Technologies of Drawing Conference

A break from the reading group posts but this seems an appropriate place to share the notes taken at the recent Huddersfield conference on drawing technologies.

Technologies of Drawing Conference 26. 8. 2011

Notes:

Deanna Petherbridge:
Idea, pragmatics and critique: Drawing as empowering and interactive practice.
A presentation that focused on ‘inventing, making, siting and the reception of art’.
Deanna returned to the old painting v sculpture debate in order to shed light on the way different materials effect the way we can carry content. (Media specificity).
Touch and sight, the hierarchy of the senses.
The supremacy of sight was often cited during the Renaissance. Drawing was used by all professions, these multifarious practitioners, painters, sculptors, architects etc. often being the same person, (sic) Michelangelo. The common thread that links these professions together is drawing.
Narrative veracity. Issues surrounding narrative veracity in relation to sculpture and painting were highlighted using a comparison between Bernini and the Carracci brothers.
Annibale Carracci in particular had pioneered a synthesis of the traditionally opposed Renaissance concepts of disegno ("drawing") and colore ("colour"). The plasticity of the central Italian tradition is wedded to the Venetian colour tradition and this is seen at its optimum in the decoration of the vault of the gallery in the Palazzo Farnese, Rome (1597-1604). However the Carracci brothers also play with the idea of illusion and ‘grisaille’. Grisaille (painting in grey monotone) in particular plays off against the limitations of sculpture, highlighting its lack of colour. There are many levels of representation here, paint pretending to be architecture, sculpture, flesh etc.
N.b. Annibale’s preparatory drawings for the ceiling are a lesson I can use when composing contemporary history images.
It was pointed out that modern work can be read in the same way, Picasso’s Guernica has drawings exploring emotional impact as studies for the final painting, this parallels Carracci’s studies of how to draw a foreshortened leg. All these artists use worked up studies and doodles and try out ideas in drawing. It was pointed out that all these drawing activities are still vital, working through roughs, playing with initial ideas, doing technical drawing to clarify the situation, making more detailed drawings to illustrate ideas to clients etc.
These are making and thinking 2D art works. The study of sculpture as a thinking device is harder because unlike drawing not all the stages are recorded. (In drawing if you look closely you can always see rubbings out, reinforcement of one mark over another etc.) This is similar to looking at computer drawings, as all stages are deleted. (However I was aware of the Z key, the software remembers) However Deanna wanted to emphasise the fact that drawing reveals the stages of its own process, therefore was deeply implicated in the personal narrative of making and thinking. We are aware of the authorial hand of the artist, but can we remove our awareness of this when trying to engage with the meaning or communication made by any particular artwork?
In sculpture we need to take on a higher level of imaginative will in order to believe that stone represents flesh or soft cloth. In the case of a more contemporary artist (Boccioni’s Unique Forms of Continuity in Space was shown in this case) we are asked to accept that polished cast metal can be seen as a metaphor for speed and energy. We need to ‘suspend disbelief’ in response to the clarity and ‘insistence’ of signs available to us. This is still the case when an artist uses ‘real’ materials, such as in installation art.
Drawing as witness and recording.
The act of drawing allows us to re-use our perceptions. A line is always a concept, an abstraction.
Van Heemskerk’s drawing of a sculpture courtyard was now used to illustrate how sculpture was collected and presented in the 16th century and to make a point about how sculpture was conceptualised within drawing.
Bernini’s drawings and the way they use light and touch were used to illustrate the sculptor’s approach to an understanding of drawing as a tool. His tactile drawings feel as if they are almost sculptures, marks ‘feeling’ for the form. In particular his chalk study for the fountain of Neptune, 1652, which was contrasted to his pen, ink and wash drawing of the same subject.

The presentation now moved onto a different tack. The importance of worked through concepts that used drawing as a thinking tool was highlighted and compared to the use of ‘found and readymade’ images within contemporary practice. Baudrillard’s use of the term ‘simulcra’ was now used as a way of defining levels of representation.
When using ‘real’ objects representation starts from the principle that the sign and the real are of equal value. However in a culture suffused with images (such as our own), the real can sometimes be confused with that which has already been reproduced. (We need to see it on TV to believe it exists) The potency of these images it was claimed, partly created the recent London riots. People enacting the roles of rioters because of the potency of riot images they had already seen. Therefore images of riots stimulate riots. The adoption of these images is hard to track, but in some ways the ‘real’ (the riots) is in fact a simulacra, as these actions are actually mimicking earlier news footage, which presented very powerful images to a lot of people that had no other comparable images to model themselves on.
So what has this to do with drawing? Petherbridge proposes a split in sensibility between art that creates constructed metaphors and artists using existing situations (found objects etc.) as concepts. She uses a compare and contrast method (perhaps she is an ex Courtauld Institute graduate) to illustrate her point, citing Hirst’s ‘Pharmacy’ and Richard Wilson’s ‘20:50’. She points out that Wilson’s work creates phenomena and is (sic) ‘a real experience’ rather than a simulacra. Wilson’s work, ‘Watertable’ she describes as, ‘uncanny, profound and disruptive’. “The hand of the artist is apparent”. She muses on the fact that Wilson must draw.
In the non metaphorical space of the simulacra, drawing however has for Petherbridge a problematic relationship.
If art has to do with ‘acts of transformation’ (she tells a joke about 2 peas placed on the studio floor as a representation of life) what is the conceptual apparatus that triggers this? In the past metaphor was the key, but it now appears as if this is no longer viable. (Questionable) In the non metaphorical space of the simulacra drawing now has a problematic position. The hand of the maker/auteur (authorship) is now diminished in favour of the onlooker. As simulacra, artworks therefore have to be signposted for spectators. (DP cites Hirst and Mike Nelson). I.e. if not you can’t see the difference between art and what is not art) This ‘conceptual’ act is however not one of abstraction and it is abstraction that allows us to see and think about the world. We need abstraction as a focus to cut through the infinite complexity of reality.
Because drawing employs line it uses something outside of nature (this is the moment of abstraction) and is conceptual but in a metaphorical domain. It’s critical role allows for better solutions to be sought and found and for the drawing thinker to go off on tangents as images arrive within the process of drawing. Drawing has a complete relationship to an extended practice, and should be understood as a tool for abstract conceptual thinking.
Finally Susanna Heron’s work was looked at, Heron uses both old and new technologies in her drawing/sculptural practice.

