Art&Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings

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Veils

First Annual Philosophy and Art Conference

Stony Brook University Manhattan

March 28-29, 2008

Conference Proceedings


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The Inaugural conference of the Stony Brook Manhattanprogram in art and philosophy took place on March 28th and29th, 2008. It was organized by Professor Megan Craig as wellas the following Stony Brook graduate students:

Phil Bouska, Katie Brennan, Eric Charles, Audrey Ellis, NickFortier, Susan Henry, Paul Jaissle, Ryland Johnson, RebeccaLangley, Paul Netter, Dave Smucker, Heather White

The conference would not have been possible without thesupport of our sponsors:

SBU Philosophy Department, SBU College of Arts and

Science, SBU Humanities Institute, SBU Fine ArtsDepartment, SBU Comp. Lit. & Cultural Studies, SBUSociology Department, SBU Graduate Student Organization,SBU Office of the President


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ContentsEditors' Preface ........................................................................ 1Opening Remarks - Dr. Megan Craig ...................................... 3Panel I: Aesthetics and Photographic Vision ........................... 6Barnett Newman and the Aesthetics of TotalityClay Matlin .............................................................................. 6The Question Concerning Bernd and Hilla BecherDavid Smucker ...................................................................... 25AL-ADHANMichael Knierim .................................................................... 36Panel ResponseIsaac Fer ................................................................................. 46Panel II: Identity and Seeing Others ...................................... 50A New Narcissism: Refracting the Self in Contemporary VideoMax Razdow .......................................................................... 50Baudrillards Butterfly AthleticismRyland Johnson ...................................................................... 59You & IClare Samuel .......................................................................... 68Panel ResponseHeather White ........................................................................ 74Panel III: Feeling and Interaction .......................................... 76Unveiling the Life of FeelingNikolay Tugushev .................................................................. 76Karen Joan Topping ............................................................... 86CENTRE-LUMIRE-BLEUSophie Lavaud-Forest .......................................................... 100Panel ResponseMarlene Clark ...................................................................... 105Panel IV: New Perspectives for Architecture ...................... 108Reversing and Folding the Language of ArchitectureBryan Norwood and Aaron Speaks ...................................... 108


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A One Thousand Square Meter Veil: Truths DoubleConcealmentMusetta Durkee .................................................................... 117The Reminiscing EyeSimona Mihaela Josan ......................................................... 130Panel ResponseInna Osipova ........................................................................ 139Panel V: Imagery and Consumption .................................... 142The Abject and the Ugly:Modern Art in Kristeva and AdornoSurti Singh ........................................................................... 142Piercing the Veil of Law:A Schizoanalytic Critique of the Obscene Aesthetics of ControlKyle J. McGee ..................................................................... 153Affirmative FashionMarijke Bouchier ................................................................. 165Panel ResponseAmir Jaima .......................................................................... 172Keynote AddressThe Parergons VeilDr. Rosalind Krauss ............................................................. 175Closing Remarks:The Veil's EdgeDr. Edward S. Casey ............................................................ 182Contributing Artists: ............................................................ 188'com()pass40n75w' and 'symchronaut'Constantina Zavitsanos ........................................................ 188The Brown Studyeldritch Priest ....................................................................... 192


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Preface

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Editors' Preface

The first annual philosophy and art conference atStony Brook Manhattan was an attempt to further the ongoingdialogue among a vast array of modes of inquiry andexpression, and included presentations on architecture,politics, photography, prose, painting, installation, theory,interpretation and many other approaches, all constellatedunder the categories philosophy and art. The purposefullyambiguous theme 'veils', as well as the broad disciplinaryschema indicated in the call for papers intended to bring

participants from a variety of fields and media to respond to atruly interdisciplinary set of problems, concerns, and projects.The results were overwhelmingly successful, as evidenced inthe following papers collected here, as well as in many waysthat cannot be reproduced.

In her opening remarks, Dr. Megan Craig exploresthe implications of 'veils' for both art and philosophy, as wellas the intimate relation of these two disciplines. What washoped for by all involved is indicated clearly here: that wesee the obscurity of veils as the condition of possibility forapproaching the faces, beings, places, and discourses that onlyappear enigmatically. The keynote address from Dr. RosalindKrauss and the closing remarks of Dr. Edward S. Casey both

respond to the veiling nature of art, as well as the un-veiling oftruth that occurs at the edges of art and theory. The paneldiscussions reproduced here represent and explore the deepand fruitful connections between art and philosophy, as wellas demonstrate some of the most current research and work inthe area. This collection falls short, however, of conveying thefullness with which each participant and audience membercontributed to the days events, especially in the case ofpresentations of actual works of art, both within panels as wellas parts of the larger conference event (see Contributing

Artists at the back of this volume), which are here only

represented by digital images and text, offering only a trace ofthe truly revelatory aspects of these works and projects.

What lies beyond the veil is of utmost interest toseekers of truth and beauty alike. The provocation that follows


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from the presentation of a veil has been unavoidably temptingto curious and dedicated minds throughout history, and thisexploration has become increasingly central in instantiationsof art, philosophy and inquiry alike since the dawn of time,This conference was one, albeit powerful and revealing,among many attempts to explore these murky waters that flowin and out of not only philosophy and art, but humanexpressivity in general.

This collection is a testimony to the success of thisinaugural conference and attempts to show just how thisgathering set the tone for a continued tradition of challengingand fruitful dialogue on the essential and continually evolving

relationships between art and philosophy, as well as manyother fields of inquiry. Thus, we not only recognize thoseinvolved in the conference, but hope to foster furtherexploration and dialogue.

Editors:Phil BouskaPaul R Jaissle


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Dr. Megan CraigOpening Remarks

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Veils: Opening Remarks

Dr. Megan Craig

Welcome. We are so happy to have all of you here at our firstannual conference in philosophy and art. Youve come fromseveral continents and multiple disciplines. As we drafted thecall for papers and discussed the possible theme for these twodays, we knew we were casting a net far and wide. We couldnot anticipate how rich the catch would be. And the realrewards are yet before us, as we stand on the edge of oneshore here together and have no idea where we might travelover the next two days or what we might find.

In these few minutes before we set sail, Id like to say

a few words about the title of our conference: Veils. Thisgathering is essentially plural, and we are dealing with notone, but several veils. We might envision these as a cascade offinely woven materials hanging in front of us. They may bemore or less opaque, more or less transparent. Together theydiffuse the light and create a scrim of ambiguity. We mightglean the dim outline of something behind or beyond them,perhaps the contours of a body or a face. Or perhaps, like thescreens aligned at the back of a stage, they rise and fall toreveal an ever-changing scene. Perhaps these veils part and

close together and separately, veils upon veils.Veils conceal. There is something rare, valuable,

fragile, or vulnerable beyond the veils. A veil conceals andprotects a mystery.

Veils conceal, but as we learn from Heidegger, everyconcealing is also a revealing. The double concealment

Heidegger describes in The Origin of the Work of Art

includes concealment as refusal and concealment as

dissembling. In the first case, concealment as refusal,

things resist or evade us in a distinctly opaque way. Somethingrefuses to appear or come to light. In the second case,concealment as dissembling, one thing stands in front of

another, or parades as another. In this case, something appears

enigmatically, semi-transparently in a half-light. We are neversure which form of concealment were dealing with: refusal or


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dissembling. We might say, we can never be certain whetherthe veils we encounter are opaque or transparent, and to whatdegree. Heidegger takes this essential uncertainty to meanthat:

The open place in the midst of beings, theclearing, is never a rigid stage with apermanently raised curtain on which the play ofbeings runs its course. Rather, the clearinghappens only as this double concealmentthisis never a merely existent state, but ahappening.1

The curtain doesnt rise on the stage to reveal alighted set where a story unfolds. A curtain rises on a stagethat is composed of infinite curtains rising and falling. Thestage itself, the clearing, moves afloat or adrift. And wedont find ourselves in seats in the dark, looking on from

below at the dim lights and moving shadows as Platos

prisoners found themselves in the cave. We find ourselves inthe midst of the bright and dim lights, neither above norbelow, but enmeshed in the veils that are rising and falling.We are, ourselves, veils that rise and fall, that refuse anddissemble, open and close. Heidegger describes this clearing

as a complex performance piece. It is a happening in which

we become or embody the very veils we attempt to hide

beyond and to lift.Art and philosophy, if we can say these separately,

are also entangled in this double concealment. It is not clearwhether one refuses or obscures the other. It is not clear whereone begins and where the other ends. We may be tempted, asany veil tempts us, to lift these veils quickly, to get underneaththem and uncover the enigma to make philosophy and art, atlong last, show their faces or meet face to face. But rather thanrush impatiently, my hope is that we will see the obscurity ofveils as the condition of possibility for approaching the faces,beings, places, and discourses that only appear enigmatically.

