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Consciously
or unconsciously, art constructs a picture of the world.
Philosophy constructs a picture of the picture of the world.
Joseph Beuys spoke of sculpture in terms of thinking
forms - how we mould our thoughts, or spoken forms - how
we shape our thoughts into words, or social sculpture -
how we mould and shape the world in which we live:
'SCULPTURE AS AN EVOLUTIONARY PROCESS: EVERYONE AN ARTIST'.
'My objects are to be seen as stimulants for the transformation
of the idea of sculpture...or of art in general. They should
provoke thoughts about what sculpture can be and how the
concept of sculpting can be extended to the invisible materials
used by everyone. That is why the nature of my sculpture
is not fixed and finished. Processes continue in most of
them; chemical reactions, fermentations, colour changes,
decay, drying up. Everything is in STATE OF CHANGE'.
The idea that how we shape our thoughts and words within
a social project can be called sculpture may seem the most
far-reaching abstraction but is in fact most appropriate.
It indicates that sculpture is rooted in the lived-in world,
the complex and multi-layered world of objects and physical
stuff - of things.
Tony Cragg, talks of 'these things we have chosen to call
sculpture' as existing on equal terms with every other object,
and calls on sculpture to 'admit its fraternity in the republic
of existence, where no object is a second class citizen...
Sculpture's prerogative is to confront us with the fact
of our material, physical, bodily reality, making that fact
available to thought and feeling - and making it sociable,
an open secret shared with others in a common space. When
it works the confrontation is some admixture of seduction
and violence'.
(from Tony Cragg 'Sculpture 1989-90')
Beuys thought of sculpture as a life-long process involving
everybody, through which one sought to comprehend the world
around the term 'Everyone an Artist' implied that everyone
had the innate capacity to see and make the world anew -
life as it is lived as art.
Beuys's
ideas were advanced in the spirit of the phenomenological
enquiry instigated by Edmund Husserl (German Philosopher
1859-1938)
Phenomenology derives it name from the Greek word
'phaino' (to appear), and is an attempt to construct a 'science
of appearances: of how things appear to us in their true
and original nature, before being overlaid by social and
cultural constructs. Phenomenology proposed a return to
the origins of knowledge, to what Husserl called 'the things
themselves'. He attempted to do this by examining how the
world first appears to our consciousness, and demonstrating
that the world is an experience which we live before it
becomes an object which we know. Husserl said that the world
and ones consciousness exist in relation to each other.
Not in the sense that they are distinct entities which have
attributes in common, but that they are essentially the
same entity. We exist in, and are part of, the world before
we become reflectively aware of our own existence. It is
only subsequently on the level of logic that a separation
occurs. The French psychoanalyst Jacque Lacan's so-called
Mirror Phase is derived from this idea. The Mirror-Phase
is the point at which a child first becomes aware of itself
as a conscious being distinct and separate from the world
of things around it.
The word 'logic' derives from the Greek word 'logos', and
for pre-Socratic thinkers (ie around 600 – 400BC) it
was understood not as some logical correlation between objects
as we tend to think of it now, but rather as an underlying
harmony of thinking and being. The pre-Socratic philosopher
Parmenides said 'It is the same thing to think and to be'.
In other words there is no separation between subjectivity
and objectivity. This is in direct contradiction of Rene
Descartes famous maxim which came to characterise Western
rationalist thought 'Cogito ergo sum' ( I think therefore
I am), which separates subject from object . For Decartes
reason offered an assurance to his consciousness that things
exist.
Phenomenology is in fact much closer in spirit to Eastern
philosophies which are characterised by a unifying principle.
'Zen…means that state of mind in which we are not separated
from other things, we are indeed identical with them, and
yet we retain our own individuality and personal peculiarities.As
an expression of Zen, we grasp in Haiku the inexpressible
meaning of some quite ordinary thing or fact hitherto overlooked.
It is the apprehension of a thing by a realisation of our
own essential unity with it, the word 'realisation' having
the literal meaning here of 'making real' in ourselves.