David Dernie: Material Drawings
The Greeks had always linked ‘teche’ (often translated as craftsmanship but also a word for art) to ‘poiesis’to make, poïetic work reconciles thought with matter and time. This points to an interdependence with what we do/say and how we do it. (The specificity of technology) At the core of this thinking is content and how it is carried by different media.
Architectural drawing has a long history, initiated with activities concerning with measuring the ground and developing bounded spaces ordered within timed perimeters. In this instance we can see technique (chalk lines etc.) making the world visible.
Drawing as a way of separating one bit of the world from another simply by drawing a line around something.
The relationship between the technologies and the content that runs through them was expressed by the difference in situated-ness. Content comes from the fact that human beings are situated in the world, the computer or any other tool is not situated, (aware of what is going on) it is simply a carrier.
Hand-made drawing was described as non-mediated (having direct contact hand/eye/brain with perception), computer drawing was described as mediated.
The second stage (after boundary drawing) is predicative/planning. A street plan for example. However this cannot contain the ‘life’ of the street. Therefore how does a specific ‘human’ reader of a plan understand it? How do they deal with the levels of abstraction?
Perception was then examined in terms of the ‘screen’ and the different ways that the mind engages with the conditions of mediation. (Cinema screen, phone screen, computer etc.)
Computer generated images bring a formal imagination to the fore because 3D generative software programmes rely on basic geometric shapes to build complex solids. However this limits materials imagination and certain types of spatial thinking outside of perspective projections. In particular the formal codes now in place within architectural rendering software (glass, stone etc.) are leading to particularly insensitive design approaches. There is no longer any space for material thinking/play within many areas of contemporary design practice. Instead we have an iconography of materials which are becoming the norm.
Where did the implications of Cubism go? Multi viewpoint, viewer engagement and synchronistic vision, now forgotten. We need to bring back a more complex understanding of situational understanding of space. Not just one, two and three point perspectives.
The work of the installation artist and photographer Georges Rousse was looked at because it asks questions as to our ‘situatedness’ in relation to architectural space. The work seen was in fact similar to images used to develop LCA Foundation Art and Design curriculum during the 1980s. A welcome reminder of his work, in particular photographs taken of painted forms that appear to be squares but are in fact lots of different bits of colour applied to surfaces that when seen at one exact point, suddenly appear to be a flat coherent square.
Berthold Brecht stage designer Caspar Neher was cited as an important influence of situatedness. His work on breaking the forth wall conventions and ‘enframing relationships in respect to the drama of events’ was seen as very important to the way we might be able to re-envisage architectural drawing.

Teresa Carneiro:
The indisciplinarity of drawing – drawing spaces
An introduction to the work of the Lisbon based Drawing Spaces.
Teresa spoke about the work of 8 different practitioner projects held within Drawing Spaces. She detailed the different approaches artists had taken. For more details see: http://drawingspacesen.weebly.com/index.html
Central to many of the approaches is an acceptance of a phenomenological approach to drawing, this was questioned by the chair, who it appeared, hadn’t any awareness of the issues involved.
The space operates as a dynamic research arena and could be a useful place for the LCA to make links with. In particular the space provides a context for thinking through the pedagogic implications of drawing within contemporary art practice.

Brass Art:
Pinning it Down: Drawing as capture
A discussion of both digital and analogue drawing in relation to themes of practice. Brass Art is a collaborative project between HE institution staff (Chara Lewis, Kristin Mojsiewicz and Anneke Pettican) See: http://www.brassart.org.uk/about.php?focus=exhib&im=1&tm=about
Brass Art are concerned with the liminal. (Spaces between things and at the entrances and exits) The double and the shadow are current themes. Representation itself being a form of doubling.
The most interesting part of this presentation was the implications of White Light Projection Technology. Used extensively for human body measurement it is based on the projection of light patterns. This has allowed them to use body scanners as image making tools and more recent developments have seen the use of Wiii 3 entertainment system technology as a crude recording device. The use of this easily available technology, (reverse engineered Wiii system) to record 3D movement, has a lot of implications of future drawing thinking within both the games industry and other visual imagery using professions.
The importance of data points and the evolution of images using directed line technology was compared to ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ an experimental 1929 silent documentary film, with no story and no actors by director Dziga Vertov, and edited by his wife Elizaveta Svilova.
In the film Soviet citizens are shown at work and at play interacting with the machinery of modern life. To the extent that the film can be said to have "characters," they are the cameramen of the title and the film editor. (Brass Art show a slide of Svilova editing) This film is famous for the range of cinematic techniques Vertov invents, deploys or develops, such as double exposure, fast motion, slow motion, freeze frames, jump cuts, split screens, oblique angles, extreme close-ups, tracking shots, footage played backwards, stop motion animations a totally self-reflexive film.
Brass Art point to the fact that new digitally centred art forms can also be self reflective in this way, media specificity being at the centre of this thinking.

Finally we had a visit to Huddersfield Art Gallery and Deborah Gardner gave a talk on her sculpture and how it responded to selected work within the gallery collection.

Round Table Discussion Transcript

This is the raw unedited transcript. Simply cut and pasted into the blog. I'll try and tidy it up at some point when I have time. Lots of spaces are in the wrong place etc. However. everyone has to go away and edit their contributions now and add footnotes, therefore except for the recording of the process there seems little need to attempt the tidy up. Will post the final edited transcript when it arrives.

The End of Art

Present: Garry Barker, Michael Belshaw, Joanna Geldard, Richard Miles, Tom Palin

MB Here we are at the Round Table discussion at the end of two reading groups that we conducted in the second semester. The link between the two books which were The Specters of Marx by Derrida and The End of Art by Eva Geulen was endism and that is the theme that we are going to discuss in the broadest possible way. The endism of The Specters of Marx was to do with the end of history and that theme pursued by Fukuyama and of course the endism in Geulen’s book is the end of art, so we’re going to combine themes from both sources and see where that takes us. So who wants to begin?

GB As a lot of this has been about Hegel, and Derrida himself was quoting Hegel quite a bit when we were reading through Derrida; it interesting for me the sense of going back into Hegel and starting to read other stuff of Hegels - going back into his work and reading stuff like The Phenomenology of Spirit and trying to get the sense of what was underlying all of this and it seems to me that there’s a real friction in Hegel’s thinking. On the one hand he’s one of the first philosophers to deal with history and materiality and yet at the same time he’s left over with this thing that philosophy must deal with the spirit and with the idea of something that transcends us; so we’ve really got this duality and I thought reading Derrida that we were constantly focused on this duality. You’ve also got Hegel’s master/slave dialectic which is again another duality; a duality that means as you think the master takes over, actually the voice of the slave opens that otherness – so the master can never take full control; there is always as the master evolves, the slave somewhere finds the strength to revolt and push back. That sort of conflict seemed to me to go right back to Hegel’s worry about… really I think he was an atheist and yet at the same time he’s trying to deal with the Christian leftovers or the Christian sort of ideals come through – that in itself has a deeper issue and the deeper issue is Hegel’s awareness of his own mortality; Hegel’s awareness of the sort of ‘death’ business. When I went
back to reading Hegel he actually has a lot to say about death and what it is as part of the human condition, so somewhere this awareness of death is something about that essential component of the human condition and for us to be aware of life, it is actually at its height and at its highest level of awareness when we know death faces us; when we know that death is the end of it. I had this sort of sense of going through this whole reading of death that why we keep coming back to it is because it gives us the most heightened experience of what it is not to die – in a way, to be alive – so the death of art has to be faced in order for us to be aware of what art actually means to us. If we lose it, through its extinction, in some way we become more aware of what it actually means to us.

MB That’s an interesting point. Would it be right to say that in Hegel, the idea even of the death of art is just a prelude to something moving on – to something further down the line as it were? I wonder whether or not we could find a contrast in the writers that we’ve been looking at in those that see this continuity and see this ‘rising to the absolute’ on the one hand, and other writers on the other hand like Nietzsche who see death in terms of finality, in the way I think that the Greeks were more accustomed to.