1 Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art," inPoetry,

Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York:Harper & Rowe, 1975) 54.


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We lift one veil to find another. We are together today tomove among the veils. Not to go behind the curtains, but tojoin together for this multivalent happening.

In a short story called Conversation in the

Mountains, Paul Clan writes about two people whose eyes

are filled with veils. There is not a single lid to the eye, but aninfinite series of lids opening and closing deep in the hearts ofvision and memory. Meeting on a mountain, on a steep andarduous climb, these two make their way towards each other,drawing back the curtains in their eyes. Today, as we open ourown conversation, we draw back an initial veil, the first ofmany, to begin to establish the clearing that is never clear. One

veil draws aside barely and we begin to grope our waytowards each other, in and amidst veils.


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Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

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Panel I: Aesthetics and Photographic Vision

Barnett Newman and the Aesthetics of Totality

Clay Matlin

School of Visual Arts

As he looked over his newly finished painting on January 29 th1948, what might Barnett Newman have thought? It was a

modestly sized canvas (27in by 16in), covered in Indian redpaint and cleaved in two by an electric stripe of l ight cadmiumred, like some Technicolor lightning bolt come to set theworld on fire. Do we picture Newman clad in that formaloutfit he is so often photographed wearing: pants hiked upover his waist, sports jacket unbuttoned, white dress shirt andwide tie? Perhaps he sat for hours, as his friend Mark Rothkodid, in a comfortable chair smoking endlessly whilecontemplating the newly finished Onement I. After all, it washis 43rd birthday.

Newman would come to regard Onement I as theturning point in his art: perhaps the exact moment when all hisruminating on both the need to paint and the question of whatto paint merged into one perfect concrete presence to guidehim forward. The English critic David Sylvester writes ofNewman, As Athena sprang fully formed from the brow of

Zeus, so Newman the artist sprang fully formed from Newmanthe dreamerNewman of course, did more than meditate

during his years of preparation; he wrote. He wrote, it appears,in order to define for himself what had to be done. 1 Indeed,Newman the artist could never have existed without Newmanthe dreamer. This essay will inquire into the aestheticphilosophy of Newman the dreamer and especially hisassertion that the role of art is to make the Nietzschian task ofliving more bearable.

1 David Sylvester,About Modern Art, 2ndEdition (YaleUniversity Press, 2001) 322.


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Clay MatlinBarnett Newman and The Aesthetics of Totality

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In his Plasmic Image, a collection of short

statements from the mid 1940s, Newman writes that abstractart is not a thing to be loved because it is abstract, it is to beloved because of the means it possesses to communicate newideas.2 Before Onement INewman had experimented with thebands that would later become known as zips. Yet these

early paintings, with their tapered bands and canvases oftendivided into thirds, have the feeling of tense experimentation.There is roughness to the work, the same searching touch thatRothko had before his own breakthrough. The pooling ofpaint, thin in some areas, thick in others, different shades ofthe same color dominate the canvases; the zip is there in

nuce but it is not yet focused. The later tightness and powerthat Newman would come to possess is only evident ininfrequent flashes. He seems to be working out what hebelieved to be at the foundation of all art, the handling ofchaos.3Onement I bound Newman to his craft; it became amoral need:

what it made me realize is that I was

confronted for the first time with the thing that Idid, whereas up until that moment I was able toremove myself from the act of painting, or fromthe painting itself. The painting was somethingthat I was making, whereas somehow for thefirst time with this painting the painting itself

had a life of its own in a way that I dont thinkthe others did, as much.4

No longer separate, the painting became an extension ofNewman, just as alive as he was. The act of painting wastransformed from the simplicity of the action of making a

2Newman called the image Plasmic because he felt the newartist would give life to the abstract, converting the artsplastic elements into what he called mental plasma. The

ideas were to be made tangible.3 From the Plasmic Image in Barnett Newman: SelectedWritings and Interviews, ed. John P. ONeill (New York:

Alfred A Knopf, 1990) 139.4 Newman, David Sylvester Interview, 256.


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painted work, into the creation of something that would notmerely live in this world but communicate with it. Onement Igave Newman a sense of both who and where he was. Itgrounded him. The life it possessed linked him to the world.His intent was to move away from nature, to distance himselffrom the flaws he saw in the abstraction of European painterssuch as Kandinsky, flaws that, in his view, allowed forabstract shapes to be construed as objects from life. Newmanbelieved that the goal of abstract painting should be to removethe painter from the presence of nature but not from that of lifeitself.

For Newman, the artist is an individual who delves

into the mysteries of the world so they might then come topresent the unknowable. Newmans vocal espousal of his

vision led him to be characterized by his fellow AbstractExpressionists, according to Sylvester, as either the groupssage or fool. What Newman hunted after was a new artist, onewho believed, as he did, that the truth is a search for the

hidden meanings of life. To practice it, art must become ametaphysical exercise. That is why the new painter isdissatisfied only to titillate our sensibilities. That is why he hasno intention of giving us cut and dried journalist answers

(The Plasmic Image, 145). The boldness of Newmans

assertion is that the truth in painting is not a concrete thing butis instead a search for meaning and that such searching can be

represented only in abstraction, a medium that does not tradeon the easy susceptibility of our emotional arousal.Representational painting had ceased to be capable of showingthe truth of the worlds problems. The role of the artist was to

move beyond the visible and known world, to work withforms mysterious even to him, to invent new modes andsymbols that will have the living quality of creation (The

Plasmic Image, 140). Under Newmans formulation, theartist must attempt to wrest truth from the void, for the void

is incomprehensible, it is the graveyard of truth. Thus the artistmust pull truth from its prison so that she might have theopportunity to search for those hidden meanings that lifeoffers. Newman sought to present mans connection to man as

well as mans relation to the absolute, by attempting to bestow

living thought, the desire to know lifes mysteries, to the


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language of painting.5Newmans new painter, however, was of a

decidedly American variety. In The Sublime is Now,

perhaps his most influential though not necessarily his mostaccomplished essay, he argues that contemporary Europeanartists are incapable of achieving sublimity because theycontinue to insist on living inside the reality of sensation,

building artwork within a framework of plasticity based onGreek ideals of beauty. It was his belief that these artists weretrapped under the crushing weight of their own history, ahistory that followed them wherever they went.6

5Perhaps the best way to approach Newmans conception ofthe absolute is if we turn to the German Romantic poet andplaywright Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805). Schiller believedthat mans search for the absolute is a search not only for agrand truth about the nature of existence but a chance torecapture the unity man once possessed, both internal and inrelation to ones fellow man. He saw reason as the means to

approach the absolute, for reason is there to direct us in theface of Natures devotion to the sensuous and the

shortcomings of the imagination. It is reason, according toSchiller, that gives us a glass with which to peer into theabsolute (Schiller, 43). This is not so different from Newmans

attempt to create an art of ethics and content by removing hisown painting from a reality of sensation. Indeed, for Schiller

writes in the Ninth Letter of On the Aesthetic Education ofMan, that the pure moral impulse is directed towards theAbsolute. For such an impulse time does not exist, and thefuture turns into the present from the moment that it is seen todevelop with inevitable Necessity out of the present. In theeyes of a Reason which knows no limits, the Direction is atonce the Destination, and the Way is completed from themoment it is trodden (Schiller, 59). If we consider Newmans

desire to present to his viewer that viewers connection not

only to her fellow man, but to the absolute as well then we caninterpret Newmans quest as one that seeks to engage with thesame sense of immediate presentness that is alive in Schillers

vision of mans desire to come to know the absolute.6 It is interesting to note that Donald Judd would make a


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Newman writes:I believe that here in America, some of us, freefrom the weight of European culture, are findingthe answer by completely denying that art hasany concern with the problem of beauty andwhere to find it.We are asserting mans

natural desire for the exalted, for a concern withour relationship to the absolute emotions.The

image we produce is the self-evident one ofrevelation, real and concrete, that can beunderstood by anyone who will look at itwithout the nostalgic glasses of history (The

Sublime is Now, 173).

