Nietzsche and the Future of Art

Page III

Danto defines the precise meaning of the end of art by quoting Hegel directly:

. . . he claimed, it must have seemed prematurely, that ‘art, considered in its highest vocation, is and remains for us a thing of the past.’

Thereby it has lost for us genuine truth and life, and has rather been transferred into our ideas instead of maintaining its earlier necessity in reality and occupying its higher place . . . The philosophy of art is therefore a greater need in our days than it was when art by itself as art yielded full satisfaction. Art invites us to intellectual consideration, and that not for the purpose of creating art again but for knowing philosophically what art is.

It is with regard to this sort of consideration that I had meant to say not that art had stopped, nor that it was dead, but that it had come to an end by turning into something else—namely, philosophy.(43)

This position effectively turns Nietzsche’s aesthetics on its head, for Nietzsche can be said to have desired a philosophy that functioned like art (in his “Attempt at a Self-Criticism,” which served as the preface for the second edition of The Birth of Tragedy, the “tongue” that voiced the book “should have sung, this ‘new soul’—and not spoken”(44)). Danto describes an art that functions like philosophy, and it is a philosophy oriented on art rather than the world. Danto exemplifies its key moment with the instance of Andy Warhol:

. . . when he exhibited, in 1964, those marvelous Brillo boxes, relevantly so precisely like the cartons of Brillo in the supermarket, raising the question acutely as to why something should be a work of art while something altogether like it should not. And that, I thought, was as far as art could go, the answers to the question having to come from philosophy.(45)

Nietzsche’s propositions concerning an art of the future, an art of the ontological claim that is incapable of passing out of pertinence, are immediately at risk here. But it is not philosophers who make art, or who determine what art is, it is artists who do—that is a point not at issue in either camp. So, it becomes an imperative matter to determine whether the Nietzschean aesthetic continues to be practiced, or whether it has gone entirely out of circulation, no longer being ratified by any contemporary artists.

There are, however, significant artists of the period after Modernism who practice a decisively and recognizably Nietzschean aesthetic, regardless of whether they acknowledge Nietzsche as a direct influence on their practice. There are artists who continue Nietzsche’s art of the future, demonstrating that his aesthetic possesses what it claims: a future beyond the Modernist period. Only a few can be mentioned here, but even those few are sufficient to dispute the claim of the obsolescence of art’s function of revealing the truth of the world—a truth that is distinctly what Nietzsche proposed in his ontological philosophy.

Such a purpose is precisely what the composer John Cage claimed for his music. He characterized his music as a “music of reality,”(46) capable of revealing the world as it is. Cage argued, “Before we wished for logical experiences; nothing was more important to us than stability. What we hope for is the experience of that which is. But ‘what is’ is not necessarily the stable, the immutable. We do know quite clearly, in any case, that it is we who bring logic into the picture. It is not laid out before us waiting for us to discover it. ‘What is’ does not depend on us, we depend on it. […] And unfortunately for logic, everything we understand under that rubric ‘logic’ represents such a simplification with regard to the event and what really happens, that we must learn to keep away from it.”(47) This is precisely matched to Nietzsche’s thought of the inexpressibility of the truth of the world, to its Dionysian mystery that defies encapsulation in conceptual thought. And for Cage, as for Nietzsche, art can convey what concepts cannot grasp: “The function of art at the present time is to preserve us from all the logical minimalizations that we are at each instant tempted to apply to the flux of events. To draw us nearer to the process which is the world we live in.”(48)

As with Nietzsche, the world is “not an object. It is a process.”(49) There is for Cage a “fluidity of all things,”(50) a simultaneity of their presence and absence: “Appearing, changing, and then disappearing . . . coming and going, this presence and absence, together.”(51) Cage put this sense of the world as it is into his music through the use of a “network of chance operations.”(52) The oxymoronic aspect of the term “chance operations” alludes simultaneously to all that exceeds or escapes our designs (“chance”) and to the reasoned process by which a design is put into effect (“operations”). What this means in terms of Cage’s practice is the escape from “precise cause-effect relationships” and “exclusions, radical alternatives between opposites.”(53) Chance operations, because they free the artwork from the straightjacket of cause and effect, will also bring about “interpenetration and non-obstruction.”(54) In other words, Cage views his chance operations as a kind of emancipation, dissolving structures that immobilize, restoring them to what he calls “openness”: “the opening up of everything that is possible and to everything that is possible.”(55)An example of this openness is Cage’s practice of allowing music “a structure based on rhythm or time … [to] be hospitable to noises as to so-called musical sounds.”(56) From this perspective, Cage characterized art as the “ultimate ‘experimental’ situation,”(57) “ultimate” in the sense of being paradoxically without “ultimacy”: a futurity without end. Cage’s “music of reality” is the art that Nietzsche looked towards, an art intrinsically oriented to an open-ended, horizonless future.

