Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art: Pictures Without a World (SpringerBriefs in Philosophy) [1st ed. 2021] 3030753042, 9783030753047

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SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PHILOSOPHY

Žarko Paić

Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art Pictures Without a World 123

SpringerBriefs in Philosophy

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Žarko Paić

Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art Pictures Without a World

Žarko Paić Faculty of Textile Technology University of Zagreb Zagreb, Croatia

ISSN 2211-4548     ISSN 2211-4556 (electronic) SpringerBriefs in Philosophy ISBN 978-3-030-75304-7    ISBN 978-3-030-75305-4 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Preface

The book I am presenting belongs formally to the field of contemporary aesthetics and the theory of contemporary art. However, its field is located beyond the disciplinary boundaries of the humanities because it seeks to rethink the conditions for the possibility of the emergence and disappearance of the image in the age of the technosphere. Dealing intensively with image theory for years in the context of its epistemic and aesthetic possibilities today when the acceleration of scientific constructions of artificial intelligence takes our breath away, I came to the notion of the end of its metaphysical possibilities and transition to a post-human condition marked by a triad of concepts: calculation-planning-construction. When the image in the horizon of its appearance no longer has the world in its meaning coming from language as a frame of reference, and when instead of mimesis and representation the image is determined by cybernetic notions of information, feedback, control and communication in a virtual environment, we are at the end of historical-epochal possibilities as emanations of sublime meanings. We cannot understand this world kept alive by the production of information and the narcissistic aspiration for the rule of the subject as substance if we do not undertake a genealogy of the pictorial construction/deconstruction of what art as an event bestowed on the beauty and sublime of truth. What is a picture? How should an artistic image be understood, and how can an image be created through technical reproduction? Are these different images, and how should they be interpreted? What concepts should be used to approach the analysis of contemporary art, which deals with a multitude of completely different pictorial expressions? These are all inevitable questions we face today when we want to open a debate about the boundaries and transgressions of the traditionally understood humanities in their interpretation of art. The contemporary use of the term “fine arts” is already controversial. Art focused on the character as an artistic expression no longer corresponds to the intention of art. The destruction of the human figure in modernism and the movements of the historical avant-garde from the first half of the twentieth century to the contemporary art of kinetics, events and performativity abolished the reasons for the self-evident continuation of the subject of fine arts. v

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The singular use of the notion of fine art has been replaced by the plural use of visual arts. The replacement of fine art with visual arts at the end of the 20th century introduced important innovations in the consideration of theoretical aspects of painting, media and visuality. This changed the very notion of modern and contemporary art. Undoubtedly, this is an extension of the field of visual culture to visual arts, and of mass communications – primarily mass media: audiovisual, television, film, internet – to visual communications. The essence of this change, which externally consists in expanding the field of fine art by exceeding its content, is reflected in the paradigm shift of the image. It can be said that the discussion of the meaning, function and ontological status of the image is a condition of the possibility of any development of general transdisciplinary image science (Bildwissenschaft), visual studies, visual culture and visual communications. Emphasizing the picture, of course, is not limited to art. Because philosophy focused on the problem of logical statements and the truth of attitude in the twentieth century, the emphasis was shifted from the mind/logos to language. How and under what conditions can we understand a statement if what the truth means is no longer self-evident? Heidegger’s destruction of traditional ontology and Wittgenstein’s critique of language opened up the problem of constructing the meaning of terms with which we traditionally name things, beings and phenomena. Rorty called the transition from categories and notions of the mind to linguistic questions “a linguistic turn” in the 1960s. To begin with, it is enough to draw attention to the fact that the decomposition of the meaning of metaphysics as the rule of logocentrism in Western history was a necessary step in establishing the video-centrism of contemporary media culture. The picture could become a central place of theoretical consideration in philosophy, art and science only when the foundations were laid for the interpretation of its irreducible “meaning”. When the image emerges from the shackles of logically written, age-old superiority, new relationships are created between what the image refers to. The loss of metaphysical references is compensated for in the picture by its orientation to society, politics and culture. Within the new post-disciplinary sciences, such as visual culture and visual studies, are precisely cultural studies (a fusion of sociology, cultural anthropology and critical policy practice), which are the leading theoretical orientations. The image in the age of technological reproduction appears as replicated, multiplied information-communication. But it is not just the image that duplicates the original, the one-off. That is life itself. Image and life in their principled separation of visualization and the process of the movement of reality itself merge into images of real/artificial life by the technological act of generating new life as artificial life. Life turns from singleness and chance into multiplicity and the necessary reproduction/replication of the original. Cloning a detached stem cell formally corresponds to a copy of the image. Duplicating the original is thus multiplied by copying (film and digital photography). The aestheticization of life from the time of the historical avant-garde of the first half of the 20th century is completed in the biological matrix of the aesthetic as a process of intervention in the body only as an image.

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In short, to think of an image starting from an effort to transcend traditional aesthetic notions and historical-artistic approaches presupposes an insight into its riddle of events which no longer depicts the world as it is but the transformation of life itself. To think in this way means using new tools of philosophical insight into the openness of the coming worlds that will fundamentally change our cognition, the notion of art and, ultimately, the essence of man. Zagreb, Croatia

Žarko Paić

Acknowledgements

I owe my gratitude for the creation of this book to the closeness of thought and analysis of my dear colleagues Prof. Dieter Mersch, University of Zurich, Switzerland; Prof. Adriano Fabris, University of Pisa, Italy; Prof. W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, USA; Prof. Krešimir Purgar, University of Osijek, Croatia; and Asst. Prof. Tonči Valentić, University of Zagreb, Croatia, who also gave valuable language advice for publishing in English, and to Anthony Wright for his proofreading. Finally, thanks belong to my friend Dražen Katunarić, philosopher, writer and editor of the publishing house at Litteris (Zagreb), with whom I have elaborated the thematic framework of this book in long and inspiring conversations since 2002. Last but not least, I owe a debt of gratitude for publishing this book to my editor Christopher Coughlin.

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Contents

1 Introduction����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    1 2 The World Without a Picture: Avant-­Garde and Iconoclasm��������������    5 2.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������    5 2.2 Iconoclasm Beyond Religion and Aesthetics������������������������������������   10 2.3 The Worldhood of the World������������������������������������������������������������   17 2.4 The Sublime and the Avant-Garde����������������������������������������������������   21 2.5 The Avant-Garde and the “End of Art” ��������������������������������������������   26 2.6 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   32 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   34 3 Deconstruction of the Image: From Mimesis and Representation to Communication ������������������������������������������������   37 3.1 Introduction: On the Trace of the Picture ����������������������������������������   37 3.1.1 The Iconic Turn��������������������������������������������������������������������   42 3.1.2 The Anthropology of Images (Bild-Anthropologie)��������������   49 3.1.3 The Image as a Communication Medium����������������������������   54 3.1.4 The World-Picture and the Scene of the Subject: Heidegger’s Trace ����������������������������������������������������������������   56 3.2 Conclusion: Video-Centrism Without History?��������������������������������   59 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   60 4 The Dark Core of Mimesis: Art, Body and Image in the Thought of Jean-Luc Nancy ��������������������������������������������������������   61 4.1 Introduction��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   61 4.1.1 What Is Art?��������������������������������������������������������������������������   65 4.1.2 The Disembodiment and the Rising of the Body������������������   73 4.1.3 An Image Without Foundation����������������������������������������������   78 4.2 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   81 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������   82

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5 The Dead-Nature of the Body: Biopolitics and Images of Humans’ End������������������������������������������������������������������   85 5.1 Art, But for What Reason?����������������������������������������������������������������   85 5.2 Metamorphosis of the Body��������������������������������������������������������������   90 5.2.1 Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde��������������������������������������   90 5.2.2 The Symbolism of Life and Its Images��������������������������������   97 5.2.3 Two Bodies of Performative Art ������������������������������������������   99 5.2.4 Spectacle and Virtual Art������������������������������������������������������  105 5.3 Biopolitics Against Life?������������������������������������������������������������������  107 5.3.1 Art Without a Human������������������������������������������������������������  107 5.3.2 Cyborg—Transgenic Art—The Other World������������������������  108 5.4 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  111 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  112 6 Event of the Moment: Time in Contemporary Art ������������������������������  115 6.1 The Permanent Revolution: Time of the Avant-Garde����������������������  115 6.2 Flash Moment ����������������������������������������������������������������������������������  116 6.3 Clocks and Calendars: Dalí—Darboven ������������������������������������������  119 6.4 Conclusion����������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  121 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  121 7 Figures of Resistance: Painting After the End of the Avant-garde������  123 7.1 The Black Cross of the Retro-Avant-garde��������������������������������������  123 7.2 How Are Objects Observed?������������������������������������������������������������  125 7.3 Mediation of the Society of the Spectacle����������������������������������������  129 7.4 Conclusion: Duchamp’s Last Act������������������������������������������������������  132 References��������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  133 8 Conclusion������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  135 Index������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������������  141

Chapter 1

Introduction

The iconoclasm of contemporary art considered in this book presupposes the inner development of the avant-garde from its destruction of the image to the iconic turn of the present era. The development of the avant-garde during the twentieth century is not an irrefutably historical and artistic theme. Avant-garde art was the last radical movement of modernism. To speak, therefore, of the art that sought to overcome and abolish existence by life cannot be reduced to speaking about the development of artistic styles, tendencies and directions. This book intends to exhibit the fundamental reasons for the disappearance of the picture in the era of virtual reality, starting from the notion of contemporary art as realized iconoclasm. In a critical dialogue with current aesthetics, philosophers and theoreticians of art endeavour to understand the essential moment in which art has no world for its “image”. The disappearance of the world from the work of modern art and the events of contemporary art require a completely different development of iconoclasm. Steps beyond all the aesthetic advances in the modern day (such as the return of aura, fiction, reality, history, image, sublime, myth and divine) are reflected in something that “pictures” of contemporary art reveal. Iconoclasm is not a religious-aesthetic-political dispute about the ban of depicting the human figure, body figures, but rather pertains to avant-garde art that has changed our consciousness of reality and the world at large. The inherent difficulty in the process of deconstructing historical consciousness from the image is seen in the fact that the fundamental proposition is based on the radical critique of how avant-garde graces its “big narrative” of the destruction of all historical traditions. It is the destruction of the notion of life as a social construction, the destruction of the notions of modernity, post-modernism and society through culture. The iconoclasm of contemporary art completes the image of the end of Human. From the “new man” of social utopia to the end of Human, the historical path of the radical destruction of the world is at large. The avant-garde and neo-avant-garde have not opened a new world but decomposed social and cultural assumptions of the present world’s survival. All that remains in this adventure of images without the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_1

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1 Introduction

world is reduced to the establishment of art as an event at the time of “madness without a consolation” (Heidegger) of modern technology. The picture and the necessary possibility of the art after the end of the avant-garde no longer exist for the subject as the world, but rather the endlessly multiplied image of the society of the spectacle. So, the iconoclasm of life itself, which is no longer primordial life but the bio-genetic occurrence of the cyborg’s life in the virtual art of the present, takes over the power of rulership over anything else that has the features of art. We can say that the picture without a world no longer has its truth or its beauty. The process of the aestheticization of everyday life has confirmed the uncanny of the modern image of the world. The more beautiful objects and things are, the less chance art has to open space-time to a different world and a different art outside of a tremendous reduction to the unconditional rule of modern technology. At the time of the performative-­ conceptual turn, the image of life that modern art has for it blurs the foundation, nothing is possible or real, except a strike on the very essence of iconoclasm appropriate to contemporary art. A bizarre event can be more than an occasion for reflection on what has already been done with avant-garde art, as the act of overcoming it and abolishing the boundaries between art and life shows the dimension of absurdity with events of the world of art. For example, a piece of brief news was announced in Libération on August 30, 1993: Nîmes: The man who damaged one of Duchamp’s works on Tuesday has been sentenced to one month in prison. Pierre Pinoncelli, an artist-painter, destroyed the work of Marcel Duchamp after he had pissed into it and then left the Carré d’Art in Nimes, without the knowledge of the guards.

The subversive artist as painter invoked himself, of course, to Dadaist aesthetics and the basic idea of the avant-garde about the unity of art and life. His iconoclastic “hammer” abolished the meaning of the iconoclasm of avant-garde art. The artist-­ painter in his radical life-work did not know that Duchamp’s act of challenging the aesthetic taste of our time was the true end of art and the transition to the lifestyle of the iconoclasm of the world without a picture. The hammer for Duchamp’s Fountain had already been performed by the very act of setting up the urinal in the space-time of contemporary art. After that, only contemporary science and genetic technology have been created without the world as a virtual space of artificial life that has long since surpassed its need for a living man, just as contemporary art no longer needed a picture of the human body long ago. Ortega y Gasset recognized the death of art in the fatigue of repeating what was originally open to the world. This book applies this notion not only to the art of the avant-garde but to the entirety of contemporary aesthetics, the philosophy of art and the theory of contemporary art. As a result of the rhetoric about the return of something that has been lost by the exodus of man from the world in modern times, the time has come to reflect on why the iconoclasm of contemporary art has no possibility of returning to its sources, as there is even less chance of expecting some

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respectable iconic turn after the end of the avant-garde. How should we think about art after we realize that, after the end of the avant-garde, there is no longer a way to go backwards, and going forwards is even less meaningful? This book, paradoxically, starts from the situation of the productive powerlessness of art and thoughts about it.

Chapter 2

The World Without a Picture: Avant-­Garde and Iconoclasm Omne corpus fugiendum est. Porphyry

2.1  Introduction Are we nearing the moment of the disappearance of what we still call the picture? This question leaves no possibility of a negative answer. However, it is assumed that such a condition is already at work. The inner possibilities of the non-pictured world as a non-objective of the image are determined not only by the visual art of the twentieth century but also by the scientific-technological complex of modernity. Malevich’s intentions in art were analogously the aim of quantum theory in physics. The last act of this unique process of losing the distinction between the worldhood as a “picture” and a reality as a frame within which the “image” acquires its meaning is just in front of our eyes. The development of biotechnological research, the finding of the human genome map, a real possibility of cloning living beings, makes the narrative of the subjectivity of man and his irreducible identity historically outdated. If the twentieth century, with its dizzying development of technical inventions, is considered to be a spectacle of paintings, it is not a rare prediction to say that the twenty-first century will be the scene of the ultimate erasure of the image in the visualization of the speed of light (Virilio, 2000). Following the deliberations of Paul Virilio, Canadian media theoretician Arthur Kroker made the assumption that in the irresistible process of the disappearance of traditional camera photos, negatives and the “eye” of photographic apparatus, the replacement of analogue by digital should be changed by the transcendental status of the picture. This is the disappearance of the picture itself (Kroker, 2000). This radical change does not, of course, mean that there are no longer “pictures”. They are all around us. The whole visible world of our media-virtualized reality is filled with “images”. Going on about a culture of spectacle means talking about the spectacle of a “picture” culture. This self-evident fact means that it might be truly uncanny in the world where anything in the human environment becomes a picture. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_2

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Only the body as a simulacrum becomes the place of a new image of the world. The bio-cybernetic image development template came to the point of its disappearance. TV, video, digital photography, CT scans, X-rays, laser technology in medicine, all the digital cameras that accompany every human movement, all external/ internal environments—are these not cravings for looking behind and beyond the body itself as an independent Being-in-the-world structure, the result of avant-garde iconoclasm in the visual art of the twentieth century? Why would the discussion of philosophy and visual artists at the end of painting at the time of new information-­ communication technologies determine more than two decades? The disappearance of the image and the appearance of body-as-movement as a world-picture denotes an upsetting and truly fatal event in contemporary art. But this event cannot only be affected by art but by the entire project of the world, in which all inner, outer and over-world beings are shown to be completely non-objective. The picture no longer emerges as a reflection or appearance of objectivity. Bio-cybernetics produces a picture of autopoiesis and genetic machinery assembly by recombination, mutation and replication of the already-standing body. In the art of the twentieth century, this process of the decomposition of objectivity began with the avant-garde at the crucial moment of Malevich’s art movement called Suprematism. The transition or the turn of the aesthetics of an artistic work into the aesthetics of the event—in which contemporary art is elaborated not only with the figurative painting but with the notion of the originality of artistic genius and hence is radical with its notions of beauty and the sublime—puts into question the possibility of “creation” itself as art (Sutlić, 1987: 136).1 To say that a contemporary artist does not “create” works of art but produces an experimented “new reality” means the same thing as saying that contemporary art cannot achieve a spectator’s “looking” or “experiencing”. In the world without pictures, it should be only a significant event as a creative process. Contemporary art is, therefore, the event of the world as an art performance rather than an artwork (Mersch, 2002). Understanding this turn might be possible if we assume that iconoclasm denotes the essence of the avant-garde. (Besanҫon, 1994).2 1  The notion of creativity is not a term that originally belongs to art in its novel meaning of imitation of the divine creative act. The artist as a creator in the modern age takes over the features of God who “creates” ex nihilo. It is, therefore, a theological concept which, in modern anthropological criticisms of metaphysics, has been set up as an exceptional self-deception by the artist-genius. Vanja Sutlić, in his discussion of “Labour and God”, shows the epochal metaphysical horizon of “Christian creation” as the reduction of the Absolute: “How and when is it possible that a ‘realistic’ being, traditionally, depending on the other, gains the attribute of the ‘most realistic’ of the essentials (ens a se)? Abolishing the oppositions of two worlds—‘transcendent’ and ‘immanent’, ‘creative’ God and man, mere ‘creatures’, ‘real’ worlds and ‘here’, ‘apparent’, etc—is the fundamental line of the so-called ‘realization’ and ‘abolition’ of metaphysics. The ‘absolutionist’ reduction, for example, takes place so that what it reduces only takes over its qualities and attributes, etc. This is done in the entirety of post-Hegelian philosophy from Feuerbach until Sartre; the most significant representations of this ‘reduction’: Nietzsche and Marx” (Sutlić, 1987: 136, pf. 20). 2  A book by Alain Besanҫon, L’image interdite: Une histoire intellectuelle de iconoclasm, is certainly the most challenging study on this issue. Despite its overall ambition to present the history of ideas and of the pre-Platonic era to Malevich as “intellectual history of the iconoclasm”, the

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But we are faced with completely something different. This means that this is not about the consideration of the avant-garde phenomenon from the defence or the criticism of its achievements for the development of contemporary art, although it will immanently attempt to show that without its radical gesture of tradition it should be impossible to comprehend why the assumption about the novelty of the future as an essential dimension is vulgar timelessness (to borrow Heidegger’s terms from Being and Time) raises the inner urge and the outer canon of contemporary art in general. Comprehending the world without a picture assumes the answer to the issue: why does the final synthesis of art, life and the world from the events of twentieth-century avant-garde art—from Duchamp and Malevich to Beuys, Kiefer and Neue Slowenische Kunst—come just at the time of the disappearance of the picture? How could the original act of “just” artistic rebellion against figurative painting be transformed into a state of the new “joyful apocalypse” (Hermann Broch) in which the true form of an event is perceived as a unique act of scattering the image at the velocity of a beam of light, thus giving more distinction to the imaginary and realistic in the imagination of the future? From the perspective of contemporary art, which determines itself as an autonomous and exceptional self-agency of the spirit without any connection to something external to it as the supreme support—no matter whether this is God, society, politics, or even the idea of beauty, which is often among people’s experiences of the “essence” of art—, such an event is no reason to return to the past in the sense of turning to figurative painting. At least this is a form of regret for the irretrievably lost time of the painting as an “open work” that is created in the relationship between “artist” and “audience”, like action painting on the traces of abstract Expressionism by Jackson Pollock. Autonomous contemporary art cannot complain about the past because its temporality lies beyond the mere conception of the dimensions of present and future as a line in a linear order. Hence, the aesthetics of an artistic event denotes the event itself. It does not require a permanent work of its own, a fixed, exposure space. True discomfort has a different feature. It does not only affect the indifferent audience of all possible variants of shock and experimentation. Also, we cannot say that it is even relevant to the judgment of some art historians because many exhibitions of contemporary art (e.g. the Biennale in Venice and the Documenta in Kassel) have already become spectacles of repetition, fatigue and boredom. So, judging is based on different interpretations of Hegel’s assumption about the end of result was at least doubtful as the author of avant-garde art is judged as a reduction of the notion of an image from which any form of the presence of the human body is “exiled” as something in itself abjective, an inappropriate canon of the world’s total dissipation. Instead of determining the place of the iconoclasm in Western culture as a religious-spiritual horizon of the encounter between divine and human in the “image” of the world itself, we dare the avant-garde controversy with the “picture” to be maintained at all as a worldview, or even the mere problem of a “stylistic” transition from one age to another, thus banning the image from the liberation of the modern from religious sources. Despite the lucid arguments of Besanҫon on the iconoclasm, it joins the philosophy of aesthetics and art history; however, it remains unconfirmed why the avant-garde, from the very beginning with the return of iconoclasm to modern art, radically rejects any form of the subject world at all.

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art, such as the aesthetic thoughts of Hans Sedlmayr, José Ortega y Gasset, Arnold Gehlen, Arthur C. Danto and Hans Belting. If, after experiencing the iconoclasm of avant-garde contemporary art, the world without a picture as its own eventual habitat has come to fruition, then we should determine all of that as second-level discussions about it that may be directed towards the issue of why figurative painting has again become a challenge for artists and the art public. Undoubtedly, contemporary art rests on the foundations of the avant-garde. Without its desire for the aesthetics of the world of life, when art becomes an event within the possibility of philosophical aesthetics in advance, there is no sufficient or necessary reason for the transition or turn from the aesthetics of the work of art to the aesthetics of the event. All art is today attached to contemporaneity. Not because it has rejected the image, the narrative, the real event as such in any kind of expression, but because of its relationship with real changes. Each new information-communication assemblage becomes the means-of-purpose of its endorsement (from video art to today’s dominant cyber-art). Hence, simply speaking of the end of the avant-garde or its renewal cannot be a relevant level of discussion concerning the basic problem of contemporary art (Bürger, 2001: 186–192).3 Sociological explanations or the kind of art history that is trying to be interdisciplinary cannot avoid answering the question not of what art today is but what its direction is and why, despite the radical break with beauty and tradition, it has become an inevitable phenomenon of world awareness as an event of absolute absurdity. Among the more interesting recent contributions to the understanding of contemporary art theory, three approaches are certainly worth mentioning. The first belongs to new materialism, and its main guidelines are to attempt to connect non-­ Western ecologies and cosmologies, cultural and epistemic heterogeneity. The second is oriented towards the relational aesthetics created by curator Nicholas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe the tendency to make art based on, or inspired by,

3  In this regard, however, Bürger does not illuminate the key question of the post-avant-garde or meta-avant-garde without articulating ideological conflicts with tradition, social order and poor social taste after the loss of “social” survival—the end of the real socialist order in Eastern Europe. Nobody has renounced their interest in telling stories about East-Kunst in the global era of capitalism. However, exhaustion with “utopian” modern or avant-garde art (Habermas—Bürger),, is not more important for something completely self-explanatory: it is not decisive for the so-called artistic values of avant-garde works for contemporary art in terms of their reception and dialogue, but rather for what has become the real energy of the modern world from the spirit of the avant-garde, which is constant innovation, experimentation, absolute novelty and, ultimately, the disappearance of the imagery of the world itself in the non-objectivity of reality. In the first act of the avant-garde transformation of art from the very nature of life as Being, in the sense of Nietzsche’s “vitalist semiotic”, there has been a change not only in the notion of art but also of those of the world and the life of the technology in the production of the conditions of the “new”. In other words, the avant-garde does not die in its very youth, as a well-known saying goes, but is constantly perpetuating its obsolescence. Its dynamism destroys the “static” of the act by exposing the “event” of destruction as a negative form of creativity. In the avant-garde, art is “happening” as a flashy event, and creativity gains a world-wide dimension in which all people become artists. This is a dream come true in Romanticism and for the utopian Lautréamont, who has the vision that, in the future, all people will write poetry.

2.1 Introduction

9

human relations and their social context. The third is, in my opinion, an extremely provocative theory of post-conceptual art advocated by the avant-garde theorist Peter Osborne, a British philosopher in the footsteps of Adorno. Current “contemporary art” presupposes for Osborne the following: 1 . idea, problem, fiction and actuality; 2. the construction/expression of contemporary or post-conceptual art; 3. the fictionalization of artistic authority; and 4. the collectivization of artistic fiction (Osborne, 2014: 2–4). Osborne seeks to define the concept of contemporaneity, starting with identity and difference in the various points regarding the concept of globalization. There should be a historical time as opposed to the globalized economy of the network and a “homogeneous time” in which capitalism has taken its special merits and competence. Osborne may conclude that the dialectical complex of contemporary art is composed of “aesthetic, conceptual and distributive aspects of the work” (Osborne, 2014: 10). All of this can be termed as the “post-conceptual condition” of contemporary art. Six of its major features are: 1. necessary but insufficient conceptuality; the art is constituted by its concepts concerning non-art; 2. a necessary but insufficient aesthetic dimension, which includes some kind of materialization as aesthetic spatial-temporal phenomena; 3. the anti-aesthetic use of aesthetic materials; 4. the extension of infinity to the possible material of art (trans-category); this could be the meaning of “post-media”; 5. being radically distributive, the irreducible relational unity of the individual work of art through the totality of its tangible achievements (the ontology of materialization); and 6. the historically violent transformation of the boundaries of this unity (Osborne, 2014: 11). Contemporary art is far more than the aspiration for the (de)materialization and (de)realization of an idea beyond the contradictions of the work and the event. It is an experiment with life, at least. Finally, Osborne argues that art contributes to the aesthetic dimension of political subjectivation by reflecting and re-presenting it for reflection, although art itself cannot be of direct political significance. With the avant-garde, art becomes more than art, not just an event beyond the art. With the disappearance of an image, a time emerges without a work of art because the artistic “action” as life denotes a substitute for the work. It is precisely this turn of the self-understanding of art wherein hides the underlying problem of the contemporary development of the world without pictures. Is iconoclasm the historical condition of the occurrence of contemporary art?

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2.2  Iconoclasm Beyond Religion and Aesthetics The history of art as the history of “art history”—a humanistic discipline that studies art in its development through the changing eras of stylistic epochs—strives to encompass the subject of its study by advancing from proper notions of time and history. Remarkably, interest in iconoclasm was present at the same time as the apocalyptic charge of the late twentieth century. In the general blunder of the various “endisms” (end of ideology, end of utopia, end of philosophy, end of art, end of history), with the enthusiasm of the emergence of something new and the appearance of the fracture of the earlier epoch, which in turn was expressed in the spirit of avant-garde news, two thinkers were almost intentionally related to the contemplation of the end of modern art. Works by Alain Besanҫon devoted to iconoclasm have raised the question of how to understand contemporary art from within, hence, in the light of a profession that can no longer speak of, for example, conceptual art with the means of the hermeneutics of style, as iconoclasm cannot be thought of just as a historically irreversible episode from the period of Byzantine art. For Hans Belting, Bilderstreit (the image dispute) has already been included in the open text of modern art as its external framework and is the reason why the avant-garde’s ban of the depiction of human figures lies on the horizon of anthropological criticism of religion. Where it can still be said that the historical iconoclasm of Byzantine art could be a representation of a human person who offends the divine revelation, because Christ Pantocrator is a living icon of God and not a mere resemblance of the character of the Son of God, the avant-garde has essentially moved from the sphere of religious banning to the new (artistic) canon (Belting, 2002: 139–140). The new dogma does not, however, arise only from purely artistic reasons for interruptions with the ruling templates, the conditional, figurative traditions of painting. A step beyond the self-development of contemporary art as an “era of the end of art as mimesis and representation” has been made by Besanҫon in the genealogy of abstract art. The analysis is based on a parallel review of Western religions and philosophical statements from Plato through gnostics to Plotin about the concepts of the image and mimesis. Historical representations of iconoclasm range from Greek and Jewish ones to Romanticism and esoteric movements at the end of the nineteenth century to culminate in the setting of how the abstract painting of Kandinsky and Malevich’s suprematism completed the circle of the iconoclastic history of the West. What was heretical and “alternative” in history has become a main avant-garde direction of artistic agency. An important set of Besanҫon’s criticisms of iconoclasm and the avant-garde as the legitimate “ban of depicting a human person” in art is summarized in two religious attitudes. The first belongs to the viewpoint of the theology of the Catholic Church in which the world is created as a divine work from the idea of​​ the good in which evil exists but is not the cause of creation. Christ has become a man by the act of Incarnation. So, artists show his form/figure (eidos) as a picture of the world in which beauty derives from its divine truth. Imagery or figuration might only be permissible under the condition of an iconographic assignment. The image

2.2  Iconoclasm Beyond Religion and Aesthetics

11

cannot be exposed as an independent subject of the adoration of the beauty created by the artist as a subject of the creation of beautiful nature or the human world but as the unity of religious content and new art to show the figure of Christ based on historical submission to the New Testament. The second attitude is radically opposed to this and argues that the world and humanity come from primordial sources of life and are already evil. God denotes the unrecognizable absolute, the supreme law of the human race. From this gnostic idea on the realm of God’s creation, restored by Emil M. Cioran in contemporary French philosophy, Besanҫon seeks to expose the mystery of iconoclasm. The dogma of incarnation is disjointed. But it is a heretical doctrine rejected by the official fathers of the Catholic Church. Gnostic theology developed the concept of the world and the cosmic doctrine of the degree of Being in the knowledge of God, which in essence is hostile to the depiction of figures in religious art (Koslowski, 1989). Disputes or clashes with iconoclasts were pervasive in Western culture during the eighth and ninth centuries. In this historical “clash of civilizations”, if we use a popular contemporary expression from the sociology of conflict, Besanҫon seeks to understand why the adventure of modern art and the avant-garde is associated with iconoclasm, and why Gnosticism is related to sources and primitivism in twentieth-century painting, and finally why the “figuration” from the canon of official Christianity, except in rare moments of surrealistic dejection, as in the Dalí phase of mystical devotion to Christianity, vanished from contemporary art, giving place to “iconoclasts” like Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich (Besanҫon, 1994: 476). We have mentioned the considerations of Belting and Besanҫon as representative views, albeit very different from their conclusions and the manner of their testimonies, about the problem of understanding the end (of the history) of art as a line of progress. While Belting methodically puts the relationship between the avant-garde and religion in the background, Besanҫon’s analysis of the iconoclasm of modern art is perceived explicitly in analogy with the original historical iconoclasm in Byzantine art. Its dualistic scheme about a somewhat rather conservative view that the overcoming of this other “alternative” theology of the image as avant-garde immanence has led to the ultimate limitations of art’s defeat at all, and it is evident that this famous writer of historical discussions about Russian culture and art took over the worthy position known from the theory of the “dehumanization of art” by Ortega y Gasset in advance, thus negating any reflection of why iconoclasm cannot be spoken only of in a religious and artistic sense (Ortega y Gasset, 1968). Here, we will not indulge in this inauspicious and problematic issue of an ideological nature, which stems from the very socialist position of the avant-garde in its early period of consent with the totalitarian movements of Leninism and Stalinism. To judge the so-called progressivity or contemporaneity of artists—if they were followed by an iconoclastic canon in modern art—and the so-called reactionism or antimodernity of an artist—if they are attached to figurative painting—comes from the avant-­ garde’s heritage. Undoubtedly, it still determines the direction of polemic attitudes, and Besanҫon himself is, in controversy concerning his book in France, proclaimed to be a “representative of traditionalism” and “conservativism”, as expressed by the French theoretician Jean Clair at the Venice Biennale in 1995, when, at the centre of

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its concept of art, at the turn of the twentieth century, he laid figuration and the body as essential features of art in our time. Let us only point out that such an expression of the discourse of commands as a mark of value judgment for external reasons and not for the very thing of the artwork in the avant-garde can only be understood as a secularized version of the religious-aesthetic nature of iconoclasm. The pronouncement of Porphyry to avoid any kind of body presentation still has significant echoes in the revolutionary rhetoric of avant-garde movements in the twentieth century, and especially in Kazimir Malevich’s Suprematism. But, indeed, here echoes the terrible sound of the Manichean conception of the world: from abject presence to the shining stars of the future! If the avant-garde is a religious reason for banning the image (the human figure), it has replaced the political and the aesthetic, and is, paradoxically, eliminating traditional aesthetics with the concepts of beauty and sublime in the name of art as truth. Politics has disabused itself of religion, and the philosophy of art has been subordinated to its goals as a new aesthetic. All this does not fit the question of the disappearance of the image with the birth of avant-garde art, and therefore it has been pushed back to the problem. In the spirit of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological password, one has to go to the very things themselves—the meaning of the original iconoclasm. Therefore, we can retrieve the analogical reasons from the period of the occurrence of the historical avant-garde and its radical method of the destruction of the picture. Based on the original iconoclastic ban of painting, we can see the epochal emergence of religious art as a form of visual representation of the relationship between God and man. Iconoclasm derives its origins in the pre-Socratic era of Greek thought. The ban of the image derives from the very nature of the primordial relationship of man and the emergence of the divine. The origin (arché) is a singular event in which Being, the divine and the essence of man are acquired in a primordial relationship. Heraclitus articulated an expression for this world-epochal event: logos. It is already from the root of Greek thinking that the image’s status cannot have the same rank as the “mind” in which “speech” is not the instrumental function of the notion (ἑρμηνεύειν, hermēneúein) of Being and beings, but of the primordial act of the logos as a demonstrating and revealing essence of everything that exists (αποφαντικός λόγος) The picture does not show anything in its essence. From the sensible essence of image of what it is that gives rise to the encounter of gods and people, it should be obvious that it somehow “disturbs” the direct relationship between man and the divine. Plato’s notion of images accumulated in the radicalization of pre-Socratic thought as such is determinative for all further “philosophical” considerations of historical phenomena in iconoclastic disputes. In the Phaedrus’ all-sensible world, Plato denotes the shadow of the world of ideas as an eikon. Only ideas are truly real beings. To reach an insight into the essence of the self-showing world order is only possible through the act of pure thinking. The word eikon in Plato’s works explicitly indicates a resemblance between what is represented and the idea that determines the appearance of a thing (Plato, 2018: 250b). Some of the interpretations of Plato’s thinking pointing to the apparent contradictions in his attitude toward images refer to Timaeus, in which the cosmos represents a reflection of the primordial picture of the divine. This is the likeness of a higher rank than the

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13

mere image of the senses, so it cannot be attributed to the same thing as a picture visible in a statue or painted pottery. However, in one place (namely, Phaedrus), the sun is described as the eikon of the idea of good (Plato, 2018: 509a). Therefore, pictoriality cannot be self-evident concerning the “higher” rank assumed by logos because its primal attribute should always be linked to the openness of the world of pure appearance to have a direct insight into ideas that could appear to be the necessary step of surpassing the sensory world through its removal, but by mediating through the shadows of things. Thus, it can be shown that Plato’s conception of the image evolves the paradigm of thinking that mimetically determined the image and picture status of mimicry as a mere fragment of the idea itself. However, it is at the same time the historical horizon of the metaphysics of the image that governs the true beginning of modern painting with Cézanne as the origin of a completely different view of the imagery of the world. The curse of the image of Plato is that from its mimetic arrangement, with some strange inescapability, it produces idolatry instead of the insight and speech of its supernatural essence of Being. The image is not, therefore, as is commonly thought, excluded and condemned to contempt and ineffectiveness. It has been given space for the phenomenon and sensitivity in which any possible artistic “creativity” is happening, although in Greek art it does not appear as an autonomous sphere of pure pleasure in the showing of beauty since what we think of historically as art today goes beyond the subject’s subjectivity and the experience of being a spectator by the splendour and beauty of an artwork. ‘Pictorialist’ becomes the basic concept and the principle of spiritual mediation between individual spheres of the entire conceptual world. Cosmic and human nous have since been eikones eikonos (the images of images), a logos as God’s creativity that produces appearances. (Bauch, 1994: 279)

Almost all relevant Greek-language dictionaries describe eikon as a sensitive re-­ presentation of thought, similarity and repentance, regardless of whether it is a statue or an image. Eikon still appears, whether in a reflection, shadow or mirror image. In Neoplatonism, the distinction between logos and eikon is no longer addressed by a decisive distribution of the non-overlapping duality of ideas and sensible phenomena but by a multitude of hierarchically broken hypostases and hence by the derived eikon of the divine. The likeness of the shape determines the relationship of hypostasis. Unlike Plato’s doctrine, a man appears as the emancipator of himself and the image of logos. The Latin translation of eikon is imago. The Neoplatonist doctrine of hypostasis seems to be identical to Christian doctrine when it comes to the image model as mimesis. Christ appears as the image of God in the sense of the imago Christi (Eltester, 1958). Christianity, contrary to Platonism, thinks of a man as the image and picture of God, and the cosmos is no longer, as in Plato’s Timeus, a picture of an arché. This alteration will be decisive for that concept of the image that iconoclasm, with so much religious fervour, would reject. The etymological origin of the word is found in the sense of today’s meaning of the image—the pictorial, the imaginary, even the allegorical—in contrast to the symbolic meaning because we are already witnessing the translation of the Greek

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eikon to a completely different notion of the image’s status and, of course, the epochal “New Era” world-comprehending. Indeed, the image designates something essentially different from the variances and similarities of the sensible representations of the idea we encounter in the Greek world from Plato to Plotin. German art historian Kurt Bauch, to whom Martin Heidegger dedicated a collection of studies and essays entitled Wegmarken, concluded after a meticulous semantic and historical analysis that a conception of images and imagery in the transition from ancient times to the High Middle Ages and eikon as the self-observation of an image as an artwork for which it is presented are no longer merely appearances of something superordinate, ideal, but are the acts of setting up an artist as a kind of protector of imagination. The shown and the imaginary are not the same. The imaginary represented an open path to modern aesthetics, at its peak in Kant’s The Critique of Judgement as a legitimate mediation between the theoretical and the practical mind in connecting the power of reason with sensory perception through the power of imagination (Einbildungskraft). Bauch suggests that the Greek translation of eikon as an icon assumes the narrow meaning of the term “image” and refers to the image as a painted “object”. The icon signified the name for the profane image in the Middle Ages, while the simulacrum was used as a sacred image (Heidegger, 1972).4 On the contrary, the use of the concept/word of the image shows that it is a matter of any type of image, with the addition that the image in the sense of a picture (Bildwerk) was questionable, so the image in its relative meaning always refers to the image of the human figure. This is, as we can already see, completely opposed to the concept of an icon that would preserve the spirit of the iconoclasm from Byzantine art and the breakup of Christianity in the Orthodox religious assemblage to Malevich and the avant-garde. The painted object that displays the icon is not an image in the sense of an image. The shape of the human figure and the icon as a sacred image with the iconographic template of Christ, the Virgin/Madonna and the Saints is divided into the concept of the image and the way of its being symbolized. Every appearance of a man in medieval art presupposes the surpassing of its mortal nature. Anthropology, therefore, within medieval Christianity, is impossible for the simple reason that the human figure, as well as the image (imago), means something far more than merely a

4  Based on the notion of post-modernity in the works of Jean Baudrillard, this does not mean merely the predominant “image” in the visual culture of modernity. The simulacrum obtains the substitute status of the “transcendental” frame of any possible reality, but no longer as an inescapable reality and beyond, but as an ontological feature of the very real, thus eliminating the (metaphysical) distinctions between external and internal, surface and depth, signifier and labelled. Everything becomes an inexhaustible surface of things, a world as a space-time of Hegel’s bad infinity. Baudrillard’s premise that simulacrum precedes reality, and not vice versa, can be read at the same time as a radical, modern critique of Platonism that began with Nietzsche. Understanding the simulation as the epochal feature of the world in its post-modern setting enabled the disintegration of modern subjectivity, a feature which Martin Heidegger thought of as “The Age of the World Picture”. In the New Era, the subjectivity of the subject as a scientific-technical feature of Being makes each object the object of its own conceptions and elaborations, which, of course, is valid for both the image and the imagination (Heidegger, 1972).

