Reflections on starting an art and politics reading group in the time of corona: Week 3.

“Live with your century; but do not be its creature. Work for your contemporaries; but create what they need, not what they praise.”

— Schiller

Dear Reader,

I have taken to heart your feedback that my last letter might have made you feel like you didn’t understand Kant at all. I am sensitive to such a reaction as it might also be true for myself. With Schiller — who is wholly indebted to and picking up on Kant’s project of relating the aesthetic experience to freedom — I shall try to focus my attention further. I will try to follow Schiller in his task to plead the case of beauty, to invoke feelings no less often than principles in such a task as he set out to do in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man (1794). I am not an academic, even if I might be a scholar of sorts. I am, however, in search of answers of my own, and I want to make my letters to you the medium by which I learn to trust my feelings, my intuition, and learn to understand their relationship to reason, and be able to communicate to you my (self-)discoveries. I shall not attempt to hide from you that I have not fully understood either Kant or Schiller, but I shall attempt to elucidate what I have learned, or at least what it made me think about — and myself learn in the process. 

The first difficulty I encountered was that Schiller’s relevance to contemporary art appears to be null and void (Hegel will be another matter entirely). If there is any relationship, with regards to the importance of an aesthetic experience or beauty — in the present — it is indirect or obscure. Schiller is talking about the place of art in modern society more than talking about art in its concrete aesthetic phenomena. There is a yawning abyss I feel in my soul between our moment, our understanding of art, and his, because this whole tradition of a philosophy of art with regards to society is detached from contemporary art practices. We have also lost touch with our feelings to such a degree that Schiller’s sentences like “the way to the head must be opened through the heart”, or that “the development of man’s capacity for feeling is, therefore, the more urgent need of our age, not merely because it can be a means of making better insights effective for living, but precisely because it provides the pulse for bettering our insights” feel fanciful. How often do you hear someone talk about feelings with regards to contemporary art? 

Even further, Schiller is bringing the question of an aesthetic education into the realm of politics, that is, elaborating on the relationship between intellectual education and moral education with the aim of elucidating a practical political task. Aesthetic education is raised with regards to the question about revolutionizing modern society as a whole in a way Kant only hinted at; however, both follow Rousseau on this. Art is the foundation in which we can build and imagine society — what a wonderful idea! We owe that to Schiller’s republicanism, I think, but let there be no doubt that Schiller was recapitulating Kant in the context of the French Revolution, teasing out issues of how aesthetic judgement is meant to mediate theory and practice, precisely because the politics of his era were demonstrating the need for the faculty of judgement. 

Schiller writes: “If man is ever to solve that problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom.” 

How can we realize the ideal human being, the ideal society? How do we even begin to imagine it? Art! The Beautiful! Our capacity to reflect on an aesthetic experience, especially with regards to art, is an indicator of our ability to imagine and realize our ideal society. So there you have it, this yawning abyss is experienced as a sense of absence — what is not, but could be there. To put it bluntly, art is the intermediary between the actual and the ideal. 

The author of “Ode to Joy”, Germany’s poet/philosopher/critic is undeniably an idealist. But he was also a bourgeois revolutionary thinker, who was advocating for a bourgeois revolution that allows for the overcoming of the barbarism and fragmentation in modern society. 

The second difficulty I encountered was how to make Schiller palpable in the present. What Schiller raises elsewhere is the idea of the naive and sentimental poet, that is a self-reflective kind of poetry. I would like to attempt, at risk of utter failure, to take this up in the model of what I took to be the idea of naivete into a kind of model: the naive art critic.

I hope to convince you that the theme I have chosen — beauty — is far less alien to the needs of our age than it appears through an attempt at naive criticism.

