Art Encounters on the Uses of Theory in Art Studies

F REDERIK TYGSTRUP

Art Encounters On the Uses of Theory in Art Studies

According to the editors of Theodor Adorno’s posthumous Aesthetic Theory, the book should have had, as an epigraph, a fragment by Friedrich Schlegel: »In what is generally known as philosophy of art, usually one of the two is missing; either philosophy or art.«1 To Adorno, both alternatives are equally invalidating to a puta- tive theory of art. When philosophy is missing, we might get an authentic and even enthusiastic report of an experience of art, but without the conceptual scaffolding needed to articulate it. And when art is missing, we are left – as is usually the case in philosophical aesthetics – with consistent and often admirable conceptual sys- tems which remain nonetheless incapable of assessing the singular experience of an artwork. When art eventually makes its way into philosophical aesthetics, it is usually in the humble role of an example of some philosophical point; and when art critics and practitioners approach philosophy, it is more often to pick a concept than to engage with a discursive argument. From this vantage point, the beauty of theory would reside in its ability to embrace both philosophy and art and to bring them into a productive interaction. Theory, then, would have to transgress the disciplinary forms of reasoning laid down by institutionalized philosophy in order to somehow accommodate aesthetic experience, whereas aesthetic experience in turn should be articulated in a way that would be compatible to philosophical thinking. What is at stake here is the ability to make the experiential impact issued by an encounter with an artwork accessible to conceptual thinking, and to make the philosophical concepts useful for the articulation of this experience. The aesthetic experience has the character of an event, the experiential process stored in the artwork, as well as the unfolding experience of interacting with it. And when we are aroused by this event, it is because it makes us think, because the artwork encountered involves a highly developed formal technology of thinking and invention. The question is, however, how this artistic ›thinking‹, this production of novel sensations, affective patterns and intellectual insights, can be grasped and articulated as something more than an aperçu – something that passes by, ephemerally albeit also impressively, as a sudden concentration and intensity, the spiritual equivalent, as Robert Musil once put it, of chewing a coffee bean?

1 »In dem, was man Philosophie der Kunst nennt, fehlt gewöhnlich eins von beiden; entweder die Philosophie oder die Kunst«, Theodor W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Frankfurt am Main 1970, p. 544. In the following, references to Ästhetische Theorie are indicated in the text. If not stated otherwise, all German citations are translated by the author.

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This is where theory comes in. Aesthetic theory, conceptual and discursive thinking and the model-making concerned with artworks and aesthetic experience, are a means to articulate the mental and sensual processes produced by the artwork. Or, to put it differently, theory is a method used to appropriate the vaguely circum- scribed cognitive implications of an artwork or of an aesthetic event. The beauty of theory, then, in my view, does not stem from its intrinsic quali- ties, its elegance or its affective attraction, but from its functionality. What con- cerns us here are the ways in which it empowers our understanding through the production of effective concepts and models, and – in the case of theory in the dis- ciplines of art – the ways in which it joins forces with the artistic procedures of thinking to unfold and underpin the cognitive potentials in these procedures. To understand the beauty of theory – and the efﬁ cacy of theory – when it comes to encounters with art, I have divided the following argument into three sections dealing with the notion of aesthetic experience, with the uses of conceptual thinking as an approach to aesthetic experience, and on the production of knowledge, the cognitive potential, involved in such an encounter.

1. Aesthetic Experience

In Adorno’s philosophy, aesthetic experience is a seminal, albeit quite complex cat- egory. What it addresses is not simply the question of the beholder and her subjective assessment and/or evaluation of the work of art, as in more recent reception theory, nor a general mode of sensual experience, as has been theorized in modern pragmatist aesthetics from Dewey to Shusterman. In both of these instances, aesthetic experience is about someone (the beholder of an artwork, or simply an inter- ested subject) experiencing something (a work of art, or some piece of worldly reality) in a specifi c mode (as art, or as a sensual, aesthetic object). To Adorno, in contrast, aesthetic experience is not only a subjective act of perception and appre- hension; it also has an objective existence as an experience stored in the work of art. When contemplating a work of art, then, we are not only ›having‹ an aesthetic experience, we also encounter an aesthetic experience. Aesthetic experience, in oth- er words, exists both on the object side (as something immanent in the work) and on the subject side, as the process of encountering and sharing this ›something‹. To understand this something that persists as an objective aesthetic experience, Adorno’s fi rst move is invariably to follow a historicist impetus and track back the work in question to the situation of its genesis. When experience is immanent in the work of art, it is because any aesthetic object crystallizes, as it were, around an encounter with a historical reality. The work of art, to put it differently, presents us with an objective materialization of a specifi c historical experience. The material presence of a work of art, therefore, refers back to a process: a process of experience and a process of articulating this experience through artistic means. The work of art is, as it says in Ästhetische Theorie, ›immanently dynamic‹ (p. 263). This immanent dynamism of the work is in turn paralleled by the dyna-

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