Further thoughts on Hegel

Hegel’s thesis, that “after antiquity nothing can be or become more beautiful,” (another ‘end of art’) has its anti-thesis in Goethe.

An excerpt from: Idyll by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Let none reveal
The thoughts we feel,
The aims we own!
Let joy alone

Disclose the story!
She'll prove it right
And her delight

Includes the glory,
Includes the bliss
Of days like this!

Goethe haunts Hegel’s thinking as a giant of Romanticism who attempted to develop an all encompassing spectrum of thinking in response to the human condition. Goethe proposes a model which includes mathematics, science, philosophy and art in all its forms as part of a spectrum of human endeavours subsumed beneath a grand ‘poetic’ vision. Joy and beauty are in Goethe still regarded as experiences that it is possible to channel through art. Logic and scientific thinking are only valued if seen in their proper place as subservient to art’s ability to engage the spirit.
For Hegel art can be read as a discipline with its roots and best achievements in the past and he feels that it no longer satisfies our spiritual needs. But he is not sure about this and the German Romantic tradition operates as a powerful anti-thesis. This encounter between himself and Goethe mirrors the master/slave dialectic that he articulated in ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’ whereby two self-conscious beings engage in a "struggle to the death" before one enslaves the other by providing a more convincing rhetoric, only to find that this does not give the winner the control over the world that had been envisioned.
Hegel has this type of relationship with art; he tries to control it by pointing to its anachronistic nature, thereby limiting its use value as a discipline and yet once he has done this he is faced with the growing power of German Romanticism, which will in the late work of composers such as Beethoven and Schubert, the poetry of Goethe and the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich prove to be an important movement that still has a strong resonance within contemporary art practice. The duality within Hegel’s thinking however is still pertinent, the still resonating attraction of Romanticism could be seen as a shackle that holds contemporary art back from higher levels of objective engagement with society and this itself becomes another ‘end of art’ narrative.
Hegel’s valorising of the discipline of philosophy has another ‘end of art’ narrative. If artists start assimilating philosophy within their practice are they in reality abandoning art in favour of a ‘higher’ discipline. If we read Duchamp’s work as being the asking of philosophical questions about the nature of art, and subsequent conceptual art practices being a furtherance of philosophy’s ‘enslavement’ of art, we can then assimilate Danto’s statement that; “There is no special way works of art have to be. And that is the present and, I should say, the final moment in the master narrative. It is the end of the story" (AEA p.47). History does show us that art is not possible in certain societies.
Again if we follow Hegel’s thesis/anti-thesis model, we are reminded that this will change. The only constant is change and Danto’s reflections simply offer us a way into re-reading Hegel via contemporary art practice and thus hopefully helping artists to make decisions as to where the current situation is leading their own practices.
The media specificity that Hegel examines in his ‘Aesthetics’, is still of value to contemporary art practitioners as it helps clarify the issues surrounding where meaning in practice can come from. For many an artist what is important is the decision to paint rather than film or compose or write. Each art form has a specific possible effect on the audience. This effect leads towards what Hegel would term a “transcendence” of the everyday through a moment of realisation that the artwork achieves in the viewer/listener experience. This moment of transcendence can though only be achieved if the relationship between the artist and the audience mirrors Hegel’s idea of the domestic. I.e. true awareness of the family as a repository of core values and through this the development of an ability to communicate with the wider family of humankind. This ‘democratic’ aspect of Hegel’s writing goes directly against contemporary art world ‘elitist’ practices and cynicism regarding the ability of art to communicate anything beyond some sort of vague subjectivity. The thought that an artist could aspire to be appreciated by ‘everyman’ and also aspire to depths of engagement that can provide a meditative context for an audience is an aspiration that many art practitioners would agree with.
The current focus on art’s interpretation through a plethora of surrounding texts is also something that a reading of Hegel can help redress. For him art is not about interpretation it is about realisation; in particular a realisation of the self through art. Art is a product of the spirit, therefore beyond nature in its beauty. Art gives reality a new birth, the artist’s experience is born again or experienced again through re-creation. This is the key to how artists can think about the way they can process reality, thus pointing the way towards an abstraction from reality; these abstracts can then be universalised in order to reflect the deeper spiritual nature of being. Finally, through art we can come to understand the spirit. Therefore art appreciation is not about interrogation or interpretation but is more to do with its use value in helping the viewer/listener/audience towards some form of spiritual transcendence. Art is a vehicle for spiritual change.
There are aspects of Hegel’s writing that point towards the fact that artists don’t necessarily have to intellectualise the process of abstraction. The processes behind ‘generalisation’ can be seen as common factors of the human experience. Hegel considers the concept of digestion important. Information/perception has to be embodied and totally assimilated if it is to be transformed. This includes knowledge of other art. Hegel believes that Classical Art forms need to be totally embodied within an artist if that artist is to avoid pastiche or subjective, therefore non-communicatable forms. One way we could think of this is that Hegel’s concept of hierarchies leading towards his teleological ends is remixed and enfolded to energise the gradually diminishing power of transformation as it reaches the unassailable peak. (Art dies before it gets there) Earlier, nearer the bottom end of his hierarchic structure, perceptual/embodied experiences can now be revived as a form of Vitalism and a necessary injection of life into the moribund corpse of art.
Another way that ‘generalisation’ can be achieved is through memory. Memory can be seen as an aspect of digestion, like digestion only certain elements are absorbed into the body, unnecessary elements are rejected as waste. The conjunction of memory and embodied experience brings the artist into close proximity with an integration of past and present. The ambiguity that is a result of the gap between signifier and signified being ironed out in this stomach/head conjunction.
Again Hegel faces a dilemma. He mourns the fact that Classical Art now longer moves us, the empty shells of its outer forms are now lifeless and even memory cannot activate their spirit. (Another end of art.) If, as he believes, Classical Art reached some sort of zenith, it could be that art’s function as image creation has come to an end. It no longer has an onto-theological function. This is perhaps a reference to Kant’s transcendental theology or reasoned-based theology, which he divided into ontotheology and cosmotheology. Reason and revelation being the thesis/anti-thesis that echoes the head/stomach divide. Romanticism wrestles with these internal dilemmas and it could be argued provides the anti-thesis of private internalised revelation, which can be set off against Hegel’s “pre-individual ethical substance”. Hegel’s dilemma can be perhaps resolved by allowing art to be taken home and domesticated. His insistence on both horizontal and vertical communication, (family/everyman/universality) allows for a re-engagement of art practice with each and every present, which revitalises and reinvents art for each succeeding generation. The tension between the need for contemporality and universalism is an inheritance from the historical nature of all practices, liberating art as a component of change and offering a new lever for transcendence via the implied move towards historicist dialectical materialist thinking. As the power of the past (from feudalism to state Capitalism) is invested in the memories of the ruling class, only a revolutionary repositioning that validates present human experience can be used to re-validate art and absolve it of its historical fixation with the Classics.