The thing perceives itself in us; we perceive it by simple
self-consciousness. The joy of the (apparent) re-union of
ourselves with things, is the happiness of being our true
selves.'
Husserl took the view that the whole of Western Philosophy
to date had served to drive an ever deeper wedge between
thinking and being, starting with Aristotle whose objective
classification of the world into animal, vegetable and mineral
got the ball rolling, so to speak.
Phenomenology defined the mind not as a self-contained entity,
but as an 'intentional activity' - that is to say it is
always moving outwards, towards the outer worldly reality.
Meaning does not exist in the mind alone, and it does not
exist in the world alone. It exists in the intentional relation
between the two, literally how we intend the world to be,
how we interpret it for our individual selves.
Consciousness cannot be considered to be like a box which
contains images and impressions of the outside world. On
the contrary, phenomenologists would say, when you perceive
an object your mind is out there, in the world, reaching
towards it.
Phenomenology was proposed by Husserl as a 'radical beginning'
which would offer modern consciousness a way returning to
the root of philosophical questioning and regaining its
lost connectedness with the world. He thought the philosophical
slate had to be wiped clean so that we could see the world
anew, as it really was in our original lived experience.
It attempted to provide a theoretical representation of
a pre-theoretical experience.
This
idea has fired the imagination of many modern thinkers, not
least Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
who said that phenomenology 'enables us to bring back all
the living relationships of experience as the fishermans net
draws up from the depths of the ocean quivering fish and seaweed.'
So just how was one to achieve this connectedness with the
world which we had supposedly lost, and which bears such striking
similarities to the 'oneness' sought by Eastern philosophies,
and whose goal is won not lightly or easily , and usually
by oblique, circuitous means?
Husserl developed a supposed 'method', in which one was asked
to 'bracket', or suspend belief in, all empirical knowledge
(ie everything we know through the senses or direct experience),
and all metaphysical knowledge (ie what is known or suppose
of everything beyond the physical realm, eg ideas about being,
time, religion, space etc.) In short, disregard all received
ideas and opinions. Assuming that this is possible one can
then concentrate awareness on the way in which meanings appear
to us as phenomena, as perceptions to consciousness free of
any association. It is irrelevant whether or not we are talking
about real or imagined things, because imaginative experience
(dream, fantasy etc) is considered just as reliable as real
experience. They are all experiences of consciousness. By
freeing itself of any attachment to literal reality, Husserl
believed, the mind could experience, unclouded, its own intentionality,
how it intends the world to be, more accurately and intimately.
If one was applying this method to any given thing one could
go beyond and negate all the imposed ideas one has about it,
and attain a state of 'transcendental immediacy', in which
the being of a thing is identical with its manifestation to
consciousness. (Husserl uses the term 'transcendental' not
in any spiritual sense but to mean imaginatively going beyond
the limits of isolated fact to arrive at the essential nature
of a thing.) From this a process of 'free-variation' could
take place in which meaning is no longer confined to reality
but unfolds in a play of pure possibilities. The unfettered
imagination can liberally modify or vary any given thing until
an invariant structure is revealed, what Husserl called the
'eidos', meaning a mental image so vivid as to appear real.
The example which Husserl used to illustrate this was a table,
but it could have been absolutely anything. Any perception
of a table can be amplified in imagination to include all
possible kinds of table experienced, either in reality here
and now, in memory , dreamt about or imagined, be they round,
square, made from metal, from wood, plastic, seen from the
top, the bottom, the side, two legged, one legged, etc ad
infinitum. Every perception of the table is merely one of
a whole range of possibilities,
But taken altogether these possibilities characterise the
essential nature of table, of 'tableness', as opposed to the
isolated empirical fact of a table.
This quote from an essay on Tony Cragg by Peter Schjeldal
may help to clarify the idea. It's basically about the intuition
of a cigarette lighter:
'Cragg sought the ideal of sculpture – a silence of sheer
beholding – not in types of distancing that fill found
objects with nostalgia, but in the present tense din of the
manufactured world…Think of a spent cigarette lighter
in a junkyard, lying on the ground; an intimately human-complicit
object (the appurtenance of a human addiction), as permenant
as stone. Pick it up. It is good for nothing now, though the
story of its function surrounds it like a haze. Can you begin
simply to behold the thing? But it's not so simple. Your mind
is working in its relentless way, tugging you up from naked
vision into your mental library of categories and associations.
