File spoon-archives/lyotard.archive/lyotard_1999/lyotard.9907, message 238


From: colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net
Date: Mon, 26 Jul 1999 19:56:47 -0700
Subject: Re: Trusting liars to lie - subliminally


hugh bone wrote:
> 
> colin.wright3-AT-virgin.net wrote:
> 
> > The various forms this took - site-specific art,  Land art,
> > performance art and happenings, conceptual art etc. - all met with
> > failure.
> 
> REPLY: I've only seen pictures of Christo's work, but would have liked
> to have seen the actual productions/  Don't know what performer(s) you
> have in mind.  I've seen art that was called conceptual, but don't
> rememember it.  No loss.  Which happenings did you have in mind?
> 
> > This may sound rather bleak, but the important result is that the
> > very absurdity of the effort testifies to the differend.
> 
>  REPLY:  Don't understand.  We are interpreting the differend in
> so many ways.  Some artists put words on canvas.
> 
> 1>      I'd say Mark Rothko has provided me with the experiences most
> akin to sublimity.
> 
> REPLY:  Yes, for me too, but pleasure, not pain.
> 
> Just to substantiate my point about language closing
> > around the sublime, Rothko is always reassimilated back into a quasi-religious discourse, which I think is at best only analogical to
> > the actual viewing experience. Admittedly, this notion was not without
> > support in Rothko's own writings, but I see no relation between these
> > writings, his personality, or any of the assumptions about the
> > colour-field painters as a movement, and the canvases themselves. They
> > approach sublimity exactly because these extraneous factors fall away in
> > front of the objects themselves. I find it interesting to note that
> > those artists who create the most compellingly mysterious works are
> > often the target of the most intense bibliographical scrutiny. As
> > Lyotard says, there must be linkage, and it is as if the works
> > themselves are so resistant to this process that linkage is made instead.
> 
> REPLY:  I haven't read Lyotard on art, but linkage of paintings to
> his theories seems all apples and oranges for me - no connection.
> 
> > with the artists, the producers, their lives. A kind of homespun
> > psychology is put to work on the space behind the works. This bugs me:
> > it's actually the kind of narrative legitimation Lyotard talks about in
> > TPC. No object is left to resonate in its Being, if you know what I
> > mean. Take an example: the black paintings in the Rothko Chapel are
> > always tarred by the brush of Rothko's suicide, its proximity to the
> > production of these particular works. I'm not denying that there may
> > well be an intimate connection between the paintings and his mood, but,
> > after the event, what does it matter, at least in relation to
> > experiencing the work? It is a testament to the pieces themselves, their
> > sublimity, that even this monolithic fact of his suicide eventually ebbs
> > away in their presence.
> 
> REPLY:  I didn't know  Rothko's writings when I first saw and enjoyed
> his work.  That was just as well.
> 
> In front of some of his pictures, which approach the sublime, the artist
> is irrelevant for me. Some artists lives are very interesting, but
> millions of other lives are very interesting. The art starts the
> interest and the art dealers cultivate it to enhance the commodity they
> sell.
> 
> Incidentally, in the Van Gogh show at the National last fall there was
> a self-portrait he painted when he was in his early thirties, which was
> very conventional in color and style - no orange or cobalt, strictly
> realistic.  But it was so powerful I walked back to have another look
> two or three times, and found that other s were spending a lot of time
> with it also.
> 
> Hugh
> 
  Hugh,
       I don't have any particular works or artists in mind when
mentioning these movements. I refer to them AS movements. You mention
seeing pictures of Christo's works. This illustrates my point that these
movements have failed to escaped commodification. The reproduction you
were looking at was the opposite of site-specific, don't you think. If I
cited some performance pieces or happenings to you, they would ipso
facto have been assimilated to a violent mode of representation: neither
of us was present and yet we feel the right to talk about them as if we
were. This is akin to the differend Lyotard describes with regard to
publishing in the opening of 'The Differend'.
       You say we are interpreting the differend in so many ways? I
agree, but think this necessary. There is no monolithic differend: each
is qualitatively different, and the ethical drive of the differend means
respecting the particular nature of the differend in question. I'm not
sure why you point out that artists put words on canvas. While true,
these works do not invoke the sublime. The absurdity of the effort I was
refering to is the residual trace of meaning after the works
reassimilation: why spend months on a painting that represents nothing?
Since human activity is generally saturated in imposed meanings (it is
how we define ourselves) such an act, in its seeming pointlessness,
troubles our common sense. We begin to question the fact that it
represents nothing, and look deeper. This looking deeper is the moment
of success. The moment, which is inevitable, when the viewer does
ascribe a new meaning to the painting, is the moment of the evaporation
of the sublime. But the absurd effort of art continues, testifying to
this elusive unrepresentable thing. Art calls for meaning while
simultaneously resisting it - it calls for it BY resisting it.
      You say Rothko gives you only pleasure, and no pain? This would
not fit under the Kantian sublime then ... but no one says he has
exclusive rights to the delimitation of what the sublime can mean.
      Personally, I cannot think of Van Gogh as sublime - although his
work is incredible. He reaches a pitch of emotional intensity through
colour which is too expressionistic to make conceptual categories fall
away - in looking at his paintings, I am always in touch with his pain
as a human being: they are existentialist for me. But this is only my
experience. The really difficult thing to remember about the sublime is
that is cannot be reduced to a formalism, or located in the properties
of the object. There is no compositional golden mean for the sublime, as
there is in clacissism.
       As regards Lyotard's theoretical appeal to aesthetics, I'd say
that his greatest debt is to the model of aesthetic modernism, which is
repeated in a rather flimsy disguise in 'paralogy'.
cheers,
Col

   

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