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[10] G. W. F. Hegel, Introduction to
the Berlin Aesthetic Lectures of the
1820's, Oxford University Press,
1979, i.2.2.-i.3.2, pp.14-18.
[11] ibidem, pp.20-21.
[12] G. W. F. Hegel, Fenomenologia
spiritului (Phenomenology of Spirit),
transl. by Virgil Bogdan, IRI
Publishing, Bucharest, 1995.
[13] see Peter Bürger, Theory of the
Avant-Garde, Manchester University
Press, 1984.
[14] Though the reactive use of
aesthetics against the spectacular
social aestheticism is paramount in
the Situationist International
program of social criticism, Popart's
critique of consumption,
exemplary in Warhol, is still a
landmark for this topic.
theory about what art is and the speculative, abstract, academic theory
that deals exclusively with the concept (wheat we mean by art) and that risks to
replace its specific object with a certain, ideal, object, a purely discursive critical
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construct . How descriptive can thus theory as theory be? How free of
theoretical prejudices about what art means can be the explanation of a local
artistic phenomenon?
Hegel's answer is no less paradoxical, his solution being to affirm the
historicity of the concept of art, whose concretisation knows specific periods of
concept manifestation, while at the same time linking this empirical historicity
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to the spirit manifestation forms . This second paradox, sketched out a few
pages later in the introduction of the aesthetic necessity of art as freedom of the
spirit, which is limited in the concrete forms of particular works, answers the
paradox of the "unhappy consciousness" from the no less famous paragraph on
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the dialectics of the two consciousnesses in Phenomenology of Spirit .
According to the Hegelian analysis, the mutual recognition of the master and
the slave remain in mutual dependence, the slave's self-consciousness of
dependence being, despite the restraining necessity, freer than that of the
master, who needs a slave in order to have his existence recognised. The master
is incompletely defined just as the negative of the other, being limited by his
dependence on the slave, while the limited one is in fact free, in spite of the de
facto necessity. In the terms of Hegelian aesthetics conceived as general theory
of art, art criticism is thus freer at the level of self-consciousness (as long as the
degree of freedom is dependent here on the degree of self-understanding) than
theory understood as a generalisation on the artistic phenomenon; for its
normative definition is subject to the continually evolving artistic practice, while
theory needs the criticism of particular works of art in order for its validity to be
recognized. Proposing a philosophical questioning of its own essence, artistic
practice after Warhol frees itself from its representational task, fulfilling the
Hegelian prophecy of a philosophical “overcoming” of art: art becomes its own
critical philosophy, simultaneously turning the normative claims of aesthetics
into art criticism.
Avant-garde and artistic autonomy: the (auto)critical use of
aesthetic theory
The issue of art's autonomy in relation to the social and political sphere,
13
a correspondent of the invention of the modern concept of art , is the one that
adopts and develops these paradoxes of the irreconcilable externality between
th
art and theory into the mid-20 century. In its still active horizon is
encompassed the mutation of the discourse on the limits of art, from a project of
their ideal objectivisation into one of archaeologisation of the relations between
art and the social sphere, with the purpose, in the latter case, of exhausting the
aesthetic paradigm and the instances of its criticism in artistic practice. The
echo of this requirement for art autonomy, manifested by the aesthetic
discourse of modernity, is represented precisely by the dialectic conception of
the relation between the artistic object, autarchically
addressing public
consciousness in terms of its own language , and its critical theory, as
explicitation of this immediate and ineffable language. With the self-reflexivity
gained by the artistic process in the 60's, aesthetic theory doesn't translate
artistic language into philosophical speech any longer, but it rather follows its
own use by the artistic act in the attempt to criticise by aesthetic means the
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generalized social aestheticism .
An explicit case is that of art criticism which has often theorised on
specific currents, or of that particular art history discourse that has used
aesthetic theory as a model for explaining the marked discontinuities in modern
artistic practice, going as far as to suspect its own archiving project, together
with the de-legitimisation of any evolution criterion that would support an
intrinsic change of the concept of art. According to this interpretative practice,
which assumes, in addition, the issues of justifying the avant-gardes and the
criticism they contain, the dominant theory of modernity the aesthetic one has
become the negative of artistic practice, its specific object of delimitation. Critical
explanations have often borrowed heavily from this notion, observing in every
change of the artistic practice the negative avatar of the aesthetic definition of
art, from the end of the subject to the end of the artistic object, going through the
rhetoric of the end of the institutions of modernity.
In the first case, is well-known the explanation of minimal art in terms of
"theatricality", provided by Michael Fried, which implies the shift on the
conception of the artwork's audience. From the immateriality and, implicitly,
from the (imaginary) self-absence of the contemplative subject presupposed by
modernist painting or sculpture, conceived in terms of the self-reflexive
consciousness, audience shifts to the concrete spectator (therefore present in
the act of reception), inserted into the space in which are thus asserted
simultaneously the materiality of the object as irreducibility to an abstract and
15 16
ideal scheme . As disputed as it might be (for example by Rosalind Krauss) ,
Fried's reading scheme has been accepted as a guideline for the interpretation of
th
the historicity of 20 century art. Its contestation by Krauss, on the grounds of
the Lacanian de-realisation of the subject-onlooker in minimal art as an
exponent of the post-structuralist conception on language, itself seen as a
system of differences and as a manifestation of the profound irrationality of the
representational system, keeps in its turn to the framework of the same
fundamental assumption of the deconstruction of the modern subject. Its
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curatorial adoption, refined by Thierry de Duve in the intention of questioning
the place of the spectator-audience in the forms of the ambient or of the
installation, in relation to the place of the look in modernity, uses as analysis
object the same assumption of autonomy of the artistic object from the social
framework of its occurrence.
The rhetoric of the deconstruction of the subject-receptor of the work of
art as a monadic individual - monadic subject- also accompanies the reading of
the works of late modernity at the level of significant objects: both the loss of
aura, proclaimed by Walter Benjamin, with the advent of technical
18
reproducibility , as well as the reactivity to the consumerist character of the
19
capitalist society, in the reading Benjamin Buchloh recently offered for the
artistic neo-avant-gardes, indicating the shift of the Adornian principle of the
social negativity of artwork into a parodic assumption of the conditions of
production and reception massification, presuppose the interpretation of the
artistic phenomenon as a sign of cultural practice and its explanation in terms of
the dissolution of artistic values by means of consumption values.
The explanation of the rationale behind the birth of artistic practices
discourses in terms of the change in the attributes of the aesthetic autonomy of
the work of art which these discourse generate or which they assume and to
which they respond, leads to a criticism of modern institutions in relation to the
aesthetic autonomy of the practices of reproducibility. The genealogy of the
20
museum, performed by Douglas Crimp , as an institution of modernity that
manages, according to an aesthetic theory of the work of art, its reception, treats
[15] Michael Fried, «Art et
Objectité», in Charles Harrison,
Paul Wood, L'art en théorie 1900-
1990, Editions Hazan, 1997, pp.
896-910.
[16] Hal Foster, Discussions in
Contemporary Culture, Bay Press,
Seattle, 1987, pp. 55-65.
[17] Thierry de Duve, Look, 100
Years of Contemporary Art, Ludion,
2001.
[18] Walter Benjamin, „The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction”, in Iluminări, transl.
by Catrinel Pleşu, Idea Design &
Print, Cluj, 2003.
[19] Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-
Avantgarde and Culture Industry,
The MIT Press, 2000.
[20] Douglas Crimp, On the
Museum's Ruins, The MIT Press,
2004.
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