File spoon-archives/heidegger.archive/heidegger_2001/heidegger.0101, message 63


Date: Sat, 13 Jan 2001 16:25:08 -0500
From: edwin ruda <edwin.ruda-AT-verizon.net>
Subject: Art and Life



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Michael Eldred,

Thank you for your prompt response to the question of discussing
Heidegger and the arts, an ocean of perplexities (for me), as deep as it

is wide. Since I've been practicing and exhibiting abstract painting in
New York since 1960, I thought well, why not begin with the very
word "abstraction" itself. While many of my cohorts practice it, we
rarely if ever agree about its beingness, or how to distinguish its
way of being from other modes  or styles of artistic practice.

Ordinarily, the word "abstraction" would suggest a sort of pure essence,

or idea that has been deduced (?) from the world of lived experience,
would it not? Or inversely, one might begin with a mental image or
concept,
which only then emerges as a materialized painting let's say. Frankly,
I am uneasy with both suppositions which still seem metaphysical to
me, "a manipulation of things in accordance with the will" as you once
phrased it.

In your "Artefact" essay, "Heidegger's Holderlin and John Cage," you
suggest another approach which, to oversimplify, is to let the color or
sounds be, to see the color ascolor, the sound as sound. since they are
what they are. Thus, they would "open up a world"  Which leads me to
the crucial question, a question of difference,the difference between
abstract
artists like Rothko and Pollock, and those who were influenced by
Duchamp,
like Warhol and Cage. The philosopher-critic, Arthur Danto, remarked
that his
own thinking was shaken and inspired by the fact that Warhol's exhibited

Brillo Box was indiscernible from the one in the Supermarket; from then
on, the way was open for any thing-object to be accepted as an artwork.
Consequently, one finds a mayhem of materials today - found,
constructed,
or imitated - that are indistinguishable from their life counterparts.

Artists don't usually criticize other artists except privately - they
let the work
speak for itself in the way that it unveils and conceals what's
happening. Or as
the painter Barnett Newman abruptly put it: "If you don't like what you
see,
go home and paint what you like." So without griping or critiquing, the
question I am asking is this: Are artists who transfer "things
themselves"
from "life" to the stage or gallery, opening up a world or closing one
up?

Ed







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