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15

human and its figure. Unlike the icons in “figurative” painting of the Middle Ages, the only “object” of imitation represents the image of God in the likeness of man. Bauch thus embraced the iconoclasm from the experience of the religious framework of understanding the world at large. If an image as an image can only be understood from the transversal sphere of the transformation of the logos (word) into the body of Jesus Christ as the Son of God, then the pictorial “imagination” serves as a function of the sacral (Bauch, 1994: 278–280). However, although Christianity, necessarily following the Old Testament and the religious ban on displaying the image of the divine, implicitly rests on the assumptions of the primaeval act of the revelation of iconoclasm, it turned in both versions (West and East) towards the figure of the Son of God and was never actually consistent in its radical iconoclasm like Judaism or Islam. However, Bauch will not say that explicitly, which is rather astonishing when he points out that the peoples whose art is completely iconoclastic include all the peoples of Eastern and Northern Europe. Why am I insisting on this fact? Primarily because I want to show that the setting of the birth of imagination from the spirit of medieval art in which the image acquired the meaning of the imaginary—not as mere fantasy but an essential feature displaying God’s shape/figure in the shape/figure of a man—cannot be sufficiently justified without leaving the “shackles” of religious chains. Bauch is, by the way, not alone in his comprehension of the iconoclasm—the notion of the image as an eikon-imago from which a new pattern of images emerges no longer with a merely mimetic origin, beginning with the religiosity of the Middle Ages. This is a step in the face of the erudite and historical splendid description of the iconoclasm as a religious-aesthetic phenomenon in the history of Western art in the already mentioned book by Besanҫon, observable in the attempt to obtain a precise etymological concept of the word. It might be cynical to say that the basic reason for the consistent iconoclasm by Jews and Arabs is their orthodox religiosity, while Christians, in both of their historical civilization versions, never kept the Scripture as “supreme law.” But every single theologian will clearly show that this is not quite true, because the word of Christ do not despise sensitivity, all is in the glory of the appearing life of man, hence the images, except when they are served in the function of idolatry. It seems like a vicious circle. The images in the Middle Ages are not fundamentally new. The sacred images originate from painted scenes of Greek-Roman mythical cults. They depict Dionysus, Orpheus, Plato—gods, demigods, philosophers, poets and true epic artists. This historical relationship cannot be uniquely determined only by religious significance. The status problem of image and the iconoclasm, as we saw in Plato and Neoplatonism, is a first-rate ontological-theological problem, and then only afterwards aesthetical as well. Almost enough to paraphrase Leibniz’s remarkable metaphysical question—why is there something rather than nothing?—and ask the following question: why always picture and not anything else (non-picture)? It should be obvious that iconoclasm does not mean an absolute denial of the image of the world, the complete disappearance of the image in the post-metaphysical environment (the digitized and virtual alienated by the very hyper-event of reality, to borrow Virilio’s concepts) of the world’s adventures in its planetary time, rather

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2  The World Without a Picture: Avant-Garde and Iconoclasm

than just preparing the condition of worldly things without a picture. If the image of the Middle Ages and the essence of the iconoclasm is not limited to a religious-­ aesthetic assemblage, which is an area in the wider meaning of the word, what is so mysterious and perhaps uncanny as to derive all the historical wandering of the world—either as a progressive development or as a cyclic self-revelation to lose it in the moment when it testifies its own disappearance? The iconoclasm was born as a “movement” during the eighth century A.D. and has been preserved to date in Orthodox Christianity. By relying on Neoplatonistic conceptions of the divine and the image, the Byzantine iconoclasm was based on the assumption that the icon on which Christ is shown represents the existence and essence of his divine-human nature. The icon as an “image”, as we have seen, is not an image but an icon in the sense of the presence of the divine reality of the worshipped redeemer of mankind. Thus, the icon of Christ “refers not only to the divine reality but has a share in its mystical presence” (Bauch, 1994: 285). As an “instrument of mystery” in which Christ embodies an iconic figure, he does not take on the similarity of a pattern like the Greek term eikon. It is identical to Christ, the Son of God, because it derives from his divine being and is not the imaginary view of his superhuman person. The origin of the iconoclasm in the Old Testament, however, draws attention to the very act of prohibition. In addition to the New Testament God who is perceived in the human (sensitive) sense, the Old Testament God is invisible, indescribable, and hence the ontological-theological relationship between God and man necessarily develops only in the covenant in which God brings laws. Laws are the statement of the disclosure of the morality and moral purpose of the prohibitions. The Lord does not allow the image of himself to appear because he is not mirrored as a “person” in the sensitive world of the phenomenon. His speech encompasses a command discourse of showing the way out of bondage to a sensual thing, from the dungeon of idolatry. The meaning of the iconoclasm can by no means be a “ban” of depicting a human person as such. Although historical iconoclasm can be perceived as the latent presence of theological-political motives in the dispute over the image in the Byzantine era through the Reformation to the avant-garde art of the twentieth century, it is not a question of proving so-called alternative conflict history with the image of the Western canon. On the contrary, pictorial, iconoclastic and conditional conceptions, whether figurative or referential, continually follow the world-historical event of the emergence of the world as a horizon within which the structure of the Being and time has already been mingled with a different relationship of man with what is hoped to be aisthesis, the mere observation of the external reality. The path that leads beyond the explanation of the iconoclasm as a unique event in Western art history from the perspective of religiousness and an aesthetic way of thinking reflects the previous analysis of the notion of the world’s worldhood and the pervasive notion of sensitivity.5 What is the meaning of the answer to the question of 5  In the horizon of the analysis of the iconoclasm beyond the religious and aesthetic hypostasis, we can partly rely on the interpretation of Gottfried Boehm. By asking about the historical origins of the iconoclasm and finding it in the Old Testament to defend the divine, Boehm comes to the

2.3  The Worldhood of the World

17

changing the feature of the world’s worldhood during the historical transition from the Greek “picture” to medieval times to the New Era and the modern world? Is it not an icon store if it is based only on the religious-aesthetic ban of depicting the image of a human person, something irreversible from today, even though we historically belong to the famous dispute within Byzantine art of the eighth century A.D.? That is not a controversial issue on the state of flux of historical figures and the form in which they appear. But what motivates the reflection of the concept of the image at the time of its total disappearance as a reflection of that which is sensitively observable as well as the reflection of why it occurs precisely in our spectacularly virtual time? The image of the artwork reenters the “iconoclastic dispute” by simultaneously coinciding with aesthetic settings as a philosophical (metaphysical) discipline of the study of the meaning of art, as it comes from so close a point, but it seems so distant a place in the world of thinking about the essence of art. The issues of the world’s worldhood and sensitivity as a problem of contemporary art bring us back to the centre of the narrative of iconoclasm. The vision of the image in all the historical epochs of Western culture attests to the worldly truth of the human race. The image not only shows, marks or symbolizes, it also captivates, enthrals, rises to the rank of the supervisor as it is at the same time underestimated, making a broken, mere illusion of the event.6 All this can only be seen if the feature of the world’s worldhood moves from mythical to religious art and from religious to “world” art, which can hardly be understood in the sense of some dialectical development as the abolition of myth and religion in the world occurs at a “higher” historical stage of the emergence of “world” art as a new figure, overcoming the scientific history of the world in which art is taken over by the essence of current scientific designs in experimentation and innovation.

2.3  The Worldhood of the World The inspiration for contemplating the world’s worldhood as an essential problem of contemporary philosophy is the greatest merit of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. His term “life-world” (Lebenswelt) would be present, though without reflection on the phenomenological achievements, in the way that avant-garde art of the notional point about what is astonishing today and is not merely a reflection of the image in the history of mankind, but the fact is that behind this observation comes the fear of the depicted even when it is no longer reflected as the fear of God. As the iconoclasm does not relieve itself and disappears only by becoming a canon of painting in Byzantine art, it emerges in the contemporary painting of the “sublime” (as in the case of the American artist Barnett Newman), Boehm brings in an iconoclastic link with the term Erhabenheit from Kant to Lyotard. The interpretation of the image thus enters into the key issue of contemporary philosophical aesthetics, motivated by post-­ modernism and Lyotard’s narrative about “presenting the unrepresentable”, although it does not answer the question about the conditions of the possibility of the sublime appearing as another name for the essence of iconoclastic intervention (Boehm, 1994). 6  “Modern visual illusionism converges with perfect iconoclasm” (Boehm, 1994: 336).

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twentieth century was founded. Exiting from the metaphysical framework of the meaning of pictorialness in the view of an image of the “added” from the outside with a radical turn of the image as an image in the picture of total controversy (Malevich) will not be possible without a previous self-realization of art as life itself in its being, as a continuous process. As in the return of the iconoclasm to contemporary art as an aesthetic of the “life-world”, it is already preparing all that is turning into an object for a certain subject but by setting the world into the horizon of the scientific-technical paradigm of the new era. The image of the world itself or the world as a picture assumes, therefore, the end of primordial nature, the disappearance of the divine image and the complete self-production of any possible being as a subject of perception and appetite, as Heidegger interpreted Leibniz’s metaphysics (Heidegger, 1990). However, it is no accident that Leibniz tried to approach the essence of beings as monads through the metaphor of “windows”. It should be a way of looking at the image in the perspective of the “world” observer, which cannot be anything other than the subjectively perceptible assemblage of nature as the space of human power to be transformed into material for other purposes. Concerning the “phenomenology” of the world, Heidegger in Being and Time paid special attention to contemplating the abyss of the world. For our purposes, it might be enough to point to the circumstance that the notion of the world’s worldhood is discussed within the context of the history of the concept of time. We will briefly look at Heidegger’s notion of the world. Why Heidegger, instead of Husserl? The reason is that Heidegger had always referred to the possibility of art as a true way of showing the essence of the world, and for him, the image of a metaphysical painting was a “window” to the intentional view of the eyes or even the phenomenological perception, as developed by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the footsteps of Husserl. It should not be assumed, however, that Heidegger freed art in its true dignity from the emphatic undertaking of any kind of philosophical aesthetics, philosophy of art or “image science” in the thinking of the twentieth century. In his History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, Heidegger’s worldhood of the world is broken down into “the wherein” (Worinheit) release for being-human encounters and the worldhood surrounding the world with the primary feature of “around” as constitutive worldhood. The worldhood of the world, that is, the specific being of this entity ‘world,’ is a specific concept of being. In opposition to the traditional question of the reality of the external world, we shall ask about the worldhood of the world as it is there in everyday concern. We are asking about the world as it is encountered in the daily round of preoccupation; we are asking about the world around us, the environing world; more precisely, we are asking about the worldhood of the environing world. By asking in particular for an account of worldhood and specifying the aroundness in it, we thereby establish in its own right the genuine sense of place and space within the structural framework of the worldhood of the world. This gives us the division of the analysis of the worldhood of the environing world. 1. The Worldhood of the environing world as such; 2. The aroundness of the world as a constitutive feature of worldhood. (Heidegger, 1985: 170)

The emergence of the notion of the world’s worldhood thus contrasts with the significant theoretical definition of the reality of “the outside world”. If we put this

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Heideggerian stance into the discussion of iconoclasm, it is thought that the moment of what art in its “worldhood” is at all is superior to the distinction between inner and outer when it comes to reality. The image, therefore, within the context of medieval religious art denotes something “more” than the glimpse of the surrounding world. It does not depict “this” world but refers, in its imaginary-religious aspect, to the image of the “one” world in the way of representing the world as an event (Ereignis) or, as Heidegger says in the foreword of Being and Time, “the specific Being of this entity ‘world’”. Without a historically unique, ever-enduring and eternal space and spacing, the image cannot survive. It can neither “hang” in the air nor float above the spirit like the spectre at the time of the creation of the world, as The Gospel Book pronounces, but “happens” as an encounter in defending the Being, the essence of humanity, and beings that we call the “world” in various ways. The image has represented a historical manifestation of the features of the world as the encounter of humans and gods because a world denotes a historical place and a space of the “primordial” eye. Sensitivity, therefore, from this view of the world’s worldhood can never be inferior to mental activity (logos-word) to understand the “eye” of the surpassing reality. In light of such considerations of the world not only as “ambient” but as a primaeval event from which Being and time acquired a certain place and space, we can comprehend the dispute over the issue of the image from an essentially different horizon than that of a religious-aesthetic overstatement of iconoclasm.7 Contemporary aesthetic discussions, even if they do not go for the contemplation of the iconoclasm from that perspective of understanding the assemblage of things, come up with the word “turn” for the epochal hidden worldhood of the picture as concepts in their true place and space. Just as there was the linguistic turn in which modern philosophical thinking decisively reduced all problems to the analysis of language, as was done by Wittgenstein, there analogously appears the pictorial turn (or iconic turn) (Boehm, 1994: 13–14).8 If the meaning of the linguistic turn can be summarized in the sense that the rules of (ordinary) language determine the meaning of what is speech problematic, then it might be evident that neither transcendental consciousness nor Heidegger’s destruction of traditional ontology should be more decisive in the methods of philosophical discourse about contemporary art. But, as is well known, Heidegger has shown that language 7  On the interpretation of the iconoclasm of the changing historical worlds in which art is always affected by the “crisis” of the end and the overthrow of something that has passed and which does not always tend to synchronize the essential achievements of the past, see Lüdeking, 1994. His dialogue on the example of Heidegger’s analysis of Van Gogh’s painting and Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of Cézanne’s derives from the attempt at a phenomenological explanation of images from the horizon of the concept of the world: “Heidegger sees the world ontologically, and Merleau-­ Ponty phenomenologically, but they are both, in principle, close to looking at the image of the world” (Lüdeking, 1994: 356). 8  In the last twenty years, under the name of the iconic turn, the aim is to combine theoretical reflections of the aesthetic with artistic projects provoking new experimental trends in contemporary art. A paradigmatic case is that of the Zentrum für Künst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, which brings together curators, philosophers and artists (Hans Belting, Peter Sloterdijk, Peter Weibel, Hans Ulrich Obrist and many others) (Weibel, 2002).

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cannot be easily accommodated with its instrumental-communicative function. Language itself, and hence the image, does not run away from its fall into the world of technical fabrication. Exactly speaking, the pictorial event encompasses something much more worthy of the instrumental-mimetic function on which all structuralist and post-structuralist critiques of language are built. In a certain way, this pictorial turn, with a reflection on the feature of an event which gathers Being and time in their “truth”, implicitly testifies the text of Heidegger’s lecture “Time and Being” that begins with a reference to the “meaning” of one of Klee’s paintings and one of Rimbaud’s marvellous verses from Illumination (“il y a”) by which poetic speech comes out of the captivity of the metaphysical narrative scheme, but where the event (Ereignis) also emerges as the place of the relationship of Being and time carries all possible worldhoods of the world. To “have” Being and time does not arise, of course, from art itself, but rather art denotes the manifestation of the event itself. We can say that Heidegger in his parables took two representative modern artists—Klee and Rimbaud—to demonstrate that what we today accept as an overcoming act of language-picture has already happened in the world in the form of metaphysically expressed possibilities in a new approach to art itself (Heidegger, 1969, 1977). What is the relationship between the iconic turn and iconoclasm? Is a preassumed connection not something somewhat odd and almost impossible? Many advocates of the former in contemporary aesthetics argue that the disappearance of the image in contemporary art has been occurring since traditional painting disappeared as a mimetic framework for performing the imagery of the world and that what we have witnessed in the age of digitized reality is the return of images, a revival of the concept of iconoclasm as if it had a different function than the historical analogy of Byzantine art of the eighth century A.D.9 There is no doubt that the point of the historical appearance of the iconic turn can be fully spoken only when the reflection of the power of imagination (imaginatio, Einbildungskraft) occurs between the senses (aisthesis) and the mind (logos). It is the birthplace of aesthetics within modern philosophy with Kant’s connection between the theoretical and the practical mind in the “power of imagination”. The iconic turn and iconoclasm are derived from Kant’s analysis of the notion of the sublime. Interestingly, the key to post-modern art as the eclectic spirit of the avant-garde will be to reconsider Kant’s The Critique of Judgement with special care in the notion of the sublime (Erhabene). To get closer to the discovery of our fundamental set of circumstances wherein, in the world without images, the disappearance of the character of the world’s worldhood that enables the “place” and “space” of art in the event of living history as the art of the world itself, it is necessary to embellish who gives the reasons for restoring the notion of a universe thoroughly cleansed of beauty. It would not even be intimidating to talk about the relationship between Kant and the avant-garde, as it is legitimate when it comes to understanding the post-modern origin of art. The 9  “The modern spectator of art learns that images do not disappear, but that they are produced in a completely different way. They change their material carcass, but they are still images…” (Boehm, 1994: 37).

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iconoclasm Kant was trying to determine is the experience of freedom. To be able to think with Kant about precisely this “forbidden” area of avant-garde art as an iconoclastic ban of the image (of the human body) in the art of the twentieth century does not seem unusual if it comes from the assumption that the feeling of the sublime can never be anything but a “mere negative display”. In one place, Kant pronounces something seemingly uncanny: Perhaps there is no more sublime passage in the Jewish Book of the Law than the commandment: Thou shalt not make unto thyself any graven image, nor any likeness either of that which is in heaven, or on the earth, or yet under the earth. (Kant, 1979: B 124-125)

Why, then, is the elevation of the contemplation of contemporary art emerging as the notion of “presenting the unpresentable” (Lyotard) after experiencing a radical negation of the picture? Is it possible to finally perceive supremacy as a secular-­ divine place that alternately provides a refugium for contemporary art? Moreover, can it explain why iconoclasm has never had a mere aesthetic-religious origin, as in the avant-garde it cannot be only reduced to an anthropological-political assemblage concerning the “ban of images”?

2.4  The Sublime and the Avant-Garde The assumption about the autonomy of art with which modernity self-elevated in all ways of service to others, its external purpose, has its origin in Kant. Beauty as a self-explanatory “object” of aesthetics is somewhat irrational. Kant more closely defined the concept of beauty as being acknowledged without a conception of the subject of “necessity”. Therefore, taste cannot be logically grounded or derived from the notion of good, but rests on the mind of the subject. Expecting consensus between what the subject “experiences” as beautiful and what is beautiful-for-other (subjects) encompasses a specific form of necessity. That is the connection. The experience that joins somehow in advance presupposes the consensus of various “subjective” judgments on the subject of the good. Since beauty is “purposiveness without purpose” because it is not based on the material law of nature or free will, its “form” simply provokes a teleological provision. Based on these assumptions, Kant determined the “pure judging of taste” without the external influence of love and tenderness. Beauty, therefore, cannot be an objectively observable feature that attaches to the subject from outside. This is the essential point of Kant’s aesthetics. So, beauty transgresses the mere “lovable” because, in nature and the human (artistic) world, works can be beautiful and strange, terrible and, of course, ugly. Only for a man, in addition to the nature that follows certain purposes, does it have a beautiful inner self. It is its “purpose” in the autonomy of that aesthetic as a bond of sense and reason in the mutual game of the power of imagination. Thus, from the very ground of modern “aesthetics”, it might be possible to comprehend modern and contemporary art as a free relationship between the feature of work and the interaction of the spectator as a participant in the art event. Artistic autonomy, according to

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Kant, can only be based on the possibilities of pure taste judging that is manifested in various ways (Kulenkampff, 2002: 49–80). This means that a reflexive moment in understanding aesthetic processes requires insensitivity. We can call it an inscrutability of any universal language expression. At the same time, it goes far beyond the mere subject of sensible experience as it cannot get to the categories of pure mind at all. Jean-Franҫois Lyotard and Jacques Derrida are particularly interested in returning Kant’s analysis of the sublime to the centre of reflection in discussing the boundaries of the concept of post-modernism concerning contemporary art and the boundaries of aesthetics. Kant’s distinction between the “mathematical” and the “dynamic” concept of the sublime opens the way of understanding this conception as the link between the aesthetic and the religious in the iconoclasm of avant-garde art of the twentieth century. In the former case, it is the perception of infinity, while in the latter we are faced with the sublime. So, nature as such is not “sublime” because it functions causally-teleologically. The sublime as well as the beautiful is something unto itself. But as long as it requires peaceful contemplation, the sublime sets us into a somewhat inner movement affected by the experience of the “terrible”. The essence of nature itself is frightening. Its beauty, on the other hand, presupposes an inestimable observer. The sublime therefore needs an aesthetic field of experience. Also, the sublime necessarily demands this “subject” prevailing in man, the transcendence of sensitivity. So, this constant struggle with the “terrible” as the experience of “objects” of the endlessness and vastness of nature, where objects such as volcanoes, oceans and storms are made, is exalted by an event in which the aesthetically pleasing and prevailing experience of the fear of nature itself should be prevalent. In other words, beauty lies in satisfaction without any interest, and the sublime shows itself in its constant opposition to “the interest of the senses.” It is not nature as an image of the horror of beauty in the art and the image of nature, but nature persists in the experience of the sublime only when it presents in itself the amazing power of the inexpressible. Kant’s fondness of iconoclasm has no historical point in his “subjective” judging of paintings in his own time. Undoubtedly, we can say that the internal initiation of the course of a historical event in which the modern image of the world from the aspect of the subjectivity of the subject as the power of expression and craving develops as an unprecedented horizon of the “fear of the image”. Kant merged two terms in his concept. Both are simply implied in modern art. Beautiful and terrible, hence, are not opposed, but form an inner unity. Exaggerated in the view of a mere “negative representation”, however, it must count on the necessity of overcoming the reverberation of all possible sensible moods and imagery. The aesthetics of modern art, and especially of post-modern art, may have to be read as the aesthetics of the sublime. That is a reason why this aesthetics must be in a constant conflict of a true encounter with the essence of the iconoclasm. This encounter comes mostly indirectly, as is the case with Kant’s interpretations of the horizon of “presenting the unrepresentable,” as Lyotard put it (Lyotard, 1983). At the very centre of his interpretation of Kant’s concept of the sublime, we can see that it necessitates the “tragedy of art” because it cannot be reconciled absolutely due to it being limited by its very form of “sensuality”, so the presentation in which

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ideas and forms are shown seems to encompass this uncanny assemblage.10 Modern art, therefore, is nothing other than the fact that creating ideas and forms points to inadmissibility in the image idea. Sublime, but in a constant conflict of absolute ideas which cannot display the form that, in its limitation, witnessed its inability to display and requires a different foundation of the concept of the imagination. For our purpose, it would not be reasonable to point to the problem of a revelation in Kant that he did not, along with the aesthetic ability of judging, provide a framework for a theoretical aesthetic productivity theory. Artistic “creativity” is just hiding behind the ambition of such a theory. For modern art, it is only in itself conceivable that Kant’s theory of artistic creation will be ignored or at best discarded as conservative. On the one hand, through the analytics of the sublime, Kant “modernized” the true beginning of post-modern aesthetics, but on the other, his theory of genius would be completely inappropriate for the avant-garde iconoclasm and its application for the aesthetics of life through the manifestation of an artistic event as a collective work. The artist is for Kant a genius of power. So, beautiful art cannot be anything other than the art of genius. That is a reason why the “aesthetics of the ugly” denotes only a negative aesthetics, which arises as a reaction to self-­formulated forms of representation of the good in the sense of falling values when the daring and ornamental framework of motives from a different world becomes inappropriate for a new notion of the “nature” and the position of man in the world. The display of diseases, disintegration, scenes of ruin, abomination/abjection, explorations of the dark side of human survival in the world, all existing theories of contemporary art (from post-conceptualism to recent performance art, such as Uri Katzenstein’s “works”) are not only “subversive” areas of experience and innovation but are merely negative representations of the sublime, characterized in their apparent serenity. And even though Kant would exclude the possibility that abhorrence appears as a legitimate “object” of artistic “creativity” within the aesthetics of the genius, it is evident from his “aesthetics of the sublime” that nothing can be intact in the field of the artistically beautiful (Liessmann, 1999: 26). Kant’s methodological iconoclasm, therefore, does not allow any metaphysical (aesthetic-religious) ban even when it is the greatest determinate of the sublime in the world as an artistic work of nature and man. This, of course, does not mean that it is a sublime foundation for iconoclastic art. It is immensely important here to link the sensitive (artistic) and divine domains as an experience of religion. In the entirely different context of early Nietzsche from the time of The Birth of Tragedy, it was exalted to have an ontological-aesthetic place for linking the Dionysian and Apollonian worlds of Greek art. In both casess, it is the thought of connecting by the seeming abyss of the separated spheres of survival, attempting to think beyond the  It is remarkable that in a recent interpretation of Nietzsche’s “aesthetics of the sublime”, Christian Lipperheide took a stand against the inner necessity of the loss of the power of visualization in modern art: “In his artistic metaphysics, Nietzsche overcomes the primacy of the practical mind through the primacy of an aesthetic perspective in which the aesthetic constellations are justified within the holistic art of the world itself and possess their immanent sense in the Kantian way of thinking in purposiveness without purpose…. In a tragic thinking, the beautiful and sublime overlap and overcome the uncanny” (Lipperheide, 1999: 12).

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primordial chaos but without teleological faith in the final sense of history as ever-­ advancing, evolving in the direction of the “higher” and the “future” of the reconciliation of all divisions into One. Art hence acquires the power of interconnection and non-separation, the power of synthesis without a dialectical game of thesis and antithesis, as in Hegel. So, art possesses in such an ever-pervading sense of good looks beyond the truth the true possibility of philosophy in the post-metaphysical period. As a kind of organ of philosophy, the art of a sublime needs a genius as an artistic creator, regardless of how his “function” and place have changed in the context of contemporary art. What is another secularized version of the concept of aesthetic genius than Joseph Beuys’ case in the art of the twentieth century to restore the dignity of the artist as a shaman? Is it not contradictory to advocate Lautréamont’s claim that all people will be artists and proclaim himself a shaman at the same time? Who can be a true proponent of that kind of sublime art? Certainly, someone who is “predestinated” to artistic power, who above that situation has some uncanny power, ability, talent, imagination and creative genius. The concept of genius for Kant assumes the permeation between nature (areas of the sublime) and the human art world. Through the artist’s nature, it is their substantive possibility of construction and destruction. Nature creates the artist’s art as a “new” object, and it thus acquires another quite specific form of Being; for example, Heidegger, for whom nature and art appear as the unity of the world in the epochal-­ historical dimension. Art for Kant cannot be thought of in a mimetic model but develops from the idea itself. The true paradigm of artistic creativity goes beyond nature itself to beauty, even though, for Kant, the naturally beautiful is ontologically more original. Artistic work in the negative view of the sublime remains, however, the ultimate consequence of such “aesthetics” for modern art being insufficiently “radical” simply because it cannot develop the divine, moral program of the transformation of the world on the foundations of truth and justice. Therefore, Kant’s aesthetics must be ambivalent to the dreams and the reality of modern art, but not to the aesthetics of avant-garde life, which is performative, conceptual and all kinds of event-art (body, machine and divine self). It is not, however, the problem of updating Kant for contemporaneity. The problem with contemporary art should be that when the idea of ​​restoring beauty goes back and forth from the age of radical emptiness of the meaning of an artistic work to beyond the spheres of images of media and virtual culture, this cannot be without reference to the “unsaying”. For Lyotard, for example, the essential role of art is precisely that of overcoming that “aesthetic”. Following on the principle of destroying/deconstructing the metaphysical foundation of “visualization”, the basic principle of the avant-garde—setting the very “life-world” as the surrounding world at the centre of art events—, advocates of the reverend of the sublime see the immateriality of the digitized reality, another inescapable feature. What was “mystical” to Wittgenstein seems to Lyotard as “presenting the unrepresentable”.11 Now art practice itself, a  For Dieter Mersch, the sublime in Lyotard has the same “function” as an aura in Benjamin, another term for the “unsaying”. Hence the idea of the sublime is no longer referring to the “starry sky” or grandly natural events such as volcanic eruptions, but the superlative aura that derives from the new scientific-technological plan of planetary “intimidation” which possesses nuclear energy

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self-­contained world of artistic production, appears as the other figure of the source of an iconoclastic banning of images, as is the case with Barnett Newman’s painting. There is nothing more to “show” in terms of the reflection of an ideal form/ shape/figure. The religious foundation of art has disappeared in the total scientific production of the very reality. If there is no deeper reason to represent the depraved goddess of modern art, there is enough reason to set the process of artistic creation as a “source”. The immediate experience of the sublime no longer exists in “fear” of some natural infinite. However, it is happening in the constant disclosure and withdrawal of the truth of an artistic event. Art “has” its essence everywhere and nowhere, it is “there” and “here”. Neither God nor this world’s environment was definitively driven out of the avant-garde practice of insanity and ruthlessness. So, it should be no coincidence that in Beuys’ remarks to orthodox avant-garde-minded participants in the audience at Kunsting Folkwang in Essen on January 19, 1972 about why he talks only about God and the world and not of art, he explicitly said: “But God and the world are the art.” If it is the sublime of the metaphysical horizon of the source of artwork in the art of the world itself without the picture, it is relevant from Nietzsche through Heidegger to Lyotard and the iconoclastic practice of the avant-garde, and it can then be concluded that the sublime is not merely the fundamental atmosphere of contemporary art, but its “frame” without an image. The avant-garde did not radically disrupt the image of the human body by disintegrating the foundation from which painting from Cézanne to Malevich moved in the circle of the disappearance of perspective to the total non-objectivity of the image because in the political secularization of the original iconoclasm, the prohibition of depicting the human person “sacralized” the pure form, the contradiction itself, as the last “figure” of the aesthetic-religious picture of the world. The constant need and quest for newness to exceed the previous overrun inevitably ends in the absolute absurdity of the living body as the place and space of any possible change. The performative art of events is the overwhelmingly iconic turn of the neo-avant-garde in a moment that no longer knows the vulgar timing of sequences, scenes, fragments, but rather that event of exception that precedes any “image” (film, video, cyber-art). At the same time, we are witnessing the artificial man of the “end” of an avant-garde. This concept or idea is not shown but requires the space and time of a singular event— body performance in the surrounding world. Has this debate about the iconoclasm become irrelevant to contemporary art? Could it still point to a spectator accustomed to “pictures” from everyday life, to the structure of the visual culture of contemporaneity that is well described by the French philosopher-urbanist Paul Virilio in an interview with Pierre Sterckx? An art lover is at the same time an art critic since a taste for art implies a certain quality of judgment. As a lover of new technology art, I totally contest the objective status accorded to the techno-sciences. I acknowledge the existence of exact, experimental sciences, but technology has no claim to the grandeur of those sciences. For me, a technological object is within strategic weaponry. There is no longer an “object” of its own inattention to nature because nature itself has become a staged event of the set of science, technology and art (Mersch, 2002: 131–154).

