SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

Questioning Art beyond His Reach

Véronique M. Fóti

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438478043
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Estética en filosofía

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological ontology engages deeply with visual art, and this aspect of his work remains significant not only to philosophers, but also to artists, art theorists, and critics. Until recently, scholarly attention has been focused on the artists he himself was inspired by and wrote about, chiefly Cézanne, Klee, Matisse, and Rodin. Merleau-Ponty at the Gallery expands and shifts the focus to address a range of artists (Giorgio Morandi, Kiki Smith, Cy Twombly, Joan Mitchell, and Ellsworth Kelly) whose work came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century and thus primarily after the philosopher's death. Véronique M. Fóti does not confine her analyses to Merleau-Ponty's texts (which now importantly include his late lecture courses), but also engages directly with the art. Of particular concern to her is the art's ethical bearing, especially as related to animal and vegetal life. The book's concluding chapter addresses the still-widespread rejection of beauty as an aesthetic value.

Chapter 1

Transcending Profane Vision

The Art of Giorgio Morandi

Penso que non vi nulla di più surreale e nulla di più astratto del reale.

(I think that there is nothing more surreal or more abstract than the real.)

—Giorgio Morandi

Morandi’s well-known statement concerning the surreal and abstract quality of the real as offered to sight1 is echoed by both Merleau-Ponty (who took no notice of the Bolognese painter whose dates, 1890–1964, mark him as his longer-lived near-contemporary), as well as by Ellsworth Kelly, who has remarked that “if you can turn off your mind and look at things only with your eyes, ultimately everything becomes abstract.”2 Merleau-Ponty argues that there is no meaningful choice to be made between figuration and abstraction;3 and Kelly’s remark even suggests a disjunction between eye and mind for certain painters such as Morandi and Kelly that the philosopher (who placed less emphasis on the bond between eye and hand) would have been unwilling to recognize. Morandi, to be sure, never decisively abandoned figuration and cultivated an engagement with what Paul Auster calls “the wonder of pure thingness.”4 This engagement links his painterly vision to Heidegger’s thought concerning the thing in a manner that will shortly need to be explored.

The fundamental sameness (without identity) of figuration and abstraction here shows itself to hinge on an artist’s ability to neutralize ordinary or, as Merleau-Ponty calls it, “profane” vision, akin to what Morandi speaks of as the “conventional images” that alienate vision from reality.5 Whatever the pictorial mode an artist may work in, her inactivation of profane vision is indispensable to the artistic validity of her work. She must therefore decisively reject any understanding of the image as a mimetic representation, or as a secondary artifice standing in for an absent original. In this sense, the image intimates the strangeness of reality as visually apprehended, which then does not conform to the Platonic schema of a nonsensible eidos or form that could only be imperfectly approximated by visual (re-)presentation. Taking up Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of vision as involving the mutual precession of what is upon the seer, and of the seer upon what is, Mauro Carbone traces out the spatiotemporal dynamics of this double precession without absolute precedence that constitutes the matrix of any artistically relevant visual image.6 In this sense (and echoing the phrasing of Paul Klee), the image renders visible what could not otherwise be so. It is thus hardly surprising that Morandi, who habitually rejected comparisons of his art to that of nonfigurative painters such as Mondrian, could nevertheless tell Janet Abramovicz in 1955 that, had he been born some twenty years later, he might well have become an abstract painter.7

The Humble Thing in Focus

Notwithstanding some early portraits and self-portraits, as well as early engagements with cubism and Italian futurism and, from 1916 to 1920, a significant involvement with the movement known as pittura metafisica (metaphysical painting),8 Morandi’s work focused chiefly on the still life, complemented by landscape and, in a minor mode, by floral compositions. His still lifes were composed of humble everyday objects such as bottles, canisters, pitchers, or vases, of no particular aesthetic distinction—so that, as recounted by Siri Hustvedt, an exasperated viewer could find only yet “more bottles” in even the last room of a Morandi exhibition.9 His art, which comprises the media of drawing and etching as well as oil painting, engages with the sheer thingness of things. These things are not, however, the “mere things” (blosse Dinge) of nature, to which Heidegger ascribes an enigmatic self-containment shared by works of art in their unconstrained presencing.10 Morandi’s things, in contrast, are mostly things of use (what Heidegger calls Zeug); but they are alienated from any context of use without being, for all that, reduced to pure plastic values or forms, so that their function would become a mere pretext for purely formal concerns. Rather, the memory of use and of everyday habituality resonates in them indelibly but without prosaic literality. They remain suspended between the familiar and the strange, or the essentially unknowable that Heidegger likes to call the “uncanny.”

