Hegel points to the problems associated with the separation between the signifier and what is signified in pre-Classical Art. This ambiguity can be understood in many ways but one way to look at it is in the difference between discovery and invention. The two sides of signifier and signified imply the internalising of an external event or experience. Has the person internalising this experience, ‘discovered’ meaning or ‘invented’ meaning? If the first we have a ‘strong’ concept, if the second, we have a ‘weak’ concept. Something ‘discovered’ implies that it is already there waiting for use and it is something everybody could discover and is verifiable, as the person can say, “Look what I have found!” However if ‘invented’ this could be the product of internal subjectivity, and all that can be pointed to is one’s ‘interpretation’ of an event.
This separation could be used to oscillate between two ways of understanding the art/science divide. If the value of science or art lies in its capacity to support invention or new ideas, it could be argued that this reflects a modern fascination with originality (as driven by capitalism and its desire for new markets) and that the artist/scientists should be seen as seekers after truth. These ‘truths’ being deep spiritual matters concerned with the holistic nature of ‘a big out there’ or as Lacan puts it, ‘the big other’. More contemporary thinkers, including Slavoj Žižek and John Berger have pointed to a need to reinvestigate the ‘theological turn’ as a replacement for the ‘linguistic turn’, not to advocate a return to any specific belief system, but as a call to moral value and as a broom with which to sweep away the fragmentation of weak post-modern thinking. Novelty and pastiche being together with other symptoms of post-modernity, a reflection of Hegel’s synaptic gap, the fissures of which open out underneath the simulacrum and other forms of late semiotic analysis that have been used to drive forward aspects of contemporary art practice.
The depths of original symbols that were ‘discovered’ in life have now being replaced by a surface of ‘invented’ symbols, the ubiquitous presence of the company ‘logo’ a symbol itself of the threadbare nature of contemporary symbolic discourse. Has contemporary art therefore sown the seeds of its own end? As a self-aware practice it no longer mediates between reality and the spirit, its own processes becoming a faint shadow of its former role as a permeable membrane between life and its reconciliation within the spirit, (Awareness of life in death).
However as always there is an anti-thesis. Sign/symbol usage can become part of a process of conventionalising; a process that can be very necessary if communication with others is to be maintained; this being also very necessary if we are to maintain Hegel’s horizontal axis. We can all learn that ‘A’ represents ‘apple’. Once learnt the abracadabra of magic words and letters dissolves, the coming into transcendental being via the magic of poetry, being replaced by the symbolically understood. This again being another separation that foreshadows the ‘end of art’, by creating a symbolic coded communication system, that points to what is to be communicated, it will itself stand outside that communication, thus causing another rupture between reality and experience. Again we perhaps have to turn to analogy. Let’s “Kiss and make it better”.
Conventionalising could be regarded as a museum role. The culture of the museum was in its infancy in Hegel’s time, Classical Art being now shown in national museums across Europe, in particular in Berlin where Hegel was living at the time. If the museum as an extension of the collector is effectively starting to interpret its collections, the art work inside the museum is being re-contextualised or re-aestheticised. The museum itself taking over the role of art production/verification, thus fetishising the objects as the labour involved in their production is not valued or understood. The individual (subjective) values of the collector now being conventionalised as museum rhetoric and new canons being developed which are not founded on authentic ‘discovery’. The museum provides a space for the worship of the ‘church of reason’ which is itself fractured by the subjective power behind the knowledge, the art gallery as the modern extension of the museum space, could then be seen as another place within which to witness the ‘end of art’, as the keepers of art knowledge enfold their decisions around false knowledge, capitalist novelty and monetary exchange value.
If artists are to adhere to Hegel’s domestic principles they need to be of the people and produce work for the people. To commodify the work of artists and lock it up behind the walls of a private collector is the final nail in art’s coffin. (Yet another end of art) Public spaces where individuals pass through and have time for reflection, is where the axis of horizontal and vertical communication meet. But where is the vertical axis? If religion has been replaced by reason, where lies the spirit? It is perhaps in individual belief or consciousness. But this can only come from the community of others if it is not to be solipsistic and internalised. Using this community we can re-discover agency in relation to our relative position within it. For art to have the potential for agency it can use the powers of allegory, an external re-presentation of the facts, a figurative mode of representation conveying a meaning other than the literal, to replace the unity of religion. In this way art returns to fill in the gap vacated by religion. The paradox here being that only in a recognition of the death of God, can we have a re-birth of art.
Now for the theological turn. The agency of the individual can be found in the gap between God and man as opened out in a reading of Christ as an intermediary between the concept of man and God. The spirit being the consciousness of humanity’s role within the totality. As contemporary humans we face the abyss of death without the solace of religion, art therefore becomes a possible tool for the negotiation between our short life and moment of consciousness and the need to feel that there is more to this moment than simple existence. Another reading of the Heglian turn being that artists can provide society with aspirations of possibility. The paradox and anti-thesis being that in the death of God we find the re-birth of art as a possible third way. (Not Capitalism, not Communism)
If there is a directive principle to be found in the works and processes of nature and if we accept time and change as agency’s tools, Hegel can be a good philosopher to use as a guide through the mush of much post-modernism, and a starting point towards which an artist might develop a powerful manifesto for practice.
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