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2  The World Without a Picture: Avant-Garde and Iconoclasm first and foremost an art object: a Concorde is no different from a Cézanne painting. Until we widen this culture of technological art and its concomitant art criticism, we will not have democracy but idolatry, submission to ‘divine’ technologies. Those who claim to have killed the God of Transcendence have become the zealots of the God of Technology. (Virilio in Sterckx 2001: 149)

2.5  The Avant-Garde and the “End of Art” The iconoclasm in the avant-garde shows the inward world-historical event of completing the painting as an artwork. It was self-evident since Malevich created the emblematic work of twentieth-century visual art—the Black Square. In Aesthetic Theory, Adorno described the entire ambivalent project of avant-garde art precisely as this crisis of self-discernment. Any attempt to undo Hegel’s claim that art, “deliberately” is here meticulously forgotten just to get to the narrative of whether modern art could justify philosophical reflections on the “subject” of new art. If, then, the crisis of self-discernment denotes something that affects the essence of modern art and what happened before the historical avant-garde in the texts of Rimbaud and Mallarmé or the paintings of Cézanne, then it is no longer an issue of whether art is still possible if its assumptions disappeared with the new historical world of science and technology, as affirmed by Adorno (1970: 9). With the crisis of self-­understanding of modern art, aesthetic reflections on the status of art were also manifested. From the very beginning of the avant-garde, the end of art’s setting directly relates to the question of “the end of art history” as well as of “the end of philosophical aesthetics and the end of the philosophy of art” (Belting, 2002). For this has to be witnessed by a seemingly paradoxical fact. Contemporary art has become an inescapable drive for the cultural industries of Western societies. The greatest arts festivals such as the Biennale in Venice and Documenta in Kassel show a lot of public interest in the art of our time, above all as a phenomenon of a global spectacle in which the event surpasses the artistic reach of projects exhibited in the polyvalent Venetian and Kassel areas. The more self-produced “works” of contemporary art are, the more it is about the meaning of their existence in the world as an artistic event. The transgressive “newness” of the New Era from Descartes and Newton to the experience of nature in the logical-mathematical neglect of the world in Leibniz’s metaphysics was the self-explanation of time from the time dimension of the present as the eternal novelty of the “now”. Avant-garde art merely radicalizes this epochal time of the New Era. The term “new” is therefore not merely about the internal dynamics of avant-garde criticism but the uncanny driving force of the twentieth-century art world. The avant-garde is, hence, based on the hypostasis of the “new” precisely because it is identical to the experimental-innovative spirit of modern science. Their discoveries like the theory of relativity of Einstein or Bohr’s quantum theory up to the indetermination of Heisenberg and chaos theory are no longer self-evident as logical sequences of previous discoveries, but rather as paradigms, which means the radical abandonment of tradition. The question of the

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possibility of art in such a world at the same time marks a radical doubt about the possibility of a “new philosophy of art” despite its many attempts to overcome the end of metaphysics (Liessmann, 1999). When the avant-garde takes for its founding of the metaphysics of modern science, it is in its work to confirm its self-­identification in the emphatic character of this art of “immeasurability”. This transition, which in all manifestations and theoretical writings of avant-garde artists is perceived as a break with the past, is a world without a picture where the performativity and conceptuality of art are no longer revealed. Everything is a performance-conceptual event as a lifetime of living in its procession. The structure of the articulation of abstraction, cubism and futurism still retains a certain degree of departure from the world’s total controversy. But Dadaism is already being introduced in the space of shock art, provocation, installing artists as the provocateurs of events in the centre of life. Event-art, happenings, installations and performance in the very strange language of the new opacity of speech in its scientific-technical deployment of things (Gestell) as enframing creatures and the construction of nature point to the worklessness of the deeds, the impertinence of the image, the loss of art (Kunstlosigkeit) in the world without a picture, to use Heidegger’s language. The metaphysical issue of the possibility of art in the avant-garde age is therefore not a question of the possibility of “old” art, but the essence of the notion of “new” art without images. The fundamental method of survival of avant-garde art is its essential (in)ability to act as art. After the disappearance of the image, the illusion of reality as the perspective of the world, the notion of art from Plato to Nietzsche as a kind of ontological spectacle, and the avant-garde interruption with the semblance of the picture in the sense of mimesis become acts of real events of life in its performative-conceptual dispositif (Mersch, 2002: 195). How can we understand that avant-garde art resacralize the aestheticism of lifeless life or that the image is turned by the immeasurability of the never-before-­ minded event? One possible explanation is the return of the iconoclasm to the picture without the image of the human body. Outside of the religious-aesthetic dimension of avant-garde iconoclasm, it intends to shift the anthropological criticism of religion in a pure aesthetic event of absolute polarity. It is finally time to abandon the stereotype of the ideological subjection of the art of the spirit of communism and cut it off from being merely an explanation for its political “progressiveness” because the other side of that mage is politicized in the fascist worldview. It should be completely insignificant that Russian communism during Lenin’s era tolerated the subversive art of Malevich and Russian futurists, as it is undeniable that there was also the possibility of integrating expressionism into the new German regime before the brutal Nazi-Kunst. The problem is far removed from ideology and politics and is related to the connection between the avant-garde and history. If it were not only a mere aesthetic dislocation, it might be still visible today when the irrelevant dispute over iconoclasm and figurative simplicity continues in the context of the virtualized-digitized “image” of the world without images. The politico-­ ideological evaluation system, according to the scheme, progressively overlays pure aesthetic judgments. Such was the case in France with the reception of Alain Besanҫon, and it is notable that even Baudrillard himself has been exposed as

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having discomfort regarding contemporary (conceptual) art. In the debate about the disappearance of the image, whoever in any way revives Hegel’s end of art risk to being denounced as a conservative or one obsessed with the past (Danto, 2001; Schreibler, 2001: 1–28). The art of the avant-garde in all its forms denotes the confirmation of the new as a kind of ontological-political-aesthetic “law”. Novelty represented the canon and dogma of all movements and styles of art of the twentieth century. For futurists, for example, “new beauty” is embodied in the adoration of a fast car. The cult of speed and the cult of the destruction of “beauty” in the sense of classical static work are interrelated. The autonomy of new art in time was determined by the reduction of the timelessness of the ecstasy of the present. Dynamism, actuality and speed no longer need a work that will testify to the uninterrupted course of time between “now”, “before” and “after”. Novelty as a canonical-dogmatic version of a secularized assemblage of the avant-garde, of course, also poses the problem of restoring iconoclasm in painting in a different way. Among the rare attempts to present the history of the avant-garde as the second life of historicism in which there is an unseen paradox that the visual image of the human figure disappears in the visual arts is the thought of Hermann Lübbe, while in architecture the restoration of neoclassicism throughout Europe and America in1930s refers to the ornament, but no longer as a crime as claimed Adolf Loos. In our case, it can only be a sign of reference to the avant-garde of history and not a binding boundary point because it does not make a consensus about the iconoclastic avant-garde spirit. Lübbe’s merit opened the way out of the avant-garde to the ideology of communism, as well as to the fact that post-modernism in architecture and visual art is just a hypostasis of the avant-garde’s tendency to the classical. It is easy to pronounce ideological judgments and say that Lübbe is a conservative and regionalist and that Adorno’s followers are progressive and universal advocates of the “new” as an indispensable value in the production of contemporary art. It is, however, much more than a value judgment, enabling the horizons of evaluation from the “new” art-to-world setting. The relationship between the avant-garde and history is shown precisely in the restoration of the iconoclasm that contemporary art, even in its most radical form of elaboration with the concept of image as eikon and a picture of “presenting the unrepresentable”, has never truly liberated itself from the past. This does not mean that contemporary art can be understood by the conceptual framework of religious art of the Middle Ages, for example, or that the return of the myth to post-modern figurative painting can be interpreted by the mythical art of the ancient Greeks. On the contrary, every single historical epoch denotes a unique event without the illusion of progress and development towards some “more” forms of truth in art. What is decisive for the thought of vanishing the past in the minds of modern people, as Lübbe seeks to perceive as the essence of the avant-garde’s newness, pointing to the thought of modern German historian Reinhart Koselleck, is a moment of separation between the space of “experience” and the “horizon of expectations.” Cultural evolution is far from the past only when it is irreversibly “now” when history appears in the way of history as the end of the unity of dimensions of time and as the

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inheritance of the present to the past and the future. Therefore, the self-understanding of the avant-garde rests on the philosophy of history of a historicist type. The historicist philosophy of history is identical with dynamic civilizational evolution that, on the front of the movement’s forehead, is written: Forward! That avant-gardism belongs to a series of specifically modern cultural anti-modernisms. (Lübbe, 1992: 11)

A more detailed explanation of these assumptions is as follows. Historicism cannot be explained as an understanding of the past by itself, but the theory of a historical event that summarizes and consolidates the “real history” of the present. What has “passed” does not become “present”. The historicism of the past serves to re-­ actualize current events about the orientation point from which, figuratively speaking, Antigone can be interpreted as a tragic heroine of the New Era. What does the avant-garde do if it does not consolidate the memory arrangement according to its orientation from unambiguously understood linear progress? As a justification for Lübbe’s thoughtful act of the deconstruction of the avant-garde in the criticism of historicism, it might be sufficient to point out that all avant-garde artists, despite their break with tradition, once again reveal a “new tradition”. The iconoclasm of singular art is not, therefore, a “discovery”, but a renewal of a suppressed inner history of Western art. The step beyond the Western metaphysical circle in the discovery of Eastern history as the cycle of time in the art of Africa, India, Tibet and Bali, starting with Paul Gauguin, only shows that modern art cannot exist without a fixed historical foundation. Novelty hence gives the energetic potential of creative imagination. The same should be noted of the historicism of the avant-garde. Its anti-­ modernism, by the way, stems from its insufficiently radical overlapping with the past. That is a reason why the avant-garde paradoxically demanded art as life and opened the space of the age of total musealization. The avant-garde denotes the “classical” art of modernity because of the principle of continuous innovation, the process of an event that no longer separates or creates but, by the disappearance of the painting, the living space of art has been turned into an anti-museum, a hyper-­ museum, a post-museum. Due to the very nature of avant-garde iconoclasm, the figure of an artist as an autonomous subject changes the entire metaphysical art-­ scheme. He is no longer the genius of “imitation” or the transformer of natural extraversion into human creative power. In the multivariable overlapping and overcoming phases (such as Malevich’s non-objective and figurative phases in painting, for example), the avant-garde artist lies in a position to transgress the limits of their own “style”. As time accumulates in the actualization of the “now” that no longer exists, so its “work” breaks down on its phases of belonging to this or that movement. The case of the avant-garde poet Tristan Tzara was a turning point. In his Dadaist stage, the meaning of language was destroyed, and in his Surrealistic stage, the language of symbols and metaphors was created. All this is possible and necessary at the moment when the principle of absolute news leads to the consequence that the self-production of the new in art can only be the acknowledgement of the artistic event as such. The idea of automatic writing in surrealism did not just fill the gap the critique of the primary spontaneity

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of the writing, the unconscious act of the author’s primary freedom, but was a reflection on the possibility of the autopoietic creation of an intelligent machine such as HAL 9000 in Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Futurists were obsessed by this in poetry and painting, and the idea of a​​ machine as a “new man”, like in the early stage of Pessoa’s poetry, confirms the previous assumption of the avant-garde. Where, finally, is the other picture? Why can we even say that with the iconoclasm of the avant-garde, there is some kind of ontological turn: that, in fact, in the reign of the logos, all art and philosophy of art at the end of the twentieth century as “the end of the philosophy of art” was liberated by itself through a different iconocentrism? The picture of the “end of art” from the bottom of iconoclastic avant-garde interventions raises the matter of ​​painting itself. The possibility of painting today is not only disproved because contemporary art does not show anything, and not only because, unlike the “aesthetics of the artwork”, it is perceived as the “aesthetics of the event”, but above all because paintings no longer have a subject. Let us consider this in the light of our reflection on the iconoclasm in the avant-garde and the end of art. A painting is limited to a surface, two-dimensional in that image space. Art in the painting as an activity of the imagination in the change of objectivity is shown as “a combination of pure colour and an independent form and promotes the liberation of the composition of colour and form” (Kandinsky, 1986: 338). Removing the image from the mimesis, the figure of the default case remained in Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square from 1915. This “picture” goes beyond the abstract painting’s results in the works of Kandinsky and Mondrian with which the iconoclasm becomes a self-fulfilling frame of avant-garde art. Malevich’s “picture”, in fact, no longer resembles or depicts. As a paradigmatic non-image, it can be compared to the negative of a photo in which the black is shown and the white refers to nothing. The black point of the painting was performed as a denying figure. It is the origin of the new (avant-garde) art of the unpredictable world. The image no longer refers to any transcendental signifier; it is not referential but cleansed of any meaning because it is self-contained, tautological, self-referential. Avant-garde painting strives therefore for nihilism. In a constant overstatement of the image as emanating from or showing the idea in view, even the surplus of the imaginary one is reduced to the inadmissibility of improperness. The avant-garde, however, has set the image of the art of painting as the centre of art. By exploring the conditions under which a creative, artistic act is created as a work of the imagination and a real-world (nature in the primordial sense), the entire so-called real world is reduced to elemental figures of the circle, triangle and square. The figurative static image no longer corresponds to the time of the non-objective world. Its important newness of motion and repetition is achieved in the picture with contrasting colours that are not painted—black and white. So, the avant-garde’s beginnings are linked to the image analysis as an image of the world reduced to elemental forms, constituent elements, and the structure of the composition. Beginning, as in Hegel’s Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in which the difference between Being and Nothing is revealed, already announces the end. The disappearance of the image in the absurd, pure motion of an art event that

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surpasses the artist as a “subject” is, therefore, nothing unexpected, something that would be external to the iconoclastic avant-garde spirit. It now appears that the explanation of how Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich rejected figurative painting for the Orthodox, Russian iconoclastic tradition is not at all viable.12 Regardless of the anthropological overcoming of the religious-aesthetic being an iconoclasm in abstract painting, it is still trying to understand the disappearing a metaphysical source of the image by the other side of the suppressed primaeval Christianity in esotericism, Gnosticism, mysticism and theosophy—from Steiner to Ouspensky— it is evident that the iconoclasm of the avant-garde cannot be reduced to the civilizational-­religious iconic entropy of avant-garde artists. The problem is not about breaking the religious image in a religious-political conflict between Western and Eastern Christianity on aesthetic issues (figuration—abstraction) but in understanding the radical change of the essence of the contemporary world. The world loses its destiny as the world of precious habitation, place and space, vanishes into the absolute construction, the recklessness of absurdity. Everything real becomes a construction of pure imagination. Constructivism in twentieth-century art will, however, again and again, be exceptionally worthwhile in neo-avant-garde movements. The avant-garde and the “painting of the end of art” open the possibility for Hegel’s fundamental end-of- art legacy to be re-examined in the light of contemporary art and its iconoclasm. In Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel argued that art fulfilled its purpose by exposing the emerging elements of Christianity to Christ’s depiction of art as painting and thus deprived the art of the possibility of forming the highest spiritual need as a form. Unlike the faces of Christ and the Madonna, a man does not kneel in an encounter with works of contemporary painting (Hegel, 1972: 142). The power of religion and the image that goes beyond Christ’s depicted person no longer have a place and space for worship. With the discernment of the needs and forms of art, that fascinating subject can only stimulate hearing. So, art for Hegel was always the occurrence of the Absolute in the sensible form of representation, with its peak in classical Greek art. “The end of art” is by no means a practical end to artistic performance in the presentation and/or new performative-conceptual modes of contemporary art. When art “at its highest definition” experiences its end, it primarily means

 This is precisely a reason why Alain Besanҫon’s position on the iconoclasm of abstraction and Malevich’s Suprematism as a continuation of the Russian iconoclasm in the concept of the triangle cannot be accepted. Strangely, Besanҫon points to this direction of argumentation when he has already clearly shown before the closing chapter of his book that the avant-garde is controversial because of the hypothesis of a linear notion of time in which “traditionally” has no reason for survival simply because it denotes the only functional way of reality updating “now”, advancing in successive acts of rebellion. Besanҫon’s metaphysical, aesthetic and “civilizational” dualism of Western art corresponds to the usual picture of the history of the ideas and culture of the Christian West. But he does not answer the question of why we have in the heart of Western art, instead of the iconoclasm of abstraction and Suprematism, the rule of another feature of Janus’ face of the real world in Duchamp’s radical destruction of any concept of image. Duchamp’s irony towards the tradition of the classical beauty of figurative painting possesses the same denying feature, just like Malevich’s path to pure nothingness.

12

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that it has lost its substantive meaning. So, art in the iconoclasm of the avant-garde loses the feature of a religious-aesthetic event. By becoming meta-art, it can only autoreferentially reflect on autonomy, reversing the truth of its survival as the truth of the modern world. The sequences of Hegel’s settings about the end of art can be summarized as follows when it comes to the question of image and impertinence. If art loses its “object”, if it is obstinate, its only space-time becomes the construction of the inner space-time of the imagination and the free will of the subject. Therefore, art becomes an artificial construction of a world of freedom from the vanished reality of myth and religion. Contingency undoubtedly becomes legitimate for the choice of what will become a “subject” (Duchamp’s readymades, Warhol’s Brillo Box, the human body as a living body-art item, cyber-space immersion in virtual art). Resilience due to a solid form allows art to have complete playfulness and experiment with materials, up to the most varied interventions in space. To fulfil the purpose, such actions are provoked by social tastes, moral norms, taboos of social communication, and political and ideological bans. This is still an open field of avant-garde action today, though in the age of the global equilibrium of “styles” and “concepts” it is aimed at ultimate aesthetic purposes, such as the effort of an artist in the collective act of communicating with the surrounding world to replace the figure engaged by an intrinsic act of “subversion”. Of course, the most significant end-of-art narrative sequencing is in light of the avant-garde event of the world without pictures. This is enabled by the essential “freedom of the picture” (Salmann, 1994: 215). The image after Malevich, if indeed it is an act of radical contingency, can no longer “paint”. Moreover, there is no possibility that a thoroughly cleansed world can be nihilistically based on the foundations of the power of scientific and technical productivity differentiating the external and internal worlds, nor does the image of the observer return to a certain observer’s perception and environment of pure morality. The image itself sets “zero points”. Being self-deprecated, irrelevant and insincere, the image disappears from the world as a picture into the absolute emptiness of the non-objective world. So, the iconoclasm of the avant-garde appears, strictly speaking, not as a mere protest against the appearance of the human body from aesthetics for the reason of the impossibility of portraying a human figure in a new image of reality by the invention of photography, but as a consequence of the transformation of the ephemeral character of the world in which all objects have become pure constructions. It should not be surprising that of all artists of the historical avant-garde, only Malevich and Duchamp are alive for contemporary art, in which even the iconoclasm no longer has the “subversive” power of breaking down the image of the long-lost beautiful objectivity.

2.6  Conclusion In the introduction to the catalogue for the Iconoclash—Jenseits der Bilderkriege exhibition held in Karlsruhe in 2002, one of the curators, Peter Weibel, adds his

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thoughts on iconoclasm following Hegel’s assumption about the end of art. For Weibel, the iconoclasm of modern art is a self-explanatory fact. It emerged from the crisis of the possibility of joining in figurative painting after photographing in the appearance of the real world pushed the depiction of the human figure. Dangling in the event as a spectacle of performative-conceptual iconoclasm, the art of the image did not disappear into irretrievability. But it definitively lost the cause of survival. The iconoclastic tradition, however, knows how to replace an image with text. Thus, in contemporary art, not only “speech” but also a pictorial turn occurs, which does not mean returning to the image as a subject of the real world, but rather as a chain beyond un-objectivity into the hyperrealism of the virtual world. The world without a picture is not even the immediate present of the digitized reality. The realized iconoclasm of the avant-garde follows modern art from the Second World War in all neo-avant-garde movements, from Fluxus through happening to actionism, kinetic art, body art, process art, land art and conceptual art. Science has represented the truth of the world without pictures. Without its constructive abstraction of the new reality, it is absurd it would not be possible to talk about the end of art or about the avant-garde as the last artistic movement of modernity with which painting was reduced to pure abstraction, to the nothingness of the image. The path to the events of modern art was open to the very act of displaying the human body as a final horizon of the art of depicting a beautiful and sublime reality. What can still be left of art in a world without a picture? It is only now that the possibility of placing art in its space-time of total awareness of the world of life should be above its autonomy and that, in principle, the “scientific art” process initiated by the philosopher-scientist determines the direction and points out the contours of the future. In a world without a picture, the image of art affects what we call the world, the creatures in it and humans as one of the creatures who have not been given the freedom of construction to destroy the world. The withdrawal of the divine from such a world of iconoclastically realized art of un-pictoriality does not mean the expectation of some salvific God of the philosopher-artist, but a step towards the extraordinary one in which art bases its reason for survival—the true beauty of the world in a singular event. This is the flicker of the “indescribable” dialogue of living and dead times, as Paul Celan said in the song Auge der Zeit/The Eye of Time: Dies ist das Auge der Zeit: es blickt scheel. unter siebenfarbener Braue. Sein Lid wird von Feuern gewaschen, seine Träne ist Dampf. Der blinde Stern fliegt es an. und zerschmilzt an der heißeren Wimper: es wird warm in der Welt. und die Toten. knospen und blühen. This is the eye of time: it is widely seen. under a seven-colour eyebrow.

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2  The World Without a Picture: Avant-Garde and Iconoclasm His burden is flushed with fire, his tear is his money. The blind star comes to a halt. in the lashes: it becomes warm in the world. and the dead. bud and bloom.

Can this exceptional moment of the world’s unveiling of beauty show the way to contemporary art?

References Adorno, T. W. (1970). Ästhetische Theorie. Suhrkamp. Bauch, K. (1994). Imago. In G. Boehm (Ed.), Was ist ein Bild? W. Fink. Belting, H. (2002). Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach Zehn Jahren (2nd ed.). C.H. Beck. Besanҫon, A. (1994). L’image interdite: Une histoire intellectuelle de iconoclasm. Gallimard. Boehm, G. (1994). Was ist ein Bild? W. Fink. Bürger, P. (2001). Das Altern der Moderne: Schriften zur Bildenden Kunst. Suhrkamp. Danto, C. A. (2001). Philosophizing art. University of California Press. Eltester, F.-W. (1958). Eikon im Neuen Testament. W. de Gruyter. Hegel, G.  W. F. (1972). Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, vol. I: Theorie-Werkausgabe (13). Suhrkamp. Heidegger, M. (1969). Zur Sache des Denkens. Max Niemeyer. Heidegger, M. (1972). Holzwege. V. Klostermann. Heidegger, M. (1977). Vier Seminare. V. Klostermann. Heidegger, M.. (1985). History of the concept of time: Prolegomena (trans. Theodore Kisiel). Indiana University Press. Heidegger, M. (1990). In K.  Held (Ed.), Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 26, II.  Abteilung: Vorlesungen 1919–1944) (2nd ed.). V. Klostermann. Lübbe, H. (1992). Im Zug der Zeit: The Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart. Springer. Kandinsky, W. (1986). Über das Geistige in der Kunst. In A.  Hüneke (Ed.), Der Blau Reiter: Dokumente einer geistigen Bewegung. Ph. Reclamm. Kant, I. (1979). Kritik der Urteilskraft (4th ed.). Suhrkamp. Koslowski, P. (1989). Die Prüfungen der Neuzeit: Über Postmodernität, Metaphysik, Philosophie der Religion, Gnosis. Passagen. Kroker, A.. (2000) The image matrix. http://www.ctheory.net. Kulenkampff, J. (2002). Metaphysik und Ästhetik: Kant zum Beispiel. In A.  Kern & R.  Sonderegger (Eds.), Falsche Gegensätze: Zeitgenösische Positionen zur philosophischen Ästhetik (pp. 49–80). Suhrkamp. Liessmann, K. P. (1999). Philosophie der Modernen Kunst. WUV. Lipperheide, C. (1999). Die Ästhetik der Erhabenen by Friedrich Nietzsche: Die Verwindung der Metaphysik der Erhabenheit. Königshausen & Neumann. Lüdeking, K. (1994). Zwischen den Linien: Vermutungen zum aktuellen Frontverlauf im Bilderstreit. In G. Boehm (Ed.), Was ist ein Bild? W. Fink. Lyotard, J.-F. (1983). Différend. Ed. Minuit. Mersch, D. (2002). Ereignis and Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen. Suhrkamp.

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Ortega y Gasset, J. (1968). Dehumanization of art and other essays on art, culture, and literature. Princeton University Press. Osborne, P. (2014). The Postconceptual condition: Or, the logic of high capitalism today. Radical Philosophy, 184. (March to April), 19–27. Plato. (2018). Phaidros. Cambridge University Press. Salmann, E. (1994). Im Bilde Sein: Absolutheit des Bildes or Bildwerdung des Absoluten? In G. Boehm (Ed.), Was ist ein Bild? W. Fink. Schreibler, I. (2001). Effective history and the end of art: From Nietzsche to Danto. Philosophy & Social Criticism, 5(6), 1–28. Sutlić, V. (1987). The practice of labor as a scientific history (2nd ed.). Globus. Virilio, P. (2000). The information bomb. Verso. Virilio, P. (2001). Landscape of events seen at speed: Interview with Pierre Sterckx. In J. Armitage (Ed.), Virilio live: Selected interviews (pp. 144–153). SAGE Publications. Weibel, P. (2002). An end to the end of art? On the iconoclasm of modern art. In B. Latour & P.  Weibel (Eds.), ICONOCLASH: Beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art (pp. 570–670). The MIT Press/ZKM.

Chapter 3

Deconstruction of the Image: From Mimesis and Representation to Communication

The Byzantine Iconoclasts wanted to destroy images to tear down their meaning. Today, appearances to the contrary, we are still iconoclasts: we destroy images by overburdening them with meaning. We kill images with meaning. Borges’s “Fauna of Mirrors” draws on the idea that behind every resemblance or representation is a vanquished enemy, a defeated singularity, a dead object. The Iconoclasts really understood this idea well when they sensed that icons are a way of making God disappear (or is it God himself who chooses to disappear behind images?). Nevertheless, it is not God who disappears behind our images today, but us. No danger of anyone stealing our image or forcing us to reveal a secret: we simply don’t have any. We no longer have anything to hide. This signifies both our ultimate morality and our total obscenity. Jean Baudrillard, The violence of images, violence against the image.

3.1  Introduction: On the Trace of the Picture At the centre of the new approach to the phenomenon of visualization as the fundamental mark for the age of media presence is the concept of the image. Despite the clear demarcation of mediology, one of the auxiliary post-sciences, which combines the history of art, philosophy, sociology and various cultural sciences, from the traditional (metaphysical) notion of the image of the art, it is still open to a “new image” in the digital environment of contemporary culture. I will, therefore, try to outline the fundamental assumptions about the reasons for changing the mimetic-­ representational paradigm of the image. Within the intentions of the interdisciplinary project iconic turn, this is a necessary step towards understanding the image appropriately in our information-communication age. With the analysis of three

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_3

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distinct, albeit orientation-related theoretical assumptions, it should be possible to set the main question for any further explorations of the phenomenon of the concept and applicable hold of a new notion of the image. The question at the same time is twofold: should we speak about images in the current theoretical research in the visual arts to respond to the crisis of the mimetic-representative paradigm of the image that Foucault and Derrida in the 1970s demonstrated as a key paradigm shift, and can we even replace the long tradition of the notion of art in the historical sequence of the epoch as an analysis of the meaning of the image through language only by its introduction to the communication medium? From paintings as reflections or copies (Ab-bild) of pictures as representations of form and matter of the reality to the image as a communication medium that does not reflect, map, or even put and show something with a self-comprehension of reality, but generates a new kind of being of medial communication related to the historical way of reducing and releasing the image of something above that—the idea of God, language, speech, scripture—into the visualization of the world. The question, therefore, is not just that it is a “new image” on the side of art and—within it—in the media environment. The question might be whether the image from the outset now precedes any possible notion of the media-constructed reality. Is the picture a temporal liberation from the logocentrism of Western metaphysics presently about the image? It is well-known that, according to that notion, the image (unlike language, speech and script) has always had a lower ontological rank. Is the positive self-definition of our “culture as image”, unlike “culture as a text”, not inherent in a different type of reduction—the visual one? Also, do we find ourselves in the state of a different video-centrism if all the phenomena and all the terms from the historical legacy of metaphysics that operated the humanities until the end of the twentieth century are framed in image phenomena for the request of autonomy from language, speech and script? These questions are not new. They are just different, set in a new context. After all, undoubtedly one of the most distinctive theoreticians of visual culture and visual arts in our time, W. J. T. Mitchell, who opened the issue of the image in the horizon of the criticism of the iconology and philosophy of language and brought the pictorial turn to a legitimate milestone in the notion of the image, argued that the idea of a turn towards the image cannot be in response to anything concrete but is a way of framing questions (Mitchell, 2005). When we ask whether the image of logos as speech and language is already prefixed in traditional metaphysics on an ontological framework, it is, of course, a question to put in a different way: what was first—the logos or the picture? The three already-mentioned theoretical approaches to the picture in the iconic turn project are: 1 . The immanent logic of images beyond art by Gottfried Boehm; 2. The anthropology of images (Bild-Anthropologie) by Hans Belting; 3. The general theory of image science (Bildwissenschaft) with the guiding idea of the image as the communication medium by Klaus Sachs-Hombach.

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Rather than expand on their main points, it is sufficient here to briefly summarize why we have to perform the deconstruction of images at the time of its opposite— the visual construction of culture. Could concepts—which are at the same time the concepts and paradigms of contemporary social sciences and humanities (for example, social constructivism in sociology, anthropology and cultural studies, or post-­ structural deconstructivism in philosophy)—be understood only as common notions of dissolution and disintegration, i.e. the construction and deconstruction of something already available for construction/deconstruction? And is it just a matter of using terms from one area in another in terms of methodological guidance? In understanding the deconstruction tool with thinking as introducing the difference between what is spoken in speech, in language and in the letter of textual articulation, we are in a situation that is applicable almost everywhere. This method of thought is used in all social sciences and humanities, including the history of art, without questioning its difficulties and without the critical “deconstruction of the very concept of philosophical deconstruction”. However, deconstruction is not merely the method of interpreting these things in the metaphysical tradition—it was explicitly the task of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. In contrast, deconstruction signposts different steps in the textual analysis as deep insights into the practice of textual overlappings and cross-overs. Différence and différance of that Being signify a logically articulated trace (Derrida, 1998). So, the deconstruction of the image should be understood in an analogous way to what the subject of the philosophical deconstruction of language is in the thinking of Jacques Derrida. We will see in what way the main theoreticians of the iconic turn—Gottfried Boehm and Hans Belting—perform their analysis. In several passages related to Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida, both art historians understand deconstruction as the method of dissolving and resolving differences and distinctions between what is in the image, in analogy with language, as the remainder of the reign of a tradition of reduction, a picture of a function or a sign of something that has a deeper meaning than the representation or appearance of something peculiarly realistic. In that regard, the concepts from such traditions are still unavoidable. The assumption of the deconstruction of the rule of the image or the power of “culture as the image” in our digital age when we are faced with “culture as text” that preceded this age means that visualization becomes the construction of technical assemblages. The change, unlike in the previous analogue age, might be that concepts and categories designate which image is like a digital picture and why, for example, in the case of virtual art, we should speak of the immersion of an image, not what it shows and how symbolic its meaning is (Grau, 2003). From Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida, philosophy was in a constant dialogue with art. The question of art in the “age of the world picture” (Heidegger, 1972) was always necessary to question the possibilities of art concerning its historical-epochal destiny in the New Era. In contrast to the feature of the scientific and technical paradigm of the world, which makes all creatures available for an informational change into the matter and the power of “things”, it seems that the ontological field of art encompasses some other open possibilities to overcome this essence of technology as enframing (Gestell) (Heidegger, 1969).

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The truth in art goes beyond its placement on the horizon of the availability of scientifically-technically transformed beings. In the philosophical deconstruction, Derrida comes to those places that can be considered in this context as an appropriate relationship between philosophy and art concerning the question of the image in the time of the completed history of art. Yes, history is complete. But not in the sense of the factual end of art, but rather in the sense of the disappearance of the possibility that art still has meaning within the concept of the linear development of history. The starting point for considering the relationship between art and history within Derrida’s deconstruction denotes access to artwork within the hermeneutical interpretation of speech and language. The truth in painting is therefore not the truth of painting as such but showing the truth in the image that the truth, the world and the modes of its Being reveal about the image through the possibilities of speech and language (Derrida, 1987). Derrida’s “deconstruction of aesthetics” shows how the essence of artwork—text and images—is exposed in a heterogeneous element. To him, the total understanding of the meaning of this work in the historical-epochal context of its emergence and relationship to all life has something indescribable. There is some ambiguity or some disadvantage. Any single speech about art from the horizon of the philosophical approach to art must count on a pre-limited retrieval of the baptism of an artwork. Art opens up as the truth of the Being in action and occurs only when it crosses the horizon of scientific-technical reduction to the “thing” or the availability of man in the meaning of instrumentality. The trace of the narrative points to what is at the same time present and absent in the art, revealing and inexhaustible (Derrida, 1998). But Derrida, in his “method” of deconstructing metaphysical speech and language, necessarily focused on writing traces as text and images. They leave what the philosophical criticism of language still does not articulate as an entirety of meaning. The mysteriousness of the painting in the history of painting is therefore not a mystical trace that remains from mythical and religious art in the works of modern and contemporary art. There is something essentially different from the traditional notion of what is puzzling. At the beginning of his “most difficult” lecture, “Time and Being”, Martin Heidegger points to the riddle of Paul Klee’s Saint from a Window (Heilige aus einem Fenster), and, when it comes to understanding the statements “there is a Being” and “having time”, refers in the text’s structure to the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in Illumination (Heidegger, 1969). Thus, art places itself in the very essence of the events of Being and time. Art here is not a symbolic mediation of some “mysterious” meaning. Quite the contrary, art denotes the most amazing event of opening a new horizon. It shows the world of man as image and word in the mystery of the disclosure. The image of the riddle is not resolved by its correct interpretation from the horizon of iconological interpretation as was, for example, the method of Erwin Panofsky. The pictorial trace, unlike the linguistic trace in the textual system, points to the possibility of a different opening of the meaning of the artwork. When it comes to painting as the paradigm of artwork, the trace refers to the surface of the picture. The multiplicity of such a trace in an artwork can never be exhausted in a mere expression of what is left behind as a material expression of the

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designation of something traced. Turning to the “other reality”, which by tracing the image as an artistic work leaves the world open to the interpretation of this sign, Derrida has opened the problem, traditionally philosophically speaking, of the ontological status and function of the image as a field of being that imaginary. Contrary to the order of the signs of literature and painting, or in the relation of proto-picture and a copy (mimesis), art history tries to explain the evolution of the historical sequence of epochs and styles that can differentiate medieval religious painting from modern by the “trace” of ontological conceptions of the image as a reflection of the real one. The step towards insight into the disappearance of the metaphysical duality of the idea and the image that appropriately corresponds to it is noteworthy in the pictorial representation of new media (photos, films, videos, television, internet). As Derrida has shown in the example of the intertextuality of mutually complementary texts, which relate one another to the history of metaphysics as the history of the letter or writing (écriture), the same can be said about the inter-pictorial image in the media environment of the contemporary age. The picture is no longer relevant to the established reality of an external or internal world from religious painting to Cézanne, but the images are related to each other. This closed semiotic circle of images determines contemporary culture and the art of the image (Mersch, 2002). Furthermore, deconstruction of the image should only be conditional on being considered as a way of breaking down its ontological status in contemporary visual culture. To be able to rightly say that contemporary culture is visually constructed with the media as an information-communication framework of the world’s rule, it would be necessary, paradoxically, to deconstruct the image as a model of the imitation and similarity of the painted and the realistic (mimesis), as a model of the representation and rendering of an objectively determined reality that is determined by the linear geometric perspective from the Renaissance to Cézanne. We can say that it might be necessary to see why we are still talking about art at the time of artificially generated images or technical images that are reduced to information if the very world represented a realistic space of artificially created reality that visually and aesthetically fascinates in its appearance. Once again, Baudrillard is worth quoting for this purpose. As Marshall McLuhan has it, “We have now become aware of the possibility of arranging the entire human environment as a work of art”. The revolutionary idea of contemporary art was that any object, any detail or fragment of the material world, could exert the same strange attraction and pose the same insoluble questions as were reserved in the past for a few rare aristocratic forms known as works of art. That is where true democracy lay: not in the accession of everyone to aesthetic enjoyment, but in the transaesthetic advent of a world in which every object would, without distinction, have its fifteen minutes of fame (particularly objects without distinction). All objects are equivalent, everything is a work of genius. With, as a corollary, the transformation of art and of the work itself into an object, without illusion or transcendence, a purely conceptual acting-out, generative of deconstructed objects which deconstruct us in their turn. (Baudrillard, 2005: 108)

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3.1.1  The Iconic Turn The narrative of the changed status of the image in contemporary art and visual culture of the twentieth century was radically set by German art historian Gottfried Boehm in the book Was ist ein Bild? (1994). He believes we are entering the time of the absolute presence of images in the contemporary world (Boehm, 1994: 11–38). For Boehm, the advancement of a new meta-theory of the image as a new science of the image lies in the philosophical critique of language from Austin to Rorty. Philosophical research on the denotative and performative functions of language has opened up possibilities to a new interpretation of image status in the contemporary world. From this point of view, it can no longer be deducted from the logical and linguistic structures of the meaning of what is depicted in the picture. Speech performance and visual performance are not in any cause-effect relationship. The inescapability of language as a speech and script on the image denotes the first step in the release of the long-standing jumble of metaphysics from Plato to Hegel and, beyond art, the undeniable openness of human relationships to the Being, the divine and the world. The iconic turn is determined by Boehm to have been a phenomenon since the late nineteenth century. In analogy with the linguistic turn of the analytic philosophy of language, the concept used by the post-modernist pragmatist Richard Rorty in the 1960s, the return of images in the sense of their own “logic”, which has not yet built up its meta-theory or general epistemology for the reign of iconological-­ hermeneutical methods in the history of the art of the twentieth century, requires deep analysis and serious attempts to understand the change of the status, function and sense of the picture overall. The pragmatic abstraction of the new meta-theory known as image science (Bildwissenschaft) is present in the works of Boehm from 1994 and would later be developed in Karlsruhe University of Arts and of Design and ZKM as the leading research and performance polygon of contemporary art and theory. The iconic turn project came from Boehm’s image analysis and a number of German and French theoreticians of contemporary art, philosophy, media and communication studies. Related approaches developed almost simultaneously within visual studies in America, particularly in Mitchell’s endeavours. He radicalized the iconological method of Erwin Panofsky. In his critical iconology, Mitchell set the same demand for changing the paradigm of image and language relations. The pictorial turn should not be just a conceptual turn of iconology in the explanation of the status and meaning of artistic images but rather an introduction to the study of the visual culture of contemporaneity through the criticism of the philosophy of language. Instead of the logical and linguistic-analytical foundations of understanding the image as a symbolic transfer of ideas, forms and content of an immanent image, the pictorial turn radicalizes the viewing and observation as a visual event that is irreducible to logos. The image is thus freed in itself. With viewing and observation as the conditions and possibilities of knowledge of the real, and not as a mimetic-­representational model of reality that determines the logical and grammatical rules of language in the

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act of understanding the world, Mitchell tries to justify a new academic discipline— visual studies (Mitchell, 1994). About the iconic turn project itself and its implications for the concept of the image, status and history of art, it should be undeniable that it is far-reaching in overcoming some of the disciplinary borders of philosophy, the arts and the humanities to study painting with completely new approaches. The iconic turn can be far-­ reaching in the sense of being a genuine turn towards the construction of the new world only when it breaks through the vicious circle of avant-garde art and its fundamental ideas—the revolution of society. All post-aesthetic, post-modern, post-­ historical projections of discoveries in the culture of the digital age are merely continuations of the avant-garde by other means (Manovich, 1999). This needs to be understood as follows: 1. as a precondition for the possibility of technological innovation that changes the media of worldwide art in the horizon of aesthetic autonomy in the direction of the aestheticization of modern society; 2. as a closed circle of relationships in which innovation and forward movement always happen as marked revisions, reconstructions, reproductions, revivals and retrospectives according to the source of the “new” in the essence of the avant-­ garde (Groys, 2008). In post-modern times, society has been replaced by culture. The post-modern or cultural turn in society corresponds to the visual or iconic turn of art at the end of the twentieth century. Instead of the visual structure of society, initially referred to as the breakthrough of visual studies in understanding a different post-modern structure of the social one, we are now faced with the visual construction of culture. Culture as an image has replaced the paradigm of culture as a text. How then must one understand the meaning of the iconic turn? Boehm argues that the linguistic turn in the philosophical works of Wittgenstein is an analogue way. The image must in the same way seek the path of liberation from language. The impossibility of language as a performance-in-the-world indicates the inscrutability of the image of a transcendental source, such as the images of the crucified Christ on Mantegna’s canvases. The image does not look like a sublime, spiritual dimension that the image depicts in a sense. On the contrary, the image has its meaning in the world’s worldhood as an abyss of Being and time. Hence, the true image cannot belong to the mysticism of a secret puzzle that should be understood by iconologically describing what is depicted in the picture. The analogous “visual speech” in visual arts and visual studies after the end of the history of art from the horizons of hermeneutics and iconology rightly uses the term “visual language” in the analysis of the media world of art as “visual text” (Mirzoeff, 1998). As Wittgenstein deconstructed the metaphysics of language by placing these languages in communication rules, separating speakers who speak “the same” language, in the same way, the iconic turn can only be understood as the strategy of liberating the image from its historical sense of taking over. The language of metaphysics, however, is the historically established system of reinforced metaphors, speaking in Nietzsche’s terms. Boehm’s quest for Wittgenstein’s theory of language

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as a grammar of intersubjective communication represents a fertile starting point.1 The problem of such a short historical-philosophical takeover of ideas, as in Boehm’s approach, shows that it is not clear why Wittgenstein’s theory of language would be decisive in the means of understanding art and pictures. The contextuality of truth in the given environment of the communicative rules of the speaker does not quite reach what Boehm rightly points out. And this is modern philosophy, which since Kant has tried to find its new foundation in art. How might it be possible for Wittgenstein and the linguistic turn to reach out to understand, for example, Paul Klee’s famous image Angelus Novus? Is it not only the performance of language that is too short and inappropriate to comprehend the original artistic truth, which is reflected in the picture of the inexpressibility of what is absent? Common language is nothing original. It has already transformed the historical experience of metaphysics into action. This is exactly what Hegel showed in the phenomenological consciousness from a natural point of view to the stage of the speculative-dialectical and the exposition of the Absolute. Common language is the hyper-metaphysical language of an essentially non-natural world that emerges as a world-historical world through the work of modern science and technology. But for Boehm, the power of analogy in the formation of a paradigm of philosophy and science, introduced in the post-modern world of the cultural shift (philosophy of language, post-structuralism, the theory of deterministic chaos), is the unexamined incentive for other purposes. So, the iconic turn owes most to the discovery of the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty in an attempt to found sensible reflection and viewing theoretically. Understanding the picture according to the window-to-world model opens up the scope of abandoning the subject-object scheme of the modern age as the “image of the world”. Image-in-world as an open horizon allows the terms for the emergence of beings in full light. The clarity of the image shows that what is visible and unseen as present and absent should always be indicative of the event of the image. So, the image opens the world in its order and Being-there. Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Cézanne’s painting as a modern art paradigm in his book Visible and Invisible is a decisive step towards the iconic turn. For Boehm, it denotes a radical departure from the traditional, modern, Cartesian view of painting and art. The perspective view of the image is transformed into something completely different, open-minded inside the world. Cézanne’s image becomes the imaginary projection of the surface, invisible, captivated by the reality’s view…. (Boehm, 1994: 18)

1  “This in turn image as inevitable figures philosophical Basics of its own prehistory. This is Plotin’s thinking of One for which the relationship is a constitutive referral to the plague. (…) The pictorial turn occurred in its historical place within modern-day philosophy” (Boehm, 1994: 14). From Kant via Fichte to Schelling, the power of the imagination as a game connects sensitivity and reason. The doctrine of the picture is, according to Boehm’s view, a sort of “organ of philosophy”. With Nietzsche, that turn (surrealism, abstraction, cubism), since the power of imagination is a productive game of sense and reason, ultimately destroys the mimetic model of the image. The image no longer mimics reality but is self-explanatory in its own “iconic” rules.