In Heidegger’s 1950 essay “Das Ding” (The thing),11 enigmatic self-containment is no longer ascribed solely to “mere things,” which repudiate human meaning, or to the irruptive presencing of the work of art, but rather and even in the first place to the humble things of everyday use, such as jar, mirror, or brooch, and ultimately also to both the nonliving and living “things” of nature (Heidegger names, for instance, mountain and stream, and heron or deer).12 Far from retreating into inaccessibility, the thing is also what remains at issue, in that it concerns and engages humans in their daily lives.13 What is here in focus is not paradigmatically some object that can be represented (vorgestellt) or fabricated (hergestellt) in accordance with the Platonic schema of production (poiēsis) governed by the Form (eidos, idea). Rather, the thing brings close (nähert) world, a mutable concept in Heidegger’s trajectory of thought, but which is now thought as the onefold and simple (einfältiges) gathering together of the Fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals into the mutuality of their mirror-play. In this play or round-dance (Reigen), each of the Four comes eventfully into its own (ereignet sich) only by a movement of self-disowning (ent-eignen, vereignen) in favor of the “ring” of their mutuality: “The round-dance (Reigen) is the ring that rings in that it plays as mirroring. Enowning, it lights up [lichtet] the Four into the luster [Glanz] of their simplicity [Einfalt]. In becoming lustrous [erglänzend], the ring dis-owns [vereignet] the Four, open to everywhere, into the enigma of their essentiality [Wesen].”14

In this mirror-play, there is nowhere any insistence on a stable, inherent, or graspable ownness or identity. Thus the “ringing” of the Four, and the thing that grants it a while of appearance, are also ring (understood in Heidegger’s Allemannisch dialect as gering) in the sense of being humble, slight, self-accommodating, and easeful. The thing is ultimately of concern to mortals because it can initiate them into what, as mortals, they are uniquely capable of: being toward death, so that they uniquely have access to: “the shrine of nothingness that is the mountain-shelter [Gebirg] of being.”15

Seeking in the three textual versions of Heidegger’s “The Origin of the Work of Art” the traces of the acknowledged “turn” (Kehre) in his thought that he himself said was connected with this essay, Jacques Taminiaux finds that only the final version of 1936 abandons the tone of “voluntarist proclamation” that characterizes its predecessors.16 Moreover, as Taminiaux points out, this version is significant due to the fact that “Heidegger’s previous contempt for everydayness and its pettiness has now almost vanished … [and] that the first third of the final version is devoted simply to the question, What is a thing in its thingly character?”17 The change is not only of tone, but of philosophical orientation, and it becomes consummate in Heidegger’s 1950 meditation on the thing and on the profound import of its humble status and its seeming insignificance.

Merleau-Ponty may well have been unfamiliar with “Das Ding” (first published in 1951), and the ontological import of everyday things is not among his philosophical preoccupations; but there are formulations in his late ontology, particularly in the Working Notes to The Visible and the Invisible, which have a certain kinship with Heidegger’s meditation. Thus, in a Working Note of November 1959, he enjoins himself to say that things “are not spread out before us like perspectival spectacles,” but that they are, rather, “structures, membranes, the stars of our life” gravitating around us.18 In a note of May 1959, he reflects that the thing’s transcendence (of perceptual apprehension) means that its plenitude is inexhaustible and thus irremediably incomplete or lacunary.”19 The silent persuasion of the sensible thing, he notes in a Working Note of October 27, 1959, “is the only means for being to manifest itself without becoming positivity.”20