The European painter, the old painter, the painter foreverburdened by history was constantly besieged by the crush ofthe past. It was impossible to be European, in Newmansopinion, and in some way not be incapable of dealing with the

similar claim in December 1963 when he wrote the KansasCity Report forArts MagazinesNationwide Reports section.Judd writes: If you take an elementary course in art at a

university, it is a survey of the history of art. It is considerednormal to give the student a stiff dose of the past before heknows anything about the present. It is a confusingarrangement. The first fight almost every artist has is to getclear of old European art (Judd, Kansas City Report, 103).

For Judd the old European art to get clear of was painting,

for the rectangle ofpainting existed in his opinion as anentity, one thing, and not the indefinable sum of a group ofentities and references (Judd, Specific Objects, 182). Of

course Newman wanted to fashion a one thing, and Judd

knew this. In fact Judd, oddly enough, supported this inNewmans work, it was the quality of wholeness that Judd

viewed as vital. Everything is specifically where it is, Judd

writes, This wholeness isnew and important.The

openness of Newmans work is concomitant with chance and

one persons knowledge; it doesnt claim more than anyone

can know; it doesnt imply a social order. Newman is assertinghis concerns and knowledge (Judd, Barnett Newman, 202).


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record of previous accomplishments that lurked around everybend. How could the sublime be achieved when there wasalready such a robust framework for artistic thought? Whatterror, or even awe, would the artist be able to muster whenstrict guidelines always loomed? Newman declares: The

failure of European art to achieve the sublime is due to thisblind desire to exist inside the reality of sensation (theobjective world, whether distorted or pure) and to build an artwithin a framework of pure plasticity (the Greek ideal ofbeauty, whether that plasticity be a romantic active surface ora classic stable one) (The Sublime is Now, 173). In

Sylvesters opinion the fact that Newman lived 6000 miles

away from European art history allowed him to deal with thelikes of Giacometti and Matisse; he was able to learn thelessons they imparted and move on: In the search for the

absolute and commitment to the new, Sylvester writes, it

was advantageous not to be European, not to be steeped in atired culture (Sylvester, 324). The European masters were the

starting point for Newman, but their style of painting hadceased to address the world in which he lived and the answershe craved.7 Newman sought to free himself from thenostalgic glasses of history, glasses that tinted the world so

the past was seen as glory and the present as failure.The image Newman wanted to present could be seen

only with unencumbered vision. The naked eye of the present

was the only means of viewing his art, as the present is vastlymore capable of terror than the past. The present is painfulwhile past pain is but a ghost. It was this specter that hauntedthe Europeans. But in America, with a mere couple hundredyears of history, Newman sought to make known the present.And the present appears specifically as the new.

Consequently, in his formulation the sublime is the new. 8 It

7 Although Newman did regard the Surrealists as havingopened the worlds eyes to the possibility of real tragedy.8It would appear that Newmans conception of the sublime isnot at all reconcilable with Edmund Burkes. Yet Newmans

sublime can be viewed as a re-imagining of Burkes. Burke

describes the sublime as that which is fitted in any sort toexcite the ideas of pain and dangerwhat is in any sort


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is the terror of stepping forth from the protection of historyand allowing the unknown, the ever-changing present, topotentially strike the artist dead. The painting of the Europeanmasters did not possess the qualities of the sublime. Theirwork was representational and Newman, like Burke, believedthat representational painting did not have the power to makethe individual aware of the sublime.9 However where Newmandeparts from Burke is of major importance. Though Burkesaw all painting as incapable of portraying the sublime, he hadnever witnessed true abstraction.10 Newman believed thatabstract painting could have sublime qualities if the abstractmarks were incapable of being mistaken for nature.

If we use Newmans idea of the sublime and modifyit to fit with Kants mature vision of the sublime in the

Critique of Judgmentthen we might begin to understand whatNewman was attempting. For Kant, the sublime is that whichsurpasses our standard of sense, or to put it another way, thatwhich drowns our imagination in the waters of theincalculable. The sublime succeeds because it overwhelms oursenses, leaving our imagination to attempt to reconcile themagnitudes of the infinite, until reason comes to rescue the

terribleconversant about terrible objects, or operates in a

manner analogous to terrorproductive of the strongest

emotion which the mind is capable of feeling, and that

strongest emotion is, for Burke, the fear of death (Burke, 39).Now if we think of Newmans sublime as having a power like

Burkes, that is it has a two part function making one awareof the pain that is living in the unpredictable present andcalling for the death of an old form of art making then webegin to see the particular type of sublimity that Newmansought to bring forth.9 See the essay Newman: The Instant in Jean-FranoisLyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford University Press, 1991) 85.10Burke on painting: When painters have attempted to giveus clear representations of these very fanciful and terribleideas [the terror of death, incomprehensible darkness, etc.],

they have I think almost always failed; insomuch that I have

been at a loss, in all the pictures I have seen of hell, whetherthe painter did not intend something ludicrous (Burke, 63).


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imagination from the abyss:[What happens is that] our imagination strives toprogress toward infinity, while our reasondemands absolute totality as a real idea, and so[the imagination,] our power of estimating themagnitude of things in the world of sense, isinadequate to that idea. Yet this inadequacyitself is the arousal in us of the feeling that wehave a supersensible power; and what isabsolutely large is not an object of sense, but isthe use that judgment makes naturally of certainobjects so as to [arouse] this (feeling), and in

contrast with that use any other use is small.Hence what is to be called sublime is not theobject, but the attunement that the intellect[gets] through a certain presentation thatoccupies reflective judgment.11

Newman desired a sublime that, while unable to be depicted,could be felt and somehow known through marks on canvas.He wanted to bring forth the sensation of the infinite andinestimable. Newman sought to make the viewer aware ofhimself in relation to the universe. Kant writes: Nature is

sublime in those of its appearances whose intuition carrieswith it the idea of their infinity. But the only way for this to

occur is through the inadequacy of even the greatest effort ofour imagination to estimate an objects magnitude (Third

Critique, 112). Perhaps it was Newmans desire to speak forour imagination when it had failed us, to show mans relationto both magnitude and insignificance as we exist in thepresent. French postmodern theorist Jean-Franois Lyotardwrites:

When he [Newman] seeks sublimity in the here-and-now he breaks with the eloquence ofromantic art but he does not reject itsfundamental task, that of bearing pictorial orotherwise expressive witness to the

11 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. WernerPluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987) 106.


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inexpressible. The inexpressible does not residein an over there, in another world, or anothertime, but in this: in that (something) happens. Inthe determination of pictorial art, theindeterminate, the it happens is the paint, the

picture (Lyotard, 92-93).

Lyotard lights on a fundamental truth: that Newman did notseek to make apictorial paintings. If anything, Newmanbelieved that his work was a new way of painting anddrawing, a new draftsmanship for the post-WWII world. Theinexpressible, as Lyotard observes, is not somewhere else, it is

always present.Newman sought to express the inexpressible, but he

had come to the realization that the classic pictorial image didnot permit him to accomplish the work he believed to be theartists duty. European painters, in his estimation, no longer

possessed the capacity to make the viewer self-aware whilestanding in front of the canvas. Instead, these painters werecursed to create images that were merely aesthetic. Beautyserved as the culmination of their craft. 12 For Newman this

12 Oscar Wilde shares a similar dismay in his dialogue TheCritic as Artist. Wilde laments the shortcomings of the

painter in relation to the poet, an artist who, in Wildes

opinion, uses the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of

thought. For Wilde the painter is bound to the finite qualities

of his medium: The painter is so far limited that it is onlythrough the mask of the body that he can show us the mysteryof the soul; only through conventional images that he canhandle ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he candeal with psychology. And how inadequately he does itthen (Wilde, The Critic as Artist, 241). Wilde, like

Burke, had not yet seen abstract painting, yet it is no stretch toimagine, in my opinion, that he would have found Newmans

aesthetic philosophy similar to his own. While Wildesaesthetic focused on the beautiful and Newman sought not tomake beauty the thing, both men were involved in a search for

arts unifying power as a means to make the task of living atonce both richer and easier.