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The historical sequence of the contemporary notion of the image after the radical iconoclasm of the avant-garde in the works of art and theoretical writings of Kandinsky and Klee complete the way to the iconic turn. Kandinsky and Klee understand the concept of the image, as Boehm claims, according to the “visual grammar” model. Metaphors, symbols, allegories, all possible rhetorical figures, and the disruption of the traditional speech rules system are shown as signs of inner image history as the world in its primary (de)construction. The world of images as a “new image of the world” must be artistically created from the essential features of the image’s speech. The iconic turn is, therefore, a way of reflecting on the image as a retrospective history of the emergence of the world in the way of the primordial habitation of creatures that are irreplaceable to things, objects, and usability values. The iconic turn should, therefore, be understood as an attempt to return paintings to their never-found encounter. In one single word, turn says and suggests it is a return to the zero point. Likewise, the phenomenological call “To the things themselves!”, the programmatic words of Gottfried Boehm for the entire intention of the project of the iconic turn, can be interpreted by an analogous programme of the philosophy of language (linguistic turn), phenomenology and post-structuralism. There are four thematic and analytical intersections and points of encounter of this orientation in the contemporary theory of art. Such a theory of contemporary art might necessarily be something beyond the historical-artistic hermeneutics of paintings. The criticism of the present view of the concept of painting in art also marks the aspiration of a certain turnaround and a different approach to the history of art as a whole. If this is not entirely true in Boehm’s effort, we will see that Belting’s anthropology (Bild-Anthropologie) is explicitly a reversal of the way of considering art history by deconstructing the image in history, but also by trying to deconstruct the notion of history in the image. The mentioned four analytical intersections and points of encounter in the iconic turn are: 1. Analytical theory of language on the metaphor as an exception, an anomaly that can be developed towards knowledge of incurable diseases; 2. Recognized rhetoric that has been perceived in forms of pictorial speech (hence the metaphor) as a long-neglected phenomenon; 3. Aesthetics and poetics that for too long have treated the metaphor as a model for understanding poetry but not the visual arts; 4. From the archaeological perspective, the history of thought that can be read as the process of creating “new mythology” (Schelling) or as a forgery of those images that, over time, have become self-evident and thus conventionally understood by traditional categories and concepts (Boehm, 1994: 27). The iconic turn takes the metaphor as a key figure in the self-image of art in the history of art. With the introduction of a metaphor the iconic turn is a project that fluidly combines philosophers, art historians and contemporary artists from all fields of action (visual, representational, music, literature, architecture) to gather insight into the possibilities of returning images to an upright picture. Boehm talks only about the return of images to our socio-cultural world, created and run by the media “image of the world”. To return or turn to the picture is by no means a return

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to something that has come and gone, such as, for example, pre-Raphaelite painting or nostalgically invoking the renewal of religious painting in the de-divinized world, let alone turning to the expectation of the coming of a new and mythical era. The iconic turn represents a metaphor for attempting a unique insight into the differences in the way we propagate images without a world that has broken into pieces, The metaphor of returning and turning to the image is actually about (re)turning to the ontological-phenomenological meaning of the picture. Heidegger was a thinker who had an insight into the post-metaphysical world as a life of new and always technically calculable Being, and he contributed to the notion of the image beyond the common language and maps of perspectivism. Paradoxically, it is an iconic turn that continues to the place Heidegger himself sought to overcome with his turn of thought (Kehre). Whether it is right to understand what a presence is in the iconic turn, it should be evident that by analogy it can be shown that Heidegger’s thinking of the primordial event (Ereignis) is nearest to the basic intentions of the iconic turn. For this assemblage, we can find proof in some principled assumptions of Heidegger himself from four lectures titled Die Kehre from 1949 (Heidegger, 1962). Heidegger opened the question of the revolution of thought, in essence, that art that it thinks it is technically called an authority cannot assemble in the truth or the essence of technology. Undoubtedly, it sounds like an indicative proposition to turn the mind away from the metaphysical point of view, and the Being gains or becomes (ereignen) by thinking that God is dead or alive, and does not decide this according to the human nature of being or the theological structure of the metaphysical justification of God’s existence. The decision about the existence or death of God brings nothing else but the circuit of Being and the event and the openness of what God allows to be and Being-in-the-world. The decision to turn to the picture, in analogy with Heidegger’s turn of thinking, therefore does not bring the theoretical imagery of the image in the history of art from the beginning of modernity to its end (conditionally from the end of the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth century). The word must be an event of something preceded by the separation of images and words or images and text, which does not depend on the historical-artistic and philosophical problematization of the image as the only remaining possibility of aesthetic reality to the truth or the art of the world at the end of its historical meaning. The turn in Heidegger refers, therefore, to the epochal constellation of Being, being human, beings and God in the thought of the essence of technology. If we want to think about what the picture opens with its own imagery beyond speech, language and script, the open horizon of understanding allows us entirely different pictures or a turn towards the image. In this regard, it is indeed a question of the return of images in our contemporary times after the iconoclastic movement of the neo-avant-­ garde from the 1960s to the end of the twentieth century. Pictures are hence synthetically generated. They are neither created nor produced but genuinely generated from something beyond the concept of reality as an external reality and as objects that refer to images. The deconstruction of the image in Boehm’s understanding, therefore, denotes something somewhat close to Heidegger, at least in intention, but which is nonetheless out of it and extremely remote. Likewise, this does not mean that it is only about adopting Derrida’s views on the thinking of the peculiarity of

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the trace, although Boehm is undoubtedly closer to Derrida than to Heidegger. However, Boehm tries to open the problem in the following way. The way of the image interpreter is performed from the horizon of the aforesaid philosophical theories by thinkers from Husserl, Freud and Wittgenstein to Derrida: A shift from an epoch: a logos does not rule more with image potency than it allows addiction to it. The picture shows an approach to the inner circle of the theory that deals with the interpretation of knowledge. (Boehm, 1994: 28)

It is already apparent that Boehm considers the deconstruction of paradigm images as a change of perspective in the notion of the relationship between the image and the logos. The image is like that from one side of the language, and it is not depicted on it. Instead of post-modern references to the possibility of restoring the notion of the sublime like “presenting the unrepresentable,” as Jean-François Lyotard has formulated (Lyotard, 1983), the image here in the sense of the iconic difference between the image as an icon and language as a logos adds something that has a metaphysical tradition. It is neither a symbolic mediation of meaning nor the transcendental content of the divine in the image, but something endlessly “indefinite”. We should note that it is precisely the linguistic remainder of thought and speech. The remainder shows that the picture’s turn in the radical deconstruction of the picture remained in its enchanting circle. Boehm notes that images draw their meaning in a situation of the disappearance of logical-linguistic reduction. If the image in the media environment tends to be interpreted as the visual grammar of a new world of virtual reality, then it is constantly reaching for a substitute metaphysics of pictures. In this case, we may use the term uncertainty (Boehm, 1994: 467). Undoubtedly, it is always “determined” in the social, cultural and historical context in which the image resides. The horizon of uncertainty for Boehm denotes quite another categorical species. So, the image in its pure visuality indicates, but not semiotically, the surplus of the imaginary. The iconic difference in the context of the iconic turn therefore necessarily introduced in the notion of the image is absent, invisible and unpresentable.2 It is related to the presence of the image, the invisibility of the visibility of the formal and material conditions of the existence of the image, and inadmissible to the idea of displaying something in the image, whether it is a figurative or an abstract art picture. Finally, we are faced with an apparent paradox. The request for relief images of logos remains something mysterious not only in the structure of Boehm’s thought but also in the programmatic orientation of the iconic turn. Of course, it is not at all 2  “What appears in the iconic difference becomes apparent, the content that it causes refers to something absent. Whether the pre-conscious adorant was real or just an imaginary being, someone else was in view. No picture comes without this irrefutable deviation and no one creates a presence without the inevitable shadow of the absent. Only Pygmalion was enabled to make a woman’s sculpture created by his own hands by divine intervention to create a truly living being and to turn reality into reality. In the utopian design, the picture was eventually conceived as a genetic clone, as a living double. The image in question, though, is not an irreproachable simulacrum or camouflage that leads to the disappearance, but the difference of the imaginary” (Boehm, 1994: 461).

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controversial that the deconstruction of the image is directed to the described turnaround and that all this has far-reaching consequences for scientifically dealing with the phenomena of art at the end of linearly understood art history. The problem is that the image cannot obtain long-term freedom from logos (speech, letter) as long as it “talks” about the uncertainty of the horizon in which the image is real. If the iconic difference, in analogy with Derrida’s term différance, comprehends the difference as a resolution of the logical structure of metaphysics language, it remains simply “mystical” and the picture in the age of its digital immersion in virtual space-time is compellingly linked with an excess of imaginary. But the imaginary cannot be just the mere imagination of something absurd or anything that does not exist. That is the connecting power of imagination. Kant considered it to be constituent to the knowledge of space and time when we perceive things and appearances. The productive power of imagination opens the picture to the possibility of overcoming the horizon of uncertainty. This is going on in that way which, paradoxically, creates an unpresentable horizon so different from nullness behind the image. That nullness is not, therefore, the transcendental horizon that allows and guarantees the meaning of some images in space and time, such as Giorgio de Chirico’s metaphysical painting, rather than a determined loss of any reference to realistic and any kind of “behind” views. After Andy Warhol, the dimension of exaggeration became self-explanatory. In contrast, Boehm has opened the possibility of restoring the dignity of the image in the age of the disappearance of all real references, although he is not entirely inclined to leave the picture of the paradigm of the history of art, philosophy and semiotics. In other words, his notion is related to the inner history of the deconstruction of the historical-artistic concept of the image. It seems that this has disappeared in the kind of image that we now encounter everywhere in the media environment of the contemporary world. An excess of imaginary shows an iconic turn as a shortage in all the visualization of the world. Once we have flown through the metaphysical labyrinth of the logos (language, speech and letters) and settled in at looking at the picture as an image, we face the gaps of the real and present. Anything should be visible except visibility itself. The media through which the presence of images in the visualization of the world can take place can therefore only be information-communication. Visual media are not the means/purpose of the visibility of an image that is dislocated from the centre of its creation. Thanks to their visuality, they primarily have contact with the technical ability to transfer information through the image (television, internet). Digitizing the image thus alters the mimetic-representational paradigm of the image into the information-communication assemblage. The question of the media in which an image mediates its immediate nature as an event of information, communication, the aesthetic effect on the observer and all other socio-cultural experiences of contemporary man is thus evident today as a fundamental problem of visual culture. Therefore, it is certainly provocative, and even surprising, for Mitchell to state that there are no visual media (Mitchell, 2005). The picture in the horizon of uncertainty no longer needs its idea of what ​​ the picture depicts (Ab-bild), nor is it the object of its representation. And whether it is necessary for the new environment of

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information-communication should be something that is lost in the process of its own evolution. The need for mystery, mysticism or excess of that imaginary replaces the void in the total visualization of the world’s overproduction of those elements of mass culture that generate the beyond and unpresentable as experiencing fear of the inhuman, the uncanny, in the form of mutants, cyborgs and clones. The best example of this is represented by the fact that the movie The Matrix (1999) is a true paradigm that can be found in contemporary pictures. Of course, that was not Boehm’s conclusion. And does it rely on itself from the immanent logic of images without the world as a horizon of meaning?

3.1.2  The Anthropology of Images (Bild-Anthropologie) Gottfried Boehm’s and art historian Hans Belting’s works are based on the necessity of disciplinarity and approach the phenomenon of the image in modern times. The request for a new scientific discipline, which unlike traditional art history studies the history of the image before and after its entry into art, emerges from the end of art history. Belting published a text with such an apocalyptic title in 1983, but when he clarified the consequences of such a radical stance in the second edition of his book The End of Art History in 2002, it was not entirely comprehensible where this idea was directed. The transition from the history of art as a humanistic discipline into the science of art (Kunstwissenschaft) and then into image science (Bildwissenschaft) meant a farewell to the historical-artistic concept of the image as a mimetic-representational model of reproach, presentation and representation in reality (Belting, 2002). By the same token, Belting, like Boehm, took the view that the new image science nevertheless cannot be an auxiliary discipline of art history. The science of the image must radically change cognitive and research perspectives of painting and art in general. Unlike Boehm, who interprets an image from the aspect of the image as the media understands it by limiting itself to reflection and perception, Belting sees its intention in the anthropological-oriented science of the image. But the basic difference is that Boehm tries to see the perceived image as the predominant form of an artistic image in its historical motion in the media-structured image of the world, while Belting’s view is based on an expanded concept of the image. For him, there is a picture of phenomena which, as the unity of content and media, directly reflect the spiritually and bodily dualistic nature of man (Belting, 2001: 11). Before I point out more precisely how and why anthropology as a cultural science introduces image analysis and what constitutes an essence of the image as a reflection of the two-sided nature of man, it is worth drawing attention to the extremely important idea that Belting’s anthropology stands in the very centre. In the past, the criticism of Eurocentrism was carried out in such a way that the image no longer restricted itself to the historical-artistic space and time of Western civilization as a leader in notions of the image and art. The delineation of the field of

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research is therefore not European ethnology and art history but the world-historical treasury of different cultures and civilizations. The figure in the wider matrix of matters belongs to: 1 . New media (photography, film, video, television, internet); 2. The spaces of imagery that go beyond the traditional term of art and occur in the “world of life”; 3. Aligning with images in non-European cultures that are historically older than European ones. Art is not, therefore, the artifice of high art, but everything that manufacturers and users of artefacts, events and actions in the surrounding world consider to be art. Such a neutral and profane definition of art stems from the great work of the avant-­ garde idea of revolutionizing the world of life through art. Belting reconstructed the fundamental ideas and essence of avant-garde art. That art, in the new face of the 1960s, changed the world view of modern man. First of all, it should be obvious to leave any concept of the progress and dynamism of the new historical avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century behind. Historical development can no longer be shown in a developing, uninterrupted line. At this critical moment, breaking with historical utopias and the modern idea of ​​progress is necessary to turn to a different notion of art entirely, not just due to what is happening in the world of contemporary art today, but also due to a kind of revision and deconstruction of the entire history of art. The drawing of science on the image denotes the first step in this direction of renouncing faith in the lawful, regular and meaningful course of history in which art history builds its system. It is indubitable that Belting’s science of art as a science of the image is unfamiliar with the motives of avant-garde ideas about overcoming the differences between art and life. These are, therefore, some necessary prerequisites for understanding Belting’s work in the direction of the concept of the iconic turn. What is the subject of the anthropology of the image as a prerequisite for general and systematic image science? Belting unambiguously says the following: The double meaning of inner and outer images cannot be separated from the notion of the image and thus reveals this anthropological foundation. “Image” is more than a mere product of perception. It is the result of personal and collective symbolization. Everything that comes with a view or comes to an inner eye can be marked in a picture or an image. Therefore, the notion of an image, if taken seriously, can only be an anthropological concept. We live with images and understand the world in images. (Belting, 2001: 11)

The anthropological concept of the image starts with the radical process of overcoming the historical notion of the image in Western civilization. Instead of the dualism of the physical (pictorial) and spiritual substance of art at a particular historical time—from the mythical, religious and modern ages to the contemporary age—here it is an attempt to transcend this duality. It is present in the dominant Platonistic paradigm of the image as the mimesis and repraesentatio of reality. Belting uses the anthropology of images outside the notion of philosophical anthropology by Arnold Gehlen and Helmuth Plessner. In both versions, man is placed in the world or terms of organic life or as an eccentric being of a position that

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understands the human-historical world with speech, language and imagery. Belting’s anthropology of images attempts to oppose one kind of reduction of the concept of the image to the other instead of showing both as historically defined in the modern concept of the image of man as a subject. The first type of reduction denotes the definition of the image in the era of science and technology as information. It is therefore justified to use the philosophical concept of deconstruction from Derrida’s criticism of the logocentrism of Western metaphysics. Namely, in one place of his essay published in Iconic Turn: Die Neue Macht der Bilder titled “True Images and False Bodies”, Belting claims that the loss of references in the new media world can only be properly explained by “deconstruction that happened to the concept of the body and the concept of images” (Belting, 2005: 555). It is self-evident that images in the information age are reduced to information. New knowledge about new phenomena is generated by visual information. Almost every new event in the material world is pictorially presented like new information. The reason why Belting does not consider this image of being as information sufficient to understand the world in which a picture precedes speech and language as a systematically articulated text lies in the ideological reductionism of contemporary imagery. It is the result of contemporary information transfer technology and rests on the scientific design of reality. Deception or “categorical fraud” denotes only that the reductionism of the kind image = information relates to the reduction of man to the body as a possessor of features of genetic code (Belting, 2005: 556). In other words, the protest is directed against the biological and positivistic notion of the human as a set of information that is slightly different from the mouse or frog. Images are reduced to the visual and the body to genetic information. What does Belting argue in the theory of images as information? Nothing but the anthropology of images as a symbolic observation act with complex socio-cultural mechanisms of experiencing, viewing, understanding and acting (communication aspect). Though he does not explicitly point this out in the actual context, his anthropology of images is shifting towards some kind of visual communication practice of the image. But the problem is how anthropologically performed images might be based on the duality of the body and the remainder of the metaphysical tradition that is called the spiritual organization of man. Symbolic image mediation that cannot be technical information requires a different notion of the body and a different notion of the “spiritual”. How can this be properly understood? Certainly not just by the dialectical operation of the shift of the thesis and antithesis in the synthesis that occurs in some of the totality of causes and consequences. That body is not devoid of spiritual dimensions, as the spirit must have its place and seat in the physical organization of man. The body cannot be reduced to an organic composition or to the physical, physiological, and substantial costs that, in Cartesian terms, spread in some spatial order. The body is not just a biological information set, and the spirit is not just a rational set of speech, language and scripts that historically man relates to the Other in the world. The solution offered by Belting in his anthropology of images was the assemblage incarnation of the image through media. It is paradoxical that Belting, following Heidegger, who perceives any form of anthropology as a

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metaphysical reduction of the New Era in understanding the human being as a subject, made the following proposition: In the anthropological view, man does not appear as the owner/master of his paintings, but—something quite different—as a place of images that inhabit his body; he has been extradited to created pictures even when he tries to master them over and over again. (Belting, 2001: 14)

Incorporation, of course, here cannot be a theological concept of the incarnation of Christ in mystical transformation in the image of the human body. Incorporation (Verkörperung) should take place in the media. So, it is about translating other images into an understandable horizon of observations in the user community of the image. The question of image status goes beyond the boundaries of the existing academic disciplines of the history of art, philosophy, semiotics, etc. The anthropology of images should be understood as the history of mankind in images in different historical epochs, media and cultures. With the body as a place of the image and the process of symbolization in a special way, it becomes anthropologically reduced (Bachmann-Medick, 2006: 341). Despite the many forms of social and cultural relations to the body as a place of imaging, it should be obvious that the image is being placed in the social context of the creation of a body that a particular image carries and stores, preserving and transforming itself into an appropriate horizon of meaning. These are complaints directed towards Belting’s theory of the image: first of all, that it is not obvious why such an anthropology of the image would be radically different from Marx’s thesis that man is a social being that is historically developing as a sensible and practical being in the direction of the development of all his perceptual-­ cognitive and other abilities to understand and change the world. Secondly, Belting identifies images with universal and timeless ideas. This leads him to platonize the concept of the image as a media-communication connection of man with the reality that is generated from the idea. The embodiment of the image in the media is nothing more than an attempt to comprehend the image essentially, even when, unlike Boehm, it uses an extensively expanded image of the avant-­ garde’s turn. Instead of the radical deconstruction of the image as a mimetic-­ representational model of reality, we find ourselves in both versions of the iconic turn in the face of an ontological difficulty, and this is undoubtedly far-reaching with regard to the possibility of building a general and systematic science of the image. So, we can see how is being creating an impermeable wall of the old metaphysics of the image in new garments. If art as a complex historical sequence of epochal divine, secular and human events in the form of images was, until the crisis of representation in the early 1970s, a coherent system of assumptions about the supernatural character of ideas such as beauty, the sublime and truth, then it declares the end of that system occurred with another type of reduction. Art entered the aesthetic world of new media and lost its aura, as Walter Benjamin interpreted it. But in the iconic turn in the form of one or other version—Boehm’s or Belting’s—it might therefore be evident that instead of the supernatural aura of art, we now have an

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attempt to replace the image that has irretrievably disappeared with the end of the historical world in which art has yet to be depicted, represented as a reality, had a symbolic and allegorical meaning, or pointed to the meaning of such a world. The images embodied by the media go beyond historical epochs and their uniqueness and unparalleled networks. By the liberation of the rule of the logos, the image has not only become the place of the body in which man no longer governs himself as an entity, it is completely obliterated by the immanent logic of meaning. Released to itself, it is fragmented and dispersed. Speaking of the picture in the iconic turn therefore necessarily has to define the unambiguous use of this notion. It is no accident that Boehm emphasized that it was the return of the image in the traditional ontological sense. The return of the image already presupposes a return to the history of art at the end of its epochal completion by using a different revelation of the history of art as the history of the image. But it would be as if, in the iconic turn, the difficulties and futile efforts of reviving something that vanished from the historical horizon were repeated to preserve the universal and timeless presence of images as mimesis and repraesentatio in the new environment, but now with a changed origin from this or that theoretical point of view—the phenomenology of perception or semiotic image theory. In any case, the return of images is evidence of the need to use the term image with great caution. An artwork is not a media image, although what makes art by making sense of the openness of the world is preserved in other mediums as well as in painting. The images used in the scientific, cognitive-visual representations of different worlds—from the body to the cosmos—are not those images used by contemporary artists, although the ability to experiment with new digital images leaves the possibility of replication, manipulation and illusion in much as it measures pictures just as much as it could at any time in the past (Kemp, 2005: 382–406). The iconic difference—which, at the end of Derrida’s deconstruction, attempted to remind Boehm of the programmatic elimination of speech and language as an ontological-­ontic site of the mysterious difference between Being and beings, and within the framework of metaphysics, in many further interpretations—suggests that it cannot be relegated to the artistic image (Wiesing, 2005). However, irrespective of this extension of the concept of the image in terms of its heterogeneity and plurality in the worlds of media art and science, in the environment of the technologically-­generated new virtual reality, the issue remains unresolved. How else can we understand the ontological status and function of the image that breaks with the terms of mimesis and repraesentatio of that real one? Conceptual art was on track from the very idea that generates reality as concepts and has been proclaimed as art by dealing with “living pictures” in the world of art as an art. But such a strange metaphysical turn and matching of the image with the idea that takes on the meaning of speech and language has brought the picture into an uncertain and narrowed area of visual communication.

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3.1.3  The Image as a Communication Medium Klaus Sachs-Hombach, the philosopher and theoretician of visual arts, first systematically articulated a general theory of the image or image science as a collection of various contemporary theories and discourses about the image. As an editor of proceedings programmatically entitled Image Science: Discipline, Topics, Methods, he started from the need for a new interdisciplinary science that has as its object a view of the encompassed sense of the word (Sachs-Hombach, 2005). For Sachs-Hombach, the image is related to perceptual signs. The main criterion of the durability, artificiality, symbolic and other features of image meaning is primarily a communication medium. The image might be understood particularly. What is signifying and pointing to nothing else in its material and formal aspect? There is no doubt that in this orientation in the construction of a new science about the image of the horizon of the iconic turn, a dominant theoretical paradigm of the image comes from philosophical theory after post-structuralism and semiotics. Sachs-Hombach sees a picture in a semiotic aspect based on our visual communication, or as he says, “visual perception” (Sachs-Hombach, 2006: 95). The term “communication” is not, however, limited to social and cultural communication between users of a particular community of images in time. Communication is understood universally. It denotes the way of expressing messages and signs and understanding signs in a real-virtual community. We have seen that Belting’s anthropology of images, in its assumptions of the general science of the image, already developed an implicit possibility of a transition towards the concept of the image as a communication medium. While Belting is opposed to drawing the picture to the information, it remains open as long as it is possible to preserve the image’s necessary step in the medium/purpose of the communication media of contemporary visual culture. The embodiment of the image in the media and the duality of images and bodies, however, cannot be a strange body in a completely different view of Sachs-Hombach. In this concept, he ultimately reduces the image of the sign system and visual competence in communication. Communication processes in the social context of human relations have different means of mediation. If they are called neutral “media”, then they are already talking about a new relationship between people’s mediation based on the visual processing of information. The medium is, for Sachs-Hombach, first of all, the physical bearer of a sign. So, space is not a technological, economic or institutional framework of media in social systems. The differentiation of the media towards those who are related to the human body, and which are independent of it, complements the formal analysis of communication in general. And here is the link to Belting’s concept of the body and image as a medium that is embodied in a man beyond his role as a subject or an image owner/master. Fixed forms of communication that are independent of the body are images and films. They are transmitted in a written language and abstract symbols among the users. Expressions and mimics, in turn, forms the communication temporarily associated with the body as gestures and non-verbal communications. The body is explicitly understood as a medium (Sachs-Hombach,

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2006: 96–97). So, the transition from the mimetic-representational concept of an image to conception of image as a communication medium is not on the same ontological rank as a transition from the magical-cultural concept to Plato, with whom the philosophical issue of what a picture is at all and why it has to function as cognition through logos began. Before Plato’s doctrine of mimesis, the picture was a divine identity and reported in cults, statues and temples. The turn occurs when the image no longer reveals its real sign and its image as an identity and unity; when, then, mediation takes place in the sense of representing a pictorial image. As we have seen, Sachs-Hombach’s concept is a consistently realized attempt to establish image science (Bildwissenschaft) in the signing of the perceptual, cognitive and communication aspects of pictorialness. The problem with such interdisciplinary knowledge that one of the new (philosophical) meta-theories of the image should have at its foundation is the lack of understanding of how and in what way we have to understand: 1. Generating a new reality through the image and at the same time “creating” its presence in virtual space-time; 2. Transforming the image as information in the communication media. In both cases, we are confronted with the issue of the ontological status and function of the image in what is real and what is visually constructed. Contemporary discussions on these issues are not fading away. Indeed, there seems to be an awareness of methodological suspicion like the science of such post-science about a picture that should be part of the new general cultural studies (Kulturwissenschaft). One of the persuasive critical responses to this question was inspired by Lambert Wiesing, a contemporary German philosopher and theoretician of image and visuality. Unlike any semiotic-communication image model as a closed circle of meaning in which images refer to images as signs of signs in communication with the chain of events, he attempts to save the phenomenological approach to the image. If the picture shows something, it does not mean that it is a relationship of observation in the sense of intersubjective relations in which there is still a reference to something realistic concerning the image, the observer and the surplus of the imaginary.

The question to be asked concerns the feature of a completely new artificial presence in the field of media-constructed reality. The artificial presence of the image means that the observer is placed in a situation of understanding the iconic difference between living or real presence and non-living or artificial presence (Wiesing, 2005: 35–36). So, it is important to warn against cursive perception, image and language as the remnants of the iconological tradition of interpretation of sense images in art history. In a non-living space-time immersion of pictures in virtual reality, the observer lies in a situation that necessarily encompasses the previously mentioned dual character. At the same time, he/she is free from the excess of previously accepted knowledge of the image of the picture he/she sees as intertextual and the meta-textual creation of media images. But on the other hand, his/her vision is mediated by the awareness of the changed reality in which the present is presented to the observer. The picture thus appears in its material aspect as an intentional subject. But the experience of monitoring such artificially generated images, such as a computer interface, significantly changes the meaning of the phenomenological concept of intentionality. If all the pictures are intentionally determined by

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observation, it should be not controversial. The problem is, however, how to determine the change in the way of viewing an image that generates artificial reality (the presence and absence of an imaginary surplus). In other words, the subject view is simultaneously altered by the fact that images as artificially generated objects in virtual space-time are watched. This is what Paul Klee once again faced in modern art when he saw objects are being painted, but not objects as such (pictures). By changing the observer, radicalized by Baudrillard in his critique of contemporary art, objects have since deconstructed us.