JG I think so – in the prologue of Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play, he actually talks about an awakening and dealing with that tragic in that particular sense he deals with the death of style of art and culture – he is echoing Hegel there but he then takes that as a repetitious nature that continues from Baroque to German Romanticism and he uses that jump and how that’s mirrored as the allegory for modernism, but the key word that he uses in the prologue is ‘awakening’; that actually by finalising and tying that off within a timeframe it actually allows the suspension of the idea as an awakened idea and I suppose, it’s not even a rebirth, it is just an aliveness to a new beginning.

GB But that tragedy, perhaps, is part of that other awareness that God, Christianity, the big ‘other’ doesn’t really exist – and that is the tragedy of the human condition; that for Hegel who is sort of mourning the fact that we perhaps don’t have it; that’s his problem with atheism. But as you move further on, writers like Benjamin accept it and say ‘this is what we’ve got to do, it’s accepted now’.

JG Well he actually ties off that idea of perfection, he calls that part of what Hegel had wanted and he calls for it as an end in that trauerspiel, in that German tragedy, his perfection is…

MB Can I just ask a question? What is Benjamin’s idea of the idea?

JG Yeah. It’s really hard actually. It’s one of those things that slips away from me and I occasionally get an idea of it. My interpretation is that he fixed down the connection between thought and thought becoming an idea; that as you thought, the structure of it became idea. The reason he’s labelled German romanticism as trauerspiel is because by labelling and fixing it, he pins down that as a thought idea; a political and cultural thought idea and in so doing, almost ends it – closes the curtains on his theatre, if you like, in order to allow for a free space stage for the idea of doing that to happen again. Does that make
sense?

GB It does when you include language.

JG I pinned it down to the use of language, yes.

GB These are people that started to come to terms with the sort of linguistic terms, so to speak; so they are becoming more aware of the fact that we are conditioned by language. That we are limited in terms of what we can say about that language and what we can use. And I think that we’re going through that period historically where that becomes central to
the debate about what can possibly be said, so that the drama, the theatre, is played out around language.

JG I also think by calling it thought as idea he opens up a space with that language to allow for interpretations that are more allegorical, in the sense that they are less fixed by the cultural and political norms of that period. It’s like he uses the language to both fix and liberate; by fixing it he liberates that space for allegory and idea. In fact he is talked about alongside Vidler in terms of that creating of that space; that spatial anxiety for an uncertainty and an instability as a result of… as a result of what? Tying off, cutting loose – it’s almost like he cuts loose and says; that’s fixed in that German romanticism and it failed and the whole allegory of that failure and the tragedy of it he re-pictures in modernism, he re-pictures elsewhere but the playout of it isn’t exactly the same. But by tying it off and cutting it loose as style and how it failed, these are pockets – they overlap but they’re not the same. I think that’s how he starts talking about simultaneity in that chapter as well.

MB So allegory there could almost be contrasted with Hegel’s idea in so far as allegory as a double story; as a twice told tale is a story in complete tension or continuing tension that

is not resolved. Would that be a legitimate contrast do you think, to make between Hegel’s
idea of resolution which moves things on, and someone like Benjamin who talks about allegory as a sustained tension?

GB I think there is a clear difference there but you have to remember that Hegel almost is aware of his own failure; he posits this viewpoint of ‘we move on’ to this idea of wholeness. We have this philosophy replacing art at a high level but then you get the sense that he doesn’t know where to go from there, because he’s heading towards some wholeness which is always brought back by his other direction which is the groundedness in history, the groundedness in materiality.

JG Does he almost epitomise then, that very allegory that Benjamin then… his whole actual structure and thought process as himself is almost Benjamin is seeing that within Hegel and actually almost pitting the allegory as Hegel.

GB You could almost say the hindsight of history; that what Benjamin is able to do is look back at Hegel and become aware of his dilemma. Perhaps a lot of these people are doing that – they’re seeing Hegel’s dilemma and from that dilemma opening out different ways of answering that dilemma. That’s why I think duality occurs so much in the centre of so many of these responses to thinking about the end of art.

MB We came across an interesting allegory in the Holderlin poem. The idea that the poem The Voice of the People was sort of a repetition or a restaging of one tragedy or one drama in a later one, a bit like the way that the New Testament is an allegory of the Old Testament. So allegory is sort of spread across time… not so much continuity but stages that are repeated. I think the difference between continuity and repetition is one that features in a lot of things that we’ve been looking at.

JG But is it the structure that is repeated? The style and form of it, the materiality clearly isn’t. Can we equate that to how Benjamin talks about the reproduction of the reproduction? That that whole allegorical thinking is reproduced, it is revisited, it is restaged, but in its form, its vision, its materiality; it does actually appear differently. Therefore it could be said that it’s the death of art in one sense because it’s repetitious but it’s not the death of art because its form is still unstable.

GB In the middle of that there’s always that sort of sense of the striving for the other, the striving for that wholeness or whatever it is. In Benjamin perhaps that starts to come out as the aura; that he starts to see that as a necessary part of the human condition that we want to place that type of value on something. At the centre perhaps of that whole thing of commodity exchange is a similar sort of problem that we have.

RM Well aura is the fetish isn’t it, that’s what Benjamin is talking about and that gets in the way of direct human experience, it replaces it. I’m interested just going back to something that you said Jo, because obviously wanting to think about this from an Adornian perspective and seeing as though we’re talking about aura now; the reproduction of the reproduction – obviously under Benjamin the classic from The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction he would say that the aura with us. Adorno would view that, without wanting to use this word too lightly, tragic. Benjamin would view it as emancipatory – and is this what you mean by leading to a new beginning? The shrivelling of aura allows you to recontextualise the reproduction and bring it into different spheres.

JG Absolutely, it lifts it out and suspends it above that historicity and its original connections and that’s what he releases as a new beginning and he liberates and almost the reproduction of the reproduction actually recreates a new space.

RM Yes, and you see for Adorno it’s just one further alienated remove from direct human sensuous activity as such, and I think that’s why they had that famous disagreement. I’ve never quite decided which is the correct response actually.

GB It’s interesting in relation to that, because George Steiner was quite interested in this. He talked about this whole thing that there was a wonderful moment where all of us after going through that process of awareness where all these sort of movements towards something bigger or whatever… you have to come back to going there is a reality out there and you have to strip that away. There is something more grand about that material reality than there is actually about that thing that we all want; the big other. We have to overcome the sense of the big other in order to live the life of now. If we don’t live the life of now, we’re sort of avoiding reality.

JG Benjamin says something similar, he calls that history the historical shadows and he talks about that place of reproduction; a mirror world, and that there’s an infinity with mirrors; when you bounce them off each other there’s an infinity that evolves out of them and he talks about that reproduction of the reproduction as that mirror world and the history and our understanding of style and form and that place in a particular time period as that shadow. Which I think is quite an interesting jump across to Derrida and hauntology, that history itself is a spectre and a shadow and it casts a certain shadow; a stylised shadow; a characterised shadow that is written by politics, bourgeois, cultural aspects… by pulling the curtain down and putting that on a stage, he then allows this mirror world for us to explore in a new dimension. I’m not sure that any of us really grasp that, I certainly don’t! Once you start thinking of it like that it becomes very exciting.