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was akin to the death of painting. His was a painter who feltthat the shapes wielded, must contain the plasmic entity that

will carry his thought, the nucleus that will give life to theabstract, even abstruse ideas he is projecting (The Plasmic

Image, 141).If we return to Onement Iit is apparent why Newman

saw it as his breakthrough. There is no way to confuse thezip with an object in nature, it strikes through the canvas,severing arts relationship with the sensuous and installing art,

in Newmans view, as an expression of the mind. If art is to

be moral, that is if it is to promote an awareness of the self inrelation to others, it cannot be bound to the senses, for the

senses mislead and leave no place to lay responsibility for theactions they instigate. The senses activate desire and desireexists in neither a realm of morality nor plurality. Desire isabout wanting, not about the moral, and under Newmansconception of his new painters moral service, the want that is

bred by the senses is involved strictly with the individual, notwith society as a whole. Thus, by abandoning the sensuous thenew painter embraces the art he produces as one built upon afoundation of moral responsibility. Since realism is bound tothe senses, it gives the viewer an impression of the way thingsshould be, how one would feel in that setting. Newmans new

painter removes himself from realism, but does not deny theintent behind it, that intent being subject matter. To deny

subject matter would only force the painter to paint in avacuum, to paint with no reason, and only as a response tosomething else. This would not be his new painter, asNewman writes in the Plasmic Image: These men consideredthat the artistic problem was not whether they should orshould not have subject matter; the problem was, What kind ofsubject matter (The Plasmic Image, 154).

In Onement I we see and experience the subjectmatter Newman intended. The painting confronts us. Theviewer is granted an awareness of the present, of the self at theexact moment the painting is seen. The zip is the link. No

one is transported to another place, the zip does not open a

door to some other land.13 It is a transcendent experience, but

13 As was Rothkos intent with his three part paintings: the


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one where the viewer ends up where he began. Yet theawareness of place is stronger. The knowledge of the self inrelation to the world is more profound. The zip is the

lightning flash of being human. To return to Lyotard: If, then,there is any subject-matter, it is immediacy. It happens hereand now. What [quid] happens comes later. The beginning isthatthere is[quod]; the world, whatthere is (Lyotard, 82).Newman sought to make the moment of looking mostimportant. It was the here and now, the immediacy of the actof looking. By making a painting that offered transcendencewithout offering a new world, Newman granted the there is

of which Lyotard spoke. There is is the moment where the

viewer feels a relationship to the present and seeks to live inthis reality, not step into another.

If Newman endeavored to teach his spectatoranything it was not a message of this world then the fireworks,out of this world and the fireworks. The zip was not

welcoming, not some nebulous inviting entryway to salvation.While Rothko wanted to flee this world, Newman could notimagine being anywhere else. Wounded and awkward, Rothkowas desperate to make a world that he could live in, where hewould always feel at home. If he could have painted somemagical painting that he could step through he would have.Newman took no part in this surrender. While both men wereconsumed with the idea of representing tragedy, Newman

sought to make the tragedy that was intimately bound to life areconcilable thing, to reveal it and destroy it, Rothko wantedto run away, dive into those clouds of color and be rebornagain and again.14He once said of his paintings, I express my

bottom and top bands acting as a doorway, with the center partbeing the entrance into another world that he might escapeinto.14 Newman credits the Surrealists with prophesying ourexperience of modern tragedy. In his opinion, the art theyproduced was not the work of mad men, but was a prophetic

tableaux of what the world was to see as reality, that reality

and tragedy being World War II (Surrealism and the War,

95). Yet Newman also realized that tragedy must be combated,it must not be allowed to root itself into the world. In his essay


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not-self.15 In effect he was painting the symbol of Rothko aswhole, what he wished he could be. A luring presence posingboth inventive resource and hovering danger, it was a promiseof a new life, weightless and free, but at the same time entirelyalien an invitation to become something and someone elsedivorced from the pains of history.16 Newman in contrastbelieved that, What has to be done is to discover the proper

theme that will make contact with reality; what has to be

The New Sense of Fate Newman takes a stand against our

giving ourselves over to tragedy, declaring that man was given

a new fate with the advent of the atom bomb and that it is therole of the artist to combat both tragedy and fate: What wehave now is a tragic rather than a terrifying situation.In this

new tragedy that is playing itself out on a Greek-like stageunder a new sense of fate that we have ourselves created, shallwe artists make the same error as the Greek sculptors and playwith an art of overrefinement, an art of quality, of sensibilityof beauty? Let us rather like the Greek writers, tear the tragedyto shreds (The New Sense of Fate, 169).15 James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko A Biography (TheUniversity of Chicago Press, 1998) 273-274.16Of his own paintings, Rothko declared: Im interested onlyin expressing basic human emotions tragedy, ecstasy, doomand so onand the fact that lots of people break down and crywhen confronted by my pictures shows that I communicatethose basic human emotions.The people who weep before

my paintings are having the same religious experience I hadwhen I painted them. And if you [Selden Rodman], as yousay, are moved only be their color relationships, then you missthe point (Rothko, Notes from a conversation with Selden

Rodman, 1956, 119-120). Rothko characterized painting asan act of breaking free from solitude and silence, of

breaching and stretching ones arms again (Rothko, The

Romantics Were Prompted, 59). Newman, on the other hand,

as we have seen, did not share the same self-pitying approachto painting that Rothko did. If anything, Newmans aesthetic

philosophy resided in a sense of the celebratory experience of

the power of the image, not in the emotional weight of ecstasyand doom.


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discovered is a new subject matter (Painting and Prose,

91). Unlike Rothko, Newman chose to deal with the present,while Rothkos paintings provided a means to put to canvas

the solitary quality of his internal journey, beckoning a singlespectator to the painting, as psychoanalyst Hannah Segalwrites, evoking in the recipient of his art the sameconstellation of unconscious feelings that motivated him. 17Rothkos paintings allowed him a way out of the confines of

his wounded mind and awkward body. He saw his art as anexpression of tragedy. Thus his not-self becomes thesymbolic representation of all his dreams waiting to befulfilled, freed to wander and manifest itself in what the art

critic Dore Ashton refers to as a numinous floating world, aplace where all his obstacles were left behind.18 Rothko mayhave wished to express the tragic, but he wanted to walkthrough his paintings to a world where his not -self would behis real self.

It is impossible to imagine Newman having a not-self. Newmans work was not made to save him or anyone

else but to foster an awareness about what it means to behuman in this world. There was no desire to escape, no dreamof some place other than here. The creation of the paintingwas a moral need; the subject matter of his own self was ofleast importance. Newman writes, It is not enough to use alarge canvas and make a literary work encompass a wide and

large theme, which is what most critics believe to be thedefinition of an epic. The subject matter of epics, it is true, is alarge theme, but it must be a moraltheme if the writer is at allto catch any part of the absolute (Painting and Prose, 90).

While this passage pertains to writing it can nonetheless beapplied to Newmans own vision of painting. The idea of the

epic needing to have a moral theme if it is at all capable ofapprehending any part of the absolute, is intimately linked toNewmans belief that the new painter is to produce an image

that is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete.

17 Hanna Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art (London:Routledge, 1991) 89.18 Dore Ashton, About Rothko (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1983) 105.


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Newman desired a moral theme that revealed the absolute.The revelation that is self-evident is communicable with thespectator who is able to know the intent of the painter and bemade aware of the truth at that single moment of viewing. ForRothko, the painting was also a moral issue, but the absolutecould only be found by gaining entrance to a different world.In a way, the individual who is consumed by the richness of aRothko painting chooses a life other than this one, whereNewman forces the present to have all the meaning.