3.1.4  T  he World-Picture and the Scene of the Subject: Heidegger’s Trace But if we simply wonder why the image is reduced to communication, why the notion of communication is still in visualization, and why information technologies in the contemporary era of images are widening with the concept of communication technology, we must be caught up in the trap of the global structure of the world as the image itself. What does that mean? To understand the gravity of this issue, which affects the notion of time in the reflection point at the end of history as the end of “new” art in the era of video-centrism, we must return to the origin of the entire right turn towards the image or the iconic turn. We saw that Boehm mentioned Heidegger as an origin/source, but together with Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida. The issue of the image in ontological terms as a question of radical disruption with the platonist concept of mimesis and the modern concept of representation of reality Heidegger illuminated is unavoidable for the issue of the world as a picture and the time of the world-picture, represented in the title of this famous essay “The Age of the World-Picture” (Heidegger, 1972). Once again, it is necessary to interpret its empowerment from that discussion. And is it just because the following question is cleared: is the implicit video-centrism of the world in which all beings become information-communication not a condition of the existence of this and such a world? If it is just that, then the world must be understood not as a horizon of meaning but as an information-communication assemblage of relationships in which anything becomes an image only because the difference between subject and object, image and text, visible and invisible, transcendental and empirical has vanished in advance. The world-picture dates back to the period of the New Era as the rule of the video-centric paradigm in science and technology. Heidegger starts from the premise that science as research is the basis for the emergence of the New Era. What is called the metaphysical basis of research must be defined as the essence of the New Era. This changed the bitterness of time and history in general. Being becomes a subject in the sense of placing the subject as a subject of research. With the epochal project, it is already being placed in the position of the research facility, i.e. in the position of available information about the possibilities of changing the object itself. The fact that a person becomes a subject

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is not only changing its (historical) essence but radically changing the concept of reality. What is real cannot always be realistic in itself, but is determined by a historical-­epochal approach to Being. Reality in ancient Greece, in the Middle Ages and in the New Era is not the same. The so-called real world has always been historically constituted by defining its worldhood in contrast to another historical period in which it had a different feature from the present. For example, the notion of the cult image in the mythical period of Greece and Plato’s concept of mimesis are two different concepts of the image. Heidegger more closely defines a man as a subordinate subject, thus saying that he is the centre of the relationship of Being and beings as such only because of the understanding of Being as a whole has changed. It is set in the environment of the modern image of the world. All previous ages did not have the potential to develop this concept. What, then, is the world for Heidegger? What is the picture-world? First of all, it should be significant to point out that the world cannot be understood in terms of cosmos and nature but in terms of history. The world is, therefore, a historically built horizon of meaning within an event. There is no world as such outside history. Likewise, if we follow Heidegger’s thought from the discussion, it will not be possible to understand an image beyond the world as a horizon of the meaning of history (of art). Only in history as an art event can the image be understood epochally. Also, it is not the eternal and timeless truth of the world, man and nature, but a one-time event in which the image and word bring man to the truth about the world at large. Looking at the foregoing, Heidegger’s thoughts on the age of the picture-world show determination for what I am trying to explain here as the power of the video-centric paradigm of the contemporary world. As a matter of fact, Heidegger does not interrupt the picture with Plato’s and Descartes’ notions of the image as an oddity of reality and the image as a representation of reality but shows that it is about introducing of event into the image as a world that is historically happening in the forms of reflection, representation and information. Understood in an essential way, ‘world picture’ does not mean ‘picture of the world’ but, rather, the world grasped as picture. Beings as a whole are now taken in such a way that a being is first and only insofar as it is set in place by representing-producing (vorstellend-­ herstellenden) humanity. Whenever we have a world picture, an essential decision occurs begins as a whole. The being of beings is sought and found in the representedness of beings. (Heidegger, 1972: 89)

When a man (re)presents himself as an image in the forms of reflection, representation and information, he becomes a “being in the sense of representation” (Heidegger, 1972: 90). Being a subject as a subject in the world as a picture at the same time presents itself as a picture of the man. In this irreducible event of the New Era, unlike ancient Greek and medieval notions of the image, there is something truly decisive for the entire contemporary situation to turn the image of the metaphysical speech, language and text of the world around. The man, according to Heidegger, sets himself in the scene. He is his scene or re-presented being that becomes a picture. The performing act of placing a man in a scene signifies the entrance of a human image into his living environment. Art did not lose its trace of humanity by figurative painting disappearing in the twentieth century in the abstract, and the

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abstraction goes to the kinetics of new media. It is the human as a non-human being that has been significantly reversed in the image of a man in the scene as a world-­ picture that precedes any possible dispute over the image (Bilderfrage). The iconoclasm of the picture-world is, therefore, the most radical movement in the New Era period of history. God no longer addresses a man by forbidding the image in the picture, nor can the picture be understood any longer from any relationship with that which is elevated, indefinite, mystical, divine. The picture is radically reversing the world of scenes of the world as images. Beyond the subject and object of the image, beyond art and religion, and beyond the distinction between the metaphysical and the physical world, the world-picture also decides on the way beings appear and are named, on what is realistic, and what also has a “surplus of imaginary”. The consequence of this turn in the notion of the image is that placing a man in a scene means the simultaneous disappearance of the subject’s distinction and the object of the image itself. The world as an image and the image as a world beyond nature and the cosmos denotes a historic event of a unique scene that has its end in the real-virtual space of new media. It can be said that from Heidegger’s interpretation of the age of the world-picture, we are entering an area in which we can no longer reasonably say anything about the image as mimesis, a picture of representation or a picture as a communication medium, but only about the image as a world— the historic event of that uncanny essence of technology. And this is nothing but the generating world-picture as an image that goes beyond the metaphysical boundaries of issues concerning the reality of the world (Heckl, 2005: 128–141). The image emerges as a new “world-picture”, as an autopoietic visual system, in all forms of its technical development, from analogue to digital images (photography, film, video, television, internet). In this way, the world is understood pre-­ ontologically or pre-disposingly. The picture of a man in the scene precedes speech, language and text because he is already speaking the language of the visual text to the one he is addressing. It is an information-communication circuit. So, it is no longer mimetic or reflecting reality, nor represents a changed reality, but generates a picture of reality as the only true reality. Cartography at the time of the New Era was the first step in that direction. Mapping was not a display or a realistic picture of reality. It was a pictorial image of the real world in a linear geometric perspective (Damisch, 1995). The last step in that direction has not yet been taken. But if the world as an image understands what Heidegger has put into thinking in the information and communication context of the world-picture, then it might be self-evident that at the end of the metaphysics of the picture we enter the uncanny area of t​he post-history of video-centrism. Pictures shall not be replaced by words, speech and text. They have visualized the grammatology of the world in contrast to all the historical epochs in which it was still possible to see something other than what is depicted in it. It was, of course, possible to see some trace of presence beyond the physical-metaphysical trace itself. When the picture “speaks” in a voice like a world and is set as a universal scene, we find ourselves emptied of an abundance, torrent or flood of images. The information-communication circuit can finally be reduced to what Heidegger in his “mysterious” discussion called

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The light of the first appearance of the world as an image and a man as a subject. (Heidegger, 1972: 90)

It is a dazzling light. It does not illuminate things but is equally null and void. The image no longer reveals. However, it is pictured as the scene of an absolute subject. Thread the resulting gaps in receiving new information and indifference concerning each of the participants of visual communication. At the time of video-centrism, no one ever “sees” the trace of the visible. The invisible has become imaginary, visualized by a CT scanner. What is left? To return the image of “excess imaginary” or to release the image from its violence against the spiritual eye of man?

3.2  Conclusion: Video-Centrism Without History? Can it even be said that in the contemporary world, where excessive imagery and the lack of imaginary rule, where differences between the different levels of visual mediation are no longer recognized, the time of video-centrism appeared? Instead of the central place of logos as speech, language and script, we are faced with the total transparency of the image’s hyperrealism. When the picture no longer refers to a higher or misleading reference, as was the case in art until the radical nihilism of the image in Malevich’s Suprematism, then the picture can only be conditional in the image in the various more or less similar post-metaphysical notions of the meaning of what are substitutes of visuality through visual culture, information and communication. The image does not precede logos as speech, language and script in the ontological sense of the word. What is relevant in all the theoretical versions of the image’s turn seems to be the only way to free the world from the coercion of logical-­ rational speech and textual communication that ultimately ends with silence, emptiness and moodiness. Once the image in information and communication media has completely become their artifice and living body, we are faced with the question of what comes after the ecstasy of visual communication? The German medieval Christian mystic Angelus Silesius gave one of the most evident and mysterious definitions of God, tying his ontological status with nothingness: God is a pure nothing, untouched by now or here: the more you reach for him, the more he evades you. (Silesius, 1986: I. 25)

In the emptiness of visual communication and its overriding role in generating new real-virtual worlds, it might not be possible to liberate each other from the sign but to show and open the possibilities of insight into what at any rate the art may mean for the space-time immersion of images. This is everywhere and nowhere in the world, which is, in fact, the immediate “here”, in the immediate present, a trail of an indefinite horizon, which is so impermissible that the image without depth and surface is so imperfect.

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References Bachmann-Medick, D. (2006). Cultural Turns: Neuorientierungen in Kulturwissenschaft. Rowohlt. Baudrillard, J. (2005). Intelligence of evil or the lucidity pact. Berg. Belting, H. (2001). Bild-Anthropologie: Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. W. Fink. Belting, H. (2002). Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach Zehn Jahren (2nd ed.). C.H. Beck. Belting, H. (2005). True images and false bodies. European Messenger, 10. Boehm, G. (1994). Was ist ein Bild? W. Fink. Damisch, H. (1995). The origin of perspective. The MIT Press. Derrida, J. (1987). The truth in painting. University of Chicago Press. Derrida, J. (1998). Of grammatology. Johns Hopkins University Press. Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: From illusion to immersion. The MIT Press. Groys, B. (2008). Art Power. The MIT Press. Heckl, W. (2005). Das Unsichtbare sichtbar machen – Nanowissenschaften als Schlüsseltechnologie des 21. Jahrhunderts. In C.  Maar & H.  Burda (Eds.), ICONIC TURN: Die Neue Macht der Bilder (pp. 128–141). DuMont. Heidegger, M. (1962). Die Kehre (2nd ed.). G. Neske. Heidegger, M. (1969). Zur Sache des Denkens. Max Niemeyer. Heidegger, M. (1972). Holzwege. V. Klostermann. Kemp, M. (2005). Wissen in Bildern  – Intuitionen in Kunst und Wissenschaft. In C.  Maar & H. Burda (Eds.), ICONIC TURN: Die Neue Macht der Bilder (pp. 382–406). DuMont. Lyotard, J.-F. (1983). Différend. Ed. Minuit. Manovich, L. (1999). Avant-garde as a Software. http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/ avant-­garde-­as-­software. Mersch, D. (2002). Ereignis and Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen. Suhrkamp. Mirzoeff, N. (Ed.). (1998). The visual culture reader (2nd ed.). Routledge. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory. University of Chicago Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (2005). What do pictures want? University of Chicago Press. Sachs-Hombach, K. (Ed.). (2005). Bildwissenschaft: Discipline, Themen, Methoden. Suhrkamp. Sachs-Hombach, K. (2006). Das Bild als kommunikatives Medium: Elemente einer allgemeinen Bildwissenschaft. Herbert von Halem Verlag. Silesius, A. (1986 [1675]). In L. Gnädinger (Ed.), Cherubinischer Wandersmann, oder geistreiche Sinn- und Schlussreime. Manesse. Wiesing, L. (2005). Artifizielle Präsenz: Studien zur Philosophie des Bildes. Suhrkamp.

Chapter 4

The Dark Core of Mimesis: Art, Body and Image in the Thought of Jean-Luc Nancy

“La mimesis n’est pas la copie, ni l’imitation reproductrice. Elle re-produit au sens où elle produit à nouveau, c’est-à-dire. à neuf, la forme, c’est-à-dire l’idée ou la vérité de la chose.” Jean-Luc Nancy, Le plaisir au dessin

4.1  Introduction Speaking about the “meaning” of what renders us speechless in the close encounter between philosophy and art already presupposes an important differentiation. This is not, however, a differentiation according to rank originating in the primal uncanny (arché) from which the historicity of existence, Being, and the essence of man are interpreted. Differentiation produces difference like thinking produces meaning, but only when a language has established the equation that Jean-Luc Nancy, in the opening pages of Noli me tangere: On the Raising of the Body, terms a “parabolic truth”. In drawing attention to portrayals of Jesus Christ in art history and the symbolic course of Western history, something suddenly occurs as an unforeseen event. In Christ’s body, the difference between the “logos, the figure and the image” is cancelled out (Nancy, 2008a: 4). If philosophy and art produce meaning in the narration and depiction of the world as a horizon of meaning, then this identification, which Nancy holds to be a problem of ontological determination without rank and hierarchy between the “logos, the figure and the image”, can be viewed as a non-­ identification. Therefore, the statement itself is further problematized. How can we see as the same and identical that which according to the original determination is different and therefore points towards the primacy of philosophy over art? The logos cannot become a figure or an image unless its “essence” is previously deconstructed. However, even when we see in the figure as the image that which is “logically” perfectly performed like in a piece of conceptual art, for example by Joseph Kosuth, it remains unclear how and under what circumstances thinking can become a figure-­ image. This act must indubitably have in it something beyond logic in the formal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_4

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sense of the word. Moreover, there must be a medium mediating the experience of merging thinking and feeling so we can truly attest to differences dissolving before an almost mystical similitude. That medium is the body. It enables the equation of what seems metaphysically different. Logos and figure as the image can only be concerned with becoming part of a feasible with the body. Relation. It can even be demonstrated that this mediation, this mediality in the touching of philosophy and art without the former ruling over the latter as was the case throughout the history of metaphysics until Heidegger, is the focal point of the crystallization of the thought of the openness of meaning. In the touching of what is separate, different thinking takes place. Thinking the body outside Western metaphysics is to touch the untouchable. Is untouchability, however, not what denies the possibility of touching, even when it seems that sensuality is, like the immateriality of the virtual world, beyond any imaginable tactility? The question of touching directly affects us with a surplus of synesthetic sensuality. Touching cannot be understood from the spatiality of matter, things and objects in motion as necessarily merging, colliding, intertwining, pervading, synthesizing action between matter and energy. Only beings touch. In their desire for intimacy and confidentiality, they compensate for their inherent lack of independent existence. What moves them surpasses the experience of corporeality in the sense of physical mobility (flesh and nerves). The question of the “exalted body” which no longer possesses the signifiers of bare corporeality for Nancy in Noli me tangere as well as in his book Corpus refers to the mystery of the double helix of existence. On the one hand, it is about disembodiment after the death of a being, and on the other, about approaching what is a “relict” of metaphysics in the theological understanding of transcendence as a path towards suprasensuality. Whoever thinks “of” the body in the existential openness of the meaning of the world must pass into a state of freedom from thinking “about” the body. In the aesthetic experience of the sublime, we come to the threshold of Plato’s form (eidos), Kant’s schematism and Lyotard’s presentable unpresentability of the thing itself. Nancy’s work on the “exaltation of the body” should furthermore not be considered a mere variation on the problem Christianity has according to the relationships between man and the divine, life and death, crucifixion and resurrection. Besides, it is known that the entire hierarchy of the defundamentalization of “meaning” in the history of Western metaphysics since Derrida carries the mark of deconstruction. Starting from a primal notion/word such as the logos with which Heraclitus’ being is named up until Hegel’s absolute spirit, logos signifies the original word/concept for the meaning of Being, regardless of how it is understood and what expressions are used to compensate for its original self-referentiality. What follows next from Nancy’s work is a “deconstruction of meaning”. The reason lies in the fact that it is impossible to step out of the realm of metaphysics into the openness of a new historical world unless one first defundamentalizes Being (Sein). Language still reveals the heritage of differentiating between the worldly and the otherworldly (transcendence and immanence). Besides, it is difficult for the notion of the singular plurality of events to see the light of day (Nancy, 2008b).

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Philosophy and art intertwine when encountering what enables this relationship in the first place. If we reduce it to the omnipresent notion of “event” which has been used since Derrida, Deleuze and Lyotard to think about what is irreducible to any intentionality of consciousness, to anything objective and fixed, then this is an event that can boast a truly special authenticity. What approach can one take to the open thinking on defundamentalizing Western metaphysics in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy? Perhaps it is precisely the question of the authenticity of a text that indicates its overall veracity. In the case of the author of the unique interpretational work Noli me tangere, simultaneously a hermeneutic of the Christian representation of the mystery of resurrection and a philosophically nuanced analysis of the relationship between art and the world from the horizon of living corporeality, it is possible to say that what is untouchable and invisible to the eye signifies the “dark core of mimesis”. This is how Nancy himself expresses it in his book The Muses (1996). What does this mysterious expression signify in a volume dedicated to the issue of the meaning of art? As arts cannot be reduced to their common denominator, diverging multifariously, we must discard any self-sufficiency of reducing and suspending the artistic character of Being to a primordial form acting ahistorically. When art presents and represents Being, this is not an aesthetic impression of the world, as has always existed since ancient times. Quite the opposite—any presentation as the representation of the uncanny open is the beginning of a new event. With it begins the adventure of lending meaning to the world. My thesis, which I will strive to argue through three planes of discussion, is that, for Nancy, mimesis (μίμησις) can never be reduced to the mere imitation of an always already existing reality. Instead, we have at work here the creative principle of the openness of the world as meaning starting from the possibility of imitating something that can only be (re)presented in the identification between the logos, the figure and the image. Mimesis, therefore, (re)presents the existential event of novelty in the world. If an event cannot be questioned in traditionally metaphysical terms as to what it is (quiddittas) but instead as to how it occurs (quoddittas), we cannot depend on the language of the openness of the meaning of the world without a previous clarification of the mediality of the media in Nancy’s thought. This simultaneously means that logos and image are connected neither by language nor by a depiction of something as something (Being as singular multiplicity). It is precisely in this “elevation of the body” (levée du corps) that the event occurs authentically. And it is neither the truth of “resurrection” nor the mystery of “transcendence”. In Nancy’s narration, it is clear how the body (corpus) assumes the position of the unthinkable in traditional philosophical thought. If the logos of the body is in its depiction like the image in what is open and thus beyond the dichotomy between philosophy and art (logos and mimesis) then the entire legacy of the “oblivion of the body” in the history of Western philosophy until Maurice Merleau-Ponty needs to be decisively contested. Why is this necessary? Let us remember that the problem of the body hardly has a role to play in Heidegger’s masterwork Being and Time. This is the fundamental reason for the current redirection of phenomenology towards the relationship between the body and the world following the insight into the technical

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transformation of Being. A critique of Heidegger does not simultaneously mean that the path towards liberating the body from the outcome of metaphysics is unambiguously open. What determines the meaning of existence (Dasein) is nothing other than existential openness in the suggestion of the possibility of Being as the meaningful worldliness of the world. For Heidegger, the body cannot appear as problematic in the environment of the destruction of traditional ontology simply because existence (Dasein) is neither the animal rationale nor the homo faber. And as it cannot be exhausted thematically by biology, psychology or anthropology, it is obvious that human existence supersedes the metaphysical differentiation between the spirit/soul and the body (Heidegger, 2003). Like in Derrida regarding contending with the contemplative shadow of Heidegger, the problem of the allocation of the language of metaphysics appears in Nancy as well. What was first done by Merleau-Ponty in stepping outside of Heidegger’s “dogma of existence” appears to be continued here in even more radical terms using different means. While Merleau-­ Ponty in his Phenomenology of Perception understood existence as a spatial category of the first order in contrast with Heidegger’s temporal perspective, Nancy provides a full array of his movements in the direction of the spatial-corporeal configuration of man without the metaphysics of the subject-object. Nancy explicitly says the following on this topic in Corpus: Bodies aren’t some kind of fullness or filled space (space is filled everywhere): they are open space, implying, in some sense, space more properly spacious than spatial, what could also be called a place. Bodies are places of existence, and nothing exists without a place, a there, a “here”, a “here is”, for a this. (…) More precisely, it makes room for the fact that the essence of existence is to be without any essence. That’s why the ontology of the body is ontology itself: being’s in no way prior or subjacent to the phenomenon here. The body is the being of existence. (…) The ontological body has yet to be thought. (Nancy, 2008c: 15)

These Heideggerian-intoned conceptions of “open space”, of “the essence of existence without any essence”, culminating in the assertion that the “ontological body has yet to be thought”, should for now remain without comment. The assertions are almost programmatic. It is possible to assemble Nancy’s assertions from various books, essays, lectures dedicated to art into a set. And all circle the fundamental idea of the “openness of meaning” in existence as a singular plurality. Following Derrida, he plans his steps towards going beyond the deconstruction of logocentrism in the attempt to defundamentalize the matrix of Western metaphysics. However, if the existential structure of man in the modern times of technocracy as planetary technology is affected by the absence of “essence”, it does not necessarily follow that one ontology is to be replaced by another, that the one with the key term of existence is to be superseded by the body in a synesthetic meaning beyond mere sensuality. Moreover, it is not clear at all why the “openness of meaning” should have its safeguard in the presence of existence by way of articulating something that does not have an essence and refers instead to the form or schema of thinking as such, but the idea of inscribing art as an event of synchronicity could become autonomous. In this perspective, the logos, the figure and the image (re)present the world without the illusion of pretence and its lustre in the hour of celebratory agony and endless end. Nancy thinks about the openness of the world from the openness of

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space. This by no means refers to space as a mathematical-physical problem of movements of matter. Quite the reverse—the openness of space is thought of from the primary dimension of the placement and habitability of the place where, in Hölderlin’s words, “poetically Man dwells on this Earth” (“doch dichterisch wohnet der Mensch auf dieser Erde”). The body, therefore, has the existential freedom of possibility to be something else and different from the factuality of existence without “essence”. How are we, however, to understand that the body as the mediality of the relationship between philosophy and art (logos and mimesis) is yet to be ontologically thought of if the commencement of its new adventure is determined by the drama of deincarnation and decosmogonization? Finally, what connects thinking and sensuality if (re)presenting artistic work must be derived from the impossibility of narrating and seeing what the Greeks termed the mysterious word of origin, source, beginning, inception, the foundation of all existence—the arché.

4.1.1  What Is Art? At the beginning of the book entitled The Muses, Nancy poses a question in the reflection “Why are there more arts, not just one?” What is art as such? This is a question of a formal ontological nature. It seems as if one is asking about what requires an opinion about “one sphere of Being.” It is well-known that art refers to the area of sensitivity. In this regard, Nancy himself does not deny that Hegel’s claim of beauty as “the sensible shining of the idea” is the highest climax of metaphysics regarding the definition of the “essence” of the art. But the articulation of art is not just a matter of modern aesthetics. For Kant, the intention was to find appropriate language for what art raises above nature by creating two closely related feelings in observational reflection—beauty and the sublime. For Plato, art was defined as the conjunction of poiesis and téchne. But art for the Greeks was nothing self-sufficient. It was only from the service of the gods in the city (polis) that it found the place and time of the envisioning of Being. In the abundance of indefiniteness, it is somewhat disturbing and at the same time calming. Art is, by definition, a mimic (mimesis) imitation of Being. When we imitate someone or something, we are faced with two possible explanations for the reason of such imitation. It is either a mere or blind repetition of existence in another form of expression or image, or, on the contrary, a creative act of change from an existing source. In Aristotle’s Poetics, therefore, the mimetic act in tragedy as a dramatic form of artistic performance shows and represents the destiny of man in divine powers. Catharsis, which ultimately frames the work of rendering-presenting, elevates man into spheres of spiritual cleansing and spiritual tranquillity. Whatever the case, the beginning of art corresponds to the imitation of the Being in another form of his true factuality. To imagine the unimaginable and to think the unthinkable means to go through the enchanted chambers of logos and mimesis. Mimesis establishes a twofold relationship between art and Being as a “form of life”: the technical and the poetic. The language of art is not just something like the

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artistic style but belongs to the indefinite field of what since Romanticism has become an aspiration for a complete piece of art (Gesamtkunstwerk) by transforming the “form of life”. In his attempt to “deconstruct the sense” of all Western metaphysics, Nancy discusses Hegel’s aesthetics and the thinking of art in Heidegger’s work. In this context, the question of art does not presuppose just the dissolution of the notion of art that tradition has conveyed to contemporaneity. This is also the way of thinking about “art” as a philosophical understanding of the condition of its survival in the world. Barnett Newman does not say in vain that the artist needs a theory like birds require ornithology. The linkage between the subject matter and the philosophical question of art with the reflexive powers of reflection on the things that are being revealed here begins with Nancy’s “ontology of meaning” of Being as a singular plurality. It is already apparent that the question “about” art suggests something paradoxical and aporetic. We do not further ask for “singularity”. It is thought that “One” (unum) was comprehensively and initially assembled as a multitude. Assembling is an act of meaningful scattering (logos). If there is no common ground (arché) for all art, including architecture, what remains of philosophical thinking after Adorno’s aesthetics of modern art that states that the “truth is not a whole”? The sequence of Nancy’s accomplishments on the notion and “essence” of art in works such as The Muses (1996), Corpus and The Ground of the Image (2005) and in the short lecture “Art Today”, given in 2006 in Italy, corresponds to the structure of historical-philosophical “deconstruction”. However, it is necessary to add that this method of thought development of the very subject that is being discussed extends to what Nancy, unlike Derrida on Heidegger’s trail, introduces as the overlapping places of the inconceivable to the circulation. How is this supposed to be understood? The unthinkable is not netted into the records of tradition, just as there is not some mistake in thinking. The reason for the unenforceability of a problem stems from the fact that thinking emerges as an event. In the attempt to open the problem, as Heidegger has pointed out in his papers and lectures, there must be some original situation that requires a solution or at least a problem-solving question. Therefore, asking about the “essence” of art in the age of the world’s technical secularism does not seem instructive. Instead, the question refers “to” art in its origin and event. As Being happens in the singularity of a multitude of events, so the art puzzle does not diminish the problem of why art, for example, today no longer needs aesthetics for its last metaphysical justification. This, of course, does not mean that aesthetics is exhausted in its range. New aesthetic approaches are flourishing everywhere. Everything is happening today in the aesthetic character of artificial worlds (Mersch, 2015). Just as Corpus states that, ontologically, the body should only begin to think differently from the entire past of the tradition of philosophy, so analogically speaking it is likewise true of art. However, how does this programmatic setting come from Nancy’s understanding of the “future of philosophy”? The answer must be sought in the immanent interpretation of the problem referred to in the above texts. As has already been said, in The Muses, Nancy resolutely removes the existence of some general “essence” of art. Starting from the so-called singular plurality or plural singularity, both of which have been discussed

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by French post-structuralists like Levinas, Derrida, Deleuze, Lyotard, Lacan and Badiou, Being is in the category of suspensions. If something is not “One” but has the features of “Multitude”, this does not mean that the quantum leap of Being has disappeared in the metaphysical and not just the mathematical sense. It is only in this “post-modern nominalism” that there is a qualitative turn in the “essence” of ontology. It is not, therefore, art that has become irrelevant and destructive in its self-­ sufficiency in the modern era of planetary technology. It cannot simply be derived from a common ground, for this would mean a reduction in the extraterrestrial reality and the principle of performing arts as different activities starting from something external. The problem is that Nancy retains the process of the “essence”, the art of what Plato calls the idea or form and Kant calls the schematic of the mind. Of course, “retention” does not take place in some form of the transcendental principle of the realization of reality. However, it is precisely what comes from the “dark core of mimesis”. In all his aesthetic writings, Nancy talks about “forming or shaping meaning”. Art as a singular event of a multitude of forms is the only one that has this fatal feature of entering new in the world. It also makes it reasonable. This is true even when it overrides the tyranny of meaning in the hyperproduction of aesthetically worthless artworks. Marcel Duchamp introduced the concept of an aesthetic object (objet trouvé or readymade) to contemporary art. With it, everything becomes an aesthetic banality of the “world” as an industrial realization of reality. What seems paradoxical and aporetic in the growth of the idea of ​​art as an arché is that its “essence” is only perceived in the existential abyss of the possibility of creating new worlds. If art does not have its “essence”, then art as the self-centred event of a mimetic relationship with the world is not self-evident from the event (Ereignis), as Heidegger explained. After all, the differences between work and the event in the contemplation of contemporary art adequately testify to the problem of separation in the era of the technosphere (Hutchens, 2005). Nancy’s criticism of Heidegger derives from the fact that instead of the synthesis of poiesis and téchne, he insists on their differences. It is not mere difference as such. Its origin is beyond the metaphysics of ground and foundations (arché) (Hörl, 2013: 11–24). It is, therefore, possible to think of art without “essence” by establishing a place of difference in the very use of traditional ontological categories. Instead of the quasi-transcendentalism of the categories and concepts of metaphysics, we encounter the production of meaning. The traces of the singular plurality of events point to the dialogue of thought and artistic practice. Art does not belong to the event, as is the case in Heidegger’s work. It is a contingent event without “essence” in the project of the creation of existence. To design means to open what is not there. And this also means bringing in the presence of being in the form of logos, figures and images. Creating the world in a multitude of articulation of Being (mondialization) does not lead to the primacy of the subject over the object’s objectivity (Nancy, 2007). In this respect, Nancy, unlike Heidegger, does not consider art starting from the understanding of the workings of the work, in which the beauty and the sublime of the Being are combined. Art without “essence” not only no longer has any work in the aesthetic sense of the word, but it also remains without its

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mystery in cult event, the most remarkable of which (besides Heidegger) was written by Walter Benjamin (1963). The problem of the unthinkable in the language of metaphysics, though, seems to be quite different in Nancy compared to Heidegger, and comes in the first plan of that artificial, monstrous self-sufficiency, formally of Greek origin, but which from the new era to the modern era of information-­ communication technology turned into a thing that thinks. Nancy therefore says: Thus, the arts are first of all technical. They are not technical “first of all” in the sense that they comprise an initial part, procedure, which is capped by a final part, “artistic” accomplishment. (…) The Muses do not happen upon a craftlike operation: they install it. (Nancy, 1996: 24-25)

We should not be fooled that Nancy here is not talking about the “essence” of technique like Heidegger in Die Frage nach der Technik (Heidegger, 2000). If art does not have the “essence” or the common foundation associated with all singularly specific arts (literature, drama, music, painting, sculpture), then no technique has the foundation on which all the other technical disciplines existed at the time of Rome by separating craftsmanship as technical art from art as the art of creating something new. This difference is present in the disciplinary arrangement of the natural-technical sciences and socio-humanities right up to the present day. Nancy continues to consider this problem in The Muses: Technique extends a withdrawal of the “ground,” and the most visible part of our history consists in this extension. Technique as such, in the common sense of the word, at the same time extends and recovers this Grundlosigkeit or Abgründigkeit. This is why there is no “technique” but “techniques” and why the plural here bears the “essence” itself. It might be that art, the arts, is nothing other than the second-degree exposition of technique itself, or perhaps the technique of the ground itself. How to produce the ground that does not produce itself: that would be the question of art, and that would be its plurality of origin. (Nancy, 1996: 26)

Abyss, the groundless, non-possibility of the original and primordial as a common platform for the emergence of everything else: that is when it comes to trying to think of art based on its real plurality. But what is the multitude as opposed to the singularity? Is it just a denial of One or Being as such? Or is it perhaps a different thought of the world of the abyss without foundation as a “new” that is produced precisely thanks to the technical character of art? Nancy is inclined, as we have seen, to go for a solution that assumes the openness of the meaning of Being in its plurality. What is different from One is no opposite or negation. It is a differently articulated way of performing art in the act of creating imitation (mimesis). If there is no technique, then several techniques are evidence of becoming different in the history of technical arts and their creations (objects and apparatuses). However, art cannot be reduced to technique. Its puzzle is that it belongs to the poetic part of the mimesis, not to the technical part. It is not unusual to point out that in one of the more interesting interpretations of Nancy’s philosophy concerning his notion of the relationship between technique and art, he introduced a new understanding of “existential phenomenology” (James, 2006: 203). When it is no longer possible to access art traditionally metaphysically, what is left? Nancy leaves in the conceptual horizon all that is typical in phenomenology and deconstruction, but by redirecting their

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ways of reflection into the singular plurality of “openness of the world”. Art opens the world only because it is an immanent purpose in the “transcendence” of the existing “world” whose features are in the technical construction and shaping of Being. Why does art appear for Nancy in the signs of “openness”, “meaning” and “the world”? While for Heidegger in the 1930s, finding two keywords of a new way of thinking, namely “art” (Kunst) and “event” (Ereignis), denoted a search for a real alternative metaphysical course of Western history in nihilism with the latest fortress of modern technology in cyberspace, Nancy’s task of thinking according to the question of art is set “modestly”. No one can claim the right any longer to refer to the “other beginning” of philosophy at its return to the coming time unless it sees the invisible in the historical-epochal framework of nihilism as the emergence of a different era of Being in general. The problem for Nancy is therefore ontological and aesthetic. In his books The Muses, Corpus, and The Ground of the Image, art is no longer determined in the era of the technical construction of its Being. What is being centred is an art as a question of the possibilities of “openness” and “sense” of the world. Why, then, does art alone have the privilege of becoming a philosophical question rather than a response? In 1994 on Capri, Derrida at one point in the discussion, devoted to the issue of identity and difference in Europe after the return of religion to contemporary Western societies, said that religion, unlike philosophy, never puts it into question. Religion is, therefore, always a positive answer for the simple reason that it is the source of its events in the revealed faith in God (Derrida, 2000: 46). Unlike philosophy, however, both art and religion derive from living wounds of sensitivity. The sense of beauty and the sublime and the experience of faith in the supremacy of the highest beings determined the metaphysical structure of thought up until Hegel. Nancy does not attribute to art, however, the messianic-­ apocalyptic place of man’s salvation in the age of planetary technology like Moloch, which devours the remnants of some primal humanity. However, one must not deny that art is bound to téchne and poiesis and that its non-historical ontological provision from Plato is equally biased. Art is shaping the world from the notion of beauty and sublime and simultaneously imitation of the world. On the one hand, it is about producing the new (poiesis) and, on the other, it is about repeating Being in the form of language and image. Also, music as the most extravagant and most abstract of all art goes beyond the limits of the worlds of overstatement and the other. Raising itself above the sensory limits of observation and experience of the world, music is now reaching the point where the body goes beyond its corporeality. The problem that Nancy wants to deal with when it comes to the assignment of art in the technically constructed world of contemporaneity once again places art and technique at the same level: Technology “as such” is nothing other than the “technique” of compensating for the non-­ immanence of existence in the given. Its operation is the existing of that which is not pure immanence. It begins with the first tool, for it would not be as easy as one imagines to demarcate it clearly and distinctly from all animal, if not indeed a vegetable, “technologies.” The “nexus” of technologies is existing itself. Insofar as its being is not, but is the opening of its finitude, existing is technological through and through. Existence is not itself

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4  The Dark Core of Mimesis: Art, Body and Image in the Thought of Jean-Luc Nancy the technology of anything else, nor is technology “as such” the technology of existence: it is the “essential” technicity of existence insofar as technology has no essence and stands in for being. (Nancy, 2003: 24)

The question of the “essence” of art is no longer sustainable. We have seen the reason for that. Instead, we are faced with a turn in the idea that art still survives its historical-epochal obsolescence. In a few places in The Muses, Nancy mentions Hegel and his remarkable thesis that the age of art has passed since the character of truth does not appear in the sensible mantle. We can agree with Nancy when he calls Hegel’s concept of art “the Western Idea”. But what does that mean? Nothing else but that art in the time of the “loss of art” (Kunstlosigkeit), as Heidegger stated in his comments on the Diary of Paul Klee, has been condemned to a state that has nothing to do with the historical epochs where it played the fateful role of mediator between divine and human, heaven and earth. Its task no longer consists of being the form in which dwells the truth, righteousness, good. What is left of the glorious mission of art in modern times is the existence of the existential sign of freedom. The gestures of eccentric resistance have become more important than the work itself and the events of intervention in social relations from the institutional drive of art. If there is no longer a universal idea such that art can be identified with in the shaping of worlds (for example, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Romanticism), what still remains? At the limit, ultimately, there remains nothing more than the Idea of art itself, like a pure gesture of presentation folded back on itself. But this residue still functions as Idea, and even as pure Idea of pure sense, or like ideal visibility without any other content than light itself: like the pure kernel of darkness in an absolute self-imitation. (Nancy, 1996: 90)

In his lecture “Art Today” held in Italy in 2006, Nancy summarized the basic problems of contemporary art. Since the criterion of “contemporary” cannot be performed without a critical understanding of time in the difference between the metaphysical and historical view of Being as an event, it is quite clear that this term/ word causes a great deal of misunderstanding. Firstly, it is something new to the current in terms of “news”. But it does not amount to a mere acceleration of time in the technical meaning of innovation. So, Nancy is pointing out that the “pragmatic” meaning of modern art is that it must, whether or not it is, be considered within the discipline of art history for the simple reason that it encompasses avant-garde moves such as cubism and arte povera up to the latest trends in digital or cyber-art. The problem of “contemporary art” is even more evident in its intention that, like Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, it should integrate everything, starting with the aesthetic modality of figuration and abstraction, hyperrealism and body art. The way of thinking in Nancy’s view of art appears to be unusual. He does not question the category of time as a vulgar transience of “now” and does not act like any other author, such as Heidegger and Simondon, for whom the emergence of a technical arrangement of “essence” art evolved from the movement of the historical avant-garde to the present. The problem that we are constantly pointing to is the same as in other papers that we have been broadly analyzing. And this is the status or place of art in

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the “designing” of human existence on the outcome of the metaphysically outbound history of the West: Where does art stand today? What is happening with art today? Firstly, this category of ‘contemporary art’ has been created and is being used, and this category immediately raises a whole series of problems, for art has always been contemporary with its time. Michelangelo was contemporary, Praxiteles was contemporary, the painter of Lascaux was contemporary with his contemporaries, how could an artist not be contemporary? He or she cannot be so probably only if he or she works in some style of art, that is, if today someone executes a painting in the style of Poussin or Renoir, he or she will not be contemporary, he or she will not even be contemporary with Renoir or Delacroix, he or she will be contemporary with no one, he or she will be somewhere in a repetition of forms. So we understand that art is always contemporary because it always belongs to a creation of forms in the space of the contemporary, in the space of an actuality, and that in this actuality art makes us feel, see first of all, if we are talking about the plastic arts. (Nancy, 2010: 92)

What strikes the eyes here is the “confusion” that Nancy attaches to the idea of contemporary art. According to him, everything and nothing can become a piece of art. Furthermore, it is not necessarily current and modern. Therefore, the fact that even great masters of the classical age, including the anonymous participants of occult depictions in caves from humanity’s prehistory, were in the same way “contemporary” in their age sounds too self-explanatory to the common reason. To avoid its principles when it comes to art, it is enough to speak of manifestations of avant-­ garde movements. Dadaism is surely the most reliable witness in the prophetic statements of Hugo Ball. Is “current” in contemporary art not something truly uncanny in the definition of its suspended and neutralized “essence” which makes it possible and what is seemingly impossible—to pervade the classical and the modern in contemporaneity—if it is the event they live in the presence of the body in the “logic of the event” of the world itself? The criteria for distinguishing contemporary art from modern art, which Nancy wants to establish it ontologically, cannot be strictly separated as in the concept of Heidegger’s “ontological difference” between Being and beings in his work Being and Time (Sein und Zeit). It is not my intention here to enter into a critical discussion with Nancy’s notion of the problematics of the concept of “contemporary art” concerning its further “advancement” and “development”. It is enough to say that in the aesthetic sense of the word, the difference between modern and contemporary art shows that the latter rests on the threefold concepts of performance-concept-enframing the event as work and not vice versa. This means that the “contemporary” in the idea of ​​art cannot be separated from its life practice. In all this is reflected the radicality of the desire to objectify, transform the body into an aesthetic object that thinks and exists in the world shaped by the demands of the technosphere (Paić, 2016: 121–143). There is no doubt that contemporary art is a historically developed category. The crucial thing in its action is that it goes beyond all the metaphysical boundaries to date. This is true for the elimination of rank, the democratization of taste, and the overlapping of the technical and poetic dimensions of mimesis. Although that ancient Greek term would consider almost all relevant interpretations of the idea of contemporary art outdated with regard to explaining the complexity of an artistic event as an aesthetic object in a ruptured state and, accordingly, the notion of