Whereas Cage’s alignment with Nietzsche’s thought is overt but lacks any evidence of direct influence, Milan Kundera’s connection with the philosopher is openly admitted. His literature is clearly and confessedly Nietzschean. His best-known novel in English, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, opens with a rumination on Nietzsche’s idea of the eternal recurrence. For Kundera, the eternal recurrence implies a quality of weight to existence, of significance that cannot be possessed by that which would occur once and once only. Tomas, the main character of the novel, realizes that “Einmal ist keinmal . . . What happens but once, says the German adage, might as well not have happened at all. If we have only one life to live, we might as well not have lived at all.”(58) The absolute end to life gives it the unbearable lightness, whereas the weight of the recurrence is the significance due to an open-ended future, a futurity without end. The text refers to Nietzsche’s claim that the eternal recurrence is “the heaviest of burdens”(59) and then asks “is heaviness truly deplorable and lightness splendid?”(60)

This reversal of values is the mark of the most Nietzschean aspect of Kundera’s art. Kundera deals with sets of polar opposites that are continually shifting in their symbolisms and their attributions. The lightness / weight opposition of The Unbearable Lightness of Being indicates the model for Kundera’s oppositions: opposing values are subjected to a process of perspectivalism that leaves the situations or figures to which they are applied ambiguous and open-ended in their artistic implications. The opposition of weight and lightness in the life of Tomas is represented, respectively, by the characters Tereza and Sabina: “Tereza and Sabina represented the two poles of his life, separate and irreconcilable, yet equally appealing.”(61) But Kundera ultimately unsettles the simplicity of the initial assumption that Sabina represents lightness and Tereza represents weight, as well as the notion that lightness and weight are “separate and irreconcilable,” as Tomas believes. Below the opposition-laden surface, Kundera exposes and moves beyond the limitations of Tomas’s original thinking, detailing through the lives of the women themselves an unsettling or deconstruction of the opposition Tomas has such trouble seeing through. Indications of symbolic value are matched to indications of the opposing symbolic value for the same character—Sabina, for example, initially the image of lightness, is aligned with the imagery of recurrence, in her bowler hat that returns “again and again, each time with a different meaning,”(62) and with the implication of the weight carried by the recurrence.

Kundera’s art is an art of the Nietzschean, chiasmic unity of oppositions, an art of plural perspectives that continually recast the aligning of opposing values, showing them to be interdependent, not hierarchical, never to settle into a synthesis but ceaselessly in a Heraclitean eternal strife: an endless play of opposing forces. His work stresses the need to abandon mutually exclusive (either/or) positions in favor of a (both/and) balance in which neither pole is dominant but in which a whole spectrum of possibilities is allowed within only a provisional field of equilibrium. Kundera may propose no revolutionary alternative to the binary structure he critiques, but in the exposure of oppositional thinking and its consequences, it is clear that Kundera aims beyond a clarity of established, unchanging oppositions, in an attempt to expose oppositional extremes and deprive them of their power and appeal.

The similarity of the work of Cage and Kundera to Nietzsche’s idea is obvious—they adopt positions and tenets stated openly by the philosopher. However, the sculpture of Kenneth Snelson relates to Nietzsche’s philosophy in a manner that is not immediately self-evident but, once recognized, is undeniable. Nietzsche’s rejection of a worldview of enduring material objects constitutes a fundamental shift of paradigm in the conception of reality: a shift from particle theory to field theory. In essence, particle and field theories are necessary alternatives as models for conceiving the world—either the world is conceived as discrete objects interacting when they come into contact, or it must be seen as an arrangement of flowing forces related by some quality of distance or, more fundamentally, intensity. Put simply, either the world is envisioned essentially as broken into pieces or it is not. It can be argued readily that Nietzsche is the first philosopher to re-conceive the world along the lines of field theory, departing from the particle model that had dominated physical theory for millennia.

In this, Nietzsche foresaw a similar shift in conception conducted by Einstein’s 1905 Special Theory of Relativity. He also, in this regard and in a more precise way than has been suggested here so far, foresaw the development of pure abstraction in art, for it can be argued that the move to abstraction is nothing more than the reduction of the figure / ground relation in representational painting—the relation of foreground to background—down to pure ground. Abstraction is merely the flattening of the picture image through the elimination of the figure, leaving a background only, which is nothing more than field—the elimination of the discrete object and the retention of the extensive space, across which colors play in much the way forces would.

