ONLY CONNECT 1 PLEASURE GROUND ONLY CONNECT 2 five exercises in aesthetics Christophe Van Eecke Lokaal 01 ‘Verweile doch! Du bist so schön’ Goethe, Faust, Part I 4 5 ‘Once I could speak joyfully of beautiful things, thinking to be understood; – now I cannot anymore; for it seems to me that no one regards them. Wherever I look or travel in England or abroad, I see that men, wherever they can reach, destroy all beauty.’ John Ruskin TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction, 9 Chapter One: Better Living Through Art Chapter Four: Engaging The World War and Resentment, 24 Making the World, 289 The Power of Vision, 34 Unmaking the World, 299 Divine Substance, 39 The Brutality of Fact, 304 The Therapeutic Fallacy, 43 The Quickening, 312 Narrative Didactics, 47 The Order of Things, 321 Feeling and Form, 56 Dionysian Mysteries, 329 Virtual Spaces, 70 Cleansing Cleanliness, 339 Fields of Vision, 80 Irreligious Rituals, 348 Virtual Life, 90 Lost in the Stars: A Materialist Manifesto, 354 Against Form, 98 Demonic Time, 357 Genius Redeemed, 104 Comes Undone, 364 Inventing the Human, 109 Chapter Five: Frail Gazing Chapter Two: Artworld Inc. Pathetic Fallacies, 371 6 Art Criticism After the End of Art, 122 Having the World, 378 7 Skirting Langer, 131 Doubling, 386 A Short History of the Avant-Garde, 140 Body Doubles, 389 Kondylian Combinations, 145 Pictures Imperfect, 392 Art and Philosophy, 154 Scattergorising the World, 404 Beauty and Ugliness, 163 Optics of Desire, 410 Killing Art, 169 Imagining Petals, 416 Avant-Garde After the End of Avant-Garde, 177 Living Memory, 422 Radical Chic for Chic Radicals, 184 Inner Space, 432 Magmatic Poetics, 441 Chapter Three: Getting Physicals Perchance to Dream, 445 A Body of Art, 193 Soft Sightings, 450 From Performance to Concept, 199 Cinechroma, 459 Engaging the Audience, 204 Gardens of the Underworld, 467 Lethal Objections, 214 Into the Garden, 473 The Meating of Porn and Art on a Dissecting Table, 219 Do Androids Wank to Electric Wet Dreams?, 228 Bibliography, 482 Mathesis Sexualis, 238 Scientia Sexualis, 243 Pleasure Machines, 251 Bodice Rest and Motion, 259 Moving Towards Stillness, 268 The Belly of a Dyslectic, 277 Introduction This book takes its title from the epigraph of E.M. Forster’s novel Howards End (1910) and takes as its own epigraph a phrase from Goethe’s Faust that is meant to recall 8 Immanuel Kant’s idea of purposiveness without purpose 9 in the experience of art. As such, the title really does say it all. It is the project of this book to present, in a series of interconnected essays, a philosophy of art that seeks to demonstrate how art is one of the primary ways in which human beings express their connectedness to the world. The book was developed out of a series of four essays written for the exhibition project Pleasure Ground at Lokaal 01 in Breda, The Netherlands, in the Spring of 2010. Pleasure Ground was an investigation of the relationship between an art institution and the artists it exhibits and the mutual engagement this implies. My task consisted in framing the exhibition process with four essays that would investigate several aspects of commitment or engagement in art. These essays were published in ThRu, the theoretical journal published by Lokaal 01, and form the backbone of the first four chapters. The texts were heavily edited and expanded for the book. Chapter Five is entirely new. what you should cut and what you should keep in a book. Although the book develops an argument, the five chapters But I have always felt that editors are a frustrated breed of can be read as self-contained pieces. Every chapter in turn people who are incapable of writing good books themselves consists of a series of sections that develop its argument. and who get off telling other people how to write theirs But many of these sections can also be read as self- to compensate. I also suspect that there is a conspiracy of contained essays. This applies especially to the sections that philologists at work here. First, they get themselves a job offer an extended analysis of the work of one individual editing your texts into something entirely at odds with artist. As such, Chapter Three ends with a very long your intentions. Then, forty years on, if you happen to have discussion of the films of Andy Warhol, the first chapter become famous, they get themselves another job editing the contains a discussion of David Hockney, and the fourth critical edition of your works, restoring the text to resemble deals at some length with Francis Bacon. Chapter Five is “the author’s original intentions”. But since you had those structured almost entirely as