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representation that Michel Foucault puts forth in the credo of modern epistemology, as emphasized in his most significant work The Order of Things (Foucault, 2001), in Nancy’s work, we cannot find this “epistemological cut” in such a radical way. That is the reason why the notion of contemporaneity and the contemporary can be used with ultimate fluidity. Even better: it can navigate to the edges and nodes of the network without fear of falling into the hassle of technical banality. By affirming the old notion of new meaning, we do not elevate it from nothingness only in an attempt to restore the history of deceptive foundations. Much more important in all this is something “irrational”—language as opposed to the image, as if it were abandoning its inexcusable fate of desolation. Why does Nancy avoid talking about contemporary art as a state and a part of a variety of techno-poetical practices and simply approaches the phenomenological description of what is happening “today”? The answer likely lies in his attempt to get the idea of the edge of the “meaning of the world” from the idea of art itself to the process of embodying new meanings (mondialization). That is why art in every aspect of today’s movement is twofold. It is both contemporary and non-­ contemporary. The reason is that the idea as an auto-reflection of one’s position in the “form of life” has no direct relationship to the reference frame of society, ideology, politics, culture, etc. In other words, the “Big Other” lacks contemporary art and differs from its antecedents. Myth and religion disappeared from the world of art a long time ago. What remains are the modern substitutes for the repoliticization and reaestheticization of the event. Heidegger called it the political and aesthetic kitsch of modernism (Heidegger, 1997: 39). What art ultimately needs to open up a different perspective at a time when logos, body and images are no longer separate entities should be the question. Instead of differentiating and differentiating, we are witnessing the production of a multitude of identities. This goes from immersion into a virtual space to the ability for a bodily transformation into the aesthetic object of clear visibility. The problem with (contemporary) art as a set of “forms of life” is the fact that Nancy must assume that behind its essential autonomy versus science and the technosphere lies a deep void. We are immersed in the aesthetic code of the world. It seems that we are so confident about how everything works that it is in service of being “purposeful without purpose”. But that is not Kant’s definition of beauty, without which art does not make sense. It is now something complex and uncanny. This is what Nancy says about the concept of the image in The Muses: In a world without the image in this sense, profusion, a whirlwind of imageries unfolds in which one gets utterly lost, no longer find oneself again, in which art no longer finds itself again. It is a proliferation of views (vues), the visible or the sensible itself in multiple brilliant slivers (éclats), which refer to nothing. Views that give nothing to be seen or that see nothing: views without vision. (Think of the effacement of the romantic figure in which the artist was visionary.) (Nancy, 1996: 94)

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4.1.2  The Disembodiment and the Rising of the Body Can we ask what the body is if the question of what art has become is self-evidently moving in a meaningless circle? Everyone today feels obligated to criticize Descartes’ dualism of mind and body (res cogitans and res extensa), as if it is a duty of contemporary philosophy, and it is likewise art as having an integral structure in which there is no longer a transcendental primacy of consciousness about the empirical reality of the physical world. Instead, it seems to be necessary for an opinion to persist in a new monism. However, the body is not superior to the mind in the ontological sense, which one at first glance might presume. But it has a different path of articulating what remains of the metaphysical treasury of the notion of founding and the rule of reality itself. In the case of Nancy’s contemplation of the status of art “today”, we have seen how the relationship between logos and mimesis was altered at the pervading level and the so-called mutual relationship. It is no longer like Hegel’s speculative dialectics. We are now facing a turn to understand the relationship between the existential freedom of creation of the new world and the “ontology of the body.” If logos is taken as the creator of meaning, as the signifier of Being, then it is self-evident that mimesis can only be the one marked in an orderly manner. Art, however, does not appear alone for Nancy with the medium of aesthetic experience with which the subject constructs his imaginary worlds to reign over them with beauty and the sublime. This is the event of envisioning the new world. And at the same time, it means that mimesis requires its “authentic” logos. Nancy is not close to any aesthetics of the new rationality, which in the concept of reflexes finds a new key for deciphering the techno-poetic code of contemporary art. His fundamental problem is in the effort to phenomenologically open the space of existential freedom to create “sense”. For such a thing, it is necessary to think how the media’s mediality, which art “today” self-realizes as an idea without “essence”, comes to its autopoietic “extensiveness”. For art, neither psychoanalysis nor theology (desire and God) can be more than metaphysically faded fiction. The body in its sovereignty of the event gives existence to “flesh” and “nerves”. That is how a figure-­ image of lives self-defeating Being emerges in moments of endangerment of its meaning. As much as the body is free from the “sins” of lust in the mechanical space of movement as imagined by the rationalism of the eighteenth century, so the very space in which the physicality of existence occurs essentially changes under the pressure of a new situation of thought and expression. The body exposes a breakthrough of sense, constituted absolutely and simply by existence. (…) And finally, we will not call it “the body of sense,” as if “sense” at this limit could still be the support or subject of anything at all: instead, and absolutely so, we will call it the body, as the absolute of sense itself, properly exposed. The body is neither a “signifier” nor a “signified”. It’s exposing/exposed: ausgedehnt, an extension of the breakthrough that existence is. An extension of the there, the site of a breakthrough through which it can come in from the world. A mobile extension, spacings, geological and cosmological displacements, drifts, sutures and fractures in archi-continents of sense, in immemorial tectonic plates shifting under our feet, under our history. The body is the architectonics of sense. (Nancy, 2008c: 25)

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For Nancy, the next turn is decisive: the body is the Being of existence! This seems to be counter to the direction of Heidegger in Being and Time. Instead of Being-­ towards-­death (Sein-zum-Tode), which is the fundamental determination of man (Dasein), here is the existence of an existential production of events. It is not accidental that Corpus quotes a posthumous fragment of Sigmund Freud from 1938: “Psyche ist ausgedehnt; weiss nichts davon [Psyche is extended; it knows nothing of it]” (Nancy, 2008c: 21). The phrase reminds us of Spinoza, whose phrase was delightfully quoted by Gilles Deleuze: We do not yet know what the body can do. Derrida finds the reason for the deconstruction of body and body lines in Western metaphysics by criticizing the phenomenological approach of intuitionism as opposed to rationalism. In any case, Nancy starts by “concretizing” the existential event. The body becomes “sensually architectural” only when it is at the intersection of two equally insurmountable states: between the threat of disappearance or death and the way towards the resurrection. Disembodiment and elevation are not negations of the living body in its authentic Being. It is better to say that this is the ultimate possibility of the body in its existential freedom of self-determination of life. In the aforementioned text from Corpus, we encounter Kant’s transcendental idealism. It cannot, therefore, be concluded that instead of having consciousness, the body has now become a subject. Quite the contrary, its “enlargement” testifies to the necessity of a different approach to the liberty of existential freedom in the world. In the attempt to open such a fluid and mobile body as a problem of philosophical thinking, it seems that some condition is needed, without which the entire effort of thinking the body is in vain. After all, such a surprisingly thoughtful idea of ​​“the future of philosophy” cannot ignore the achievements of the “tactile-­ corporeal” turn. This condition of the body’s reemergence as the “flesh” and “nerves” of existence presupposes the criticism of structuralism and the redirection of phenomenology into the articulation of the “meaning of the world”. The body cannot be fixed as a signifier or signified. It is still less reason to consider it a mere aesthetic object. In a technically established world, the body increasingly loses its eccentricity. By becoming prosthesis or organs-without-body, the process of its rupture is taking place. It should not be forgotten that the rise of “A-intelligence” simultaneously means the loss of the significance of existential contact between beings. Discussing the body within existential phenomenology had already been attempted in Merleau-Ponty’s thought, becoming scandal or exaggeration. First of all, it is something unimaginable from the metaphysical relationship between logos and mimesis. The “logic” of the body does not hide in the “imitation” of an already established Being in its factuality. Why? For the simple reason that this would mean that both philosophy and art are the result of some overwhelming power (perhaps God?). The elimination of this is directed at the exceptional possibilities of the Being as a singular-plural. It is further known that, for Merleau-Ponty, the world was not thought beyond the body. It can only be encompassed by opening multiple pathways of self-perceiving through the body (Merleau-Ponty, 2013). In this sense, the notion of “embodied existence” means a break with the metaphysics of the spirit of the German speculative tradition from Kant and Fichte to Schelling and Hegel. A further step in the exploration of the ways of thinking of bodies beyond the Cartesian

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tradition meant re-examining why phenomenology in Husserl did not positively address the question of the body as flesh (Leib) and corporeal body (Körper). The touching problem that Nancy put in such an exaggerated philosophical way in the reflection of the resurrection in Noli me tangere cannot be considered his last thoughts on the body. As in Corpus, and in this text, it emphasizes the necessity of passing beyond the reduction of phenomenology to intersubjectivity. The body is in contact more than an existentially fragile and fluid “object”. Therefore, the “architectural sense” should be analyzed much deeper than the metaphysical tradition reduced to “rationalism” and “intuitionism” attempted to do. In the proximity of the body as a substance that has no “essence” in the world, everything happens so that in the foreground comes what we call the object from the tradition of the new age and its metaphysics. This does not mean in any way that the body is lying in the process of “designing the world”, although it is increasingly impossible to avoid it. The body, of course, cannot even be “subjected”, become some solipsistic “I” in the tradition of the reign of the conscious Being as the guarantee or foundation of the mindset order of the world. What the body can do, and what the psyche does not know, is hiding in its aspiration for fever as ascension. That is a reason why Christianity in the ontological sense is the greatest possible scandal and excess in world history. The problem is that the figurative image of Jesus Christ is not only a synthesis of logos and mimesis, thought and sensitivity, but a universal drama of the conflict between the proposal of Being and the nihilism of what Heidegger first noticed and what Nancy on Derrida’s trail synthesized as to how Christianity or monotheism is in “essence” a kind of nihilism of history. The paradoxical “destiny” of the body crucified on the cross and the act of ascending from Earth witness the mystery of the Being as an event of sacrifice. Sacrifice is indeed nothing but an aesthetic-ethical vow of existential freedom in dealing with the negligence of abyssal Nothingness. In Nancy’s view, however, the distinction between the “outside” (world) and the “self” goes through the transformation of the body. What for Levinas is absolutely the Other in the unconditional love of existence as a justification of my “life” from the ethical perspective is for Nancy the aesthetically transformed place of the Other. Instead of the face as a sign of the identity of the Other, it is now about touching the body in all conceivable meanings. What is the Other if its being is now trying to get closer to the aesthetic dimension of body contact? In the last chapter of Corpus, and at the same time the most intriguing one, titled “L’intrus”, inspired by the experience of Nancy’s fight against the suffering of the body caused by cancer and the necessity of a heart transplant, the body is shown as alien or Other. And this is not only because the need to continue life processes, including thinking, is a necessary technical denature as a guarantee of the extension of a different sense of the “healthy man”. What is left of “man” at the end of his natural body? At the end of Corpus, Nancy says: We are, along with the rest of my more and more numerous fellow-creatures, the beginnings, in effect, of a mutation: a man begins again by passing infinitely beyond man. (…) Man becomes what he is: the most terrifying and the most troubling technician, as Sophocles called him twenty-five centuries ago, who denatures and remakes nature, who recreates

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4  The Dark Core of Mimesis: Art, Body and Image in the Thought of Jean-Luc Nancy creation, who brings it out of nothing and, perhaps, leads it back to nothing. One capable of origin and end. The intruder is nothing but myself and man himself. None other than the same, never done with being altered, at once sharpened and exhausted, denuded and overequipped, an intruder in the world as well as in himself, a disturbing thrust of the strange, the conatus of an on-growing infinity. (Nancy, 2008c: 170)

What is the body? In the meaningful performance of all the possibilities of words matched by the Latin language (corpus), Nancy emphasizes that the language itself is already proof of the materiality and meaningfulness of entering the body into the discourse. Language through speech speaks of the “expansion” of the psychological structure of the unconscious. Also, the body is spread in the sensory network. Contrary to “containers” for empty two-dimensional objects is the space in the five dimensions of cosmic-biological-cognitive evolution. The rise of the body of the twentieth century when it comes to humanities came at the same time as the degradation of metaphysics in linguistics and semiology and progressive studies of technically created visualities in cybernetics and informatics. The body in the strict sense of the word, ontologically, is “not” simply because it does not reduce to Being in the sense of mere extension. Physical presence does not differentiate the human body from any other object. Is there, though, something “more”, a corporeal difference between man and animal? From classical metaphysics, man is the embodiment of the spiritual ability of thought and feeling like God. We read in the Bible that man is made in the image of God. This resemblance or similarity leads directly to the body of the image (eikon). The body cannot be a mimicry thought if it is a figure in terms of the contours of its abyss with the addition of the symbolic dimension of beauty and the sublime. The matter, however, is substantially changed by displaying-­ presenting the body (Christ’s body) in the history of art. This should always draw attention to the fact that there is no apparition. We cannot, with certainty, have an account of the historical character of the Savior. The reason lies in the fact that its existence is just unambiguously impossible. At the same time, it is about the fractured body as a sacrifice on the cross and about the ascension by the body ascending into the celestial sphere of pure spirit. The body, therefore, is defined as an existential sacrifice (Nancy, 1991: 20–38). This should be understood at the beginning of each “ontology of the body”, which has not been possible in metaphysical language and imagery so far. And this could not have been because the understanding of the mimetic nature of Jesus Christ is denied since Christ is not a “man” but God in the human being as a representation—a representation of what is visible in the ultimate invisibility. In Noli me tangere, Nancy passes virtuously through all the mysterious places of interpretation of Christ’s resurrection. Consequently, his concept of touching is derived from the phenomenology of corporeality as the inestimable presence of meaning. Nothing is to the tune of that substance. Sartre in Being and Nothingness and Nausea has already completely expressed the abstinence (abjection) towards the primordial magma of Being. What is touched is not meat (flesh, Leib), a complex of proteins, something biological or objectively structured. It is the design of the world in something that goes beyond the metaphysical distinction between spirit/soul and body. That is why it is an existential drama of meeting with the Other.

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When Christ forbids Mary Magdalene, who saw him first after the resurrection, from physically touching his “new” body, the disruption in the act of prohibition is expressed in what lies in-between. Nancy exegetically and hermeneutically questions the nature of the statement “do not touch me” (Noli me tangere) in detail, because it is clear to him that there is no longer any conflict between divergences with a metaphysical understanding of difference. God and man are not merely two different beings in the tradition of ontology. They are primarily a place to reconcile the difference between logos and mimesis, thought and sensitivity. And this place should be understood as the beginning of a new space, to which the body as a medium mediates a deeper meaning. Between God and man, between the disembodiment and the rising of the body, there is an unimaginably far space. It seems unmistakable that the space between is not a religious taboo for the possibility of a credible sacrifice of the body as a gifted “object”. If Nancy’s understanding of the possibility of mimesis is being derived from the technical and poetic vision of creating the world by artwork, then the difference between the gift of the “object” and its creation is precisely that nature is subjected to mimicry by sacrificing the body, and the technical construction of “artificial life” shows that it has not been sacrificed at all. Why, then, a body? Because only a body can be cut down or raised up, because only a body can touch or not touch. A spirit can do nothing of the sort. A “pure spirit” gives only a formal and empty index of a presence entirely closed in on itself. A body opens this presence; it presents it; it puts presence outside of itself; it moves presence away from itself, and, by that very fact, it brings others along with it: Mary Magdalene thus becomes the true body of the departed. (Nancy, 2003: 48)

Why, then, a body? Nancy’s answer refers to the place between two: what is already on the road to the fallacy and what is waiting for the rising in the sky is extremely “realistic”. Only the body allows the spirit of its invisible action. In the “dark core of the mimesis” there is something which illuminates the passage towards the place of absolute untouchability. This is logos as a figure-image of a rising body whose representation in Western painting is achieved only in rare attempts like those of Rembrandt and Titian. But why painting alone? Why not other media like poetry and film? Does this not hide some simple dimension of the originality of the image over language? Nancy makes it impossible for any other art in its singular nature to show and present this event of visible invisibility. The reason lies in the sight of mediation. Seeing does not mean perceiving the mere meaning of an external subject. It is a vision that meets the time dimension of the presence of the body “here” and “now” with what is absent in the sense of the upcoming future. The secret of the body is thus the question of the time of an existential event with which historical events take their meaning. Only “in” the body can we leave signs of decay and “on” the body can we see signs of rising. It is as if the agitated body agitates the spirit into the inevitable line of noble suffering. Only painting can do that because it is rooted in the “dark core of mimesis”. The gap between the body’s decay and its ascension remains a work in the serenity of life-in-eternity. Unlike poetry that language gives supremacy and unlike film that reduces the image to several “nows” in movement, only painting occurs as a synthesis and the incarnation of logos, figures and images

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until its own unpredictability and abstraction. From Giotto to Francis Bacon, painting disintegrates the body into spirit and flesh; the idea and the reality of the universal performance of humanity are left to the grace and inevitability of art. As painting developed from the Renaissance to Cubism, the body becomes a grew line. Abstraction as a method of desubstantializing the image of art leaves the body with only prostheses and supplements. In this respect, the technical and poetic dimensions of mimesis must be reconsidered. Why is painting after the historical avant-­ garde no longer about the body image, where the figure of Jesus Christ evaporated to the demands of aestheticization and art politicization, but only about the transition of the body to the performance of the performative-conceptual turn (Paić, 2014: 63–105)? The acceptable answer to this question is in the violence against the body, its disintegration, which finds in Picasso’s Guernica its best testimony. But what is behind all of that visible “deconstruction” of the world to which painting gave the glow and the shine of decency? The image withdraws as phantom or phantasm of the Idea, destined to vanish in ideal presence itself. It withdraws therefore as image of, image of something or someone that, itself or himself or herself, would not be an image. It effaces itself as simulacrum or as face of being, as shroud or as glory of God, as imprint of a matrix or as expression of something unimaginable. (Nancy, 2005: 9)

Yes, the picture no longer corresponds to any universal idea as it does not fit any historical sense that no longer emerges in the future. So how then is it possible that art in the rift between the disembodiment and rising of the body still leaves traces of some hope in the salvation of the technologically-devastated world?

4.1.3  An Image Without Foundation Nancy’s “ontology of the image” cannot be understood without his “ontology of the body”. If the body of Western metaphysics was scandalous and excessive, then the long-term reflection of the image would be too if it did not fit the body, and then be similarly fated. The body could not think of its autonomy as an association of logos, figures and images as the image could not be understood without regard to art as a representation of things. The notion of mimesis is certainly one that allows this bond/relationship. But the question is under what conditions the image as a material trace or imprint of the technical skill of creating a new one can be distinguished from its original “transcendence”. The problem of the “ontology of the image” is that its material structure does not reach the “essence” of what the image “is”. And originally it “is” primarily something that belongs to the “holy” area. In his deconstruction of religion and monotheism in The Ground of the Image, Nancy takes the methodical and hermeneutical separation of the sacred and religion. The reason lies in the fact that the sacred can be understood only from the untouchable. We have seen that its sense of touch is directed towards releasing the body from every bond with two heavy balls:

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1. The super-sensible field in which God or His secular substitute enters the body as a symbolic trace of the deity and so the spirit/soul is constant in all aspects of its metaphysical “essence”; 2. Sensitivity as a mechanical affection that leaves Descartes’ body space of infinite extension (extensio). From this, it might be obvious that Nancy assumes a phenomenological understanding of the image. Repentance, therefore, appears with the key concept of (syn) aesthetics with which the dual contradictions of Ur-image and copy, spirit and body, object and subject lose the meaning of fixed determinants. Only now can we find out why the picture is no longer performed in “pure form”. Instead of that Platonic concept, Nancy uses material substrates such as “energy” and “intensity”. If form (eidos) is no longer the basis of the image in the metaphysical understanding of arché and the conditions of the possibilities of everything that the image signifies, what comes to the empty place of form, the schematic of the mind and the expressible inexpressibility? The thing as image is thus distinct from its being-there in the sense of the Vorhanden, its simple presence in the homogeneity of the world and in the linking together of natural or technological operations. Its distinction is the dissimilarity that inhabits resemblance, that agitates it and troubles it with a pressure of spacing and of passion. What is distinct in being-there is being-image: it is not here but over there, in the distance, in a distance that is called “absence” (by which one often wants to characterize the image) only in a very hasty manner. The absence of the imaged subject is nothing other than an intense presence, receding into itself, gathering itself together in its intensity. Resemblance gathers together in force and gathers itself as a force of the same—the same differing in itself from itself: hence the enjoyment [jouissance] we take in it. We touch on the same and on this power that affirms this: I am what I am, and I am this well beyond or well on this side of what I am for you, for your goals and your manipulations. We touch on the intensity of this withdrawal or this excess. Thus, mimesis encompasses methexis, a participation or a contagion through which the image seizes us. (Nancy, 2005: 10)

As Nancy points out, mimesis includes methexis. The meaning of this ancient Greek word (μέθεξις) is derived from group sharing, participation in the picture. The ritual connects people in a communion that expresses an attachment to the sacred. Without that, the community remains vacant and abandoned. It is now obvious, however, that the image can be nothing but “sacred” in an entirely different meaning from the “religiosity” of the individual. To make the image as mimesis more than copying or imitating Being, something extraordinary must happen. The image must show the present absence of a hidden foundation beyond mere materiality and character. In other words, the image as methexis is the event of the sacred and secular encounter even when it seems that the entire era of defiance of the Being seems to occur. It is worth asking whether Nancy’s phenomenology of the image is possible without understanding the “sense of Being”. What he calls the “fundamental feature of the image” does not refer to the hidden form of Platonic ideas. However, it is difficult to show at least a bit of scepticism about how the image of the image we are talking about is kept in mind when the image takes on the features of performance and gesture. Modernity was marked by the emergence of an image as an indefinite

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referentiality. Therefore, the crisis of representation does not exist until the perfecting of technical appliances is at the point of breaking with “imitation” and “introducing” a new complex reality. Distinction and distancing, on which Nancy bases his observations on the theory of images, primarily relate to the status of the object in the eyes of the observer. The observer’s role has changed significantly. He/she is no longer a Kantian passive subject to the reflection of beauty, nor a Nietzschean active producer who disturbs indifferent senses. The observer does not look at what is happening in a picture like an idle screen. Violence caused by the rise of the chaotic reality of the twentieth century, by its wars and revolutions, by the technical acceleration of the cinematic energy of one’s life, becomes the “energy” and “intensity” of the image. The image is always an image of something. It is therefore mimetic in its aspiration to turn life into the objectivity of reality. However, the representation of something does not mean that it is only an empty intentional act of observing objects. Mimesis primarily indicates the possibility of reorganizing objects in creating a new situation and context. Bodies that represent and represent possible events of change in observation are not frozen in time. Their “essence” is a creative projection of the possibilities of radical change. What changes is nothing external or internal. It is an immanent change of perspective from which a work gains the status of an exceptional event in its own time, such as Malevich’s unpredictable images or an out-of-print figure in the conceptual art of the neo-avant-garde, which ends with all the remnants of referentiality and raises the question of the meaning of art in its place. Let us go back briefly to suspending and neutralizing the idea of foundation. The name of Nancy’s book in which he explicitly discusses the “ontology of the image” is, at first glance, problematic. What is the “foundation” worth talking about concerning which image could be invoked and rest on it unless it is a metaphysical source of the distinction between spirit and matter, form and content, mind and sensitivity? Of course, it is the one that derives from the heritage of Western philosophy. Still, for Nancy, art is never a servant of religion. Though the myth is the beginning of the mimic activity of the narration and the story and the logic of the very thing are permeated in it, we have seen that the distinction between the sacred and the secular is conditioned by the difference of the image as an event of the meaning of Being and the image as a material sign. The deconstruction of the idea of ​​a picture’s foundation can only be that God’s logos of the thing itself does not hide behind the idea or form (idea or eidolon). The secret of mimesis is in methexis. What now does not seem quasi-transcendental, as in Derrida, appears in a touch of power in the whole spectrum of energy and intensity. The basis of the image in its original groundlessness is precisely that fluid touch in its unmistakably which Nancy perfectly read in the hermeneutics of the Christian understanding of the body as a medium of existential freedom between disembodiment and rising (Noli me tangere). The image is unmistakable, just seemingly touchable. That is why visuality is here the only form of its presence. Others have remained in music, poetry, synaesthetic experiences, etc. Without pictures as a rendering-presenting event, the body could not be anything that disturbs the psyche because it cannot be retrieved by logos. Touch always vanishes in the desire for the absolute possession of the

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Other as an object. What is the basis of the picture if the spirit has lost the ground under its feet? There is nothing in the spirit that is not in the senses: nothing in the idea that is not in the image. I become the ground and depth of the painter’s eye that looks at me, as well as the reflection in the mirror (in Aachen’s painting). I become the dissonance of a harmony, the leap of a dance step. “I”: but it is no longer a question of “I.” Cogito becomes imago. (Nancy, 2005: 10)

How does cogito become imago? The process of painting is more important than its attachment to sacred and secular content. Anyway, the picture will remain picture and the mind will remain mind as long as there is something like an untouchable Being. In other words, permeating one another is possible without ontological rupture only by assuming the survival of a universal reality structure. Since Nancy thinks on the trails of Heidegger and Derrida, with the phenomenological trace of Merleau-Ponty’s opinion, it does not appear advisable that this assumption is inexcusable. Namely, Being and its meaning are not predetermined in terms of time and spatial meaning. Therefore, the process of creating a new relationship or producing a new form by which art enters into the world may happen simultaneously with the deconstruction of the foundation idea. The mind is not superior to the senses; rationalism has no superiority over empiricism. However, the differences are necessary for the attempt to confirm the identity with a different path of thinking. This is a post-phenomenological approach to the world’s design from the demands for the openness of existence. Its place is mediation between the mind and the image in the bodily constitution of the “form of life” belonging to man. What happens when instead of the ground in the metaphysical sense we have the touch and the fluid meanings of the “sense of Being”? Probably nothing spectacular, except that we can figure out that touch cannot be anything sensible. In the technical way of articulating Being, touch is already becoming a self-fulfilling condition of the digital world of visual communication. Returning the dignity of touch is impossible without the return of the “image” that links mimesis with methexis. But if it is no longer possible to have any reference frame or universal idea for art to function spontaneously in this “world”, there is still a search for what the image gives more than aesthetic appeal in the irrelevant age of technical destruction. Where is it all salvaged for Nancy except in the immediate community of the world as a place and a time of the true world reification of Being (mondialization)?

4.2  Conclusion In the thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, the question of “the meaning of Being”, contrary to Heidegger, is not merely about the possibilities of philosophy and art at the end of a metaphysically determined Western history. Instead, we are faced with three deconstructions:

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1. The ideas of the “sense of Being”, starting from the understanding of Being as a singular plurality; 2. The “oblivion of the body” in the effort to think of the body in its openness as a remnant of existential freedom in a space whose temporal perspectives do not diminish their actuality and duration; 3. The idea of art as a form in which the world has the characteristics of the synthesis of logos, figures and images. So, Nancy’s approach to thinking of what was unimaginable in the history of philosophy is also evidence of an attempt at a new understanding of the fundamental word in the Western concept of art—mimesis. At a time when arts are seemingly perceived as a unique globalized influence on the aesthetic shaping of life-worlds, the question of the possibility of thinking as the connection between language and image in the creation of new worlds marks a step towards something directly affecting human sensitivity in general. It is, of course, the touch with which the world opens in a shared sense of closeness to the Other. Nancy’s aesthetic-corporate turn in the “essence” of metaphysics ultimately shows a unique way of thinking on the path of post-phenomenology. The end of the already thoughtful one, such as Being, the foundation, the reason, becomes a challenge for a different path of thinking. What is an art in the age of its growth and rancour other than the event of the common touch of the untouchable that no longer belongs to the “sacred” area, but nor to the banality of this dazzling, accelerated technical adventure of life with which we vanish without a visible trace like spots, lines in nothingness? The question of art, therefore, remains the last crucial question about the meaning of human existence.

References Benjamin, W. (1963). Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Suhrkamp. Derrida, J. (2000). Glaube und Wissen: Die beiden Quellen der ‘Religion’ an den Grenzen der bloβen Vernunft. In J. Derrida & G. Vattimo (Eds.), Die Religion. Suhrkamp. Foucault, M. (2001). The order of things: Archaeology of the human sciences. Routledge. Heidegger, M. (1997). Besinnung (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 66). V. Klostermann. Heidegger, M. (2000). Vorträge und Aufsätze (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 7). V. Klostermann. Heidegger, M. (2003). Sein und Zeit (Gesamtausgabe, vol. 2). V. Klostermann. Hörl, E. (2013). The artificial intelligence of sense: The history of sense and technology after Jean-­ Luc Nancy (by way of Gilbert Simondon). Parrhesia, 17, 11–24. Hutchens, B. C. (2005). Jean-Luc Nancy and the future of philosophy. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Routledge. James, I. (2006). The fragmentary demand: An introduction to the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy. Stanford University Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (2013). Phenomenology of perception. Routledge. Mersch, D. (2015). Epistemologien des Ästhetischen. Diaphanes. Nancy, J.-L. (1991). The Unsacrificeable. Yale French Studies, 79, 20–38. Nancy, J.-L. (1996). The muses. Stanford University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2003). In S. Sparks (Ed.), A finite thinking. Stanford University Press.

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Nancy, J.-L. (2005). The ground of the image. Fordham University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2007). The creation of the world or globalization. SUNY Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2008a). Noli me tangere: On the raising of the body. Fordham University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2008b). Dis-enclosure: The deconstruction of Christianity. Fordham University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2008c). Corpus. Fordham University Press. Nancy, J.-L. (2010). Art today. Journal of Visual Culture, 9, 91–99. Paić, Ž. (2014). The third earth: Technosphere and art. Litteris. Paić, Ž. (2016). Technosphere – A new digital aesthetic? The body as event, interactivity and visualization of ideas. In Ž. Paić & K. Purgar (Eds.), Theorizing images (pp. 121–143). Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Chapter 5

The Dead-Nature of the Body: Biopolitics and Images of Humans’ End

5.1  Art, But for What Reason? Is it quite ordinary to ask what else art should be? Adorno has raised the question of what philosophy is at the point of ultimate suspicion in the social-critical sense of overcoming philosophy in the scientific-technical world. It still assumed that the coming age no longer needs it anymore, except perhaps as a substitute for modern nihilism and science in terms of its meta-theory. When it is no longer possible to determine why we still need something and what the meaning of it is, a moment of absurdity emerges. It manifests itself in the knowledge that everything is lacking reason. It has already lost its roots. For an explanation of contemporary conceptual art, for example, the notion of phenomena and the phenomenological notion of the purity of art as a concept— ideas in self-expression and self-representation—are not relevant (Alberro, 2003). Conceptual art, namely, rests on the assumptions of avant-garde intervention in the social power of art as a cultural institution. So, it is a subject of a self-reflexive critique of institutionalizing the world of art, which acts as a universal commercialization and neoliberal globalization of the world. Asking what else art might be during this period than realized avant-garde ideas for materialization in the life-world (Lebenswelt) means actually asking about two essentially connected things. The first is to ask what art still is, and does it make any sense at all? The second is irreducible in what else is pointing to the feature of the essence of contemporaneity. Art as well as the world that does not allow it—both of which, paradoxically, derive from life itself—occur as mere duration and self-assimilation of the new. In that ever-present, furious imposition of the novelty of our time, there is now no truth but what is defined as a kind of an already seen end of history (Virno, 2005: 94–122), and an issue arises that recalls the traditional, metaphysical way of questioning the meaning of what goes beyond the mere appearance of beings in their appearance

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_5

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(eidos). It asks what else art is, thus asking about the art adventures realized on the metaphysical horizon at the time of its ending. As far as art is concerned, it might not be a new definition of art for the contemporary age. It is simply that it is no longer possible and by no means self-evident that art can answer the question about the essence of the world as a primaeval event without its own self-destruction. The hyper-production of art artefacts, objects, installations, performative-conceptual events in the world that no longer has its worldhood as a meaningful historical Being, and the essence of man and beings requires a search for the response to that issue. So, what is the meaning of art in the world without a picture and in the image without the world, if only the life that overcomes the collapsed historical world through the social self-regulation of culture can be a fixed assemblage of matters? Does art have a meaning if it does not have a world that has given it a reason for survival? The victory of life over art represents its fundamental defeat. It no longer has a reason to live if it is not able to perform the most radical of all resistance, as could never have been imagined, let alone in the avant-garde art of the twentieth century. Resistance cannot represent a figure of the revolutionary overcoming of the borders of the modern world. Nor is its tool in the fight against the perversion of the social power structure that self-­ explanatorily all the movements and neo-avant-garde of today’s actually radically subversive directions of art engage in as a cultural-social strategy of resistance against the hegemony of the neoliberal concept of globalization of capital. The question of the disturbing and almost messianic way of opening the true time of art from true time as an event (Ereignis) was articulated at the end of his life by Martin Heidegger. The problem is not, of course, how it is articulated, but why he had come to think about the “messianic” feature of contemporary art as the last word to overcome the scientific and technical destiny of the West. It is well-known that Heidegger was not entirely acquainted with the trends and directions of contemporary art. If there is an epistemological-conceptual cut that exists between modern and contemporary art, which introduced the historical avant-garde as a world without an image at the time of its disintegration process, Heidegger reflected on the source and origin of artwork in connection with the messengers and heralds of contemporary art (like Vincent Van Gogh) and irreducible artists crossing between the two coasts (like Paul Klee). In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger says that art requires man as his or her governor and as the pro-leader of the world as an artistic event. We need art. The reason should be in the overcoming of the power of the rule of “madness without a consolation” (trostlosen Raserei) of modern technology. It all comes down to evaluation and exploitation; so, the essence of technology lies in the enframing (Gestell). Man is no longer the placeholder for the primaeval relationship between Being and time. He is a mere “function of technology” (Heidegger, 1972: 271). The loss of the world as a primaeval dwelling place (man, nature and divine) in which pro-leadership and division of beings possess the feature of the artistic Being denotes at the same time the process of insulting such a world, the loss of its naturalness and, ultimately, the loss of a man. The bare Being of man cannot reach out to his essential determinant at the time of setting anthropological horizons of human subjects, as we can find in philosophical anthropology

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from Gehlen through Plessner to Sartre’s existentialism, in which man holds the frame of a ruling subject, but not a Being as the source of overall existence. The loss of the essence of man corresponds to the inevitability and impermissibility of the world of modern art. Contemporary art will ultimately accomplish this in the emergence of art as social-cultural activity, activism and interactivity. What is without Being and essence lacks a root and origin. Being-without means being without any relationship to anything other than the autoreferential reference to its image. Modern art for Heidegger does not express a visualization of the scene as modern nihilism. It was just the imprint of an epochal event of annihilating the Being in the age of science and modern technology, which did not mean the total impossibility of openness to the expectation of that salvation from being art itself. However, modern art cannot be only a nihilistic picture of the self-expression of the disintegration of the metaphysical world. From it comes more than mere self-­ presentation and self-rendering—the performativity and conceptuality of the world as image. What is that “more”? Overcoming the boundaries of modern technology indirectly denotes the liberation of art from the primordial relationship of man with the inhumane, natural and divine. Why inhumane? It is just a hidden riddle of contemporary art. For now, we will only refer to a known diagnosis of modern art. It derives from the philosophical criticism of the spirit of the time, and it is assembled as vitalistic cultural pessimism in the age of the mass society. (Liessmann, 1999; Seubold, 1997). Let us forget that the sociological analysis of modernity, not aesthetics, is in this monumental setting, a far-reaching issue for the question of what art is constructed for. Ortega y Gasset does not determine what is dehumanized in the last instance. Is this an inhumane or even nihilistic mask of humanity as the art of a beautiful illusion? In the diagnosis of the disintegration of the whole Being of art, there are degrees or stages of dehumanization: 1 . Art is deprived of humanity; 2. It avoids a living will of form; 3. The artwork becomes only a work of art; 4. The art is a game or nothing else; 5. Irony becomes a fundamental artistic instrument; 6. The purity of abstract (re)presentation should become a credo; 7. To new artists, the art has no longer any transcendental significance. The sociological analysis of the modern age and the status of an artwork in the thought of Ortega y Gasset, if we dismiss the emphases of cultural pessimism and the inevitable pattern of time distance from which such penetrating and simple analysis really must seem cultural-conservative, points to the underlying problem of contemporary art and its image. This is a question about the deadly nature of the body or the non-human, dehumanized in modern technology. The analysis is identical to what Heidegger thought more deeply from the horizon of the end of metaphysics and the possibility of his overlapping as a question of the possibility and necessity of art to release the embrace of modern techniques. The persuasiveness of man as a “functional” of modern technology represented the cause of the