Schiller writes:

“By beauty the sensuous man is led to form and to thought; by beauty the spiritual man is brought back to matter and restored to the world of sense.From this statement it would appear to follow that between matter and form, between passivity and activity, there must be a middle state, and that beauty plants us in this state. It actually happens that the greater part of mankind really form this conception of beauty as soon as they begin to reflect on its operations, and all experience seems to point to this conclusion. But, on the other hand, nothing is more unwarrantable and contradictory than such a conception, because the aversion of matter and form, the passive and the active, feeling and thought, is eternal, and cannot be mediated in any way. How can we remove this contradiction? Beauty weds the two opposed conditions of feeling and thinking, and yet there is absolutely no medium between them. The former is immediately certain through experience, the other through the reason.”

After failing terribly to find a work of art that could make us think about beauty in the present, in the way Schiller might have intended (I miss going to see art you guys!) I decided to look at painting contemporaneous with Schiller. I pulled out Albert Boime’s Art in the Age of Revolution from my shelf, and as I browsed purposefully in search of that connection, I came upon some usual suspects: Fragonard’s The Swing — heavenly, but too hedonistic and decadent — Fuseli’s The Nightmare — enigmatic, but too melodramatic and sensual — and David’s Death of Marat — closer, but too loaded with history. None of these paintings seemed to evoke that feeling and thought — aesthetic experience — I was aiming for. I then grabbed the book on Diderot’s Art writing from the 1765 Salon, and one painting I had never really looked at before struck me as recognizable. Even though it was in black and white, it evoked the feeling I was searching for: Jean-Baptiste Greuze’s Girl with a Dead Canary (1765). 

I pulled the image up online, and saw an oval painting of a pretty dirty-blond girl who grieves for her dead bird while her head rests on her left hand. The dead bird lies on top of the cage, its head hanging down, its wings limp, its feet in the air. It was the kind of painting that elicits pleasure in melancholy and in innocence, a kind of conflicted experience of pity and admiration — of beauty. The purity of the young girl as she expresses her sadness over the loss of the bird by covering half her face with her supple hand, the pain of looking at the dead bird is such that she can only allow herself to see it with one hand. I still mute or cover my face with my hands when I watch scary movies; I leave a little space between my fingers to control the amount I can take in at a single moment. But is it possible that a girl her age would feel such loss for a bird? She must be 16! Her hair is so elegantly arranged, while the flowers seem to come off of her bosom. I do not wish to merely treat the girl in the painting as an illustration, but make my experience of her and her suffering the loss of her object, my subject. My experience of pleasure and delight came from recognizing a kind of simplicity and ease of the work: how easy it made me feel her loss, adore it, appreciate it, relate to it, find consolation in it. I also want to console her, hug her, and tell her it will all be okay. Such pure emotion is not something I have felt in ages. I have long since lost the innocence required for such feelings of sadness and grief that Greuze’s painting expresses in the moment it conveys. It must be more than just the loss of the bird! My grief is bundled up with self-hate and self-deprecating thoughts, with numerous experiences of personal suffering, that such pure, unadulterated feeling is something I have admiration and respect for. But is it unadulterated? The girl fulfills an ideal, which presents a potential of connecting/relating myself to that ideal. The painting represents the ideal of naivete I seek to develop in and through art criticism. I can recognize that feeling and mourn its loss, mourn my own loss of innocence. That’s it! She’s lost her innocence! With that grief also comes a feeling of shame for having lost those pure feelings, anger at having to let go of childlike impulses, but it also comes with a sublime edge, that is, with the feeling and recognition that I have matured and endured suffering I never expected to experience. That I have gained experience. The girl is a woman now. I am no longer a girl. The shame and anger becomes about my own struggle with loss of innocence, with my self-imposed immaturity, with an unfulfilled ideal of myself. 

There you have it, dear reader, my attempt at naive criticism. I do not know if I have failed or succeeded in pleading the case for beauty. I leave it to you to answer that question, but I found it fruitful to seek beauty out. I hope you try it too.

More soon,

Laurie 

PS: Berlin museums and galleries have reopened. I hope to write about some IRL art soon.  //

You can read Laurie’s Week 1 letter here and her Week 2 letter here.