MB Well commodity fetish is a good example of the spectre in that it is both alive and dead
at the same time.

GB There’s also that thing of whether the way that we interpret life is something that we can resolve through rational thinking, or whether it’s an emotional dilemma. I think this is a crux here because images like the shadow presuppose that we are attuned to an emotional understanding of a rational response, and again that becomes another duality.

JG But then some of Benjamin’s work does actually rest on the cognitive processes that Freud did use to do with dreamscape and that use of the phantasm – he did allegorise all of that and he did ground himself in some of Freud’s cognitive processes. That rationalising of the conscious and unconscious he did use, and he goes on to use throughout his work. I was saying earlier; it’s like The Origin of the German Mourning Play and trauerspiel is the beginning of his vision of this stage and this theatre, whereas the arcades project at the end of his life latterly really visualises his struggle of processes and ideas as allegory and he brings in that spatial anxiety of architecture, that spatial anxiety of time, that idea of monument and ruin and all those aspects. When I think of it like that, it’s no wonder it took so long to write and that it was never finished! Because actually it encompasses many of the things that we’re talking about in all of that, including even, I don’t think Benjamin ever
gets to where Holderlin is with poetry but there is a sense of a poetic language in the visual stimuli that Benjamin uses as allegory and it’s like he never quite got to what Holderlin arrived at, which is perhaps what you’re saying about this resolution of the emotional as well…

GB What I would say to that is that Freud’s response is a rational response to an emotional dilemma, while Holderlin’s is actually an emotional response to the rational dilemma.

JG But then doesn’t he resolve Hegel’s failure?

GB I think what we do is we play out in tragedy, each time, Hegel’s failure.

MB I think one of the interesting things about what’s coming out in the way that you’re discussing this, is that for Hegel of course, art is left behind in favour of philosophy, and philosophy has to be rational. But for Benjamin, as you’re describing his work, and for Nietzsche it’s more of a philosophical continuation of art, rather than art into philosophy. I think that makes room for a discussion of tragedy as well; of course there is in a sense a philosophy of tragedy and I think Holderlin is a deeply philosophical poet, and that’s certainly Hegel’s perspective on it. I just thought I would throw in at this particular juncture
an interesting remark from Geulen’s book where she says, “tragedy is afterall that genre in which death is meaningful and meaningless and the same time” and I think that seems to be a very telling thing to say. It’s obviously paradoxical but it highlights the fact that for the Greeks, death was sheer finality; it had no other side to it as it were. But at the same we can’t accept that so we’re caught in a kind of double bind of believing in something, and believing that it’s not the case at the same time. That again comes across as like the allegorical in the sense that it is a thing in tension rather than a thing in resolution.

RM That’s interesting; that’s quite relevant to Adorno’s notion of autonomy, just going back a bit obviously the standard, orthodox Marxist perspective is that with the rise of capitalism, the rise of the market, art is lost; art ends there and gets more and more degraded as capitalism gets more and more sophisticated. Adorno in his notion of autonomy knows this to be the case; knows almost that autonomy is, as a materialist, that autonomy is impossible. It’s impossible to step outside of the market, to step outside of the social system you’re born into, but you must strive for that anyway in order to have any truth content to what you produce but there is always that dialectical tension.

MB Is it a continuing tension rather than a resolution?

RM It’s a continuing tension that’s central to all of the negative dialectics that that is never resolved. It’s exactly the opposite of Hegel actually that some synthesis is achieved. Actually you’re in an impasse with these two things constantly negating each other and held, in almost like a co-dependence, and co-dependence with its negative connotations, rather than a synthesis.

MB Is that a kind of idea, or an understanding which then puts the receiver of that idea in a position of action? That one has to act, in the face of that?

RM That’s interesting, because throughout all of Adorno’s work actually – he was criticised
in ’68 for not actually having what those ‘soixante-huiters’ would call a praxis – he wasn’t on
the barricades as it were. But he said that his praxis was remaining as uncorrupted by the
social system as possible through thought; his writing was his kind of praxis. But it’s not a
philosophy of action as is inscribed on Marx’s tomb; it’s not that the point is to change it. It’s
almost a strange deadlock until you’re waiting for the revolution to come; emancipation only
comes with a revolutionary change in the social base but it doesn’t give you a direct route to

achieve it. Which again is this peculiar tension that exists.

GB That’s a very old dialectic; the difference between acceptance or struggle goes right
back. The interesting thing that I was looking at in terms of Hegel was that he was very
interested in Luther… Through Luther you get this struggle obviously in the way that you
position yourself in relation to the Catholic Church – you develop a struggle within that. But
the two strands of Christian debate: one is to struggle to sort out, get rid of all the crap, let’s
use rationality to get there, to define a purpose; but you’ve got another strand, that Meister
Eckhart type of strand, which is actually their acceptance, that acceptance of duality. You
could say it’s more the Buddhist strand of the Christian tradition. So you’ve got these two
strands; one which you could say ends up in dialectical materialism and the idea of action,
and another one that says actually we can overcome all this stuff in the world as long as we
just, in the acceptance of it, somewhere understand it. And that understanding transcends
the need for action.

RM Yes, that’s interesting Garry. Definitely in Adorno, as I mentioned in the sort of
preamble, for Adorno what the radical thinker is left with is; his task, is to merely cut
through the veil of reification to expose fetishism where it exists and waiting for that to turn
into action.

GB But what’s interesting in relation to that is how many Buddhists light the centre of radical
change. If we look at some of the changes in South-East Asia, it’s often been Buddhist priests
that are at the centre of revolt in terms of the powers that be; making very dramatic stances
like burning themselves in public.

RM It’s the classic contrast in terms of protest between non-participation and direct action
that you still find today.

TP I don’t think that the Geulen text ever deals with some of the issues that you’re
discussing; I think it exists within a layer of theory – it exists as theoretically possible and I
think that duality that you’re talking about; it’s the maintenance of those two opposites that
keeps the system in place. I think the end of art as idea needs to be maintained. The later
sections of the Geulen text deal with the perpetuation of the end of art as idea, they don’t
deal with the coupling of the end of art with an event; they deal with the separation of the
end of art from the possibility of an event – that’s what gives it life.

JG I think that links with Benjamin as well because he restages things as drama and he
almost creates a staging for action to take place. In fact I think he’s almost pre-empting
the need for encounter to engage with, not necessarily this acceptance or struggle but
something in between to encounter what is; to encounter what is of the now in that space,
in that stage, in that time free from both the historicity of what’s gone before and liberating
from a context in order to create that beginning.

MB It’s a very peculiar beginning isn’t it, because the word that we’ve not yet touched on is
rumour. Geulen’s book is called ‘Readings in a rumour after Hegel’. A rumour, like a myth,
is something that has no particular beginning. It’s somehow an accepted thing en route as it
were– permanently on en route like a river in a sense.

