Weighed down with theory
Biography and positioning text
Garry Barker
DipAD, MA
Garry Barker is an artist with a long standing interest in visual narrative conventions and the interrelationship between ekphrasis and fine art practice. He is currently editor/publisher for the Workshop Press: Leeds which is focused on the publication of artist books and texts that relate to but don’t operate within academic knowledge conventions. His personal interest in the reading group was to continue with his own search for a manifesto for practice and the positioning text below can be read as part of that process.
Thoughts on Hegel and the end of art
As a philosopher Hegel could be seen as the last of the great teleological believers, (the supposition that there is a purpose or directive principle in the works and processes of nature) and the first of the philosophers of time and change.
He presents an intriguing paradox. On the one hand he believes or argues for a type of universal truth; an ideal towards which mankind should strive and have aspirations towards as individuals and as a society as a whole. On the other hand he is a rationalist and seeks to ground his philosophical system in logical thought which acknowledges the historical nature of change and the importance of the particular time period that philosophers find themselves born into.
The concept of art, like other aspects of Hegel’s thinking, is therefore deeply conflicted. It is however this duality that makes his philosophy interesting and of continuing relevance to contemporary art practice.
It could be argued that the root of Hegel’s position lies in Christianity’s moment of separation between the spirit and the material world. The dualistic reality of Christ the man and the spiritual acceptance of Christ the God being at the centre of Christian belief.
One reading of Hegel is that a realistic, logical individual relies on perceptions of the everyday world on which to develop a logical belief system. This individual has a moral duty to all other people and this duty is the duty of communicating to others how they can progress from this worldly understanding towards a greater holistic awareness of what Hegel would call the spirit.
The family unit is where this ‘duty’ is fostered and it is the family that guides each of us on entry into what it is to be part of the human family.
However this is not enough. There is another type of duty, the duty to strive towards higher levels of ‘spiritual awareness’. Art could therefore be seen, like religion, as a stage to progress through on the way towards full enlightenment. It is because of this idea that art may be simply a stage we go through in order to get somewhere else, that talk of the ‘end of art’ begins. This is perfectly understandable and it is easily arguable that culturally humans would have no need for art if everyone was fully enlightened. The reality is though that as a society we will never get anywhere near full enlightenment and as individuals only the rare, remarkable individual has ever attained a position of complete spiritual awareness. Therefore if we are to take something more tangible from Hegel it is perhaps his concept of thesis/anti-thesis. This pairing of opposites allows for the reader to use a historical materialist argument in conjunction with Universalist arguments to establish a rich complex position on the interrelationship between reality and idealism.
Hegel allows us to revisit certain ways of thinking about art practice in relation to more contemporary thinking. For instance, his argument in relation to inherent weaknesses in pre-Classical art is that it separates the signifier from the signified. Certain 20th century thinkers have proposed that at the core of the way we should understand art is to think of it as a specific type of language. The tools of semiotics can therefore be used to come to an understanding of how art works as a sign system. However for Hegel the need to create a symbol separates what is constructed (a symbol such as human with a dogs head) from what is signified. This separation demonstrates a lack of ‘wholeness’ or ‘completeness’, and it is this totality towards which we should be aspiring. This is interesting as it points towards the weakness of interpretive approaches, (an anti hermeneutic stance) and could be re-read in conjunction with Susan Sontag’s essay ‘Against Interpretation’. My own reading of this and personal convictions as an artist point towards a more phenomenological or embodied approach to an understanding of art.
Hegel believes that Classical Greek Art achieves a synthesis of the signifier and what is signified. (Form and content), but this fusion is in some ways too static and the resolution itself could therefore be seen to become ‘timeless’ or ‘fixed’ as a canon. Another paradox now develops. In this case if Greek Classical Art has achieved some sort of universal truth, it blocks the historical time bound duty of humankind to progress further. Hegel suggests that this type of art lacks an inner vitality or emotional struggle to move an awareness of the spirit on further. It therefore fails to achieve a higher synthesis with the life spirit. This argument points towards another aspect of what is often seen as ‘the end of art’. The fact that for Hegel, Classical Greek Art has it all, a perfect synthesis between form and content, and yet it still fails to deliver in terms of higher spiritual understandings, means that perhaps art has failed or outlived its value and that further enlightenment can only be achieved via philosophical investigation, art thus being supplanted by philosophy, which Hegel sees as a more worthy vehicle.
For the artist however this dilemma of Hegel’s can be read in a different way. The need to have fully resolved work is often a problem for an artist when thinking about audience reaction. Hegel’s critique of the perfection of Greek Art opens out the possibility of leaving un-resolved work to operate as a catalyst between the artist and audience, the historical process of time could therefore provide the necessary friction and edge to give the work value. Open as opposed to closed solutions being predicated by this position.
