THE SUBJECT OF ART 8TH LECTURE AT THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL: MAY 9, 2009 BY MARCUS STEINWEG (ABSTRACT)
THE BIJLMER SPINOZA-FESTIVAL
AN ARTWORK BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
http://www.thebijlmerspinozafestival.nl/_home/home.html
AN ARTWORK BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
http://www.thebijlmerspinozafestival.nl/_home/home.html
Perhaps there is art and philosophy only as an exaggeration, that is, as hyperbolism, as self-acceleration, as headlessness and blind excess. Perhaps this is the case because the human subject itself represents an exaggeration, a hyperbolic element. What is human being? What is philosophy? What is art? What does it mean to affirm an exaggeratedness, to undersign for its blindness, impotence and overtaxing as a subject of exaggeration? Can art and philosophy be such signatures of a subject that starts to assume responsibility for its overtaxing and its innocence and blindness? What is responsibility as excess and for the excess, for the exaggeration? What is the subject that constitutes its life out of this exaggerated responsibility?
Truth is not grounded by art and philosophy. Truth is asserted. An assertion of truth is at the same time an assertion of form. Philosophy asserts its form as the assertion of truth. Art asserts its truth as an assertion of form. There is the moment at which art and philosophy become indistinguishable. Art and philosophy constitute the alliance of a shared insistence on truth and form. This alliance is a kind of fighting brotherhood. The fighting brotherhood opposes the dictatorship of the belief in facts, the imperatives of power. The power of art and philosophy is a power which opposes the power of the universe of facts. This power is nevertheless not reactive. On the contrary, the universe of facts obliges the subjects who inhabit it to merely react. In the universe of facts, the options for making a decision are defined and prescribed. The universe of facts, the public space is the space of regulations, of the dictatorship of facts.
The art work's evidence consists in transcending its own status as document, transcending its own conditions in order to open this split or rift or gulf in relation to its times, to this universe of facts to which it never completely corresponds. Therefore, in art it is not primarily, not at first, and especially not exclusively, a matter of comprehensibility. I believe that this is not a philosophical experience, but an experience with which everyone is familiar: that we see the work of an artist whom we do not know and know (knowing, of course, is a provisional concept because it is an experience that transcends knowing) that this work hangs together. I would call this the evidence of the art work: this hanging-together which hands the subject of this experience over to a certain uneasiness because, when it starts to explain why it hangs together, it cannot find the right words. This holds also for the work of an artist whom we know very well, that there remains something which eludes and withdraws from understanding. This withdrawal, this remaining resistance is part of the art work. It can light up in its evidence without explaining itself, without being at all comprehensible. It can assert itself as absolute clarity without our being able to understand it. In art as in philosophy it is not a matter of comprehensibility, but of clarity. Clarity is a concept which I would connote with the concept of truth. The experience of a truth is the experience of a clarity, and there is no clarity which is not disturbing. The experience of a clarity is the experience of the inconsistency of my habitual realities and practices, my previous opinions and conceptions, including those about art and philosophy.