The Art of

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The canon defines a system of rules; it serves as a guiding principle, as a
binding arrangement that can be accessed and reproduced. Canonical law,
the law of the Roman Catholic Church, comprises the institution’s set of
rules. It exists in the form of a codex. The codex, on the other hand, is a
medium of writing that at one point superseded the scroll and constituted
the book page. The codex is a collection of loose sheets of paper that,
compiled in bound form, can now easily be coordinated and compared
with one another. The canon is disseminated through the medium of the
codex and can now be interpreted by various readers. The codex therefore
already assumes a function similar to that of a printed book: the canonical
text itself is deprived of its uniqueness and now becomes an object
that brings scattered and more or less decentralized readings and interpretation
along with it. In music, the canon is based specifically on the
temporal shifts with which one sound form is used after another, so that
here, too, the canon in no way suborns mechanical repetition and copying,
but rather is performed as variants, staggered in time, and generally
also by various voices, instruments, et cetera. One might suspect that the
canon was therefore never entirely what its conservative supporters and
its critics consider it to be, since it has always also been a process based
on variation and comparison. The canon is thus a tense form, and the subsequent
question is whether it has remained essentially stable over time
and preserved its form or whether it has changed in its duration and resulted
in an altered canon. Good arguments can be found for both positions,
but in the logical figure of the canon, both arguments nevertheless
remain a set of rules that has to be implemented, and hence has a performative
aspect that can lead to deviation as well as consolidation.
For this reason, it is also not surprising that what often stand at the
beginning of changes to the canon are new paradigms in art that await
coding, namely both on the part of artists as well as on the part of critics
and the public. Radical opposition to the canon, in contrast, stands in a
different model of time, not the model of the continuum moving in
time and its quasi reformist, small, incremental changes that can ultimately
be summarized in new practices of interpretation. No, the radical
counter-position to the canon as a model for the development of a set
of rules, judgments, et cetera, is the break, the radical beginning, the
abrupt end. This model of time, which is based on the suspending of
time, on the exposing of catastrophes, endeavors to interrupt the continuum,
to break the various tunings and successive retunings of the
canon. Its form is the manifesto, the pamphlet, media of rejection and
repudiation, in short: the gesture of interruption.
Considered from a hermeneutic standpoint, there is no escape from
the circles of reception, and the possibility for a canon to form also has a
GERTRUD KOCH