JG But doesn’t that support what Tom was saying about that mainstream – about it having
to be sustained within, well say, the river; the stream of cultural dialect.
RM You see this is really interesting going back to Adorno because the one reading that

Geulen introduces of Adorno’s text which I suppose as an orthodox Marxist I never picked
up on; she introduces the idea that actually Adorno’s writing is in some way a parody of
the end. Its apocalyptic tone is an invention, in some way performative. Which leads me
to another point I wanted to raise here; going back to what I said before about Adorno
maybe not suggesting any kind of praxis, any kind of concrete programme out of this – it’s
just bleak, it is just the apocalypse. I think in assigning an apocalypse, in assigning the end
of human culture, Adorno needs to assign an origin and this brings me back to Derrida and
to make that origin seem more authentic and that origin is pure human use value, pure un-
alienated, pre-capitalist society, maybe he has to make the apocalypse – the end – seem
more dramatic to make that origin seem more authentic. That’s not in Geulen but that’s
something that I’m starting to think about from Geulen.

TP That’s quite like what Garry was talking about earlier about death defining life, but I think
in Geulen, in the last chapters she talks about the river in Holderlin and she uses the end –
it’s an attempt to establish the meaning of the present which does draw from the end so it
draws from the apocalypse or death or whatever Richard and Garry were talking about but
it also draws from the source of the river. So an understanding of the present has to draw
from two directions; the present exists between something – it doesn’t exist in relation to an
end, it exists in relation to both end and beginning.

RM This is close to Derrida’s notion of hauntology I think… it seems throughout every single
bit of Marxist aesthetic theory; they all want to assign an end. It seems to be necessary
to assign that end to imagine a fictitious utopian origin and this is something Derrida
deconstructs immaculately in the end of Specters of Marx – that notion that there once was
a pure society, a pure idea of human use value without exchange outside of the market is
itself phantasmagorical – it is an invention, it is fictive.

MB And also a kind of rumour, because I keep thinking these questions keep coming back
to the idea of perpetual repetition. We’re always talking about a simulacrum of an idea and
I think the end of art – I can see now why Geulen used that word. When we began talking
about this topic, we inevitably thought of the end of art as something that could be posited
at a certain date because we think in terms of dates going from one year to another to
another – and if there is something called the end of art it must have happened some time.
What we seem to be gravitating towards is the idea that the end of art, as a rumour or as a
simulacrum, is something that cannot occur at any one time. I suppose if we think of it this
way, one of the ideas that we come up against in Geulen’s writing is that the moment of
the end of art, let’s say for the sake of argument that it was Hegel’s own moment in history
where he sees art displayed in museums – therefore inauthentic in itself – that moment also
coincides with the moment that art is studied. When it becomes studied it becomes created
retrospectively, that those things that were called art previously…

RM What Adorno would call the administration as opposed… the direct opposition to
culture…

GB There’s also another side of rumour which also in normal layman’s parlance is called
gossip; tickle-tackle as it would be in the Midlands. The thing about that is that is leads very
quickly to a false consciousness; it leads very, very quickly to ‘we think this is going on’ –
it’s spread by gossip and yet it’s not founded in anything. That type of false consciousness;
therefore you could mirror that with certain aspects of theory that are tickle-tackle, that are
actually almost like theory as gossip. So many of these issues develop by people conversing
around the point and you get further and further away from reality; you get further and

further away from material practice.

TP I saw the use of rumour as some kind of acknowledgement of a dislocation between an
event and the language of an event that follows it. So in a sense the imprecision of language
or the failure of language is an inability to replicate or document an event, and the further
from that event, the more space exists between the language that describes it and the thing
that happened. So rumour for me, in my reading of Geulen, was that acknowledgment of a
space, or an inaccuracy of language.

JG I think she was hinting at that through Nietzsche as well, because of the tragedy of
the tragedy and she arrives at the end of that chapter calling that parody almost the attic
comedy – the comic tragedy. So that the tragedy of the tragedy isn’t just the initial mourning
of a tragedy, the tragedy becomes through rumour sort of comical and continues to be
parodied and inaccurate and then suspended and out of joint?

TP It attains a life of its own doesn’t it? Irrespective of any link with history. It attains a life
within discourse which is unsatisfactory to some but I think that’s what the Geulen text is
pointing towards especially through Holderlin in the last chapter.

JG I think Nietzsche being so tragic and final in that sense is the funniest out of this chapter
because it arrives at the most comical; he does almost have the last laugh with it.

GB It’s interesting as you move through that that we move towards poetry and that poetry
then becomes a model for an ability to actually reconcile these different elements. It can
accept allegory as part of its form, but its own form itself is always a duality. So as a way
of understanding, through language, the dilemma it perhaps sort of puts forward the
limitations of philosophical discourse. Going back to Derrida, he often in order to answer
his points goes back to Shakespeare. It’s the poetry of Shakespeare that allows him to
understand the nature of tragedy and through that particular poetic language, in its own
structures allows for duality. The problem with prose is it has a linear construction which
is always looking for an end while poetry itself is able to cope with the perplexity of both
emotion and logic.

JG Does that also link back then to Tom’s description of the present in terms of it being
a space that uses the past and links to the future; it can’t be just the present in isolation.
Perhaps poetry allows to take in the language of the now but also to recapture and use the
allegories of the past, the narrative of the past…

GB I think that links very closely to Yates. Yates’s issue of when asked about how he read
that poem; “I made it out of a mouthful of air”. I made it out of its becoming, which is now,
but actually it’s also history because my moment of now is my memories of all the other
poetry I’ve read that goes behind my mouth as I open it.

TP I think that the end of art as a statement or an idea is a poetic one; I don’t think it’s ever
expected to chart a series of events. In the same way as the river – the meaning of the river
– has to draw from its source and its destination I was thinking that the end of art as thesis
draws from Hegel as its source and draws from the fabled end of art as a destination, and
in so doing acquires the meaning that it has. But that perpetual meaning doesn’t lead to an
event, it doesn’t chart an event; it doesn’t document a thing in a sense.

MB It’s very interesting isn’t it, because it’s almost as though we are participating in Hegel’s

rumour by discussing this, that we are somehow allegorising what he’s already started
off or what he has not necessarily started off himself but somehow put his finger on, in a
way. We’re not talking about Hegel or anyone else in the past, that we are actually sort of
participating in re-describing that past in the actual act of discussing it.

TP Maybe we could also separate Hegel from the people who followed Hegel because
they’re interpreters of Hegel; they have Hegel as a starting point.

GB But then Hegel himself is an interpreter of other people. When he talks about
relationships between Goethe and Kant, both signifying for him two different Germanic
traditions in terms of a way of understanding the world. You get the sense that what Hegel’s
trying to do is reconcile them! How do I understand Kant, but at the same time how do I
understand Goethe? They both threaten him and yet they both at the same they support
where he is. At the same time in the middle of that there is Luther. All of which are writing
in the German language, all of which are contributing to the idea of how German thought
is constructing a view of the world, and we’ve got to remember going back to nationalist
politics at the time, the way the German nation itself was forming itself into a shape and
that continuation politically, eventually would become Hitler and the Third Reich.

