ON PHILOSOPHY & ART MARCUS STEINWEG LECTURE 17TH JANUARY 2011 ART ACADEMY REYKJAVIK (ICELAND) (LECTURE IN REYKJAVIK: ABSTRACT)
Thomas Hirschhorn's installation at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston: Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War,One Army, One Dress, 2004.
Integrated Texts by Marcus Steinweg
Integrated Texts by Marcus Steinweg
1. Philosophy exists only as an assertion. Every assertion is headless, blind and exaggerated. To assert headlessness itself demands of Philosophy a kind of breathless precision.
2. Art and philosophy know that knowledge is not everything. They know about the fragility of any knowledge. Therefore, for them, it cannot be a matter of avoiding knowledge and what can be known, as propagated by a popular anti-intellectualism, but rather, it is always a matter of extending the dimension of what can be known and of keeping it differentiated, complex. The analytical power, reflection on determinants and conditions, insight into the complexity of state of affairs, sensibility for the historical, cultural, social and economic codification of knowledge are the precondition for artistic and philosophical production, but they do not constitute any work. The work comprises the transgressing and transcending of its conditions, the corruption of its own will, the unexaminability of its origin, the illegitimacy of its appearance.
3. From the outset philosophy has caused anxiety. What caused the anxiety was the lack of anxiety, philosophy's courage, because philosophy is a movement full of risks. It is a movement of love (philía, philein) requiring courage and resolve. People have tried to subject it to ridicule. People were scared of the philosopher as the dark one (skoteinós). People mocked the philosopher because, instead of seeing what was close to hand, he only saw what was remote so that he would only fall into a well or continually stumble. People accused him of seducing the youth of Athens and brought him to trial and, occasionally, they killed him. I define philosophy as the courage not to evade the call of the great concepts: What is freedom, what is truth, what is justice, what is love, what is the human being? And how do these questions stand in relation to art and philosophy? I think that art and philosophy share this courage. Art is an assertion of form in the opening toward formlessness; philosophy is the assertion of truth within the intransparency of instituted realities. Art's assertion of form, philosophy's assertion of truth demand a confrontation with these realities without bending to them.
4. Art and philosophy exist only in autonomy and resistance to what is established. The autonomy and resistance of art and philosophy cannot be scientifically proven; they must be asserted through works eluding the dictates of provability whilst constituting the autonomy of the artwork. That work is autonomous which maintains a resistant autonomy vis-à-vis the imperatives of the Zeitgeist: the freedom of its form.
5. Art and philosophy share a kind of geometrization of the incommensurable. The assertion of form by art gives contour to formlessness. The ghostliness of the work implies that its consistency is indebted to inconsistency. To make chaos precise means to tear the consistency of the work from its invisibility and dissolution, to produce a visibility lacking any self-evidence and to defend it. Therefore the appearance of the work is a continual surprise because its evidence is of the order of the non-evident. Art exists at the moment when this appearance tears a hole in the web of facts in order to darken the evidence of instituted realities, not through obscurantism, but through clarity, through an excessive measure of evidence which blinds understanding and the senses.
6. Art and philosophy exist only in relation to that which makes every hold and every relationship insecure and impossible, interrupting them and putting them so out of relation that they have a relation only to the acosmic exterior, to the real, to uncanniness. It is as if at least this were obvious: that the subject (as well as art and philosophy) comprised a self-extension to an alienness which forces all acts and all decisions to the edge of what can be done and said, to the limit of reality itself. Once again, the subject finds itself referred to its impotence. Once again it touches and invents and grasps itself in contact with the untouchable, the impossible and ungraspable.