Dissolution, not End: Dialectic and Hegel's Philosophy of Art

Andy Warhol, “Brillo Box” (1964)

Synthetic polymer paint and silkscreen ink on wood, 17 1/8 x 17 x 14" (43.3 x 43.2 x 36.5 cm)

MOMA, New York City

The dissolution of art is fundamentally related to concept of dialectical sublation, which is “one of the most important notions in all of Hegel”[1] for art has, in fact, been sublated.  It is specifically with the irony of the Romantic period that art is supposed to have “come to an end” (in the sense indicated by Danto, for example); it has been cancelled and at the same time preserved, acting as the catalyst in the resolution of contradictory elements (reason and sensuality), and dissolving in the progress of that reaction.  Hence the connection between Auflösung is aufheben.  Hegel takes full advantage of the equivocal term Auflösung: literally, it  means “to raise up something; however, as a philosophical notion it can mean ‘cancel’, ‘dissolve’, or ‘preserve’, or all three at once!” (Carter, 1980:94).   Inwood says that the word “has three main senses:   (1) ‘to raise, to hold, lift up” (2) ‘to annul, abolish, destroy, cancel, suspend’ (3) ‘to keep, save, preserve’…Hegel regularly uses all three senses at once.”[2]  Similarly, Etter comments on “the difficulty of the German term aufheben, which may mean ‘to raise’, ‘to preserve’, or ‘to annul’-a profoundly plural ambiguity that Hegel exploits as the central explanatory term of his dialectical sense of history.”[3]  It’s worth quoting Hegel’s Logic at length to get a sense of exactly what he intends by the term, and to understand its central importance:

To sublate, and the sublated (that which exists ideally as a moment), constitute one of the most important notions in philosophy.  It is a fundamental determination which repeatedly occurs throughout the whole of philosophy, the meaning of which is to be clearly grasped and especially distinguished from nothing.  What is sublated is not thereby reduced to nothing.  Nothing is immediate; what is sublated, on the other hand, is the result of mediation; it is a non-being which has its origin in a being.  It still has, therefore, in itself the determinateness from which it originates.  “To sublate” has a twofold meaning in the [German] language: on the one hand it means to preserve, to maintain, and equally it also means to cause to cease, to put an end to.  Even “to preserve” includes a negative element, namely, that something is removed from its immediacy and so from an existence which is open to external influences, in order to preserve it.  Thus what is sublated is at the same time preserved; it has only lost its immediacy but is not on that account annihilated.[4]

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[1]. Curtis L. Carter, “A Re-Examination of the ‘End of art” Interpretation of Hegel’s Aesthetics” in Art and Logic in Hegel’s Philosophy Warren E. Steinkraus; Kenneth L. Schmitz Humanities Press, 1980 p. 94

[2]. Michael Inwood A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford, England: Blackwell, 1999) p. 283

[3]. Brian K. Etter Between Transcendence and Historicism: The Ethical Nature of the Arts in Hegelian Aesthetics (Buffalo: SUNY, 2006) p. 69

[4]. G. W. F. Hegel Science of Logic A.V. Miller, trans. (London and New York: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. And Humanities Press, 1969) pp. 106-7

Art History as “Empirical Phenomenology”

Piet Mondrian, “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” 1943

Oil on canvas, 1.27 m x 1.27 m

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

Since art historical knowledge is just one of many registers of interpretation and self-interpretation available to artists, we have to have knowledge of more the more general historical and social world expressed by the aesthetic life of the period.  The artists’ exposure to scientific theories of color, their interest in biological discoveries, their responses to developments in social life, their beliefs about synesthesia or mysticism, may all affect the form and content of the canvas.  The holistic nature of art history means that any art historical study is forced to invoke all of the human sciences, including but not limited to the social sciences like psychology, anthropology, sociology and so forth.  For example, Margolis describes Schapiro’s work as “centered on art history, but…more of a psychological discipline” and suggests that Schapiro practices a kind of “empirical phenomenology.”[1]  This last remark indicates an Hegelian tendency to view one’s own interpretations as grounded in the practices and traditions that make up one’s milieu and the consequent problems of historicism, relativism and interpretation are opened up by that view.  Each period appears to have its own aesthetic criteria and modes of artistic self-understanding, so the study of artworks demands singular combinations of disciplines in different cases.

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[1]. Joseph Margolis, “Meyer Schapiro and the Science of Art History” in British Journal of Aesthetics (Summer, 1981) Vol. 21, No. 3 p. 242

Modernism: Painting as Art Historical Practice

Pablo Picasso, Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907)

Oil on canvas, 243.9 cm × 233.7 cm

Museum of Modern Art, New York City

In modern times the most direct relation is not between painter and nature, or the painter and the Holy Spirit, but the painter and other painters.  Manet learned much from Velázquez both stylistically and in terms of content, which offers us a key to why he painted as he did.  Cezanne closely followed Poussin’s rules for composition, both as an aesthetic and stylistic discipline and as a kind of patriotic gesture that would establish his place in the tradition of French painting.  Picasso combined the most advanced stylistic elements available at the time, primitivism and cubism, and used them to depict the charged theme of prostitution in Le Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), perhaps in order to attain an optimal level of notoriety and secure the patronage of the Steins.  In each case, a painter’s self-understanding and interpretation of his milieu enters into his choice of subject and technique.  The painter’s explicit or implicit theorizing always has effects on the overall trajectory of his or her career, as well as effecting individual works.  All of these examples show painters exercising art historical knowledge in their pursuit of a career and an identity as an artist, and all of them illustrate the need to distinguish between internal (or emic) and external (etic) modes of art historical explanation.  Art history therefore has to be reflexive and historically sensitive with regard to epistemic questions, cross-disciplinary with regard to method, and pragmatic with regard to the relationship between theory and practice.  Particularly in the modern period, when artists very deliberately and self-consciously interact with and react against each other and their traditions (Manet with Velázquez, Picasso with Matisse, Van Gogh with Gauguin), no reduction to causes and general laws is available.  Painters and sculptors explain what they do, like other human beings, with reasons in form of the letters, journals, articles, lectures, and interviews they leave behind.  Artists both cause and are caused by the styles and schools with which they are associated and according to which they are categorized, and their interrelations with the tradition and their contemporaries forms the background within which they struggle to produce art that is powerfully expressive, unique yet immediately communicative.  Such reflexive causality may come to light in the biological sciences, but it’s far from Newtonian causation in the sense of an instance of a law.  There simply is no causal account of the paintings and sculptures they create in the sense that there is a causal account of a planet’s course in its orbit.