by Santiago Zabala
The world needs creative
interpretations of global issues, not better descriptions of things people are
accustomed to.
Perhaps rather than God, as Martin
Heidegger once said, it is art that can save us. After all, artistic
creations have always had political, religious and social meanings that also
aimed in some way to save us. Certainly, they also express beauty, but this
depends very much on the public's aesthetic taste, which varies according to
the cultural environment of each society.
But when the political
meaning is manifest, aesthetics (our sensations and taste) lose ground in
favour of interpretation (knowledge and judgment); that is, instead of inviting
us to contemplate its beauty, a work calls us to respond, react and become involved.
As it turns out, art - as a channel to express reactions to significant issues
- has sometimes worked better than historical or factual reconstructions.
[...]
Pablo Picasso's Guernica is the example we all have in mind: painted
as a response to the Spanish nationalist forces' bombing of a town in the
Basque country, it was used not only to inform the public but also as a symbol
of all the innocent victims of war. This is probably why
"aesthetics", a term coined by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten in 1735, refers not only to the
study of art but also to sensory experience coupled with feelings regardless of
the nature of its object. But can contemporary art, whether through music,
conceptual installations or cinema actually save us from the damned
circumstances, atrocities and injustices we live among?
As an ontological
discipline, philosophy must always pay attention to existential claims, whether
they come from science, religion or art. Even though this is now possible,
since philosophy (and aesthetics) has overcome metaphysics, that is,
objectivist-representational nature (which also limited art's creations), not
all philosophers pay attention to the claims these works make.
If such distinguished
thinkers as Arthur Danto and Gianni
Vattimo have moved beyond aesthetic representationalism and formalism,
it is because of their post-metaphysical positions but also their interest in
art's current existential appeal. Both philosophers seem to agree that the end
of art proclaimed by Hegel is not simply a matter of art becoming conceptual -
that is, "philosophical". Rather, the radical changes brought about
in the advent of global society mean that the artist today must respond to a
wider public than in the past, one that is concerned with the same global
issues that affect the artist.
Existential intervention
After the eras of
"imitation" and "ideology", when artists were often
commissioned for their work, we have now entered the era of "existential
claims", where we, the viewers, are the ones called to respond. Although
this began in 1917 when Marcel Duchamp revealed his Fountain (to point out how any "readymade"
could become a work of art if placed within the walls of a museum), there are
some new examples of (as Danto and Vattimo would probably call them) "transfigurations
of our common places" for "existential claims of truth", that is, art that is
determined to save us. But what here is transfigured and claimed?
[...]
When one listens to Tom
Waits' The Road to Peace or watches Alfredo Jaar's Rwanda
Project or Daniele Viccari's Diaz: Don't Clean
up this Mess, it is difficult to remain simply (aesthetically) satisfied
since they involve us at an existential level. But this is not because they
simply narrate the truth of ongoing events (the Palestinian-Israeli conflict,
the 1994 Rwanda genocide and the brutal police violence against the 2001 G8
protesters in Genoa) in a more objectivist way than we are accustomed to, but
rather because they demand that we take a stance in a process of
transformation, which is vital for our future.
Rather than points of
arrival for consumers' contemplation of beauty, they are points of departure to
change the world, a world that needs new interpretations instead of better
descriptions. While some might consider these works excessively politically
correct, it is difficult to ignore their interest in our salvation. But
salvation from what?
If there is a
"transfiguration" (in music, photographs, film) of our
"commonplaces" (conflict, genocide, violence) in these three works,
it does not come only from the creative energy in the composition but also
because these commonplaces have become much too common. If we have become so
accustomed to these events that we take them for granted, then art is saving us
from discrimination, forgetfulness and annihilation.
It should not come as a
surprise that Hans-Georg Gadamer's greatest concern was to emphasise
how art, just as science, also manifests claims of truth. The only difference
between them is their requirements: while science will remain satisfied with
propositional truths (information regarding the state of things), art demands
we enter into dialogue with the work.
This is why the German
master believed so much in the capacity of hermeneutic philosophy (concerned
with the interpretative nature of human beings) to stimulate further interest
through interpretation. If "being", that is, our existence, were affected
only by propositional truths, not only art would be useless but also the
variety of information networks that are the cornerstone of democratic
institutions.
Waits, Jaar and Viccari call
their audiences to respond and also to intervene practically - and this, an
involvement in the shocking commonplace atrocities of the world, is necessarily
existential.
Santiago Zabala is ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona. His books include The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy (2008), The Remains of Being (2009), and, most recently, Hermeneutic Communism (2011, coauthored with G. Vattimo), all published by Columbia University Press. His forthcoming book is 'Only Art Can Save Us: The Emergency of Aesthetics'.
No comments:
Post a Comment