Sylvester writes that a Newman canvas presents uswith a sustained experience of ourselves. We confront thereality of what and where we are:

Newmans art does not have to do with mansfeelings when threatened by something in theair; it has to do with mans sense of himself. The

painting gives a sense of being where we arewhich somehow makes us rejoice in being there(Sylvester, 327).

Sylvester is correct: Newman attempted to make the presentmore present. The painting silences the world, eliminating alldistraction and commotion. The viewer is rooted to the spot,confronted with the vertical, whether it is the single centralline in Onement Ior the blood red stripe on the left side of ablack canvas that defines Joshua. As the gaze fixes upon it,

the straightness of Newmans zip draws the viewer in. Theexperience becomes one of wholeness, making that thin linethe missing piece of the viewers existence. As Lyotard

asserts, The purpose of a painting by Newman is not to show

that duration is in excess of consciousness, but to be theoccurrence, the moment which has arrived (Lyotard, 79). Theviewer is aware of herself at the moment of looking. That isNewmans subject matter: awareness of the self. If he had

given the viewer the means to escape this world he wouldhave failed at his task. Like Rothko, Newman wanted hispainting to affect people, but he did not long, as Rothko did, tofree his viewers from the weight of their lives. Both menhoped to give salvation, but Newman desired it be found in

this world, while Rothko wanted to paint a new universewhere all the wounded could feel whole.


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In an interview with Sylvester from 1965, Newmanremarked that he sought to give his viewer a sense of place,

that the viewer should know where he was:In that sense he relates to me when I made thepainting because in that sense I wastherestanding in front of one of my paintings

you [Sylvester] had the sense of your ownscalethis is what I have tried to do: that the

onlooker in front of my painting knows that hes

there.I hope that my painting has the impactof giving someone, as it did me, the feeling ofhis own totality, of his own separateness, of his

own individuality, and at the same time of hisconnection to others who are also separate.I

think you can only feel others if you have somesense of your own being (Selected Writings andInterviews, 257).

That Newman rejected the episodic is an unequivocal fact inhis painting. His art is not snippets of time or looselyconnected sections of experience, instead each work is a singleevent unburdened by temporality. One does not pick up whereone last left off with Newman; one experiences ones

connection to the work at that exact moment of seeing.Totality does not come in installments.

Perhaps Newmans greatest moral act in his art was the desire to give the individual a feeling of his own

individuality, and at the same time of his connection to otherswho are also separate.19 If the viewer were to look at a

19 When Alexis de Tocqueville traveled through America in1831, he observed that democracy, and specifically itsAmerican form, does not foster individuality, but insteadbreeds individualism: Individualism is a mature and calm

feeling, which disposes each member of the community tosever himself from the mass of his fellows and to draw apartwith his family and his friends, so that after he has thusformed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at

large to itself. Individualism proceeds from erroneousjudgment more than from depraved feelings; it originates as


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Newman painting and feel only ones self and no relation to

others then Newman would have failed. This is what BarnettNewman, sage and fool, yearned to destroy. One cannot lookat Onement Iand think only of oneself in relation to ones self.The zip does give the viewer the sense of scale that

Newman wished for. Standing before the painting spectatorsknow they are not alone. One maintains ones individuality in

front of these paintings. The spectator remains a self, stillfilled with ones own personal feelings and thoughts, but

remains linked to the rest of society. With that simple,asymmetrical line, Newman tries to connect the world.

Newman makes us one among many; we come to

know ourselves so that we might live among others. Again wereturn to the zip, it is there to root the individual to the

collective, yet in that rooting Newman sets in motion thetearing to shreds of tragedy. For Newmans ideal artist is there

to present to us not just the pain of living in the present, but todemonstrate that as a unity of individuals we have the capacityto be more than the tragic nature of the world in which we findourselves. Newmans is an art of ethics and moral need: I

would say that if my painting were properly understood,

Newman once remarked in an interview, society would

change (Newman, 276). Each time we view a Newman we goon a journey of transcendence that ends where it began. WhatNewman imparts to the viewer is the lesson that there are no

other worlds to travel to, no places to escape the difficulty thatis life; the paintings tell us, This is the world that matters. In

much in deficiencies of mind as in perversity of heart (Alexis

de Tocqueville, Democracy in America - Vol, II (New York:Vintage Classics, 1990) 98). Individuality on the other hand,allows one to assert ones sense of self, to proclaim oneself asan individual, but still retain a commitment to ones fellow

man. In contrast, individualism, as Tocqueville, argues, givesone no sense of ones own being, it merely clings to the basest

desires and misplaced hungers, putting the individual atvariance to the rest of society. We can think of Tocquevilles

distinction when we look at Newmans work and thus be able

to see the paintings as a testament to Newmans struggle to tryto combat this destructive separation.


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Newmans sublime we feel the terror of selfhood, the gift of

being an individual, and the realization that one cannot existalone.

Works Cited

Dore Ashton,About Rothko (Oxford University Press, 1983)

James E.B. Breslin, Mark Rothko A Biography (The University ofChicago Press, 1998)

Edmund Burke,A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas

of the Sublime and the Beautiful (Notre Dame: University of NotreDame Press, 1968)

Donald Judd, Complete Writings: 19591975 (Halifax, Nova Scotia:The Press of the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, 2005)

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment, trans. Werner Pluhar(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1987)

Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Inhuman (Stanford University Press,1991)

Barnett Newman: Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P.ONeill (Alfred A Knopf, 1990)

Mark Rothko, Writings on Art, ed. Miguel Lpez-Remiro (YaleUniversity Press, 2006)

Hanna Segal,Dream, Phantasy and Art(Routledge, 1991)

Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series ofLetters, ed. and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L.A. Willoughby(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).

David Sylvester, About Modern Art, 2nd Edition (Yale UniversityPress, 2001)

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II (New York:Vintage Classics, 1990)

Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man Under Socialism & Selected CriticalProse, ed. Linda Dowling (Penguin, 2001)


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Onement, I, 1948Oil on canvas and oil on masking tape on canvas.

Barnett Newman. (American, 1905-1970).


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White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), 1950Oil on canvas.Mark Rothko. (American, 1903-1970)


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The Question Concerning Bernd and Hilla Becher

David Smucker

Stony Brook University

Bernd and Hilla Becher have been photographing industrialarchitecture since the 1950s. Their work provides aninteresting artistic reaction to the ways that moderntechnology has become an issue for contemporary life. It is thepurpose of this paper to attempt to look at their photographythrough a Heideggerian lens, taking its main cues fromHeideggers The Question Concerning Technology. After an

explanation of Heidegger and his thoughts on the matter, wewill see how these can be applied critically to the Bechers,looking to Blake Stimsons essay, The PhotographicComportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher, for a thorough

description of their work. 1One of Heideggers opening remarks, that the

essence of technology is nothing technological,2 outlines theapproach he takes to the issue. He is not looking at anyparticular technological advance or use of technology, but forwhat makes the manner in which man uses technologypossible, for the way that man relates to the world through

technology. He says that the most prominent way of seeingtechnology is as a means to an end, a way of achieving ahuman project, the instrumental and anthropological

conception of technology.3He believes that this conception does not understand

the full importance of technology. Heidegger wants to contrasta Greek understanding of techne with a modern one. For the

1 This article was accessed online athttp://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm on 4/21/2007. hereafter it will bereferred to as Stimson.2The Question Concerning Technology inMartin

Heidegger: Basic Writings, 311. hereafter referred to as QCT3 QCT 312
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm%20on%204/21/2007http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm%20on%204/21/2007http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm%20on%204/21/2007http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm%20on%204/21/2007http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/stimson_paper.htm%20on%204/21/2007


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Greeks, techne was a way of knowing, in the sense of alatheia,or revealing. He thinks that the idea, prevalent when he waswriting, that techne designates the capability to produce bothart and craft objects is incorrect. Quoting Plato, he says thatevery occasion for whatever passes beyond the nonpresent andgoes forward into presencing is poiesis, bringing-forth.4Since Technology is involved in bringing something forth, itseems to be a kind of poiesis, but Heidegger thinks that whilePlato may have been right about his own historical situation,technology has created a way of bringing forth that is notaccounted for in the sense of poiesis. Poiesis is an allowing ofsomething to be brought forth as itself, to be created or

revealed (remember alatheia for revealing) according to itsown inner essence and necessity. This is different that whatmodern technology does: Heidegger says the revealing that

holds sway throughout modern technology does not unfoldinto a bringing-forth in the sense of poiesis. The revealing thatrules in modern technology is a challenging, which puts tonature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy whichcan be extracted and stored as such.5

This extraction of energy that challenges forth insteadof bringing forth imposes categorical thought upon the world,interested in the world only in terms of how anything andeverything can be made into a resource for achieving ourgoals. This organization and ordering of the world according

to usable energy makes things appear to us not as themselves,but as a standing-reserve which we can use at will.6 Thekind of thinking which causes man to think of the world as astanding-reserve Heidegger calls enframing, which is in directopposition to a poetic frame of thought (poiesis from above)which allows things to be present to us as themselves.