JG I remember an artist describing to me how one of his rules for making art was to take the
chance occurrence that it occurred in his previous piece of work on into his next piece and
I think there is an element with all of these that there is a sense of a series of inter-collated
circles. They’re overlapping and interlocking at various points and they’re not linear, they’re
not necessarily linear time-based. They are linked and inter-collating at the point of idea,
at the point of concept. I think that is very interesting about what Geulen does with this
book because the order that she has put those authors in is not even to do with that linear
sense of time. It is to do with a series of turning points, or seems to be to do with a series of
turning points of understanding the materiality in history, the visual form, the visual culture.
It’s a series of turning points in our understanding of endism.

MB That’s actually really interesting. The Nietzsche chapter is called ‘Nietzsche’s retrograde
motion’ and there is a sense that Nietzsche and Holderlin do make this point of turning back,
wherein Holderlin in the Voice of the People poem he talks about the failure of the town
by the Xanthos that saw itself as somehow repeating the past as an event. But then the
remedy to that for Holderlin is the position of poet that interprets that event or interprets
that allegory so that interpretation is a way not of passing on to a moment of the future but
a way of looking back. Roughly speaking that’s exactly what Nietzsche does… the retrograde
movement in Nietzsche is a way of understanding tragedy as a tragedy of a tragedy in a
sense that it’s an interpretation of the death of tragedy rather than a repetition of it in
terms of an event. It was Holderlin who cautioned against the forming German nation of
the Volk at the time of seeing itself as Greek, seeing themselves as latter-day Greeks and
he cautioned that in his decline of the fatherland essay. For me that makes an interesting
way of summing up almost the end of art as a rumour; that it’s not going to happen, or has
happened, but is always continually in a gap between those two things, a little bit like the
river I suppose in a sense.

GB So it is always repeated isn’t it? For somebody the dawn tomorrow is going to be their
first dawn they will ever experience, for many other people they will have seen that dawn
many times before and for some people it will be the last one they will see. That cyclic
tradition is actually at the core of so many of our religions, so many of our ways of thinking.
Our own awareness of a start and an end is similar to nature where we grow plants and they

come to an end, winter comes and we replant the seeds… all of those cyclical moments are
a part of some sort of phenomenologically understood, embodied experience as well as it
being an intellectual one.

JG I think that word experience is crucial in what you’ve just said because I do relate that to
how Benjamin uses theatre. Theatre as experience – it’s not theatre about just what’s on
the stage – it is about whether those people in the audience are objective or subjective in
order of their own cultural experience and he does question whether we can actually step
outside of that subjectivity in our own time. I think your reference to experience there is
quite interesting because if we label it as experience and we label it as a possible repetition
of, there is a closing and understanding of it, closing and beginning, closing and beginning;
and understanding that it is cyclical.

GB Which is very interesting in relation to Benjamin’s final monument. Have you ever been
to Benjamin’s final monument which is right on the coast? You have this experience of a
tunnel that you go in that then extends itself over the cliff top. You go through that and it
really is quite spectacular. You come to the end and you look out to this moment of the cliff
top over the sea which is sheer experience, it’s sheer phenomenal experience.

MB I wonder if I could just chip in at that point. Shouldn’t we critique that idea of sheer
experience? If, as you were saying before, someone has a first dawn. Well, they don’t have a
first dawn until they’ve had a second one and experience is out of joint, it’s time out of joint.
It’s not something that you grasp in the immediate present. I think that is why the end of art
as a topic is so interesting because it is also out of joint.

JG Unless you grasp it as an experience at the very end of something else, and where you’d
be able to recognise it as a dawning of a new experience.

RM That’s right – under the classic Marxist reading of alienated art supposing that there was
once art; that relies on retrospective labelling of what they were doing as pure art. Which
is not actually quite what Marx says in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts but
for man under primitive communism everything was aesthetic; every single aspect of life –
walking through the woods, picking up a stick… the idea to try and find art seems to be to
apply retrospectively the principles of classification to something that was never there. This
pure origin that Derrida is attacking in the Specters of Marx.

GB But that’s the mourning isn’t it – you’re actually mourning that experience in some way
because of that linguistic term we never really had any unmediated experience outside of
language and its structures, and there is a mourning of that.

RM But that’s not necessarily art is it?

GB No…

TP I think Mike’s tragedy of tragedy is interesting because I think that is way of dislocating
language from event – it is language of language of event. There’s a stage removed from
event that can then be seen as tragedy, or as tragic. That in a sense is a way of freeing the
end of art thesis itself and having it become endless and having it become possibly a rumour
of itself.

JG I agree and I think it’s why Geulen also put Benjamin between Nietzsche and Heidegger

there because she does align Benjamin with Nietzsche on that aspect that it’s a use of
language that defines that endism, but it’s the encounter that Benjamin touches upon in
the staging that links so nicely in to Heidegger that she then goes on to in the next chapter
and that circulatory thinking that we were talking about that before appears so frequently in
Heidegger.

TP Isn’t it an attempting to free language of its historicism in some way?

JG Yes – so it becomes just idea, but Benjamin sees idea as a structure; as a map; a
constellation, if you like, that is suspended above that historicity. It can link into it but it is
not its literal counterpart.

TP Language isn’t a tracing of events; it doesn’t document it in that sense. It sits above it but
it’s free flowing – it can move above events.

GB But if art is going to renew itself, it sometimes has to free itself of its trap within
language because all it will to do is repeat itself endlessly through the structures of the
language that it uses to articulate itself.

JG Which maybe makes a case for that reproduction of the reproduction and out of context
that we often criticise that lack of context so much but sometimes if you have established
that context, to then remove it from context there is a sense of liberation that is occurring
there rather than the entrapment of that language.

GB And as people that deal with art and design pedagogy…

JG This is really interesting!

RM I was wondering if we could bring this back to pedagogy maybe now to almost
summarise…

GB We need, as pedagogy practitioners, to recognise that. Our job perhaps is therefore
to question those languages and the acceptance of the way that practice is understood
so that when students are developing a practice they have levers for change, they have
levers for ways of trying to articulate their experience of the world that are not coloured
by acceptance of the dominant practitioners of the time, which are often of course led by
capitalist philosophy.

RM Well you’re talking about ideology there Garry aren’t you… the task for us as educators
is to smash ideology; not just unpick and interpret it but to find ways in which students can
change that.

TP But it also problematises the whole linkage of theory and practice in some sense… in the
assumption that theory arises out of practice, or impinges upon practice, or that practice is a
justification of theory. If we think of practice as event, and think of theory as language of an
event and the relationship that I described earlier could be seen to exist between the two…

RM Of course for a Marxist, praxis is what we’re aiming for which is the unity of thought and
action.

GB And between the two the one big issue is just awareness and that is what you are trying

to grow within, I would have thought, our student body. A sense of awareness of possibility.
Without that awareness of possibility what you get is poor, fake and repetition which I think
is what Benjamin somewhere was talking about.

RM Of course we are in a situation now where there is no government funding for art
education. Students will be paying £9000 – art education has been commodified and the
relationship between student and teacher has fundamentally shifted, possibly forever. I
don’t know if that means the end of art education, in tandem with the end of art?