In Snelson’s sculpture, there are literally forces at play. His works are borderline scientific experiments that test the intricacies of actual and intrinsic spatial structuring. Each sculpture is an assembly of aluminum rods that do not touch and that are held in place by a network of steel cables. The form of the sculpture is stabilized by the internal forces of tension and compression, meaning that everything must be in precisely the correct place, or the entire assembly will simply fall down. It is as if, and more than “as if,” each work were testing the organizing principles of spatialization—the laws by which forces interact and apparent things—which are nothing more than the arrangements of those forces—hang together in the void. The aluminum rods illuminate a portion of the invisible netting of available systems of balance, systems built into sheer extensiveness. In short, were the void truly chaotic and opposing forces incapable of interacting harmonically, nothing would hold together—and something does.

Like Kundera, Snelson is a currently functioning artist, one of the premier sculptors of our time, and he has extensive influence among many younger sculptors, among many of the more accomplished of them, such as John Powers and Stephen Talasnik, who conduct their own experiments in the interaction of forces within the geometric organizational principles of the field. These are but a very small number of the many examples that could be cited of a recognizably Nietzschean aesthetic currently being practiced, but they are sufficient to argue the point, because they are sufficient to engage certain logical necessities. If Nietzsche’s proposition of the function of art being the telling of the truth of the world, a truth that can be approached by no other means, were ever capable of being put to practice, then such art could not come to its end, either through obsolescence or through a goal achieved and a project completed, which is more precisely Danto’s evident point. The open-endedness of futurity, the impossibility of the completion and stabilization of any process, is a logical implication of Nietzsche’s philosophy. Thus, according to the Modus Tollens, for Nietzsche’s conception of the quality of futurity to prove false, his entire philosophy, and with it his aesthetics, would have to be false—if the conclusion is proved inaccurate, the premise must be inaccurate. Put simply, if there cannot now be an art of the ontological claim as Nietzsche conceived it, then there never could have been, for the Nietzschean aesthetic implies a ceaseless capability. More bluntly still—History, even the history of art, cannot terminate. If it could reach an end, then there never was History.

Of course, there is no one arguing such a case with regard to art. And so, the only possibility of our having reached an end of art is the chance that its purpose has been fully achieved, that the ontological claim which art practiced under a Nietzschean aesthetic seeks to convey has been fully conveyed. However, such a completion is not possible, and not merely because of Nietzsche’s stipulations of the open-endedness of futurity and of the ceaselessness of all processes, but because of a logical inevitability of his aesthetic. The ontological claim, the Dionysian tragic insight, is not a piece of conceptual thinking. It is not an element of knowledge that can be learned and retained, and finally no longer needs to be repeated. In a proper sense, the Dionysian insight is not knowledge at all, and there is nothing to learn. It is a quality of experience, a state of illumination that one must undergo—as Schönberg put it, the insight is, of necessity, perceptible and otherwise unintelligible. It can be known only by being known directly. And thus, it is in principle inexhaustible. The experience of the Dionysian insight must be continually re-invoked for it to be known at all. And so, the pertinence of the Nietzsche aesthetic cannot be fully accomplished, and the need of it cannot be extinguished. It remains a continual possibility, and a continual requirement of the only possible “knowledge” of the truth of the world.

Thus, Nietzsche’s aesthetic conceives an art of the future that continues to today. It is a contemporary possibility of an art of the sublime—the term that Newman employed, as did Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. His aesthetic idea departs from both the Platonic conception of art as portraying the world of illusory objects and from the Aristotelian aesthetics of reinforcing ego structures through dispensing the balm of catharsis, the purpose of which is to psychologically medicate and recuperate individuality. Rather, it aligns more closely with and significantly augments the Kantian aesthetic. The capacity of art to deliver a Dionysian insight is categorically akin to the “supersensible faculty” of Kant’s mathematical Sublime in The Critique of Judgement, in that it appeals to and exploits for an aesthetic, non-rational form of receptivity and awareness, so as to remit an apprehension of a truth otherwise unavailable, unavailable as a form of human expression outside the precincts of art—only the awesome and awful quality of sheer magnitude in Kant has become the Nietzschean excess of the chiasmic unity of opposing forces, and the thing-in-itself is no longer a thing but an apprehension of the continual making and unmaking of the entire world. Such art offers a different “mimesis” of the real, not through its images but through its manner as art, not through its representations but through its simulations of the processes of the real. And it stretches before us, in both senses of the word, into an indefinite future.

© Friedrich Ulfers and Mark Daniel Cohen, 2003

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, December 2007)

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