Words re-haze the cigarette lighter. 'Artificial' for instance
as opposed to 'natural'. Can you feel the violence being done
to the reality of what you hold by that reflexive distinction,
with its moralising undertones? Petrochemicals, remnants of
ancient life. The chemicals were cooked together by humans
rather than spewed from a volcano, say, but are humans artificial?
Are you? Cragg has commented on a capital example of such
semantic tyranny; we call the nest a bird builds 'natural',
but the house a man builds 'artificial'. Use the crystalline
impartiality of scientific description to dispel the verbal
haze blocking both your vision and your knowledge of the lighter'.
What the example of the lighter serves to illustrate is that
while the content of our empirical experience and our phenomenological
experience is the same, the attitude to that content is radically
different. Husserls intuited table is still a table and the
lighter is still a lighter, but they are perceived in a more
fundamental manner, in all their 'tableness' and 'lighterness',
so to speak.
It is only by means of such intuition, according to Husserl,
that the world ceases to be self-evident (ie what you see
is what you see), and becomes instead what he called a 'gift
of meaning', or an 'explicit re-appropriation of all its implicit
meanings'.
Husserl had to admit, later in life, that his method was flawed
in that it was impossible to reduce anything to an essential
nature since the process of calling up possibilities can go
on indefinitely, association piling upon association ad infinitum
without end. However this is perhaps not the critical point,
as Husserl regarded phenomenology less as a philosophy and
more as a social project in which subsequent thinkers would
take up the challenge of upsetting orthodox ways of thinking
about and perceiving the world.
One of the most radical to do so was former student and subsequent
associate of Husserl, Martin Heidegger. Husserl had been pre-occupied
with questions of knowledge. What does it mean to be conscious
of, or know, something? Heidegger cut to the quick and asked
'What is the truth of being?, 'What does it mean to be? This
seems at once an obvious and an impossible question, but Heidegger
was amazed that no-one had asked it before. The jury is still
out as to whether it was a worthwhile question (ref. quotes
in Collins)
Heidegger thought there were two ways of arriving at the truth.
One was one we're all familiar with, and which he called Adequation
or Correspondence. That is, where a statement conforms to
an object. Truth in this case is the correspondence of knowledge
to matter. For example 'This paper is white'. Such things
can be said to be correct, right or true. And what's wrong
with that? It seems obvious and it's useful for navigating
ones way through life and the world. However Heidegger was
thinking of something else when he spoke of truth, and what
he was thinking of he gave the name 'Alatheia', the Ancient
Greek word for 'truth'. 'Alatheia', significantly, also means
'unconcealment', so truth in this sense means unveiling, uncovering
or disclosing. Being, said Heidegger, cannot be experienced
or encountered until it has been disclosed.
Beings, things, are disclosed or revealed to us in particular
ways. We experience things in particular ways, as tools, for
example or as natural, man-made, old, new etc. These disclosures,
said Heidegger, needed a place in which they could occur,
an 'open region' or 'field of relatedness' in which manifestations
of being could appear in their many different ways. For this
open space Heidegger gave the name 'Lichtung', meaning 'open-space'
or 'forest clearing'. It also means 'lighting', that is to
say clearing in the sense of clarifying, bringing something
out of the shadows or obscurity. Heidegger also talked of
'presencing'. When beings are unconcealed they become present
or apparent to us.
All this, of course, is a very elaborate (some have said lunatic)
way of dscribing the material world, or simply, reality. So
why the elaboration? Because, like Husserl before him, Heidegger
wanted to disrupt common habits of thought. Ordinarily we
seem to live in a world filled up with things that exist.
Everything around us simply seems to be there. We live in
a world of stable presences.
