THE EXPERIENCE OF ART LECTURE: 14TH JANUARY 2011 THE MODERN INSTITUTE, GLASGOW
Marcus Steinweg
Diagram: Nine Theses On Art (2010)
Diagram: Nine Theses On Art (2010)
THE EXPERIENCE OF ART
The experience of art is the experience of the conditions of its possibility as much as of the affront to these conditions the work represents. The concept of art condenses the paradox of a performance that must turn against its own possibilities for the sake of the impossible as the impossible that is possible within its realm. Art is what engenders a conception of art in the assertion of works that, as they resist assimilation to what already exists, articulate themselves as affirmations of contingency, as figures of an opening toward an indeterminate or incommensurable something that marks the truth of the space of fact. I call the universe of fact the dimension of a reality overdetermined by social, political, economic, historical, cultural, biological, technological, etc. factors. It is here that the work of art fights for its autonomy, in the field of factual codification and real heteronomy—a heteronomy the work remains at risk of falling back into—: “Artworks are able to appropriate their heterogeneous element, their entwinement with society, because they are themselves always at the same time something social. Nevertheless, art’s autonomy, wrested painfully from society as well as socially derived in itself, has the potential of reversing into heteronomy; everything new is weaker than the accumulated ever-same, and it is ready to regress back into it" Theodor. W. Adorno). Art “refuses definition,” but it equally calls for one. Art hardly exists other than as the work on its concept, the work of determining what art is and ought to be. In opening up toward what it has long been embedded in, the dimension of constituted certainties and valencies, art urges toward the boundaries of the space of fact as much as that of its own concept and its previous manifestations.