MB That’s an interesting problem isn’t it? For a number of decades now we’ve lived in the
period of institutional critique and I think it’s long been understood since Bill Reading’s
famous book that universities are kind of like transnational companies so we’ve all been in…

RM Education factories!

MB We’ve all been in that commodity – there never was any use value, sort of purity…

RM Again that brings us back to Derrida doesn’t it? It’s doubtful whether any pure, utopian,
art academy ever existed! We like to think of maybe the ‘60s as these kind of free spaces but
of course they weren’t.

MB I wonder whether the implications of some of the things we’ve been saying can be
brought to bear on what we might call the teaching studio, at least in terms of art, not
necessarily in terms of design but in terms of art. I have a pet theory that what goes on in
the art studio today, or always has, is a kind of double-bind in the sense that art as we’ve
sometimes been told by people like James Elkins is unteachable – cannot be taught – but at
the same time must be taught. It almost makes an allegory of the quote that I mentioned
before “tragedy is after all that genre in which death is meaningful and meaningless at the
same time”, could be that genre in which art teaching is meaningful and meaningless at the
same time!

TP We could move it right back to Jo’s point at the beginning of the discussion with idea
– that we could have an idea of art as idea and we could have art as thing. In some sense
those things are irresolvable.

GB Which is interesting in terms of that way that some institutions put formative practice
at the centre of their understanding of what goes on. So in some ways one could say that
an understanding of one’s role within a tragedy and of how you actually play it out is more
essential than actually a logical understanding of where you are, or even a philosophical
understanding of where you are – it is all in fact just something we play out.

JG I think it is being prepared to take the encounter and be the actor on a stage and actually
going through a series of endings. No practitioner actually goes through a process without
coming to endings within their own practice. It’s almost their awareness of those endings
– we’re saying there’s a problem with theory and practice – but actually they can only
become aware of those endings within their practice if they have the language with which
to begin to define that as repetitious, that as parody… So it’s almost maybe there’s a sense
where that counter play in the practitioners studio is there; that actually as much as they
are trying to become, or make, or create something new that they are in at the same time
ending, and that they have to go through that process of ending in order to open up the
possibility and there is no chance of finding that possibility unless they place themselves in

the performative, risk taking, unstable, uncertain, exposure of that practice.

TP I was just thinking about Heidegger’s notion of clearing – he has this idea of a clearing
and it’s a space in which being is allowed to show up in its being, or as being. In a sense that
parallels my conception of the studio as that place in which things are allowed to exist as the
things that they exist as, or in the form that they exist.

GB Except the studio itself is just so occluded by myths of what the studio…

JG It is, yes, it comes back to an institutional…

RM It’s a space of ideology…

MB There wouldn’t be a notion of studio as studio within Heidegger

JG They release that uncoupling of language again, yes

MB I think you said earlier on, or in your notes, that the clearing for Heidegger was like the
river; the source and the destination and the moment and the flux. Could you enlarge on
that?

TP I’ll try to…

MB I mean, is there a sense in which… because I think it would be really interesting to see
the teaching studio in terms of Holderlin’s river.

TP This was going back to Holderlin’s river, and it was Geulen’s analysis of the river. I said
that it could be seen to parallel history in the sense that to Holderlin, events seem held
between and defined by origin and destination. I used Heidegger’s clearing; I used that
double projection as something that was close to Heidegger’s clearing that allowed for
a space. It was an infinitesimally thin space but it was a space or a butting of source and
destination that in Heideggerian terms could be called a clearing. It actually wasn’t a space
at all, it wasn’t a space in a location; it was a meeting of two other things.

MB Sort of an overlap, an imbrication of two things.

RM In a peculiar way for me the art institution, the art academy, the studio is almost like for
Hegel when the museum signifies the death of art in the same way. This institutionalisation
of art within the academy becomes the death of art in its own way. Paradoxically though I’m
an art educator, and I go on being that.

MB A double-bind.

GB Going back to the master/slave dialectic, which I think this is very much about what that
is. We switch roles, and what we do is become aware that as one form of ideology takes
over it leaves a space underneath it for its attack, for its reversal. In some ways what we
remind the students of is that although we are part of the master in terms of that dialectic
we are also as our own masters we have our frailties, we have our oppositions. Though we
are seen in one way as teachers we are also very aware that we stand for something that is
the opposite of what we are.

RM That’s very interesting Garry.

MB We’ve talked about the teaching studio but we haven’t talked about the idea of teaching
the history of art or the history of design, certainly the history of art.

JG I was just going to come to that.

RM The stuff of rust and filing cabinets…

JG You alluded to it when you responded to my synopsis about… we’ve got Benjamin’s
trauerspiel here at the beginning when he was first attempting to be a professor; that was
his professorship work; that was him entering into the academy. By the time he gets into the
arcades project he’s already firmly established this idea of the phantasm and of this shadow
play and he uses all that materiality of 19th to 20th century to illuminate that but he uses
what is within our own time to illuminate the structure of what is really going on. I think
there’s an element where we as art educators have to almost take on a bit of that approach.
We use those allegories and that understanding and that labelling and that visual language
in order to identify these myths and phantasms that do end up as ruins – and monumental
ruins.

GB So therefore, shouldn’t we start our first lecture with the fact that art is dead?!

JG Very good point because then you allow the practitioner to walk amongst the ruins as
ruins, to appreciate them monumentally; to appreciate them as myth, as phantasms, as a
structure but also to encounter the space between. To actually look at the spaces between
language and materiality, to look at the spaces between institution and their sense of being
in the studio.

RM But that’s not how art history works though is it?

JG No…!

RM Art history is dominated largely by a particular kind of right-wing thought. It’s about the
assignation of fictive origins as I’ve said before… phantasmagorical ends, just like all history
is played out to the tunes of the ruling class. Eventually these fictive origins and ends achieve
a consensus and then become fact and then become history.

TP In a sense art history is just history; it’s not history of art, it’s just adding to what history
is.

MB It’s history with pictures.

JG That’s why I like the use of the word phantasm because phantasm in itself is illusory, it is
illusion. It’s not real, it’s not fact; it is interpreted, it is part of a narrative.

RM So the primary task of us as educators is to make students realise that – to pick through
reification and ideology.

TP Or we could consider teaching a rumour of art history, or a rumour of art. If we declare
art dead at the beginning of a lecture series we can then talk about the rumours of it.

GB And in fact perhaps we end up doing is writing within in the margins a type of annotated
practice.

TP But do we acknowledge that there’s something outside of the history that we can’t
teach?

JG Yes and that’s their place to be in it and to and explore it – that’s their possibility and by
presenting it in that way as possibility, how much more exciting for them?

TP It’s like Wittgenstein’s unsayable – it’s beyond the pale!

JG That was bloody brilliant!