a series of such interconnected intentions to begin with, why tamper with them? Would essays. So the reader should feel free to browse. If the size we require a painter to submit his painting to an editor and of the book seems rather intimidating but you have a liking then make the recommended changes to his canvas? Would 10 for Warhol, you might simply read those sections and we require Rodin to lose the thinking person on his already 11 hopefully be triggered by that discussion to find out how my alarmingly overcrowded Gates of Hell? I don’t think so. approach to Warhol’s films is embedded in the philosophical Filmmakers have to deal with this kind of shit all the time discussions elsewhere in the book. But readers would in any because film is all about investors and money and people case be well-advised to first read the sections dealing with crunching popcorn and spilling drinks in the aisles – but Susanne K. Langer in the first chapter. Since Langer provides usually history proves the director’s cut right. Obviously, any the philosophical foundations on which this book is built, intelligent writer will be open to constructive criticism. But some knowledge of her work will be helpful. But apart from if and how he or she deals with it is entirely his or her affair. that, feel free to pick and choose. Is my treatment of Early So don’t kill your darlings. As Nigella knows, ‘in cooking, German Romanticism a bore? Don’t complain about it, go as in writing, you must please yourself to please others’ read about pornography in Chapter Three! If SM is your (Lawson 1998: viii). thing, rush to Chapter Four to discover its metaphysics. But Given the structure of the book and the many excursions if you’re not keen on Derek Jarman you will probably need and diversions that people it, it seems sensible to provide to seek professional help. an overview of the several chapters, so that the reader may For me the patchwork structure of the book meant that I did know what can be found where and how it should all be not have to kill my darlings. I know that there is a law of the connected. There are many threads running through the literary land which states that you need an editor to tell you several chapters and I trust the reader will often be triggered to connect (details in) discussions in later chapters with much more persuasive account of how art works. In fact, elements encountered in earlier chapters. It is impossible it is the most persuasive philosophy of art I know. Langer’s (and tiresome) to constantly point out such possible links. ideas are illustrated with, among other things, a section on Reading the book several times will certainly help bring the work of David Hockney. Finally, at the end of the chapter, out the connections. Among our constant concerns are we return to Early German Romanticism to find there the relationship between feeling (or meaning) and form, the roots of our postmodern concept of the self, which is the transformation of commonplace objects, voyeurism, illustrated in a discussion of Shakespeare, who made us. fetishism, pornography, creation or world-making, the The second chapter is called Artworld Inc. and investigates burden of identity, and several kinds of embodiment. the way the larger artworld influences our relationship with This intricate web of connections means that the reader art. An important element in our discussion is the influence is invited and even encouraged to constantly make such of philosophy on the way we perceive and judge works of connections, also to things that are not in the book. That is art. Most of the chapter is devoted to a heroic attempt at the point of Only Connect. refuting the work of Arthur C. Danto and his ideas on the Chapter One, Better Living Through Art, takes the so- transfiguration of the commonplace in art. But we also take 12 called “culture wars” in America as a starting point for issue with the emergence of the PhD in the arts. Along the 13 a discussion of the artist’s relationship to the larger way we sketch two histories of the avant-garde that are community. This is an old philosophical question, at least at odds with Danto’s account of the avant-garde. One of as old as Plato’s Politics: does the artist have some kind of our counterexamples is the German philosopher Panajotis moral or social responsibility or not? The chapter argues Kondylis, whose concept of postmodernism will stay with that those who feel that art does have a role to play in our us for the rest of the book. Finally, we will also address the moral well-being are guilty of the “therapeutic fallacy”. issue of the avant-garde after the end of avant-garde.