In fact, the opposition between these two modes ofthought is so intense that Heidegger believes that enframingblocks poetic thought. Since, in our age, man is born into aworld where the most common way of thinking is through thisenframing thought, it is possible that he will understand only

4 QCT 3175 QCT 3206 QCT 322


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through this technological or enframing lens. If this happens,if man engages in the world only through enframing thought,the other possibility is blocked that man might rather beadmitted sooner and ever more primally to the essence of whatis unconcealed and to its unconcealment, in order that hemight experience as his essence the requisite belonging torevealing.7 It is clear that Heidegger values poetic thoughtinstead of enframing. This is because of the way that thesekinds of thought understand human beings. In enframingthought, mankind is viewed only as a means to an end, a kindof energy that can be used to achieve some project or other.On the other hand, poetic thought, which is more in touch with

the essences of things, sees man as the only kind of being whocan understand things precisely though poetic thought, whocan come into contact with the essences of things. Ifenframing thought blocks his ability to do this, Heideggerbelieves that it will put mankind out of touch with his ownessence, will make man homeless in the world. It makes sensethen, when he says that where enframing reigns, there isdanger in the highest sense.8 He finds some hope for man,though, in the words of the poet Hlderlin, who says thatWhere danger is, grows/ The saving power also.9

The saving power is not so immediate, though, that itcan bring man to an immediate victory over technology.Instead, it is requisite that man begin to pay heed to the

essence of technology.10

This will happen when manexamines his relationship to the world, and sees thatenframing is blocking him from his proper essence, his properway of comporting himself to the world. It seems that onlythrough an encounter with the danger of our technological wayof thinking will modern man be able to reassert his properessence. But if most people are already under the sway ofenframing thought, then who can we call on to provide thiscritical reaction? Again Heidegger takes guidance fromHlderlin, who, in addition to the lines above, also says that

7 QCT 3118 QCT 3339 QCT 33310 QCT 335


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poetically man dwells on this earth.11 If we think of poetryin a sense which includes all of the arts, at least when theyrein touch with mans essence as a poetic, as opposed to

enframing, being, then art is precisely the arena in whichtechnology and its essence as enframing thought can beopposed. Heidegger adds the important warning that this willonly work if reflection upon art, for its part, does not shut its

eyes to the constellation of truth, concerning which we arequestioning.12

Now the question becomes whether or not theBechers works are ones which engage technology and

enframing in the way Heidegger wants them to. Do these

works show man the essence of technology, and do they do soin a way which also shows man his own essence as a non-technological, non-enframing being? Blake Stimsons articleThe Photographic Comportment of Bernd and Hilla Becher

will be our guide as we approach the Bechers work.Stimson quotes from an interview with the Bechers

that their work was largely focused on the idea of makingfamilies of objects that become humanized and destroy one

another as in nature where the older is devoured by thenewer.13 This short phrase already says much about theBechers photography. The concept of introducing familyrelationships amongst the various industrial buildings can beseen as an attempt to organize them under rational thought.

The fact that their books of photography are organizedaccording to the kind of technology photographed speaks tothis, as does the fact that one of their publications is titledsimply, Typologies. The problem here is to discern whetheror not these typologies are natural (poetically revealed) orartificial (the result of enframing thought). That were dealing

with industry, which appears to be, at bottom, an enframingapproach to nature, leads us to the idea that whateverheterogeneity we find in the buildings is a result of theirability to acknowledge only the aspects of their location thatare suitable for bringing into a standing-reserve. These

11 QCT 34012 QCT 34013 Stimson 2


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aspects, the resources challenged forth, are bound to besimilar, and so the industrial architecture and machines used toextract this material will also likely be similar, if not exactlythe same. So while the typology may not have been previouslyarticulated as such by the creators of these industrial sites, itseems fair to say that the Bechers project does not impose anartificial schema onto these buildings.

The next part of the phrase may be more problematicfor a Heideggerian reading of their work. The idea that theobjects become humanized and destroy one another as innature where the older is devoured by the newer speaks to anenframing mode of thought. Heidegger warns that when man

is in an enframing mode of thought, he believes that herecognizes himself in everything. Everything seems to behaveaccording to certain patterns of his thought, and so it seems asif these things are essentially related to man. 14 This idea seemsto be present in the idea that the buildings become

humanized and in the idea that the process of industrial

advancement is like the process of both human and naturaladvancement, where the older is devoured by the newer. For

Heidegger, there is a fundamental difference in the way thatnatural things, humans, and technology relate to the world.Technological advancements quicken the pace of the worlds

being put into an unnatural standing-reserve of energy, and itseems a strange idea to associate a plants relationship to the

earth, where it only takes what it needs to live, to that oftechnology. The overturning of one industrial paradigm foranother more technologically advanced and efficient oneseems at the root much different than a sapling growing out ofthe fallen rotting trunk of its ancestor. If the reference here isnot to generations immediately following one another, but theevolutionary process, then this is still problematic. We mustremember that the natural process of evolution is not ateleological one, is not motivated towards an ever-more-thoroughgoing domination of the world in the way thattechnological development (at least from Heideggersperspective) has been.

Another aspect of these photographs that Stimson

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investigates is the system by which they are produced. Systemis an important factor in their work, as the photographs arebased on a rigorous set of procedural rules which results in agroup of photographs that are, at first glance, nearlyidentical.15 This desire for nearly identical results from all oftheir photographic activity (at least within any given project)together with their rigorous application of a procedure toproduce them seems much like the process Heideggerdescribes when hes talking about enframing. When we

investigate the reasons for this procedure, though, we find thatthey dont seem to be motivated by an enframing desire. By

placing their photographs together in grid format, as the

Bechers do consistently, though not exclusively, they find thatthey are able to see new things about each particular objectphotographed. While for the most part the objects look sosimilar it is as if they came from a product ion series, likecars, the Bechers have found that only when you put them

beside each other do you see their individuality. 16 Through aninteresting circumstance, it is only through a rigorouslytechnological process which, following Heidegger, we assumewill produce homogenous results, that we can actually see theheterogeneity of the objects in question. They have produced ataxonomy which is not exactly a taxonomy: while it doesgather the tokens of the type together, we learn little moreabout the type from this gathering, instead what we learn is

about the individuality of its members. We are reminded ofHlderlins phrase where the danger is, grows the savingpower also. The Bechers photography, in a sustained

engagement with technology, has shown us something about itthat we could not see before, and that is the ability of atechnological/enframing method to enable the perception ofindividuality and difference.

What, though, does this difference amount to?