ROUNDTABLE TOPICS

The thematic link between Specters of Marx and The End of Art was ‘endism’ – the view that political, cultural, religious institutions can come to an end. Derrida’s opponent was Fukuyama whose book The End of History and the Last Man takes its premise from an Hegelian view of history. Likewise in Geulen’s book the ‘rumour’ that is the end of art begins with Hegel’s famous thesis.
But it soon became clear that in discussing versions of the end of art we were simultaneously discussing tragedy. With hindsight this is no surprise when we learn that Hegel developed his dialectic whilst formulating an idea of tragedy. ‘For Hegel tragedy is the conflict of two substantive positions, each of which is justified, yet each of which is wrong to the extent that it fails either to recognize the validity of the other position or to grant it its moment of truth; the conflict can be resolved only with the fall of the hero...Hegelian tragedy is the inevitable consequence of the absolute realizing itself in history.’ (Mark Roche) Where Antigone was the much cited example in Geulen’s account, Derrida uses Hamlet to read Marx and critique Fukuyama. In both cases and for both scenarios ‘the time is out of joint’.
Why does tragedy serve as a paradigm of temporality in endism? And, outside of getting students to read these two books, can it be taught: is there a tragedy of the teaching studio?

Michael Belshaw



Tragedy and Trauerspiel – Synopsis for Roundtable discussion Draft
The distinction in the use of language between tragedy and Trauerspiel emphasizes a closure to historicity and in so doing opens up the dialogue over thought as ‘Idea’. He stages allegory in the process of asking whether we can be outside of our history and without subjectivity.

Guelan aligns him with Nietzsche due to language and development of idea and next to Heidegger due to circulatory thinking.

The circles of thinking are to do with allegory. In fact he uses theatre as staging of this thinking. A series of intercalated circles that reveal the overlap of allegories out of time but over a period of time hence Baroque, German Romanticism to modernism. These were also an end of the idea i.e. perfection, therefore Benjamin sets a stage for a more unstable future (Vidler on Baroque and Interpreting the Void). He distinctly makes possibility of fragmentation by his use of language and allegory. Indeed he introduces an anesthetisation of everyday life. By framing he creates distinction and closed ends within art and ultimately makes possible endisms resulting into beginnings. He places uncertainty centre stage.

These allegories are tragic in term of the Derridean nature of hauntology. They echo the same demise and act as memory. They are allegorised at the point of their demise clarifying them at the point of closure. Artaud is relevant here in focussing on this aspect of cruelty the repetitious nature endings and endings of theatre.

Benjamin’s Trauerspiel was to close the event and create a stage for endism at the point of beginning. In so doing he sets a stage for ‘Idea’ outside of historicity and brings the thought/idea to our attention. i.e. reproduction of the reproduction is the circular endings simultaneous with beginnings – thought = ‘idea’.

Joanna Geldard


The Perpetual Present: The End of Art as an Uncoupling of Discourse from History?
Hölderlin’s understanding of the river is key. When Geulen writes that Heidegger’s interest in the river in Hölderlin’s poem stems from its double-directedness, she does not mean to imply that it flows both ways. Hölderlin’s description of the river does not emphasise direction as such (or at least directedness that points to the meaning of the river being determined by its final resting place). Instead, the meaning/being of the river in/as the present draws from both its source (“far away”) and its destination (“seaward”), which in turn establishes it as river.
In drawing from both source and destination, Hölderlin maintains the river as, in essence, a static thing in perpetual flux—the river (as river) can never reach its end, nor can we ever witness its beginning. More importantly, in Geulen’s analysis, the river can be seen to parallel history in the sense that, to Hölderlin, events seem held between (and defined by) origin and destination. This alignment or double projection appears close to Heidegger’s clearing (the space in which being shows up as being).
However, the situation is made more complex by language (after all, the end of art is a written thesis). Here, Geulen alludes to a problem that arises out of the distance that exists between ‘event’ and ‘language of event’. The assumption that language ‘refers to’ or ‘arises out of’ allows language to follow or trail, and to trace a lineage of, what will become through language, sequential, ordered events—language plots history. Or, to put it another way, history is, here, seen to underpin, author and legitimate the language which follows it and establishes it as history.
If Hegel is (or his interpreters are) mistaken, it is in naturalising this linkage. The end of art, therefore, appears as language of an event which has not existed, nor ever can exist if the end of art is to have meaning. This paradox relieves language of historicism, and points to Hölderlin’s reliance on rumour and legend. Rumour thus serves as an acknowledgment of an irresolvable dislocation between event and language of event, and as an explanation of what it is that fills the gap.
If event (river) is requiring of origin and destination to establish itself as river, then the end of art thesis, too, requires an origin and destination which it must maintain in order to perpetuate its existence as end of art thesis. Within German metaphysics, the end of art draws from Hegel as its source and the fabled end of art as its destination. With both ends buffered by rumour, the thesis is uncoupled from the events it is taken to chart. In so doing, the end of art attains both freedom and endlessness, and in the process becomes a rumour of itself.

Tom Palin (June, 2011)

Commodification as the end of art

Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, as Guelen recognises, proposes two ends of art. The first of these is the false demise of art that comes with the rise of capitalism and the logic of the market. For Adorno, ‘all songs have sickened’ since the emergence of bourgeois culture and art withers when governed by principles of economic rationalism. Under Capitalism art will always reflect the economic interests and mandates of the handlers that it serves. In contrast, there is the promise of a utopian end of art, under a reconciled communist society, where the pure use value of art is freed from the shackles of exchange.

Both of these ends can be seen as directly informed by the two famous, but fragmentary and passing, comments made by Marx, the only two that specifically comment on art, which subsequently came form the basis of an orthodox Marxist aesthetics developed by various writers throughout the Stalinist and Zhdanovite era. The first, in the Grundrisse, is an idealistic-utopian statement that labels Greek art as epochal and free, and all subsequent art as ‘Art Production’, that is, art co-opted to the market and corrupted by exchange. The second notion, the famous passage on Raphael from the German Ideology, points to a future communist society, where ‘there are no painters, but at most, men who, among other things, also paint’. This historically determinist notion insists that the emancipation of culture from ideology is conditional to a revolutionary change in the economic base. Until then, the philosopher’s task is merely to highlight the ‘semblance of autonomy’ in art from its ideal or utopian form.

The mystical character of the commodity undoubtedly removes art from the sphere of production into alienated production, which is in itself an end of art. However, this end suggests a beginning of art, where pure use value existed, before and outside the possibility of exchange. The purity of such a use-value, as Derrida has argued, cannot be guaranteed. The fidelity to such an origin, or beginning, could already be thought of as haunted, fictive or ideal.

Richard Miles

The Round Table

Wednesday night saw the final session of the reading group. A round table discussion was held from 5.00pm onwards lasting for approximately an hour and a half. Five of us had submitted draft ideas in written form as to from what point our conversation would be grounded, (see previous post for my own) and Michael introduced the session. For the first time we had a recording device available, this is an interesting and hopefully fruitful development, so many of the previous sessions arrived at what seemed very illuminating arguments, which were promptly forgotten as they arrived out of talking, rather than the normal textual analysis. I shall paste the other standpoints in when I have time and hopefully a copy of the transcript when it becomes available.
Everyone seemed enervated by the discussion and it really felt as if we had arrived at a positive outcome.

Hegel and the Death of God

"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.

More thoughts on Hegel

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.

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.