Art is fundamentally misunderstood precisely by the experts, the art historians and critics. Art is not about what it depicts or what it means. Art is not a riddle to be deciphered, nor is it the expression of an artistic genius that can be explained through the artist’s biography. Nor is art necessarily beautiful, or aesthetic, or sublime.
Representation
Art is not representation—that is the great misunderstanding of modernity. Only out of this misunderstanding does the avant-garde arise. Its concern was to keep inventing new forms of representation, to express new phenomena for the first time. I think of the subconscious, of the conception of four-dimensional space, synesthetic perception, functionalism, enthusiasm for technology. These and many other phenomena of the 20th century became the ‘subject’ of art. If something is the ‘subject’ of art, then art represents this ‘subject’, depicts it—so the prevailing theory of art goes. The understanding of art underlying this clings to a belief in progress, postulates an objective development of a history of art, rests on principles of rational historiography. Within a limited framework, all these approaches have a certain explanatory power. They illuminate particular aspects. But they misunderstand the nature of art.
If I go so far out on a limb and attack the prevailing art discourses of the West in a single paragraph, then of course I also have to say briefly what I would like to set against them. There are some essays by Roland Barthes, a great semiotician or semiologist and French art critic. His texts show the limits of what can be represented in art. And of course I think of Gilles Deleuze, who thought much further and more radically and characterized art as an encounter (Encounter). I associate him with a radical critique of the dogma of the representational theory of art. Art actually has nothing at all to do with representation. The idea that something stands for something else is actually absurd. It leads into all the problems of dualism, its paradoxes and pseudo-problems. A text, a picture, a composition, a play, an opera or a sculpture, even a photograph, none of them represents anything. Rather, they are very particular things in the world that make a very particular experience possible for us. The fact that they sometimes resemble other things is trivial and hardly interesting.
Encounter
When I say that art is an encounter, or makes one possible, this means that artworks are the result of a creative process. The difference between the artist as the producer of works and the viewers as their recipients is much smaller here than is generally assumed. Art is not an object of communication between artist and viewer. Nor is art a medium between a sender and a receiver. And art is not a sign that can be decoded.
Art is art. Let us try, for once, not immediately to reduce it to something. Art is brought forth and becomes part of the world. It acts, like everything else in the world. There are very different ways of acting; here I am thinking a little of Schopenhauer’s fourfold root of the principle of sufficient reason. I vary it freely: There is mechanical causal action, there is the dynamics of living, that is, biological systems, and there is social interaction as action, there is inspiration and creativity. Their ways of acting differ. I would like to claim here that they are irreducible.
Art is art. It is brought forth and stands within interrelations of action. We can encounter it. The encounter with art is not reserved for humans alone. Some animals have it too, though to a limited extent, and perhaps artificial intelligence will also make further progress here.
From Deleuze we learn that:
- the cinematograph produces and plays a film that manifests thought (Deleuze ‘Cinema’).
- for us, art is not merely like a house, but is a house. As human beings, we stand between earth and sky—the cosmos. In this tension we need a boundary, a home. We need a territory we call our own, and we must be able to leave it; we deterritorialize and reterritorialize. Art has a very essential role here. In encountering others, the earth and the cosmos, we build a house; that is the basic principle of art. We inhabit the house, visit other houses. This is of course meant both literally and metaphorically (Deleuze ‘What is Philosphy’).
- in the encounter with art, our senses merge with art itself. Our eyes, ears, senses of taste and touch vibrate on contact with vibrating art (Deleuze ‘Logic of Sensation’).
What Deleuze avoids, and only hints at in his final essay ‘Immanence: A life’, is a spiritual component. Part of our being-in-the-world is our relationship to the great questions of meaning. A life conscious of its Self—if not fully, then richly—understands itself as part of a whole. This relationship also becomes a subject in art. We can encounter the force of creation. For Aurobindo, art has the ability to foster Bhakti; that is, to be a medium of devotion—an encounter with the Divine—not in the form of a representation of the Divine as in Christianity, but as an object of meditation that, through contemplative devotion, facilitates the path of Bhakti.
I am interested in the relationship between Deleuze’s concept of art as a house and Aurobindo’s concept of art as Bhakti in the temples. There seems to me to be a parallel here. Both lead out of the impasse of representation toward a concept that does greater justice to spiritual experience.
Here is a link to a long presentation (35MB) with material on the question of why I, as an art historian, read Deleuze.