15 Stimson 716 From an interview by Ulf Erdmann Ziegler in 2000, foundonline athttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_90/ai_87022

990/print on 4/21/2007
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_90/ai_87022990/printhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_90/ai_87022990/printhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_90/ai_87022990/printhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_90/ai_87022990/printhttp://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1248/is_6_90/ai_87022990/print


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Certainly the essential qualities of the industrial sites that theyphotograph are still bound to enframing, to producing a worldof a standing reserve of resources. But, each individualindustrial site is different, as weve seen. This difference must

then be the result of a conceptual movement away from theirimpact on social reality to the level of shape and rhythm,formal interest and analysis. Stimson says their project is one

of aesthetizing industry rather than industrializing art. 17 Ithink that in a way, it really is both. While thei r work doesnttake on the proportions of Warhols factory (nor, as Stimson

notes, does it take on Warhols sense of irony), it remains

industrial in that it is tied to industrial / scientific / enframing

modes of thought during its production.18 The crucial point,though, is that, in moving into the realm of the purelyaesthetic, our investigation loses the ability to be critical of therelationship of man to technology. It seems that it no longer isin search of truth, at least not in the way Heidegger urges us tokeep focused at the end of his essay. Instead, at this point oursearch can only point to the hollowness that stands now inthese buildings where there was once ambition and a sense ofprogress.19 The Bechers seem to have moved into the Kantianrealm of disinterested appreciation where there was once asearch for truth that could lead to social critique and change.

At this point in our investigation, if we maintain aposition in line with Heideggers, we might have to take a

negative view toward the Bechers work. It seems that theirwork manages to combine enframing thought and aconception of art that is unbound to truth, and this is totallyunacceptable, or at least un-poetic or inartistic, fromHeideggers standpoint. I think, though, that there may be afinal saving element. If their work is really drawn from the

soul of industrial thought, and if the feeling we get when we

look at their photography is one of disappointment andmelancholy, then perhaps through an engagement with theirwork we can see the essence of technology as something

17 Stimson 1418 Stimson 1619 Stimson 10


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dangerous, disappointing, and melancholy.20 If the onlypositive thing we can get from their work is on a formal level,then perhaps by noting this we can see that that is all that thereis to be gained from technology. The photographic work of theBechers can lead us to the conclusion that looking at the worldthrough the enframing lens of technological thought isunfulfilling unless we are disinterested in the worldlyconsequences of that kind of thinking. At this point we canstart to think critically about technology, and the Bechhers

photography can be seen in a positive (Heideggerian) light atlast. The Bechers work draws itself extremely near to the

danger of technology, modeling itself on technological

procedures to show how unfruitful, how disappointing theycan be, and for someone interested in the truth abouttechnology, the questioning that follows this realization mayhave the ability to lead them out of an enframing mode ofthought.

Before concluding altogether, I would like to brieflyinvestigate photography itself and its relationship toenframing. As a technological development, photographyseems dangerously allied to enframing. This idea gets somebackup from the fact that when we talk about photographiccomposition we ask about what the photographer has put in

the frame. In investigating any particular photographers

work, then, we are investigating their relationship to putting

into the frame, to enframing. Photography is the trace, notonly of the object that was placed before the camera, but alsoof the photographers relationship to that object, to their

understanding of the world when they took the photograph.Abigail Solomon-Godeau, in her feminist analysis of eroticand pornographic photography, says: Images, in other words,do not causally produce a world of female objects and malesubjects; rather, they may articulate, naturalize, and confirman oppressive order whose roots are elsewhere.21 What I wantto focus on in this quote is the idea that photography can

20 Stimson 1321Photography at the Dock: Essays on Photographic History,

Institutions, and Practices, in the essay Reconsidering EroticPhotography: Notes for a Project of Historical Salvage. 221.


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articulate an order, an ordering scheme. Heidegger also hassomething to say about how enframing thought is related topublic opinion: the newspapers and illustrated

magazinesset public opinion to swallowing what is printed,so that a set configuration of public opinion becomes availableon demand.22 The images that we create are related to ourunderstanding of the world, the public opinion that is

articulated in places like the newspapers is a result of a certainway of thinking, and its instantiation in print and imagesshows us the trace of that thought. Photography can show uswhat, for a certain photographer, has been accepted as thetruth. Photography may not always be a result of enframing

thought, but through a close analysis of a photographic work,it seems that we ought to be able to determine whether or notthe photographer has been held under the sway of enframingthought.

In the Bechers work, I believe we have two options

as to what to believe their relationship to enframing thoughtand technology is. First, we can believe that they are whollyunder its sway, and a critical investigation of how thismanifests itself in their work is as good as an investigation ofenframing thought itself. Second, if the Bechers are aware ofthe negative consequences of enframing thought, then this hasmanifested itself in their work by way of exemplification: toshow us its problems, they have recreated it for us, with a little

aesthetic kick thrown in to show us that whatever positivevalue there is in the manifestation of enframing thought andthe creation of a standing-reserve, that value is not related, andindeed stands in opposition to, the consequences of technologyand enframing. In either case, a sustained attention to thephotographic work of Bernd and Hilla Becher ought toproduce exactly what Heidegger would want, a critical attitudetowards technology, which may be enough to help save usfrom the danger of enframing thought.

22 QCT 323


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AL-ADHAN

Michael Knierim

Northern Illinois University

I have thought much about what I would say to you today. Iam not a theoretician, but a creator of objects and images. Ihave come to the conclusion that the recounting of mythoughts and actions during the creation of this video wouldbe the most illuminating veil to unfold for this conference.


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It became apparent to me that I was not going to findthe imagery I was looking for in the U.S. media. I then turnedtoward mainstream Islamic internet news sources. While thesebegan to show slightly more graphic imagery, they were stillfar from a true representation of the carnage and chaos of war.

It was time to reach out into harsher territory. Intodays virtual world you can Google your way across enemylines. It was on Jihad and Al-Qaeda websites where I began tofind what I was looking for: uncomposed, unvarnished photosof startling events. Just by entering these sites I had thepeculiar feeling that I was behind enemy lines. Many of thesewebsites were there one day and gone the next. The majorityof these websites seemed to be both recruiting and propagandasites. Most of these sites contained two types of images; first,strange digital montages which showed the valor n sacrificingoneself for the cause. In the other category of imagery werethe raw unsettling photos of true carnage (such as the oneshown); dead and dismembered American soldiers shown astrophies; dead, wounded and mourning Iraqis shown asvictims. These were not professional photographs, but mostlikely low-resolution cellular phone images. Although theywere meant as propaganda, they depicted the ravages of warfrom all sides of the conflict.


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Michael KnierimAl-Adhan

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I decided this would be the imagery I wouldappropriate for my work.

Antique Persian Carpet / Herati Pattern / Tehran


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Antique Wall Tile / Herati Pattern / Al Basra

Digital Montage / Herati Pattern


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Al-Adhan/ Video

Projected Image of Digital Montage Above

Decollate/Floor Installation

UV Curable Inkjet Print on Tumbled Marble


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My intent was to veil the appropriated images byusing them as the basis for creating patterns. Historically,throughout the Middle East, patterns appear to organize spaceand beautify the built environment. By their very nature,patterns in Islamic culture are seen as expressive of aworldview in which multiplicity exists in relation to the unityof all existence. Through replication and mirroring of thesource image, I have produced patterns reminiscent ofHeratipatterns. These ancient patterns are a widely used motif forcreating Middle Eastern textile, rug and tile designs. Thepatterns I created became the basis for several bodies of work.

Al-Adhan is a video installation set to the vocals of theMuslim call to prayer. During the video, the patterns areinterrupted by brief, disturbing flashes of the source images.Decollate is an installation consisting of 25 tumbled marbletiles, each printed with the identical Herati pattern. Theinstallation configurations are flexible and endless...

Decollate


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Shown above is a larger view of the appropriated source image forthe graphic at left. The image was obtained from an Al-Quedawebsite.

Decollate

Shown above is a tumbled marble tile printed with UVcurable ink.Twenty-five of these tiles form the installation shown at the bottomof the preceding page.


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The patterns in these works become things of beautywhich veil their source imagery. The overall images are

metaphors for the way each side in the Iraq War representsitself as having a noble and just cause, while the sourceimagery represents the day to day suffering of individualsinvolved on all sides of the conflict. All contemporary humanconflict has its ideological rationale for taking place as well asits actual acts of violence and suffering. Our own mediarepresses the visual imagery of bloodshed and reports thesuffering by referring to body counts of the dead each day.