In Morandi’s art, things constellate and configure themselves in space out of a luminosity that is at once both soft and radiant and that, in allowing things to become manifest, also veils them and creates ambiguities. It often calls for a rich and subtle palette of grayed earth tones, siennas, golds, and whites, or earth greens and muted violets. This palette is restrained, with a somewhat melancholy echo of classical antiquity; but it is also responsive to Cézanne’s chromatic researches, which are integral, for Merleau-Ponty, to instigating the “profound discordance” he experiences in confronting “the universe of classical thought with the researches of modern painting.”21 There is a need then to explore these painterly interrogations of visuality, dissociated as they are from both prosaic literality and from reference to any literary or ideological dimension. They are thus dissociated partly by virtue of their focus on things too humble even to invite identification, or for this study to address the interrelation between Morandi’s art and Merleau-Ponty’s thought.

Vision, Memory, and Perceptual Nonresolution

As Morandi observed in a 1959 interview, his work concentrated on so narrow a range of subject matter as to incur the risk of boring repetition. He notes that he neutralized this risk by composing each painting or graphic work as a unique take or variation on a familiar theme.22

These variations are attentive to what Merleau-Ponty calls “the imaginary texture of the real,” in the context of exploring idealities indissociable from their carnal presencing.23 They also concern, however, the lucid articulations of form in space, the interrelations of volumes and voids, and the subtle modulations of light, shade, and chromas. These painterly concerns unhinge things and their configurations from customary identification without, however, treating them as mere pretexts for painterly innovation or bravura. The familiar identities of things are not abolished by such a practice of painterly epokhē; but rather, they continue to play a part in the articulations of their imaginary texture. Sameness thus never becomes identity, and repetition does not deaden the viewer’s involvement and fascination.

It is in fact impossible, as Merleau-Ponty notes, to see things “all naked,” as Descartes longed unerotically to see (or rather to think) his piece of wax. Even a simple visual quale (a so-called sense datum) presents itself as a temporally distended crystallization of visibility, “a certain intrication in the woof of the simultaneous and the successive.”24 Rather than seeking to strip things of such accretions, the look envelops them and veils them “with its own flesh,” without thereby degrading their sovereign being.25 What allows for this seemingly paradoxical situation is that vision takes place, not with Cartesian detachment in a straightforward subject-object relation, but in an indissociable interrelation with both sensuousness and invisibles, so that no term of this interrelation has priority. In Merleau-Ponty’s phrasing, using the terminology of flesh: “The density of flesh between seer and thing is constitutive, as to the thing, of its visibility, and as to the seer, of his corporality … it is the means of their communication.”26

If even the visual quale, interrogated by the look, interlaces not only seer and seen but also the simultaneous and the successive; the temporal dimension is indissociable from painting (often misconstrued as a purely spatial art). It is then not merely a question of understanding how the intrinsically static arts of sculpture or painting can convey the temporality of motion—a question that preoccupies Merleau-Ponty in dialogue with Rodin. In this dialogue, his focus is on conveying the temporality of motion by showing bodies in positions that are incompossible in simultaneity. His focus expands to address how what is perceptually given is always already subtended by memory, whether cultural, historical, or personal, explicit or latent. A painting, moreover, constitutes a visual concretion of its own process that, for Morandi, was a process of looking intently, over a lifetime, not only at the painting in progress but also at how familiar things continuously present new aspects of themselves in novel conjunctions and in cadences of light. Sometimes not even the look, but only the mere memory of objects is distilled into light or into sparse fragments of their form. Merleau-Ponty does not, however, explicitly thematize: the visual dialogue of the artist with her own work as it takes form, as well as with works of his or hers that h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Plethora of Issues
• Chapter 1 Transcending Profane Vision: The Art of Giorgio Morandi
• Chapter 2 At Vision’s Crossroads: Body, Animality, and Cosmos in the Art of Kiki Smith
• Chapter 3 Image and Writ in Cy Twombly’s Visual Poetics
• Chapter 4 Resonances of Silence and the Dimension of Color: The Art of Joan Mitchell
• Chapter 5 Plant Drawing, Abstraction, and the Philosophy of Nature: The Art of Ellsworth Kelly
• Chapter 6 Strong Beauty and Structures of Exclusion
• Conclusion More Ethereal Bodies
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Topics
• Index of Persons
• Back Cover