The 'Lichtung', the forest clearing, however, is like an infinitely
complex space of possibilities for things, and people, to
be. And for every manifestation of a thing that appears, that
apparently 'is', there are many more that do not, that remain
concealed or undisclosed, which 'are not'. If we neglect what
is not, this 'not being', says Heidegger, we can't hope to
understand the most fundamental events of being.
Within the word 'aletheia' (unconcealment) is its opposite:
'lethe' (concealment). If a being or thing is disclosed in
the clearing in a certain way, for example as a tool, decayed,
dangerous etc, then it is not appearing in some other way.
Other disclosures are possible but that particular disclosure
blocks them out. You can think of it like a radio. When you
tune into one wavelength you block out the others, which remain
as unheard possibilities. Every unconcealment conceals, every
presence arrives with absence. For Heidegger, that is the
truth of being.
The concept of 'Aletheia' goes contrary to the grain of Western
Philosophy and its search for empirical knowledge. It cannot
be tested by logical means, it cannot be said to be right
or wrong or be verified. It can only be experienced. Heidegger
defined truth ultimately as a mystery, in echo of Eastern
mysticism. And if this mystery of being is anywhere evident,
where is it? Where can it be most fully experienced? Well
not, according to Heidegger in the familiar. 'Truth', he said,
'is never gathered from ordinary things that are at hand'.
But it can be experienced through art and poetry (although
bear in mind what art can be according to Heidegger).
Turning his thoughts to art caused Heidegger to modify his
concept of the clearing and divide it into two realms, World
and Earth. World is the realm of human activity and relations,
the realm of human history, society and culture. Earth is
the realm of soil and rocks, of plants and animals, of all
things not human. World represents the tendency to open-ness
and light. Earth represents closure and concealment, and also
sheltering and preserving. World and Earth are two opposites
which exist in a state of strife.
These may seem like crazy notions, but Heidegger was deliberately
trying to escape traditional patterns of thought, and was
drawing on the statements of the pre-Socratic thinkers whose
cosmological theories looked for an underlying unity in all
things, for example the idea that all things were a form of
water or air or mist. The important thing for Heidegger was
that such thinking was not based on any observation or experiment,
that is on empirical knowledge, and nor was it dependent on
any notion of God and religion or the spirit world.
Art belongs, paradoxically, to both and neither of these two
realms at once. Artworks are not like stones or rain, natural
things which belong to the Earth, but neither are they practical
'equipment-like' things which belong to the human world. They
exist as a kind of interface , a meeting place of human purpose
and its unknowable horizon. Art exists as a site of tension
between opposites, existing as a hazardous kind of interference
between the world of stable presences and our common approaches
to them as utilitarian vehicles of information. Art disturbs
by refusing to reduce (verbal and visual) language to an objectifiable
concept. That is, it cannot be quite placed in our lexicon
of known ideas. As well as calling up 'what is', it calls
up 'what is not' .
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References and Further Reading:
Richard Kearney, (1994), 'Modern Movements in European Philosophy',
Manchester University Press
Martin Heidegger, (1972/97), 'Basic Writings', Harper &
Row
John Lechte, (1994), 'Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers',
Routledge
Bertrand Russell, (1991), 'A History of Western Philosophy',
Routledge
Jeff Collins & Howard Selina, (1998), 'Introducing Heidegger',
Icon Books
Dermot Moran, (2000), 'Introduction to Phenomenology', Routledge
Dermot Moran & Timothy Mooney (eds.), (2002), 'The Phenomenology
Reader', Routledge
H.Blythe, (1970), 'Haiku vols. 1-4', Hokuseido Press
Kuoni, Carin, (compiler), (1990), 'Josef Beuys in America'
- Energy Plan for the Western Man
Writings by and interviews with the artist, 'Four Walls
Eight Windows', New York
'Faux Amis-Richard Wentworth/Eugene Atget', (2001), Photographers
Gallery & Lisson Gallery
Lucinda Barnes et al, (1990),' Tony Cragg Sculpture 1975-90',
Thames&Hudson
Please
send further links/references for inclusion to: p1ramsay@plymouth.ac.uk
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