While these counts are necessary and saddening, they alsobecome an abstraction which cannot communicate the true

carnage occurring.


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These images are a commentary on how the actualdaily ravages of the war are obscured by each governments

ideologies, the media, and our own psyches. My hope is thebrief flashes of the source images within the video are startlingenough to lift the veil and bring into consciousness theongoing suffering. Awareness is the first step toward change.


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Panel Response:

Ethi cal Demand and Technological Replication

Isaac Fer

Stony Brook University

In the first paper, we have the presentation of whatmight be called an ethico-aesthetics of totality, or of thesublime. In the second, we have a question of what might becalled the mechanisms of the modern art process. In our series

of images, we have the geometric replication of what might becalled terrifying or even sublime photographs. It is with thesecharacterizations that we may attempt to proceed in examiningthe possibilities of thought that they offer together.

While many of us may question the aesthetic successof Newman's works, this is fortunately not under considerationhere. Instead, I am interested in the reverberations ofNewman's ethico-aesthetics with Heidegger's claim that artshould provide a clearing for poetic truth to be revealed. I takeit that David Smucker's argument supports the work of theBechers insofar as it embodies this Heideggerian-privilegedmode of art. But how does the work of the Bechers stand inrelation to Newman's ethico-aesthetics of the sublime? And

that of, as a work under consideration here, Michael Knierim?In order to begin to hear these reverberations, we mustconsider photography not only as representational art, but alsoas rhythmic art.

Is photography always a strictly representational artform? It is not immediately clear. It is certain that manyphotographs are representational, identification photographsfor instance. But it not so certain that this is the function of thephotograph in either the Bechers' or Knierim's work. Let usconsider the role of repetition and of rhythm in these works.

One note may sound precisely like a car horn, but in asong, if it is taken as such, we feel it to be 'wrong'. That is,even if a car horn is in a song, we are not meant to think that a

car was in the recording studio or something equallyridiculousit is not meant, nor taken, to be representational.


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Similarly, one photograph may resemble its 'object' precisely,but in sequence, a sort of 'melody' can be achieved, and theindividual photograph is like a note, or a movement in asymphony. And a symphony, not without its immediatesensuous pleasures, is best appreciated when its movementsare mentally overlapped, recombined, taken apart andreassembled, so that each is seen in its particularity as well asits relation to the whole (It seems we have come back toNewman. Only here, the art relates back to itselfto itsuniverse if you will, while in Newman the viewer is placed,

vis a vis art, in this relation to his universe). Let us alsorecollect a 'representational' work such as Raphael's 'The

School of Athens.' The simultaneous juxtaposition of figureswhose lives spread several centuries should not be taken as'representational,' insofar as it taken to represent an actualsimultaneity of these figures. The goal of this work is not thesensuous, or the representational. Instead, it presents to us thehistorical 'dialog' of philosophy, the grand and nearly mythicalnature of this history as a sort of symposium or conference.

Hence it is not certain that we should take theindividual photographs in these works as such, outside of theirrelation to one another and to the whole work. FollowingDavid Smucker's argument, we see that the effect of the singleimage can be precisely opposite of that of the montage takenas a whole. It is only in this configuration the movements and

variations of this visual symphony may reveal what theirsimilarities and differences contain. While it is true thatcomparison reveals the technological essence of these objects,it is also true that their contrasts reveal the poetry of thearchitecture. But while the Bechers' montages can be seen tobe a break with direct representation, the trace ofrepresentation has not been entirely effaced from their work.Knierim takes us a step further.

With his geometrical replication of single images in amontage, Knierim manages to float in between the distinctionswe have considered thus far. From a distance, or on a smallscale, his works appear as geometric abstractions. Myexperience of the work began as such, with it impossible tomake out the details of the pieces. Here his work appearsdirectly in line with the Kantian sublime. With each repeated


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frame, we are offered an aesthetic estimation of magnitude.Our imaginations attempt to comprehend simultaneously theunit and the unity of the work. With the failure of this attempt,we are presented with the sublime. Both the extremeabstraction and the presence of sublimity puts this workdirectly in line with the ethico-aesthetics of Newman.

But once again we must confront the questions ofboth representation and of technology. Knierim's workachieves its abstraction by the geometric replication of'representational' images. As we approach these works, webreak through the barrier of representation and a world isrevealed. Suddenly Newman's aesthetics recede. On this scale,

the images present to us a different sublimity, that of terror (orof what Kant called the dynamically sublime). Images of theoverwhelming might of nature and of humanity's resiliencecombine to make us simultaneously aware of our fragility andour strength. They make us aware of the suffering of othersand violence which causes it. They make us consider our rolein that suffering and violence. Hence, while Newman'saesthetics recede, his ethics come to the fore.

But what of the replication of these images? Does itnot distort or conceal these truths? Does it not carry with it thedanger of technological en-framing? That is, to reduce theseunits to a standing-reserve, to replace their suffering with thedemand that they be challenged-forth in order to produce the

'work'? In a way, all photography carries with it this danger; toreveal its subject not poetically, not aspoesis, but as techne, asan object to be 'made into a photograph' (photography asexploitative or objectifying). But perhaps Knierim's especially,as not only may the individual photograph be a challenging-forth of its subject/object, but that also here the photographitself is challenged-forth as a tile or brick in theseconfigurations.

It is perhaps undecidable whether these photographscause their subjects to emerge and rise in themselves, as

Heidegger says in The Origin of the Work of Art, or make oftheir objects a standing-reserves. What is important though, isto recognize that the photograph wavers between these twomodes of revealing, that it presents each opportunity, ordanger. Moreover, that as we move to and from abstraction


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and representation in the works of Knierim, distinct worlds areopened for us. On the level of abstraction, we are presentedwith a Newmanian sublime, with the individual's relation tothe absolute. On the level of representation, the world of thesubject, and that of ourselves in relation, is made present. Butif the movement between levels is cause for praise, it is alsocause for criticism. For Newman, Knierim's work wouldappear too representational. For Heidegger, the mechanical (ormore likely, computational) replication of the image in ageometric pattern would appear essentially technological.

In this way, Knierim's work may be seen as a sort ofinterference pattern between the sine (sign) waves of Newman

and of Heidegger. One way of seeing these waves would bethe of relating the viewing distance to the aesthetic 'value' ofthe work. The peaks of Newmanian abstraction and ofHeideggerian poetic revealing combine their amplitude toreach a new intensity of aesthetics which reveal an ethicaldemand to consider our relation with others. The troughs ofNewmanian representation and of Heideggerian technologyfall to the depths of what may be called technologicalescapismthe challenging-forth of entities as a means ofleaving 'our obstacles behind,' in Ashton's phrase. And whenthe peaks of Newman and the troughs of Heidegger cometogether, in the middle zone between abstraction andrepresentation, we find them nearly canceling one another out,

the only remainder being the work itself. In this way, we cansee Knierim's work as piercing or tearing many veilssimultaneously: those of individualism, of technological en-framing, and finally, perhaps, of philosophical ideology.

Questions on Revealing: The dawning or revealingof a world, the appearance of truth in HeideggerHow doesthis relate to the work of Rothko, who also wanted his viewersto be opened into a new world? Or: is the dawning of thisworld in Heidegger an altogether 'new' world, distinct from theone which we previously inhabited? Or is it the same world,re-presented? Would the Heideggerian art project resemblethat of Newman or that of Rothko? How might we see therelationship between poetic revealing and that revealing whichNewman's seeks to accomplish?


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Panel II: Identity and Seeing Others

A New Narcissism: Refracting the Self in ContemporaryVideo

Max Razdow

New York University

We are familiar with the concept of the narcissistic gaze in apejorative sense. To view ones self in absolution, to ignore

the calls of the nymph Echo, is to flirt with a moral sentence

of fossilization. According to the Narcissus myth, as wasretold memorably in Ovids Metamorphoses, one must bewary of self involvement, lest one perish under the stonyreflection of his or her own image. We are begged by themoral of this tale to associate acute self observation withvanity, isolation and fallibility, to understand introversion asakin to a

Art&Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings

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Transcript of Art&Phil 2008 Conference Proceedings