The thesis-anti-thesis position is one that is useful as it levers change into being. By always having to struggle with history/time/change and how to reconcile universal fixed meanings, the artist can have a constantly unfolding set of meanings that are discovered as part of the process of making, rather than worked towards as a determined goal.
Hegel’s thesis on the end of art is of course only understandable in conjunction with its anti-thesis, the thesis that points towards the continuing relevance of art.
The Dadaist cries of “Bollocks” to art, which emerge every few years, are only understandable in the context of art’s traditional values. The ‘end of art’ it could be argued, is therefore an old and often repeated refrain that is very easy to make but that doesn’t really have much value outside of very closely argued hermeneutic inward looking contemporary art practices.
An alternative approach is to examine Hegel’s arguments from a more formalistic point of view. If we think of Hegel as the last theoretician of the beautiful, we can revisit art via Plato, Kant, metaphysics and the concept of universals. Art can be read as a universal form of the self-unfolding idea of beauty. The actualisation of this is what we see as art. The concept of self-unfolding means that art is not driven by outside means, it comes to a self-actualisation by being attuned at a deep level to the spirit. This tuning or empathy should run deep within the material structure of any particular art form, the specificity of medium, dictating what is achievable. (Hegel goes to great length to point out what poetry can carry as an art form as opposed to painting or music). At one point Hegel explains that art is built by the self-comprehending spirit of beauty and it could therefore take thousands of years for a full realisation of integration with the spirit to be achieved. This could be understood as a call for the continuation of art. The fact that artists have a long tradition going back to cave paintings, suggesting that the artist is involved in a constant process of attempting to ‘realise’ the image, each generation of artists passing on the moral duty to strive towards an almost impossible actualisation.
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 as 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 subjectivity, and is to avoid deeply non-communicatable forms. One way we could think of this is that Hegel’s concept of hierarchies leading towards his teleological ends, could be 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.
Hegel’s dilemma is that he mourns the fact that classical art no 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.
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 is 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, creates a structure that will 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 was being extensively exhibited in national museums across Europe, in particular in Berlin where Hegel was living at the time. If the museum is read as an extension of the collector, it is effectively operating as an interpreter of the collector’s ideals, the art work inside the museum 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, therefore 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 is 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.
"Man is that night, that empty Nothingness, which contains everything in its undivided simplicity: the wealth of an infinite number of representations, of images, not one of which comes precisely to mind, or which [moreover], are not [there] insofar as they are really present. It is the night, the interiority-or-the intimacy of Nature which exists here: [the] pure personal-Ego. In phantasmagorical representations it is night on all sides: here suddenly surges up a blood- spattered head; there, another, white, apparition; and they disappear just as abruptly. That is the night that one perceives if one looks a man in the eyes: then one is delving into a night which becomes terrible; it is the night of the world which then presents itself to us."
G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Philosophie des Geistes in Samtliche Werke, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister, (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1931), vol. 20 180-81. Cited by Kojeve in YFS 78, On Bataille, ed. Allan Stoekl, C) 1990 by Yale University.
The philosophy of Hegel is in reality a philosophy of death, what Hegel is working through in the writing of The Phenomenology of Spirit is in reality an anthropomorphic reflection on the birth, life and death cycle. The end of art is a substitute for the end of man/woman.
Art and man contain ‘everything in undivided simplicity, an infinite number of representations’, these representations at some point coming to an end as the eyes close in death. The night which cuts off all light, also eliminates reproductions. The copy ceases with death.
Man is for Hegel "death living a human life” a term that it could be argued arises because of his struggle with atheism. If Christ did not absolve us from sin, if there is no such thing as religious absolution, we are grounded in our past sins and the blood of our actions is never washed clean from our hands.
The legacy of Hegel’s thought lies in the Lutherian tradition, which itself can be traced back to William of Ockham. If something has an essence that is part of its very foundation, it is also something which it is not. (This is developed in detail in the master slave compact). The particular must exist within the universal and yet must also displace it. Death is a particular experience but is also universal and Hegel’s struggle that he sets out for our soul’s final holistic unification with that something that can only be defined as wholeness, is defeated in its very efforts because of the canker in the rose. A disease that corrupts the deepest ontological essence, being at this level becomes in Hegel’s mind identical with nothing. Therefore the great theme of history is mired in the necessity of illusion. The question, “can there be an original human being?” itself as a question defined an answer that predicated a metaphysical deity. Hegel doesn’t want to accept the full implication of the duality of the master/slave dialectic, his own growing atheism in effect creating a hollow space for protestant theology. Unlike Meister Eckhart who speaks of a fusion of being with nothingness, the Ockham tradition of stripping down to essences is pre-disposed towards an ontological finality. This is Hegel’s end of art, the ontic ground zero that for him, only a return to philosophy can negate.
The end of art can therefore be read as an embodied metaphor for the necessity of having to confront death with the knowledge that this confrontation is something that will in the end define our life.
