• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 183 An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images)* Robert HUGHES With special attention to landscape art, this overview explores Jean-Luc Nancy’s aesthetics in five theses: (1) The event of art involves shedding the everyday significations and conceptual framings that shut out the world and enclose the subject in solipsism, (2) Art locates the subject in the presentness of a singular sensuous event, (3) Art arouses intimations of the ground of the image as a ground of unpresented chaos, wildness, and indifference, (4) Art stages a real encounter with the world’s unsignifying indifference to human existence, and (5) Art exposes the subject as other to itself in the event of art. The recent publication of Aavo Kokk and Andres Eilart’s Pintsliga tõmmatud Eesti (2011)1 gives us occasion to reconsider the strange and special pleasures of landscape images. By happy coincidence, this issue of Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi / Studies on Art and Architecture invites consideration of the aesthetics of the contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940), whose essay on landscape painting begs us to do the same. Now, if landscape art calls for a critical reconsideration, this is surely not be- cause landscape has been neglected, exactly, but because certain corners of the critical humanities – mine, to be specific, literary studies – have come to regard landscape primarily as a sign of something else: as a symbol of forces more dynamic and dramatic than mere landscape, more urgent than mere pretty pictures with * The present essay owes much to the kind hospitality of the Research Group in Critical Theory at the Estonian Literary Museum. I should also mention my dear sister-in-law, Anu Tamm (who gave me Kokk and Eilart’s book while I was at work on a larger project on the aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy) and, of course, I could never forget the remarkable conversation of Uku, Anna, and Ella, interlocutors of infinite charm, all of them. 1 A. Kokk, A. Eilart, Pintsliga tõmmatud Eesti. Tallinn: Eesti Ajalehed, 2011. See also http://www.maastikumaal. ee/ENG/. RObert HUGHES 184 mountains and meadows and forests, skies fixed in their slow dramas of light and shadow, icons of a reactionary pastoral sentimentalism or an environmentalist la- ment for a world under threat. Thus, for many students and critics, landscape in art may strike the eye less for the scene itself, than for the way such images treat regional or national iconographies and for the position the landscape thereby as- sumes in political debates and identitarian passions conventionally associated with this imagery. For eyes eager to see an Estonian sublime, for patriots hungry for evidence of local or national excellence or for nationalists wishing to meditate on the Estonian people’s relation to their little bit of the earth, for pastoralists seeking a pre-modern vision of a more ‘natural’ relation of humanity within nature, for anthropologists and historians curious to see peasants, fisherfolk, and workers in their proper settings at various moments in Estonian history – for all of these view- ers, the long and excellent history of Estonian landscape art offers much to enjoy. The present essay has no wish to deny the considerable pleasures of art’s rep- resentational dimension (and I presume Jean-Luc Nancy would not deny them either), but it does propose to consider landscape painting in a different register. This more phenomenological register unsettles, in certain respects, the pleasures of representation, or, better, shows how these pleasures of landscape-as-repre- sentation enjoy their special quality as art by co-existing with a different kind of aesthetic pleasure, one that runs counter to the essentially narcissistic pleasures of finding one’s ideological predispositions confirmed in a painting or of exercis- ing one’s laboriously-acquired critical mastery. The aim of the essay, ultimately, is to think about the way that the uncanny workings of art suggest something about the aesthetic subject and his or her sense of the world. Jean-Luc Nancy’s work will be central for us here and this essay will proceed primarily as an exposition of his ideas on the aesthetics and ontology of art, especially as he has developed these ideas since the early 1990s. Consideration of several Estonian landscape paintings will help make Nancy’s course of thought more concrete – an indispensable func- tion, since what phenomenological criticism strives for, perhaps above all else, is a reflection upon one’s concrete sense of the world. In fact, this would be one way to understand Nancy’s own revolt against critical transformations of landscape into signs and symbols. Nancy’s work argues that when one encounters a landscape that is genuinely artful and not yet seized upon as a symbol for something other than itself, when one exposes oneself to an aesthetic event in its concrete, sensuous un- folding, this aesthetic encounter yields an uncannily displaced and doubled vision, both of oneself and of the world of sense that one faces. We will develop this argu- ment through five basic claims about art that Nancy puts forth. An Introduction to the Aesthetics of Jean-Luc Nancy (with Reflections on Estonian Landscape Images) 185 The event of art involves shedding the everyday significations and conceptual framings that shut out the world and enclose the subject in solipsism Interpretation has defined, for many long decades, the critical act itself and it is, as we have said, a common critical reflex to ‘read’ images for their significance. Students appreciate it as a sign of a scholar’s specialised knowledge and hope to re- produce it in fulfilling their own assignments; the public expects it of the critic; and artists and writers are commonly asked for ‘the message’ of their work, a declara- tion of its meaning. Despite the occasional exasperations for writers and artists and critics of this presumed conceptual essence of the work (‘If I could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint’ said the American painter Edward Hopper), it is easy to see one or another painting as dominated by its conceptual, ideological, biographical, or historical dimensions. Richard Sagrits’s Sügis Kundas (Autumn in Kunda, 1964, Art Museum of Estonia), for example, will strike at least some viewers, I would think, as dominated by the canons of Soviet socialist realism, whether in conformity, in resistance, or in some complex mixture of the two. If the painting also gives a sense for the acrid smell of the factory combining with the cool air of a late afternoon in early autumn, if it impresses the viewer for the special light of a mixed cloudy day, when the sun, hitherto hidden, sinks below cloud cover and shoots a few last rays over the horizon to illuminate our workers on their way home, if the viewer finds him- or herself caught in the unexpected gaze of the workers in the foreground – if the painting does these things, it likely does them over and against a predisposition to take the painting as a signifier in the shifting ideologi- cal struggles that still surround the art of the Estonian Soviet period. I do not wish to suggest that such ideological readings are improper, but rather that such read- ings tend to subordinate other, perhaps more surprising features of the painting. It might be productive, I think, to resist the critical impulse to fix a painting as a sign within already well-rehearsed debates and thoughts, and to overcome the impulse to fix the image in a moral frame judging the artist, Soviet industrial policy, Soviet pictorial dictates, and the broad course of the Soviet occupation. We may return later to the matter of judgment and consider how it operates in Sagrits’ painting (What do they see, those workers who seem to be looking at us? Do they regard the viewer or the painter? Is there a judgment implied in their regard?). These conceptual framings and these ideological arguments are ultimately so- lipsistic, I would say, in the sense that they are repetitions of already well-worn arguments and thus take the critic and his or her reader nowhere he or she has not already been. What school child on this side of the Narva River has not already been told of the wickedness of the Soviet occupation, the disaster of its industrial policy and the wrong-headedness of its cultural policy, considered from an Estonian point of view? Surely there are satisfactions and comforts in such rehearsals, but one cannot really call them surprising. In such cases, the painting effectively functions as an occasion to recall a set of arguments and positions with a life pre-existing (and unaffected by) the subject’s encounter with the painting, which thus becomes an encounter missed, we might say. A more authentic encounter with exteriority RObert HUGHES 186 would catch the viewer of this painting in a moment of openness, touch the subject in some unanticipated and surprising way, and seize upon his or her attentiveness in an event of the new. Art locates the subject in the thereness and the thisness of a singular sensuous event One of Nancy’s Heideggerian inheritances in his thinking of art is to conceive of the work of art as, to some degree, an event of presentation, in which things come forth into greater distinctness to make their impression on one’s sensibility, and in which, correspondingly, the viewer comes likewise into a fuller, more authentic sense of his or her being in the world.

Load more

  15

Copy Link