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dehumanization of art. Man has to be identical to the inhumane feature of art. But this might no longer be the case, despite the universal drive of the world of art and the aesthetics of the world of post-modern culture (Vattimo, 1990). The question of what else art should be in the final consequence is not an issue about the meaning of art in a de-humanized world without the picture (avant-garde art of the beginning of the twentieth century) or with regard to the picture without the world (images at the time of the iconic turn at the beginning of the twenty-first century) (Maar & Burda, 2005). It is a post-metaphysical question of what it still was at the time of its non-human body existence. If it is no longer a project but a mere spatial embodiment in various technical forms, the meaning of human existence is lost. Art only goes beyond that mere humanity and inhumanity if it manages to produce the image of the world as well as the conspiracy of the Being and time circuit. This is a possible-event (Ereignis). With its emergence, the epochal world evolves and erodes. For Heidegger, the need for art should be identical to the necessity of being a resident of the essence of the un-concealment (aletheia), which allows the essence of technology to emerge as an act of implanting a completely different production of beings from the Being. Art as modern art can never be just a picture of modern nihilism. It is not “official art” if it is a man in his bare life who is already condemned to the slavery of the technical character of the modern age as a time of substance-subject appropriate to science and technology. Undoubtedly, the art lies deeper than the technology itself. This technology gives the foundation of what comes out of the primordial event of pro-leading the world as a work of art. If the world and man as a modern subject (the self, the personality, the self-identity) that the world does not take as the object, rather than the creation of art objects being the result of the created world of mass production of replicators and copies, can only be conceived as the original relationship that enables art, then it is evident that Heidegger’s question of the possibility (the necessity) of art as an event of overcoming the boundaries of modern nihilism techniques is directed beyond the borders of the inhumane and the body. Art is a necessity for overcoming the technical world—but is it possible? It is possible because it is necessary. That’s the ‘turn of Hegel’s question’. (Seubold, 1997: 108)

Necessity as possibility for art? The answer to the question of art does not lie in the way of the modal category of possibilities as the necessary opportunities for art. Heidegger turns Hegel’s question about the essence of the world after the end of art around and opened up a new perspective for analyzing that inhuman and contemporary art with its experiments and provocations of a social-cultural environment without the world itself, which no longer pro-lives. Contemporary art in its last feature of the digital age of performative-conceptual iconoclasm denotes the real dead nature of the body. It is no longer the use and exploitation of nature, which has become a cultured world, but the scientific-technical feature of Being as a picture without the world. So, is Heidegger’s “messianic” assumption of art still attainable in the riddle of contemporary art as the biopolitics of the body without any

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transcendental significance? The absurdity and dehumanization of art cannot, therefore, only be the loss of the feature, figure and image of man as an integral being within the metaphysical framework of Being, nature and divine. The iconoclasm of contemporary art is far more than the loss of bodily identity and the integrity of a man as a shaped figure. The body is not dead to reviving the art of the abstraction, destruction and performativity of language/text in a picture without the world. That inhumane dead is the nature of the body that lives in the image of the cyborgs of artificial life. The necessity of art as the ultimate possibility of overcoming the dead nature of the body in the iconoclasm of contemporary art shows itself as a task of overcoming the life-world (Lebenswelt) of art itself. We can determine contemporary art as the dead nature of the body that lives in biopolitics and its images of the end of man. This is a paradoxical turning point of the issue about the reason for art in contemporaneity. Can art give to the world its true meaning of the freedom of a new beginning in the production of the new world if it has already been sentenced to the protector and subject of modern technology? I will defend the assumption that now it has something more than the messianic admonition of the salvation of being a man without roots and without reason. Art must open a new world only if it radically overcomes the boundaries of the technical world by abandoning the avant-garde destruction/deconstruction of society and culture. Its necessity is the only remaining possibility: that it is radically overcoming its idolatrous life as a biopolitical machine of inhumane reality. The iconoclasm of contemporary art means that art is finally experiencing its end when it becomes an active life. An actively understood life for art denotes its true death. The decadence of art, therefore, denotes its activist realization in life. Undoubtedly, contemporary art begins with the historical avant-garde. Life from that moment of art determines its meaning. But no longer in the sense of the ­immanent transcendence of the meaning of the image in visual arts, such as, for example, Dadaist painting. Life as an activist social transformation process of the boundaries of the social boundary itself in the face of capitalism and civil society becomes a permanent revolution of art. It is a process as life itself is perceived as processual. Pessoa’s art of the irreducible Other, who can never stop in one person, who can never become a certain, fixed and lasting identity, opens the ­necessary opportunity for art beyond life as the social process of the endurance of reality. Why is art beautiful? Because it’s useless. Why is life ugly? Because it’s all aims, objectives and intentions. All of its roads are for going from one point to another. (…) The beauty of ruins? That they’re no longer good for anything. The sweetness of the past? Our memory of it, since to remember it is to make it present, and it isn’t present nor ever can be—absurdity, my love, absurdity. (…) Motion is life, the sign of life. (Pessoa, 1991: 205, 251)

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5.2  Metamorphosis of the Body 5.2.1  Avant-Garde and Neo-Avant-Garde In his precise, concise, thoughtful and fertile analysis of contemporary art, which he shared among modernism, the avant-garde, and post-modernism, and of what is happening now, attributing to it the blatant feature of another modernism or neo-­ modernism, Heinrich Klotz represents the view that the central dogma of the avant-­ garde is the abolition of fiction (Klotz, 1999: 10). It is not only a matter of the post-modern assumption of a “revision of modernity”, which returns art to the possibility of fiction and illusion instead of the reign of life and reality. Klotz’s view that post-modernism denotes the end of the avant-garde dogmatic stems from the metaphysical, ontological-aesthetic and total power of the social-critical function of avant-garde art of the twentieth century. The end of metaphysical, ontological-aesthetic functions of avant-garde art means the will to overcome the difference between art and life. In the place of aesthetics (the aesthetic concept of modernity) and its socialization within the framework of civil society (the social term of modernity), all modern art, regardless of the differences in “styles”, programmes and the goals directed at art, strives to bring about its contents. To overcome the termination of fiction is therefore not a fundamental dogma of the avant-garde, and post-modernism as a “modern revision”, and cannot be a solution to the dispute with the central avant-garde dogma. Overcoming as the abolition of fiction in the world of life is just the external framework of the turning point that the avant-garde introduces to contemporary art. There is not even a change of aesthetic paradigm. Entering art into life should be the most distinctive ontological-metaphysical turnaround of the entirety of art history under the guise of the social revolution of art or, more appropriately, the artistic revolution of society (Lübbe, 1992). How should we understand this act of overturning the paradigm shift? Is it self-evident that life becomes an artistic act in the sense that existence and the essence of man as an artist are subjugated, and the work of art is replaced by collective practice and event? In what follows, it will be necessary to show all the consequences of this overcoming as the abolition of the aesthetic autonomy of modern art in the rational order of collective practice of the world of life. Unlike Klotz, Lübbe, Foster and other theoreticians of avant-garde art, of whom only Lübbe could be identified as a philosopher who, from his cultural-neo-conservative turn to Hegel and the sources of modern art, attacks the avant-garde idea from the perspective of the notion of vulgar temporality.1 I will try to justify and prove the premise that art prevailed and

1  “Historical consciousness is the medium of the past. Under that assumption, it is illusory to re-­ establish the institutional and scientific mediation of the free unity of art and life, as announced by advocates of the futuristic early avant-garde. Because of its dependence on the museum, avant-­ garde art has not emancipated art, quite the opposite. Avant-garde requires the cultural process of musealization. (…) Under the assumption of the sketched process of cultural differentiation, art

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abolished life before it sank into its muddy waters. The turn of the vitalist-social avant-garde as an art movement that destroys the aura of art and the freedom of aesthetic autonomy sacrificed in the name of the “dictatorship of life” presupposes an understanding of the metaphysical scheme from which it talks about the relinquishment of the secrets of art and life. Why is it so significant to re-open the debate about this problem again? The answer is quite simple: because of the criticism of false faith in any possible return—fiction, reality, history, ornament, painting, myth, image—as an iconic turn. Post-modernism designates, surely, neither the end of avant-garde dogma, nor a state of transition in neo-modernism or any other modernism, but a non-radical cultural turn which in the case of visual arts can only conditionally determine the concept of the visual turn (Sachs-Hombach, 2005). Undoubtedly, it is only the question of the pluralism of orientation in the consideration of the notion of image and the transdisciplinary approach to the reality of the dispersed post-historic situation of the heterogeneity of scientific disciplines in the study of artistic phenomena. So, post-modernism as a cultural/visual turn can only be reasonably explained by the analysis of the scope of life in the sphere of the biopolitics of art. In other words, post-modernism was a transient state of the metamorphosis of the body from the social to the cultural construction (Paić, 2005). The post-modern end to the end of avant-garde art, by the way, denotes the victory of life as a biogenetic construction of life itself. This is a reason why most critics do not want to see radical consequences even when they talk about culture at the time of the post-modern society of the spectacle, and even less when they talk about art as a return to some of the original avant-gardism in the era of the aesthetics of politics in the deeply redesigned world of life. In the case of Klotz’s criticism from the distance of the end of the twentieth century and the confidence in restoring fiction as a key post-modern art instrument, it should be mentioned in advance. The fundamental dogma of the historical and artistic approach to contemporary art in terms of synchronous-diachronic historicity by events and art as “development”, “progress”, “regression” and “decadence”, starting from the sociological concept of modernity, is precisely faith in the power of fiction and illusion. The dualism of Western metaphysics in art history does not continue to neo-­ modernism reversing the end of history after the avant-garde transition in life by the revolution of society. There is no return to fiction and illusion in the visual arts. Also, there is no return to ornamentation in architecture. Something like the “retro-­ futuristic trip”, popular in today’s hybrid social theories of virtual culture phenomena, is not only proof of the inability for a radical response to the foundations of the end of history in traditional humanities disciplines (Belting, 2002) but also as an inability to understand the temporality of what the underlying problem of today’s can no longer give a political representation of cultural representativity. There is no longer state-­ representative art; the avant-garde has won its political independence. (…) It is certain that arts such as religion and science belong to the cultural living assumptions of the modern state. However, the modern liberal state has also built an art of living in its art. It does not contradict the modern state everywhere as a subject of cultural-political expression of art” (Lübbe, 1992: 103, 105).

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virtual art is. So, that is the concept of time and the self-explanatory use of the concept of reality as a new reality rather than an irreducible reality (Grau, 2003). Therefore, Klotz himself speaks of post-modern “re-semanticization” and its eclectic spirit of historicism by other means (Klotz, 1999: 9). If there is no doubt that the aim of the avant-garde was a total change of art and society, rather than the production of a new world, it is clear that the prevalence in tearing fictions and illusions of art in life at the same time is a realization of art in the time of the “eternal present”. To Klotz, “abstraction” denotes the key term of avant-garde art. The abstract art of pure form (colour, line, surface) is shown in the medium of an image of pure non-­ objectivity—from Kandinsky to Pollock, Fontana and Klein—with the expression of life power reduced to the function and/or means of realization of the scientific and technical construction of life. A life that sucks at art like bottle dryers, the famous ready-mades of Marcel Duchamp, is not superior to art in the sense of the transcendental source of an artwork/event. Life in the unarticulated concept of the “social revolutionary action” of the historical avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century cannot be superordinated to art as a subordinate order, to use structuralist language. Overcoming the fiction and illusion of modern art in life is impossible to understand even as an immanent transcendence of art that wants to be more than art and more than life. Also, in this turn of the paradigm, we do not assume the historical necessity of moving art as an aesthetic pure “thing” into the procession of life, which occurs in everyday life, shaped to the demands of modern industrial society. Artificial life that prepares the iconoclasm of modern art is abstract as an abstract concrete totality. During the twentieth century, it appeared in the metamorphoses of human bodies and artworks/events of avant-garde art. The abstract-concrete totality cannot be, however, a society referring to the historical avant-garde. Reducing society thus is the result of avant-garde art reduction within the Hegelian speculative-­ dialectical exposition of the development of the absolute spirit in time. In this development, from the perspective of the necessity of the emergence of a higher degree of realization of the absolute spirit in time, society might be merely an emerging figure in one of its overcomings of historical destiny, which is played out in the totality of the scientific-technical setting of the world as the scientific structure of the Absolute. In it, of course, art no longer has the autonomy of aesthetic judgment. It is reduced to pure form, abstraction and the free construction of reality from pure ideas. For the best example of this, we can take abstract painting and conceptual art.2 However, abstract painting at the beginning of the twentieth century

2  When the concept assumes in its essence what is traditionally meant as a work of art, it is possible to emphatically conclude, like Sol Le Witt, that ideas (concepts) are the only authentic “works of art”. In this statement, we can recognize the consistent attitude that has profoundly shaped the conceptions of conceptual art today over all other directions, from the constructivism of the Russian avant-garde to the rationalism of modern architecture and the design of the Bauhaus school. The problem is that it conceptually, in the most radical way, realizes the avant-garde programme: the realization of art in the process of social participation. It combines the performance and art of installation, and virtual art in the digital age is nothing more than the continuation of

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and concretistic poetry in the age of the neo-avant-garde in the 1980s, in which one can see a tendency towards the iconoclasm of contemporary art in other media and historical contexts, where the materiality of the sign words as letters (grammé) has a visual form of abstract paintings, testify to the attempts to overcome the limitations of avant-garde art to change society as the foundation of modern art (Mersch, 2002: 157–244). Thus, abstraction as the keyword of the avant-garde and its inner development from the image of Kandinsky and Mondrian through Malevich to Pollock, Fontana and Klein represented only the way of realizing the idea of the art of living in activist life. The “shaped canvas,” the “aesthetic thing”, happening, and action painting show the media of how the non-objectivity of the image evolves in the action-life of the work of art. As the act of painting in action-painting has primacy over the work, so the image in the purged process of the subject matter can only be conditional in the picture. Without the material-spiritual correlates of its imagery, it no longer has the likeness or the mimesis of something real. Even less in this process of abstraction and purity of the form can speak of the fiction and illusion of objectivity. The image is not real. It is still less abstract. Also, it is a realized iconoclasm of the avant-garde—a pure life of a picture or a pure image of life reduced to an abstract form, expression and sign. The painting of the informal, for example, continues only in the traces of the abstract realization of the idea of ​​the purity of the surface, which is independent of lines and colours. Artistic actionism takes on the image of the abstract body of a human without nature in the world. The body is reduced to form, such as, for example, the blue colour of a female body in Yves Klein’s painting (Jimenez, 2005: 78–80). The pure form stems from the transformed nature of life. But this notion of nature is no longer self-explanatory. Nature is for avant-garde art the dead body of painting, the other part of a man who has lost any relationship with the tradition and place of the original relationship of art. Nature for avant-garde art, at least, denotes the “social nature of man” as a being of a permanent change in an actively understood life. Let us return to the fundamental assumption of Klotz’s analysis of avant-garde art in the twentieth century. We said that the contestability of its certainly important studies on the relationship between modernism, post-modernism and neo-­ modernism art is in the self-understanding of the dualistic concept of modernity as the epoch: (1) the aesthetic autonomy of art as an institution within which the museum becomes a paradigm of modern art and (2) the social project of mastering the world as a rational habit of man. Hence, we have further misunderstandings.3 They are not such as Jürgen Habermas argued, for example, concerning a modern conceptual art in the media of “new technology realities” determined by the space-time video sphere of computer technology (Grau, 2003). 3  Klotz relies on the theory of Peter Bürger and his understanding of the notions of modernity, modernism and modernization. The key point of his avant-garde theory is derived from the concept of the avant-garde as a historical movement of the revolution of society by attacking the institution of art as an attack on the aesthetic court’s autonomy. Bürger’s analysis of the avant-garde movement in the twentieth century is a theoretical extension of Adorno’s philosophical aesthetics of

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project of enlightenment in the context of a liberal Western society, or with regard to an ephemeral figure of the world as a social context of progress towards more complex forms of rational organization of the community, as Martin Albrow showed in his hypothesis of hyperglobalism. Modernism has represented in this two-way sense the fundamental dogma of history as advancement. Hence the expressions of modern art, post-modernism and neo-modernism are not strictly delimited conceptually, except in the sense that these terms are acquired from various dry belt theories of social and human sciences (sociology, anthropology, art history and the science of art). The concept of the new as a permanent novelty, which decides on the temporal and ontological structure of the worlds of modern, post-modern and neo-­ modern art, ultimately remains a riddle for all attempts to periodize art from Van Gogh and Cézanne to the present, or from Rimbaud to current poetry, or from Mahler to electronic music today. If, for Klotz, a “messianic” answer to the question about the necessary possibilities of contemporary art to open up new opportunities for creativity and the image itself is summed up in the expectation that post-­ modernism indicates a return to fiction and illusion or a return to the fictional and illusional feature of arts, then we are faced with yet one more fatal misunderstanding. Let us try to break it down briefly. First of all, Klotz and many other theoreticians of art, such as Hal Foster, define post-modernism as the end of avant-garde exclusivity as the eclectic transitional state of a new historicism that returns to the sources of figuration, ornaments, imagery and realities of a given world in the new situation of “presenting the unrepresentable” (Lyotard) of post-modernism. It is, therefore, the notion of a new return or renewal of avant-garde ideas with only one goal—the liberation of art from the ideology of life as an activist project, event and process. The present time is determined by the loss of fiction and illusion. Many post-­modern theoreticians speak of the “disenchanting power” of the transition. The origin of this expression lies in Weber’s diagnosis of the modern age as rationalization and disillusionment. The return of fiction and illusion to post-modernism is for Klotz, therefore, a step beyond the “dictatorship of life” over art in the avant-garde art of the twentieth century. It is at the same time a possibility for overcoming the sinister hail of the scientific-technical world in which the avant-garde is actively involved in art. In contrast to Klotz’s attempt to overcome abstraction with the inner essence of the transformation of the non-objective world into the chaos of modern art—happening, installation art, performative and conceptual art—which is a neo-avant-garde “revision” of avant-garde exclusivity, Foster critically disagrees with Bürger’s avant-­ garde theory, on whose assumptions Klotz basis his analysis, from the perspective of the development of contemporary art from the 1960s to the 1970s. Bringing into play the narrative about the two avant-gardes in the context of the US reception of Russian constructivism and Malevich’s radical non-objective painting, especially in the case of Pop Art’s famous artists like Rauschenberg and Buren in experiments

modernity and Habermas’ sociological understanding of the social project of the modern epoch (Bürger, 1974, 2001).

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with a picture, we can say that the articulation of the return of reality should be a significant focal point of reflection.4 These two solutions are opposed. On the one side, some believe in the power of post-modern games with the different reconstructions of fiction and illusion, but on the other side, we have the notion of the real. It seems that Klotz’s attitude to the criticism of the avant-garde idea of the art of living in the artistic life of the transformed society of the future is close to some cultural conservatism, while Foster is a post-modern theoretician of the neo-avant-garde, who only continues the project of overcoming the institution of art in the world of life based on criticism of avant-­ garde institutionalization. However, both narratives are essentially the same. Returning fiction is lazy and the return of reality after a period of the constructivist illusion of reality as life is no different from the fiction and illusion of reality. The fatal misunderstanding which is ultimately revealed as the expected failure of the theory of contemporary art and its unexamined “object”—contemporary art as such—is the status of the new concept and hence the greatest dogma of avant-garde art of the twentieth century as the realization of art in life. We have to argue that realization should be a philosophical term, which from Marx to Hegel has been introduced in its radical-revolutionary turn of modern world thinking. What is a realization at the end of philosophy as metaphysics has represented its form and its content. Indeed, it becomes philosophical as an immanent transcendence of the absolute spirit in time. Indeed, life is not a life, but real life encompasses an idea in its sighting of energy and the timeliness of reality based on the assumptions of the novelty of the modern world (Sutlić, 1972, 1987). The real-life in which avant-garde art builds its vision of the paradigm shift is not a mere activist life of a social group, and this is an art group that is naturally always collectivist because an artist is not important, but artist life as a collective work. So, life can never be reduced to bare reality. The problem with the setting for the fading of life and art is that the reality of life is spoken of by all manifestations of the avant-garde movements of the 4  In this explication of avant-garde theory as Foster understands it, it is about the consequences of the relationship between art and life in view of the question of institutionalizing avant-garde art in society. The important link and the relationship between the special historical avant-garde of the first half of the twentieth century (Russian constructivism, suprematism, Dadaism, futurism) and the neo-avant-garde practice of the 1960s in America is reflected in the concepts of the institution of art, perception and the cognitive relation to the image; the structural and discursive parameters of art start from a different understanding of the world of life. Unlike the historical avant-garde that was less focused on changing the institution of art, the neo-avant-garde, Foster claims, critically points to the underlying bitterness of the first avant-garde. The other avant-garde, in fact, leads paradoxically to the condition that was necessarily followed by an attack on traditional fiction and the illusion of “old” art as an institution. The first avant-garde paradoxically turned itself into an institution against which he has been programmatically fighting since the very beginning. From such dualistic schemes, on the basis of which Foster carries out other types of discourse, it is quite understandable that a search for a new solution of the old metaphysical story of the unification of life and art has led to failure. The exit is seen in a new return to reality. It is not, therefore, a question of returning to the concept of the new from the perspective of criticism of the notion of life and temporality as the “eternal present” of the avant-garde, but of overcoming the fiction and illusion of something that is self-confident, and that is precisely reality (Foster, 1996: 1–32).

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twentieth century—the construction of reality. It is exactly what Klotz would want to overcome with the post-modern, according to which, conceptually and analytically, it is not entirely trusted. The concept of reality denotes the fiction and the illusion of reality as it is the very life that refers to the entirety of avant-garde art of the twentieth century, whether it is the historical avant-garde of the first phase or the neo-avant-garde of the second phase. If so, then all attempts to exit the vicious cycle of art as life or life as art have always been condemned to failure. The return or renewal of a concept that precedes the avant-garde reduction of art to social life (first phase) or cultural identities (second phase) is not possible except as a mere review of the already accomplished. The post-modern re-semanticization, for example, presupposes a lost place or an unfinished modern project (Habermas). So is the narrative of a neo-modernity or another modernity of the same rank as the narratives of two avant-gardes that are the same as each other, only with different rhetoric and discourse. The best example of such a fatal misunderstanding stemming from the irrelevant relationship with art that sought to overcome the metaphysical duality of the idea and reality of the other and the beyond, the image and the text of the sublime and profane or aesthetic Being and the subject reality of the “one” and “this” world, traditional paintings and live images on the move, is the criticism of Marcel Duchamp addressed to neo-Dadaism. In this already ironical text, all might be faithful: the impossibility of the realization of fiction and illusion after avant-garde cut with the primordial time art, the conflict and institutionalizing of avant-garde criticism of institutions, the problem of reality as the construction of reality, and, finally, the narrative of fiction and the illusion of life that becomes a work of art/event. This neo-Dadaism, now called new realism, Pop Art, assemblage, etc., is one of the cheap pleasures and lives of what Dada learned. When I discovered ‘ready-mades’ I meant to discourage the aesthetic skies. But the neo-Dadaists used the ‘ready-mades’ to get to them, revealing an aesthetic values. I threw a bottle dryer and an urchin into their face as a challenge, and now they embody it as aesthetically pleasing. (Jimenez, 2005: 83)

Duchamp’s criticism of neo-Dadaism represents a discussion about the conflict between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde. Objects as ready-mades from the surrounding world are not real objects of some already existing reality. These artefacts are constructed of scientific-technical realities from which the primaeval nature and the real world of matter have disappeared. Urinal and bottle dryer are not aesthetic objects for pleasure in observing what is beautiful in the institutionalized space of displaying art as an object but objects of use, and they thus become an aesthetic environment. Duchamp’s criticism denotes therefore only a self-­ deprecating showdown with the basic idea of the historical avant-garde, although this can be discerned only when we see the concequences of the narrative concerning the aestheticization of the world of life in which the dead nature of the body becomes the image of the end of man. The biopolitics of contemporary art today represents the key to understanding Duchamp’s resigned and ironic attitude before the matter of power and the appearance of having art in science and the technical world. The conflict between the avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde around the

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primacy of originality, ideas as a concept that determines anything else, is ultimately irrelevant. What matters is not the subject of criticism performed by Duchamp. Such a degree of auto-reflection and auto-irony would be, however, beyond its overcoming of the idea of ​​art and its meaning in the world of modern technology would be “madness without consolation”. The only thing that might be significant cannot be an attack on neo-avant-garde aesthetics that is an institutionalized order against the will of the original Dadaists (avant-garde of the first stage). On the contrary, this is an inevitable consequence of avant-garde aspirations to overcome such fracturing art in life as actuality, activism and actionism. Behind Duchamp’s critics of the neo-avant-garde, we can find the question of the meaning of art in modern times as an experience of the inhuman, beyond the mere construction of reality (Mersch, 2002: 251–260).

5.2.2  The Symbolism of Life and Its Images The iconoclastic strategy of the avant-garde opens up the body problem in the life-­ world. This is the problem of redesigning the world and the problem of reconstructing life from what is opposed to life—the death of nature.5 Urinals and bottle dryers and artefacts are already modern images of the world before it opened the way to a total aestheticization of a decaying world. It was not the avant-garde that missed its fundamental goal since life did not prove capable of realizing art as a work/event; its mission was realized only when it became possible to create life from the spirit of scientific and technical reproduction of the world at large. That is a reason why it is necessary to review massive assumptions about the failure of the entire intention of avant-garde art as a movement to overcome the boundaries of art through its realization in life. Speaking of failure cannot be appropriate for what is there in question. Such evaluations should be omitted. We have seen from the immanent analysis of Klotz’s and Foster’s approaches to the avant-garde and neo-avant-garde that the request to return some fiction or reality after the end of the avant-garde did not realize wishful efforts. Neo-modernism, as well as the neo-avant-garde, is just a vain search for the exit from the labyrinth of the avant-garde, and they are unable to find an alternative direction. The turn to irreducible Other of modernism is even less respectable. As long as this is still true in the social and cultural aspects of post-­ colonialism and the cultural critique of the dominant European position in the global

5  “Under the influence of the technological revolution, we are confronted with changing our concept of human mental and physical properties and their corresponding dimensions in the imaginary, symbolic and realistic. In particular, transformations of the body and its outgrowth in the technology medium, as well as the transformation of matter into energy waves and immaterial signals, have changed art. The options available to us are, on the one hand, the resistance to dematerialization and persistence on the physical plane or, on the other hand, the acceptance of the uncertainty of the linguistic structure and the symbolic order in dealing with the phenomena of immaterialization” (Weibel, 2002: 630).

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economy and politics, especially when it comes to the criticism of representation as a criticism of the ideology of visualization in general, it should also be applied in visual arts. The same holds for the case of the repulsions of the cult of culture as a new ideology and the re-politicization of art (Groys, 2003). Since Picasso’s picture Les Demoiselles d’Avignon from 1907, the contemporary art of the image has enclosed the narrative of the colonial subject of the visibility of the West. Based on the African mask, Picasso freed the picture from the illusion of perspective. Returning to the primordial symbolism of the image was not derived from the tradition of European art but the world of African art and religious experiences. The problem is therefore not in the social and cultural feature of renewal and returns to the original potentials of avant-garde art. Sources have been blurred since its inception. Rivers are not clean because they carry alluvial sources that are constantly provoked. We have seen this in the case of Duchamp and neo-Dadaism, Russian constructivism and especially abstract painting of the 1960s in the case of Yves Klein and Daniel Buren (Michaud, 2011). Avant-garde art, paradoxically but at the same time necessarily, rests on the tradition it assumes. The loss of the world as a waste of ancient times at the age of modern nihilism presupposes a condition for the possibility of a new concept of tradition. So, the avant-garde tradition at the social level has represented its institutionalization and, on the cultural level, its musealization and historicization (Lübbe, 1992: 100–105). This arises from the conflict between avant-garde sources and its neo-avant-garde directions, which necessarily require some kind of relationship with tradition. The new concept of tradition is, of course, bound by the notion of shortening and tapering the timing of what is now and what is a short time. All museums of modern/contemporary art show within their name the difficulties of understanding the new. All museums of modern/contemporary art are at the same time oriented towards the continuity of historical time and its discontinuity. In all versions of time, there are exhibitions of avant-garde art, and this dual character of unbroken lines and radical cuts with the linear concept of time is visible (Danto, 1999). The novelty of the new is obsolete at the moment of actualization. Hence, the pursuit of avant-garde art as its realization in the world of life necessarily leads to the obsolescence of the new man and the devoted art of the total change of society and culture. The dead nature of the body of avant-garde art corresponds to the obsolescence of modern technology, which must always be new or nothing. It is only from this point that it is possible to understand the cultural-pessimistic setting of one of the most important critics of the spirit of modernity, of the media world and of the world of the technical calculability of contemporary life—Günther Anders— about the unstoppable process of the obsolescence of Western (modern) civilization as a media image of the exhilarating world (Anders, 2002). However, the obsolescence of man at the same time as the metaphysical being is based in his distance from and relationship to Being and the divine nature. The end of man and his image was revealed in avant-garde art in the early twentieth century. The iconoclasm of contemporary art denotes the result of the radical destruction of man and his primaeval world, not a mere religious-aesthetic-political ban of depicting human figures at all. Iconoclasm cannot be properly understood in contemporary wars of the

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image on behalf of the ideology of cultural identity. Features of the contemporary culture of visual intimidation are merely manifestations of old traits known from the Byzantine tradition. When the Taliban destroyed Buddhist statues in Bamiyan, such an act cannot be understood only from the iconoclastic strategy of politics in the global age (Latour, 2002: 14–38). Iconoclasm is, therefore, the result of identifying the identity of culture as an ideology with the only permissible image of identity. This paradigmatic conflict is politically reduced to the forms of “warfare” on the ideology of religious fundamentalism. When we say, as the theoretician of contemporary art and admirer of virtual simulation technology Peter Weibel does, that contemporary man at the time of the representation of his end in a time of crisis of representation in art as such retains confidence in the picture as a medium and its physicality and materiality of visibility and the tactile, on the one hand, and contact with the immaterial “presenting the unrepresentable” of the virtual image, on the other, it must be obvious that we are still faced with the dualism of the concept of reality. How does the pictorial go beyond materiality? How can we at least open the pictorial in the era of the dematerialization of the world?

5.2.3  Two Bodies of Performative Art The insight of the artistic vision of the metamorphosis of the body itself as a medium which avant-garde art in its iconicity has radically forgiven has finally become visibly invisible, revealing the inexhaustible in the era of virtual art. It is the last stage of the immaterial materiality of a sign within the network as the space of simultaneity and moment of the already seen. In this new reality of the picture without the world, there is the remaining art adventure beyond the human and inhuman relationships, beyond nature and the aesthetic world.6 The human body and its image before the avant-garde and its radical iconoclasm became obsolete in their natural features. Cézanne’s painting was the last moment of consciousness about the possible loss of the primordial worldhood of the world precisely by opening it from the centre of view to the world as such without figures with human attributes.7 It was a clear 6  “Thus, the entire signpost becomes understandable only when metaphysically, ontologically, it is applied to the horizon of some consciousness. The mode of dependence is characteristic for both the world of signs and consciousness. The more conscious and deeper the consciousness, the more subtle and refined the sign of the world, the more intricate and finer the communication that flows from them. (…) Consciousness not only transforms the signs it receives, but it also produces them. Signs are the real product of consciousness, manifestations, information by which it itself declares itself. These free, original manifestations are lenses in an aesthetic Being. Only in the aesthetic production does consciousness truly become the residuum of possible worlds in which there are nature and objects and the residuum of the possible loss of the world in which nature and objects are no longer needed” (Bense, 1978: 106). 7  “Cézanne’s pictures of Mont Sainte-Victoire could be metaphysical in terms of a small temple, a sanctuary of nature, which has not yet been degraded to the ‘landscape’, to a compensatory view

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world of nature without the divine and a man as a modern subject. The entirety of worldhood might be possible without a body. It is, moreover, necessary for the image to liberate the surplus of that human and inhuman, to truly glow at the moment of the sublime and visualize nature in its naturalness before it is dissolved in the biopolitical and venal space-time of the reconstruction of life as the technologically productive nature of artefacts, objects, things of the surrounding world. The portrait of a perspective-constructed image of the Renaissance in a modern image is derived from the return to the origin of the image as the openness of the world itself. Cézanne’s painting was at the same time a step outside the process of mechanically produced photographic images. The image of life is not its dissolution in the bare mechanical life. The turn of one type of physical presence in the living image of perspectivism’s value from the Renaissance to the modern world in the image that lives without the illusion of perspectivism opened up the basic possibilities of the gift of life itself. The avant-garde and its radical iconoclasm in the case of Malevich’s suprematism cannot be a necessary consequence of Cézanne’s turn of painting or of the paradigm shift of images that directly enters the world of life. On the contrary, it is a singular event devoted to the deconstruction of the modern perspective of the image. So, in this case, disembodiment is not a loss of physicality, like a tree, but only of its coextensive materiality. The feature of the neo-avant-garde movements in the art of the 1960s that determines the problem of the relationship between life and art led to the ultimate consequence. It was possible at the moment when physicality as materiality and as a hunt for living images came to the stage. In the place of the museum as an institution of modern art, a new place of life art took over the stage of a socio-cultural event. The artwork as the last refugium of the fiction and glory of the world enclosed in the dead space of exposition, which is only replacing the function of the secularized cathedral, and the real point of the end of the image’s history without the relationship with the ancient times goes to the theatricalization of the image of life. Performative art takes place in space-time life as a stage. It is the embodiment of life itself as artwork (Fischer-Lichte, 2004: 130–160). The influential philosopher and theoretician of contemporary art Dieter Mersch, in his plaidoyer for aesthetic performance beyond the metaphysical, traditional aesthetics as an autonomous discipline of the philosophical consideration of art in the historical opening of the beautiful and sublime, confirms that the performing arts are the most radical step back to the true meaning of art as an event. Performative art, according to Mersch, is art without works. It happens “in the centre of art” as a singular act, action and

of the subjectivity that is naturally related to nature. In Cézanne’s paintings, the world comes to the dawn, which still reveals the dimensions of the “fourth” (in Heidegger’s meaning: heaven, earth, divine and mortal), a world that cannot be disconnected only from a limited standpoint of man. Thus, Cézanne breaks with a painting of perspective, and at the same time with the Renaissance concept of the image. (…) The bodily organized attitude of the observer, his bodily presence in the world, is precisely what Maurice Merleau-Ponty saw as an example in Cézanne’s paintings. The painter experiences himself as a body among bodies, he still lives in ‘the world’s meat’” (Lüdeking, 1994: 352–353, 355).

