode of knowledge, called aesthetics or feelings registered by the subject/viewer in response to the stimulus of an art object. Regardless of the intent of the client or of the artist, the art object is a unique object in that it is contemplated for insight and delight.  Baumgarten widened the field of aesthetics from art to human conduct, opening possibilities for another philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, who would build upon Kantian aesthetics.  Aesthetics is a middle ground, existing somewhere between reason and morality.  Aesthetics concerned itself with that which was material or sensuous or plastic—physical life.  Like other aspects of human experience, aesthetics needed to be brought into the Kantian epistemological system.

Aesthetics is a dualistic concept, a philosophical play between the artist and the art critic or philosopher.  Aesthetics as a branch of philosophy is not concerned with particular works of art but is more concerned with the question of “art” itself.  Aesthetics like any other branch of philosophy, attempts to determine the grounds of “art,” its ontology, and the system of knowledge that produces and constructs the mode of judgment or contemplation of art, its epistemology.  Once art had been justified as an activity legitimated by its role in society as teacher and instructor and educator, working for the benefit of the community.  In the modern period, art needed two things.  First, a reason for being: ontology, and second, a definition: epistemology.  Although it was not Kant’s precise intention to create a new meaning and purpose for art, the effects of his philosophy was to link art to personal expressiveness and individual freedom. It was Kant who ushered in Romanticism by devising a theory of aesthetics that perfectly suited the times.

Given that aesthetics is a branch of philosophy, Kant proceeded by putting art into his transcendental system.  As is characteristic of his system, the idea of art was divided into two parts that correspond to self and object, that is, contemplation by the viewer of the work of art itself.  The ontology of a work of art is not the object, not even the artist, but the recognition of “art” which is a perceptual and conceptual act.  Too see is to judge/contemplate.  Art vision, like any vision, is never raw; it is always tempered and educated and acts according to (Kantian) rules.  Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) was the third in his trilogy of epistemology.  In his first two Critiques, Kant established new ground for reason and morality and the third Critique had to establish a universal and transcendent basis for making a judgment.

What did one have the occasion to judge?  To select the judgment of art as the centerpiece of this critique was a very modern move on the part of a man who had little experience of art himself.  But art was not amenable to judgment under a system of laws from the state and did not fall within the sphere of morality.  Simply by removing art from the rule of law or morality was to free it from its age-old tutelage at the hands of the powerful or the religious.  Like the rest of society, art had become secular, and, in becoming secular, had lost its place in society.  Coincidentally, Kant was writing at the precise time the artist was losing the class that had been the traditional patrons, the aristocrats, to the guillotine in France.  In the Nineteenth Century, the purpose of art and the role of artists were questions, and, regardless of his intentions, Kant’s aesthetics proved to be the new answers.

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Dec
04
2009

The French Academy

The French Academy

The French Academy was established in 1648 for the purpose of controlling art in France and included a network of provincial schools in Rouen, Marseilles, Dijon, and Tours.  Art was intended to extend the nation’s prestige beyond politics and military glory and was intended to establish a hegemony in the arts and crafts. The French Revolution toppled this “Royal” Academy, replacing it in 1795 with the Institut, a representative body of intellectuals and artists who took over the instruction of artists in the School of Fine Arts in Paris and Rome.  They served in an administrative capacity that was honorary but powerful.  The Institut defined “art” and “artist” and established standards that should not be violated.  Meanwhile, other major cities followed the lead of the French. In London, the Royal Academy was established in 1768. By 1790, over one hundred academies of art or public schools of art were flourishing: Vienna (remodeled) 1770, Dresden 1762, Berlin 1786, Copenhagen 1754, Stockholm 1768, St. Petersburg 1757, Madrid 1752, Dusseldorf 1767, Frankfort 1779, Munich 1770, Genoa 1752, Naples 1756, Mexico 1785 and Philadelphia 1791/1805. The increased importance of academic training in the arts coincided with the development of the modern nation state, and the government’s growing awareness of the usefulness of art in an international contest for prestige.  By the end of the Eighteenth century, the Neoclassical style was the official style of “Academic art,” regardless of country.  This official style of the academy was based upon the foundations of classical art and art theory, as expressed by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in Thoughts on the Imitation of Greek Works of Painting and Sculpture (1755).  According to Winckelmann, contemporary art should not copy Greek art but to should imitate the Greeks in their “noble grandeur and calm simplicity,” by attempting to think about art as they did.  This new frame of mind or mental state was hostile to that of the Rococo and put Antiquity forward as the only model to be followed.  “It is easier to discover the beauty of Greek statues than the beauty of nature,” Winckelmann stated, “imitating them will teach us how to become wise without loss of time.”

Winckelmann’s well-meaning volume of art history led to a formulaic copying by artists of classical models.  The academic learned response to the designated “ideal” beauty became a dictum to be followed.  Copying a pre-given object/objective led to the academic stress on drawing (disegno) because the pure outline was more faithful to the image.  Unlike fleeting, conditional and changeable color, drawing sought the essential and distilled the form into purity, a purity, which would have a moral character.  The moral character of art was definitively addressed by the German poet and philosopher, Friedrich Schiller, who stated that art, and only art, could lift the human being up from his/her natural state into a moral state.  Art alone produces harmony between our sensual instincts and formality and between life and order. Still, there were problems with teaching art, for speaking prophetically, Schiller asked in 1783,  “Do you expect enthusiasm where the spirit of the academies rule?”

Napoléon reorganized the Institut in 1803 and increased its membership.  The members were given exclusive rights and unprecedented power to admit and honor works shown in the Salons. Napoléon’s gift of control to a handful of individuals was part of his plan to ensure total control of art now yoked to his propaganda machine. The Salon, in its modern form, now showed the works of all artists, deemed worth of admission, not just the members of the Academy.  The Institut also awarded the Grand Prix de Rome to Beaux-Arts students (males only).  When Napoléon fell from power in 1814, the Restoration government sought to reestablish the historical link between the old Royal Academy and the Institut, which also managed to control the Ecole de Beaux-Arts, even though the two bodies were theoretically separate.  The connections between the Academy, the Ecole, and the government varied with the ruler in power who could intervene or not in the affairs of the art world. Nevertheless, the Academy exercised a great deal of power over the world of French art, and by extension, over all other serious art worlds, for French art had established an hegemony in Europe.  The forty members of the Academy held fourteen chairs in painting, eight in sculpture and in architecture, four in engraving and six in music and controlled the Beaux-Arts curriculum and the contents of the annual Salon exhibitions.

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Oct
23
2009

Podcast Episode 4 Romantic Aesthetics

AESTHETICS AND TRE RISE OF ROMANTICISM

Emerging in the mid-eighteenth century, Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy which seeks to define “art.”  The formulation of aesthetics as a separate aspect of Enlightenment thinking was a project of British and German writers on the arts.  By the end of the eighteenth century, Emmanuel Kant consolidated “aesthetics” into a coherent and influential book, the Critique of Judgment, which would shape the art world of the Romantic artists.

 

 

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Oct
16
2009

Podcast 5 Romantic Aesthetics

ART-FOR-ART’S SAKE

Aesthetics, as a branch of philosophy, was established in 1735 by Alexander Baumgartner in Germany.  The early development of aesthetics evolved from moral stances on art, espoused by Lord Shaftsbury and Winckelmann, became the basis for the modern definition of “art.”  This new definition of art was articulated by Kant and extended by Schiller.  Ideally suited to a modern world, ruled by the middle class, modern aesthetics ushered in the era of the independent Romantic artist and the concept of “art-for-art’s sake.”

 
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