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gesture of pure physicality. By letting the lively body in motion take on an iconoclastic image, only the body becomes a live picture. Visions of the historical avant-­ garde have been realized in such a way that the art system as life becomes meta-art. The temporality of this epochal event of image-to-body transition takes place as (1) open process, (2) project, and (3) moment (Mersch, 2002: 245). All neo-avant-garde art movements from the 1960sto the present use their self-reflexive procedures for interpretations of this category. Meta-art denotes art design, installation or space intervention, conceptual art, body-art, context-art and virtual art. Performativity assumes the stage as its venue. The emptiness and fullness of gesture, language and conceptual signs of the body in its (im)materiality and action change the social and cultural boundaries of art as a mimetic activity which still represents the shown—all these are moments of performances of performative art. But where? This is the fundamental question that most theoreticians of contemporary art would answer without a deeper analytical explanation. Where is the space of the performance done by neo-avant-garde performing arts? Is this space still the world or its socio-cultural creatures that no longer need the primary unity of the world as artwork and event? What if societies and cultures are just the masks of “madness without a consolation” of modern technology? Which meta-art is determined by this fatal irony of history? So, performative art ultimately prevails and abolishes the metaphysical duality of art and life. Its absolute event denotes the life of the body in the time of its dead nature. This means that the embodiment should simultaneously be the rupture of the body itself. It no longer has autonomy as the image of modern art is not an autonomous work of art, but self-presentation and self—the picture without a world. The signage system within a particular social or cultural context decides on what the image of a body is performing and what its meaning as such should be. Performativity, hence, encompasses a term that has emerged as a result of a linguistic turn in the philosophy of language in the late 1950s and early 1960s (Boehm, 2005: 28–43; Mersch, 2002: 245–250). As visual art is neither based on speech nor precedes it, language is thus not just a talking act of communication between speakers of different cultural worlds. Language is shown as an actively telling moment of practical articulation. The performative feature of language indicates its effectiveness. It performs in performance and action. The performativity of what is happening on stage requires the presence and presentation of the living body as an image, language and gesture. The meaning of the pronounced and presented body-in-action is not pre-­ transcendentally guaranteed. It might be contextual and depend on the situation. The meta-art performance, therefore, belongs to visual-auditory semiotics. Behind the body of the event on the stage is no longer a body as a sign, but what enables the body to show its visual-auditory presence at all. The notion of performance and performing art is not in what and how something is happening, but in the fact that it is happening through a living image (movie, video, virtual media) that speaks in its self-expression and self-reflection in the language beyond the peculiarity of the sign system. The sign is not a material symbol. It is even less a convention system. On the contrary, the sign encompasses a performative event of the openness of the life of the self that gives meaning to itself. Pessoa argued this accurately. Life is what we do from it. Travelling is a traveller.

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What we see is not what we see, but what we are. Life as an artistic event denotes a work of performative course in which the following are essentially related: (1) Being as an open process, (2) the existence of an artist-man in his project, (3) the temporality of the event of the moment. The ontological-temporal organization of performing art should be, therefore, an attempt to catch the moment by the actor’s physical existence on the stage as an open process and as a design of the possibilities of opening the new world. The body of an artist is an existential-temporal project of getting the moment in which there is a no longer metaphysical boundary between artists as actors and audiences as interactive participants. The distance was overcome and abolished the moment when performance art replaced the image as a living play of endlessly multiplied signs. We can see that performative art developed in the 1960s combines music, dance, theatre art, the art of installation and conceptual art, although the latter, as we have seen, might only be strictly considered to be the art of ideas as an “artwork”. This unification was by no means just the aspiration for a total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk), which was a programme of Romanticism. It is well-known that Novalis is postulated over Lautreamont as the fundamental dogma of avant-garde about the unification of art and life. Joining or overcoming and abolishing the distancing between art and life is essentially performing art referring to another kind of unification. It is far-reaching for the understanding of contemporary art. So, it is that the event of the moment of life in the open process and the artist’s existence project is about to return to the primordial sense of art. This is the way to overcome the limitation of the autonomy of the work, which, in the process of being independent of the mythical, religious and modern art of the image, has a post-metaphysical feature for a true event. The artist-on-stage cannot be a subject. He/she is not even an actor separated from the community of co-creators and co-members of an artistic event.8 Performative art, also, cannot be objectified. It does not create art artefacts, objects and things such as Duchamp’s ready-mades or Warhol’s serial created imagery from a mass media “image factory”. The art of the performative turn (performative Kehre) returns to the zero point of its own groundlessness. Therefore, art cannot be a feast, nor a ritual, nor an event in the service of a superordinate entity like God, the people or society to culture, in the autonomy of the work and the artist itself. Art is performing on the scene of an irreducible encounter with the disrupted world of the work/events of the historic Being, beings and essence of man as the moment in which everything is assembled. Through the embodiment, artists-on-­ stage enact flashes of the world. This event encompasses a singular project with

8  In analogy with Sloterdijk’s figurative words “thinker on stage” for Nietzsche’s philosophical overcoming of philosophy as metaphysics, here I introduce the figure of the artist instead of the philosopher. Nietzsche as a philosopher-artist prototypically performed in a different language, a way of thinking and articulating the spiritual life, unlike his contemporaries. The artist-on-stage figure is therefore not linked to the inevitable theatricalization of art in the world of the medially transformed reality of our time. Performative art denotes, first of all, a way of thinking about the body as a mode of presence-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-Sein), as Heidegger, in Being and Time, determined the relationship to be between Being and the world (Sloterdijk, 1986).

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primordial time. So, should where performing art perform its essence? Its place should no longer be in the world, but it is also not out-of-the-world because the inner and outer beings and the over-world God have disappeared from the stage with the emergence of modern science and technology. The world lost its essence at the time of modern nihilism as “madness without a consolation”, and there is no longer a reason for its existence, as modern man in such a depleted term of the nihilistic, abandoned world has lost his existence.9 With performance art, we find ourselves faced with nothingness. The meta-art of the neo-avant-garde not only has no more work but also its existential event is dancing on the edge of Nothing. The fact that the self-presentation and self-­representation of art live on stage is happening at all is closely related to Nothing. Life is united with the art of striking at Nothing. Thus, contemporary performative art as a mix of installation art, space intervention, virtual art and the art of interactive communication necessarily neglects the masks of Nothing—emptiness, silence, interstitial, immateriality (Fischer-Lichte, 2004: 129–142). As in Celan’s poetry and Beckett’s plays, performative art embodies and disembodies primordial signs of Being and Nothing in the temporalization of the body-on-stage. What is the irreducible paradox of the movements of the historical avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art? Especially since iconoclasm as the essence of the world without a picture is realized in the performance concept and the on-screen body presence/absence on the stage. Iconoclasm as a ban on the representation of a human figure in his materiality and bodylines is shown, at last, at the time of a performance or a live image without the world as a sign of an eventual absolute emptiness between the body and its sign. The ban of the visualization of the human body in paintings cannot have a religious-­ political-­aesthetic origin in the art of the avant-garde, which anthropologically realizes the metaphysics of perspectivism by seeing the art of the “new man” in the iconoclastic vision of the non-objectivity of reality as a scientific-technical construction. The neo-avant-garde does not return the lively body to the stage and return to the image that precedes the destructive potential of avant-garde art. The body that lives in the performing art of fiction also denotes the illusion of the living body. Why should that be going on in this direction? Because the unification of art and life presupposes a radical way of doing art and death. An example that would confirm this assumption in the case of contemporary art has never been realized. This is the case of suicide-on-stage as a negative possibility of art’s destruction of the body 9  The existential experience of death and project of acquiring of authentic time in the performative art of the neo-avant-garde can be terminologically obtained in a pure form based on Heidegger’s distinction of these ontological-metaphysical concepts in his attempt to overcome the limits of metaphysical humanism. And the impetus for understanding the performance aesthetic that Mersch takes is based on Heidegger’s thought assumptions. Indeed, even the essence of performing art as an avant-garde consequence can only be retrieved from the fertile healer hybrid concepts that serve the art of performance. Existence cannot be an anthropological “thing” of man, just as existence is not a “thing” of Being, but the overcoming of human-inhumane opposites in showing the essential dimension of art as disconnecting the world in its true possibilities. Heidegger explicitly showed the end of man as a subject or as a ruler of the age and image of the world, whose other face is unconditional modern nihilism, in “Brief über den Humanismus” (Heidegger, 1978).

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image. Death as a violent but conscious break, not as a living manifestation of dying as a process, is the only possibility of confirming the authenticity and credibility of the neo-avant-garde truth that art precedes life by justifying the meaning at all. Life is nothing but the event that we get from it. Life for neo-avant-garde art is performative Nothingness, to which only the artist gives meaning. It should be possible, therefore, to distinguish between two types of bodies: 1 . The incarnation of existence in the flesh (to be the body), and 2. The embodiment of existence (to have a body). This is the distinction between the occurrence (phenomenon) of physical existence in performance and semiotic physicality/corporeality as a spiritual sign (Fischer-Lichte, 2004: 139). Body language as a contingency and body language as a spirit (existence) are two different modes of body performance on the stage. But both are just articulations of the same: the openness of life as an artistic work/body that is happening there. In this conditional differentiation, the Cartesian dualism of body and spirit (res extensa and res cogitans) can no longer be in action (Danto, 1999). The body in performative art is not a mere mechanical stimulus. It encompasses the spiritual correlation of existence as a project at the moment of the event. It is the only artist-on-stage. He/she can urinate, cut veins, “undo” his or her gender with all forms of piercing, apply body art in the experience of the transgression of the body as such, and so on. The artist of performance can, finally, ritually devour the human body (meat) by examining the limits of humanism and cannibalism. In twentieth century painting, the work of the British artist Francis Bacon is directed to this assemblage. The possibilities of body destruction are no longer significant to the essence of performing art. These are the outer facets, the experiences, the questioning of the social consciousness taboo, the cultural boundaries of the various communities according to the gloom. In all these surface observations, theoretical explanations of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the post-structuralist criticism of languages, as well as the various discourses of cultural sciences are sovereign (Jencks, 1995). But all those theoretical insights that deal with the subjects of representation, the unconscious, the cultural barriers in the perception of what is visible to the ideologically obscured observer’s mind do not gain insight into the essence of contemporary iconoclasm or the iconoclasm of contemporary art. For this reason, it is always easy to pretend that social and cultural criticism denotes a self-explanatory tool/purpose of contemporary visual art. Therefore, today, traditional art criticism or art history as iconology and hermeneutics are speechless when they are faced with the neo-­ avant-­garde. They no longer have anything to say about the event of the moment and the sense of the performance. For those matters, Wittgenstein’s remarkable saying is valid: whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. So, it is silence as the absence of speech or as a meeting of the body/voice with that of Nothing, the oneness of what precedes speech as a performing art. Testing beyond the body’s physical existence on stage brings together performative and conceptual art (video and sound installations). The problem is that even understanding the events of contemporary art from the horizons of psychoanalytic-cultural (visual) studies cannot be an

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appropriate means of interpretation. The best example of this claim is surely represented by Arthur C.  Danto’s body and contemporary art analysis. The analytical philosopher of art, who transformed everyday life into art after art, especially in the analysis of Pop Art and “Warhol as a philosopher”, became a trap of Lacanian deconstruction of unconscious language. For contemporary art, it is completely irrelevant, since it is not a matter of crisis interpretation, doubt in the representational possibilities of art at all, which, at last, represents nothing but the context it utilizes and leads to new socio-cultural situations. The problem is therefore not in the ideological collision of the meaning of images in virtual culture. So, that is exactly why W. J. T. Mitchell built a theory of the visual or pictorial turn. The problem lies in the notion of the paradox of avant-garde and neo-avant-garde art. This paradox can be summarized as follows. The iconoclasm of contemporary art is not that the figure of the human body can no longer be relevant to contemporary painting, but that the return of the image to the world is not possible. It is fiction and illusion as it is the same as the figure of the human body on the stage of performance that deals with the examination of the limits of the human and inhumane. Also, it is not possible to return to the world at all, because there is no real basis for such a world on which the image of controversy is based, the image of objects as ready-­ mades, the image of mass media reality (Malevich–Duchamp–Warhol or Suprematism–Dadaism–Pop Art). We might call such a world a society or culture of the spectacle (Debord, 1995).

5.2.4  Spectacle and Virtual Art The body-on-stage is just a performance medium of the spectacularization of the place where performative art is happening. The answer to the question of where it is going on, whether it is in the world at all, was given by the Situationist movement and its theoretical leader Guy Debord. Neo-Marxist rhetoric and practices of Situationist movement art in the 1960s was the answer to the question of the metamorphosis of the body from the non-objectivity picture in the body. Neo-Marxism in theory and the neo-avant-garde in the art of Situationism was the answer to the question of how to overcome the abolition of the limits of art and life. The place or space-time events of contemporary art as its end is not a desacralized space of post-­ modern extravagance (museums of contemporary art—Bilbao, Graz, Paris), even less apocalyptic spaces of the megalopolis that squatters and homeless people inhabit, such as outdated and abandoned spaces of industrial architecture of classical modernism. The place of events of contemporary art as a performative-­conceptual turn should be precisely the last remaining place of the collapse of the world’s worldhood—the society of the spectacle. It is not somewhere fixed, but it virtually reaches out of everywhere and nowhere as a secular vision of the divine voice in the mystical vision of Angelus Silesius:

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God is a pure nothing, untouched by now or here: the more you reach for him, the more he evades you. (Silesius, 1986, I. 25)

It is the society of the spectacle that is the pure emergence of political power. The spectacle transforms the world economy into the world of economics. In this last act of the transformation of the image of the world into the spectacle of the socio-­ cultural power of image over the world, the reign of the modern iconoclasm of the scientific-technical creation of being as goods is taking place. So, the fetishism of the image/goods corresponds to the image of a spectacle of economics that governs all areas of reality. The spectacle in the socio-cultural feature of the space-time art symbol is an imaginary and the real power of the body is a commodity. However, it is a fictitious and illusory place for the reconciliation of life and art as a world economy, politics and culture. Guy Debord and the Situationist neo-avant-garde movement, which left a trace in experimental film, complete the narrative of the end of art by ultimately prevailing in the abolition of the form in which art occurs in the world. The form of the spectacle of the economy/world has its image in contemporary virtual art. The space for performative, conceptual and virtual art should be determined by the society of the spectacle. In that assemblage, culture appears as a new ideology of the picture of the world. So, the world is socially cultured in a multitude of fractal and fluid identities, and its image denotes a fictitious and illusory body that is alive and on display. Art in the digital age cannot avoid the point of its spectacle of the image, but the fact is that its medium is at the same time its message, as its meaning is contextually defined in the sign of the system of medial reality (Lovejoy, 2004). The life of contemporary art in the digital age is bounded by the limits of the society of the spectacle. We are moving around the circle of empty signs. Undoubtedly, this world of global information capitalism has reached out to the absolute hyper-reality of the production of goods as image-fetishism. The contemporary body in performative-conceptual art goes beyond the neo-­ Cartesian duality of the appearing and semiotic body. It now resides in a new kind of post-modern digital-virtual environment. We can say that it is a simulated environment or a surrounding world created through new information-communication technology. In this way, our concept of physical becoming is quite different. In the space-time of the new image in the society of the spectacle, which presents a new visual telepresence of the body (video, television, mobile phones, digital photography, interactive cinema, computer-generated pictures of the world), it is necessary to change human perception and consciousness. Simultaneous timing and immaterial space without distance transform, of course, the human to the inhuman. The semiotics of art decides what life is all about, from Romanticism to the neo-avant-­ garde in various ways—visionary, poetic and performative—and the artists who spoke to art overcome and abolish in the artistic event of life itself. But is this inhuman life made from biotechnology, biogenetics and biopolitics still life as a work of art or a mere artificial artefact of contemporary biology that plays God as an artistic experiment with what is left of the world?

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5.3  Biopolitics Against Life? 5.3.1  Art Without a Human How much does contemporary art still need humans? The question is not absurd. It applies not only to the pluralism of art majors and the formation of an apparent multitude of arts (event art, land art, media art, communication art, video art, net art, interactive live art) concerning the perceptive powers a contemporary user of art practices. It is a fact that, with the flourishing of media environments and new technological environments in which art expands as a pictorial-textually unviable iconoclasm of the contemporary world of information-communication, it might be inevitable to pose a question of the notion of art without the world. The question of how much humans are still needed to make art can finally be reduced to Heidegger’s “turn of Hegel’s questions”. How much humanity is still possible if it is no longer necessary to be what is metaphysically and historically determined as its essence and existence? The anthropological definition of a man, such as in the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner, as the creature of eccentric positionality—who, unlike the animal, is essentially destined to escape from the centre of nature and its immediate nature—shows that man is an eccentric ruler of the techno-morphic world (Plessner, 1975). Art at the time of the New Era, which more philosophically precisely points to the essence of things from the sociological notion of modernity, according to which the notion is defined by historically modern art, the age of the historical avant-garde, neo-avant-garde, post-modern art and all its derivatives, corresponds precisely to the age of the world-picture. Eccentric positioning is that which is deeply inhuman in a human as Other. The human in his eccentric positioning already needs technique as his Other natural environment. And since it is essentially the technique of enframing (Gestell) the epochal destiny of Being as a scientific and technical dispositif of creatures, which goes back to the essence of poiesis as producing creatures from Being, then it is an art in its original sense close to art as the event, not available beings. Art in the strict sense of the word does not need a human for eccentric positionality because it is already contained in its technological destiny of Being. As an essentially indefinite and inexcusable being of mediating life as such, a human in an anthropological sense is a technologically created cyborg that does not justify its life more than art, but the self-production of life as the artificial nature of the body gives it its final meaning.10 The turn was already on the foundation of what Heidegger  “There are several consequences to taking seriously the imagery of cyborgs as other than our enemies. Our bodies, ourselves; bodies are maps of power and identity. Cyborgs are no exception. A cyborg body is not innocent; it was not born in a garden; it does not seek unitary identity and so generate antagonistic dualisms without end (or until the world ends); it takes irony for granted. One is too few, and two is only one possibility. Intense pleasure in skill, machine skill, ceases to be a sin, but an aspect of embodiment. The machine is not an it to be animated, worshipped and dominated. The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of our embodiment. We can be responsible for

10

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“apocalyptically” saw as the accident of modern technology as “madness without consolation”. The possibility that art no longer has anything to do with the human denotes the only remaining necessity. It derives from the neo-avant-garde destiny of art as a meta-art of living in a performative-conceptual turn. So, the dehumanization of art articulated by Ortega y Gassett shows itself today in a new turn—the art of transhumanization. Aesthetics is currently possible and necessary only as a transdisciplinary science or the theory of the world’s aesthetics, just as a human might be possible and necessary only in a post-human adventure of its end in the era of biopolitics (Agamben, 2003; Foucault, 2008; Sloterdijk, 2000). Spinoza has been philosophically building the foundation of modern determinism. The concept of the autonomy of modern art as self-causal and the self-legislation of the mind (causa sui) derived freedom as a “constrained necessity”. Autonomy has a paradoxical, unbundled, deterministic line. To understand our world as the physical and life power of cosmic-natural forces acting on the deterministic chaos theory, it would be credible that it is no longer a constant change in scientific paradigms in the clarification of phenomena and laws’ nature. The change of scientific paradigms, in the sense of the reversal of Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm, denotes the result of the changes that have already been made to the observer, the artist and the scientist as a chaotic field of life, which shows itself as an open process, project and moment. Therefore, the theory and practice of performing art, as we have seen, might be something autonomous and relieved of the relationship with the event in the changes of the paradigm of social and natural sciences, as they are only conditional (Best & Kellner, 2001).

5.3.2  Cyborg—Transgenic Art—The Other World Cyborg denotes a dead nature of the body. All the hybrid concepts of contemporary art and the theory of it testify to the articulation of art thinking that has itself produced life as a real fiction, and not vice versa. In the introduction to his study of virtual art, Oliver Grau talks about the realized iconoclasm of contemporary art and the image science that supports the epistemological foundation for virtual art (Grau, 2003: 2–23). The strategies of new media create the conditions for such an already occurring turn. The interaction between a “living environment” and “real-time” within the space of virtuality takes place as the life of a cyborg body of a post-­ human species. Virtual art, hence, does not happen anywhere else than “here” and

machines; they do not dominate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they. Up till now (once upon a time), female embodiment seemed to be given, organic, necessary; and female embodiment seemed to mean skill in mothering and its metaphoric extensions. Only by being out of place could we take intense pleasure in machines, and then with excuses that this was organic activity after all, appropriate to females. Cyborgs might consider more seriously the partial, fluid, sometimes aspect of sex and sexual embodiment. Gender might not be global identity after all, even if it has profound historical breadth and depth” (Haraway, 1991: 180).

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“there”, since the term “here” as a phenomenological-spatial term of perception of what “here” is real can no longer be in line with reality. Virtuality is not imaginary space or fictitious time, but as Grau argued, a living environment in real-time. It is alive in the dead body of contemporary art and the scientific paradigm of consciousness as the coherence of the events of consciousness in the homogeneous space and the linear perspective of time. The case we are faced with in the form of virtual art and its “reality” in the meanings of virtual time is far-reaching for the notion of the life of contemporary art. The development of the space-time of virtual art is, in fact, based on genetic algorithms or images of evolutionary processes. However, it encompasses a link to the scientific research of presence (technology, perception, psychology) and the research of artificial life (bioinformatics). In this relationship of scientific research as bioscience, art cannot be reflected as a subject of possible scientific research into the process, project and moment of its life, but it has itself been introduced as an autonomous interdisciplinary part of the development of contemporary technology of the image (Grau, 2003: 7). Science and art are realized in life by changing forms and inner codes, not vice versa. That is a reason why the debate about the end of the avant-garde in art has long been the domain of contemporary art and its images without the world which belongs, speaking in the terms of Stefan Zweig, to the yesterday world. It should be quite clear that in the contemporary artistic discourse, biopolitics takes primacy as the new identity politics of contemporary art. How is it possible that the notion of politics is tied to art? It must be said though that we are far from agreeing with Groys’ concept of the repoliticization of art in the global age. First of all, because the politics of identity are nothing political in the narrow sense, but an anthropological-cultural mark for the fundamental feature of post-modern identities in the age of globalization (Paić, 2005). All sociological analyses and category-­ leading theoreticians of post-modernism and globalization, such as Manuel Castells, Ulrich Beck and Arjun Appadurai, are reflected in the actions/events of contemporary art practice. Without a scientific analysis of globalization and its consequences for the cognitive-receptive powers of our identity configuration in the new assemblage of biopolitics (the alliance of genetic technology, global capital, and bioethics as the ideology of the “healthy life” of all beings on the planet), contemporary art could not be a credible subversive-critical reflection of what is happening now. When art in contemporary times no longer leaves traces of objectification—works, ready-mades, objects from the surrounding world—or traces of subjection in the sense of avant-garde art manifestations of the first half of the twentieth century (Micheli & Mario, 1979), the question of how to preserve the memory of the performative-­conceptual events, processes, interventions, ideas, concepts, interactive discussions and installations in the area remains. This is the problem of the documentation and musealization of contemporary art. Groys’ analysis of contemporary art documentation in the era of biopolitics simply shows the practical problem of today’s situation. Preserving memories of what has happened does not have a data archiving function because the concept of the museum as a warehouse of historical time deposits is inadequate for the idea of a museum of contemporary art. Groys’ unpretentious theoretical contribution to the

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question of the meaning and the idea of art in the time of biopolitics in a bizarre way assures us of the defect of all the theoretical expectations of the “great return” as the rejuvenation of art from the spirit of fiction and illusion, reality, beauty, the sublime, aesthetic Being versus informational Being, the reconstruction of partial aesthetics and so on. In this spirit of the “great restoration or rebirth” of art as the “new salvation” of the old fundaments (Great Awakening), only nostalgic historical, cultural conservatives and authentic art-fundamentalists can have their expectations met. What did Groys show in his essay without major theoretical pretensions? The only thing that needs to be done for the realization of the iconoclasm of contemporary art in life is an image of an artistic event which is by its very nature an iconoclastic and virtual space for storing images.11 Digital photographs are technical means of protecting art as events-in-life and life-as-events of oblivion or failure. Art cannot go beyond its epochal shadow of life for which it sought its end in various ways. On the contrary, what is left of its life is only the dead nature of the human’s body as the obsolete being of current technology. Art in the era of biopolitics as the global socio-cultural power of the reign of human life manifested in human genetics, biomedicine and biotechnology marks the transition from a picture of the end of man to a post-human image adventure that generates its own life as biology, new technology and contemporary art generate the entire reality of images without the world. If the end of the twentieth century marked the era of biology and genetic technology as methods of human intervention in the process of evolution, then contemporary art finally gained the space of its realization in the idea of overcoming and abolishing the fiction and illusion of art in favour of life as a pure activity. Generating a “new picture of the world” from the spirit of biology and genetic technology—human genome mapping—is not a substitute for the idea of creativity but a path to the necessity of art without God, nature and humans. The talk of “transgenic art” (Oliver Grau) denotes only a radical consequence of speech on the end of art in the era of the scientific and technological self-production of life. The end of art is, hence, redesigning the world as post-human adventures of hybrid creatures. Life in such a new constellation becomes artificial, and the art that does not present or represent it already participates in its virtual-digital generation as artificial life images transcend its immanent boundaries. This is the state of the “eternal present”. The experiment represents the keyword of modern scientific methods. This is at the same time the only remaining word to understand the meaning of contemporary art. Experiment means art’s life in the world as an open process, project and moment.  “This also reveals the deeper reason why art documentation now serves as a field of biopolitics— and reveals the deeper dimension of modern biopolitics in general. On the one hand, the modern age is constantly substituting the artificial, the technically produced, and the simulated for the real, or (what amounts to the same thing) the reproducible for the unique. It is no coincidence that cloning has become today’s emblem of biopolitics, for it is precisely in cloning—no matter whether it ever becomes reality or forever remains a fantasy—that we perceive life as being removed from its site, which is perceived as the real threat of contemporary technology. In reaction to this threat, conservative, defensive strategies are offered which try to prevent this removal of life from its site by means of regulations and bans, even though the futility of such efforts is obvious even to those struggling for them” (Groys, 2008: 64).

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The experiment defeated, far from any kind of Ernst Bloch’s utopia, has nothing to do with the notion of utopia, even less of the world. Life is a stripped-down art of scientific-technological experimentation at every moment of its adventures and at all times in confrontation with Nothing. In the era of biopolitics, the artist is reduced to experiments with life as an “anthropological machine” (Giorgio Agamben). He denotes the “image” of his birth and “creates” based on an essentially changed image of reality that transforms our perception of space and time, our experience and our understanding of an essentially closed world. Biopolitics is hence not the age of the art of life itself under the conditions of the scientific and technological power of global capital that transforms life into goods/image in the society of the spectacle. We should note that its destiny is finally determined by the techno-genesis of artificial worlds.

5.4  Conclusion This is a time that, in addition to witnessing the “messianic” expectations of Heidegger of the necessity of art as the event of the openness of the new era of Being and time, opened up the event instead of the apology of the “madness without a consolation” of modern technology. The picture without the world sovereignly governs our lives. Does a contemporary human still need art if he does not need its picture anymore? At the end of the 402ndth fragment of the Book of Disquietude, Fernando Pessoa writes: In this metallic age of barbarians, only an excessively systematic cultivation of our faculties of dreaming, analysis and attraction can safeguard our personality from degenerating into nothing or into a personality indistinguishable from others. (Pessoa, 1991: 232)

The other world still needs other art. The only question remains: is there any chance and necessity for such a world beyond the “madness without a consolation” of the life that is governed by this “blue-eyed abandonment of the uncertainty of everything”? The need for other art derives from the need for the other world. Does it possess its image in the iconoclasm of contemporary art or is such a world important beyond any possible and necessary picture? The answer to that question is the answer to the question concerning the reasons why the historic avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde from Malevich and Duchamp to Beuys always referred to an alternative world of deity from anthroposophy and theosophy to the New Age. The quest for the other world must first answer the question of the possibility—the necessity—of that divine in the world without sense and essence. But that goes beyond the boundaries of the iconoclasm of contemporary art. This is a matter of art in the age of cyborgs and other hybrid beings that surpass the image of the human. Also, this is a question about the meaning of art as the primordial opening of the world. At a lecture on January 19, 1972 in the Art Arena Folkswang in Essen, in response to the furious and indignant attitude of one member of the audience in the debate on

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contemporary art, Joseph Beuys pronounced the key thought of the entire history of art when he was blamed for constantly just talking about God and the world but not about art: But God and the world are art.

Can there even be art without God and the world?

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Chapter 6

Event of the Moment: Time in Contemporary Art

6.1  The Permanent Revolution: Time of the Avant-Garde The newest aesthetic reflections of the “puzzle” of contemporary art speak about a paradigm shift. In the place of the entire range of modern art categories with the key notion of the autonomy of the work of art, fluid concepts are being formed that seek to capture the singular event of the new art in its exceptional act of overcoming modern subjectivity. Whoever wants to understand contemporary art in the meanings of, for example, the neo-avant-garde movements of the 1960s to the present must go beyond any apology of the subject, as it was a weak post-modern subject. Changing the paradigm can be defined as leaving the aesthetics of the work in favour of the new aesthetics of the event (Mersch, 2002). It implies that breaking with modern art cannot be as radical as it was for the avant-garde breaking with the traditional art of painting. It is enough to point to the introduction of the concept of the retro-avant-garde to explain the phenomenon of the Neue Slowenische Kunst in the 1980s in Eastern Europe. Changing the direction of original avant-garde flows requires a different relationship with time. While the avant-garde of Malevich destroyed the concept of time as a transition from the past to the present without violent fractures, the destruction of the image as a representation of what the modern world is is radically derived in the same matrix of linear time as the removal of a time ecstasy of the past on account of the other two and the future. That might be a reason why avant-garde art is truly new art. Its era marks the time of the permanent revolution, which was the conception of the history of Leon Trotsky and is the will of any totalitarian movement. The permanently novel does not generally know the limits of old destruction. It is never renewed because restoration should be a result of obsolescence, of the overwhelming status of modern art. The neo-avant-garde, on the contrary, cannot be a restoration of the historical avant-garde, but only its radicalization by other means.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_6

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In the place, therefore, of the destruction of traditional linear time with which the avant-garde has been dealt with, contemporary art as a momentary event—conceptual, multi-media, virtual—tries to deconstruct time as a circle of understanding without taking one of the dimensions of time: past, present, future (Grau, 2003). The categories of works of the earlier shortened period of modernity, such as Salvador Dalí’s designations—imagination, symbolization, unconsciousness, originality and form—, have not disappeared. But all of this does not matter to them anymore. With the concepts of the modern philosophy of subjectivity, which have become relevant to modern art, how is it possible to want to engage in dialogue with some collective act of artistic practice in which it might be obvious that the idea of​​ modern art as the subjectivity of time is deconstructed from the inside and outside? The aesthetic experience of contemporary art has found its foundation apparently in the same spirit of the strategy of destroying old forms. The strategy is known. Undoubtedly, it is an avant-garde rejection of the presentation, form and representation of art as an institution of society with the rule of global capital. If there is no longer sufficient reason to interpret the work of art as something “objective”, emanating from the subject of the divine and holy, which concepts must be accessed by events of performing, conceptual and installation art? The answer must have been known in advance. These are performance, permanence, ecstasy, event, intervention, meditation and reshaping. All these are “new” terms for the mysterious but are so close to the ordinary, banal world of life, making the moment of art, which no longer has any subject in the sense of the subject matter of the real world as something lasting, present in its presence as “the eternal” as an illusion of objectivity itself.

6.2  Flash Moment The other and different history of contemporary art is therefore created on the ruins of the avant-garde. It should only be possible as an awareness of the strictness of one’s subject. Performances of conceptual events are moments and events in space-­ time. After the experiences of trans- and post-modernity—the fundamental problem of contemporary art derives from an attempt at understanding time. So, it seems that this statement is trivial. As if that was not the problem of modern art. What did Cezanne’s and Picasso’s inner consciousness of the possibilities of the image as a deconstruction of perspective in the medium of image art find as an answer to the question of the time in which the geometry of reality and the dissolution of the subject of representation in general occurs? It was no longer a question of purity of form. There was even less torment with what to do with figurative painting in the era of the materiality and hyper-reality of the world (Seel, 2003). Mersch’s claim is that contemporary art thinks of time not in objects, not in images, not in the media, but in such a fragile moment of the event in the new world of objects/images/media as a way of staying in a collapsed space, which arises from the abandonment of the concept of subjectivity. The new position of art in the gap

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between still standing on the path as if it is only an illusory act of displaying some of materiality and the events with which arise and disappear the figures’ subjects as actors of what accountability itself enters considers aesthetics as an issue of new temporality and spatiality. For art itself, this does not mean just giving up the logic of acting on the principle of the new from cognitive sciences and new technologies. It is not important to change the paradigm of art’s status in this world in the first place, as technology and new media make illusory examples of traditional film and photography. The mediality of the media in the condition of constant change represents a problem of a lower rank than the answer to the question: what is the general meaning of the events of contemporary art? The performative-conceptual turn in contemporary art can be analogously understood as a kind of iconic turn concerning the linguistic turn in the post-modern philosophy of subjectivity. If Wittgenstein in the philosophy of language proclaimed the purity of the statement to the extent of the limit expressed as a singular grammatical realism, then the continuation of the practice of the art of performance and conceptuality in the horizon of the meta-avant-garde with the collapsed world of global capitalism should be a new form of radical relativity. The eventuality of the event takes place in a “cyclical timeframe”. The living person does not imitate life as a sequence of linear time, in a time that can no longer be retrieved as a fixed place of the past. Strictly speaking, the past denotes the relative place of the prose of time caught as a means to art artistically leaning into the performatively-conceptually alive artist with its event. He/she ironises, perforates, revives the standing model of modern art. This refers to the past as an emphasis of the differences in time. The overall work of Pop Art and especially Andy Warhol in contemporary art represents perhaps more than mere banalization exalted by the creation of objects from everyday industrial life as the subject of a new art practice precisely because it relates to time as a flow of information (Danto, 2000). The historical dimension of the objective of the media-real-world figure (MM and Mao) of deprived post-history like the end of Baudrillard’s narrative in his theory of simulacra and simulations is relative to the history of the “schizophrenia of the society of the spectacle”. What happens in such a time is the repetition, replication, duplication of the same real templates that the world produced from cultures of the industry of spectacle. A spectacle denotes an event of depleted time as a flash of a moment. So, it encompasses a post-modern expression to replace the celebration of the feast. The elements for the formation of the aesthetic performative-conceptual paradigm turn in contemporary art are already changing topology. What Heidegger in seminars in Provence during late 1960s named the topology of Being as the expression found for a new place where the openness of Being and the Earth is happening can also be applied to the place of contemporary art. Of course, this is no longer a traditional museum or gallery but irreducible places of ​​the world’s life—from factories to streets, from the Earth as a planet to the cosmo-kinetic space of interplanetary spheres, such as one of the recent projects of Slovenian contemporary artist Dragan Živadinov. The loss of a fixed location, such as an atelier or a museum or gallery as a space for displaying the history of pictoriality in the sequence of time series results in the loss of space in a classical modern art institution. This space is

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“dead”, as is the case with the art of opera, ballet, classical music and painting art. But the “death” of the art of rendering does not mean the descent or overcoming of museums as the decadence of lichen spaces of the modern world (of art) (Belting, 2002). Here we have simply the consequence of the disintegration of the traditional, hence the modern image of the world, which is formally terminated in post-­ modernism. The museum as secularized “sanctity” art without the divine and sacred places of consecrated elevations of history has transformed into a modern institutionalized pluralism of styles and chaotic weather events, yet not much is changing in the understanding of time. This is evidenced by attempts at restoring the event in the work of contemporary artists with performative-conceptual motifs. In our case, an indicative example might be Tom Gotovac’s performance. How can the time of their performances be preserved as an interception in the past that stands only as a multimedia mound of totalitarian institutions of imaginary reality in a real root of socialism in the former Yugoslavia from the 1960s to the 1980s? Is it not the same as the paintings of a modernist painter? Works and events are two very different things. The topology of art as a discontinuous event in the world without the museum takes place as a new musealization of the past (Lübbe, 1992). What denotes the time in this process? The open spaces for contemporary art assume a different relationship to reality, body and speech. The performative-conceptual turn creates the order of the symbolic representation of art as an event composed of texts, music, excerpts, body shots in action and agency. Performances, happenings and actions, and installations as scattered objects/images in the space require penetration beyond merely subjective time as the time of the internal current of the “actor”. The body’s life on the move or action as a sign of the relationship between events cannot be a subject of artistic rendering, but a sign of difference. That is the reason why all contemporary art is a de-realized space. It is non-standard in terms of static objects stored in museums’ storage. On the contrary, it is the foundation of the events as a moment of live presence. Wherever there is the possibility of transforming the body as a spiritual-symbolic movement of the motion, movement and images into the strata of the act of nullifying the previous state of affirmation of the body, the avant-garde adventure continues as an absolute dynamism. The photo is outdated and goes into video art, and this is the direction of the cybernetic art of a virtual event in a non-space. Time, undoubtedly, has represented the true foundation of contemporary art. But space is no longer a problem because of its topology—Nothing. This is a phenomenological description of the “subject” status of modernity in the toolbox. Whether a black hole in the virtual “space” really is a new artistic event, as the American underground philosopher Crispin Sartwell rightly asserts, the status of a computer virus concerns the future of our art (Sartwell, 2003). By surpassing the oppositions of the spirit-body, imagination-kinetics, the transition from the performative-­ conceptual turn to the new dimension of contemporary art as an auto-poetical self-­ production of the immateriality of the sign denotes a moment when the ontology of the things of modern art becomes obsolete.

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6.3  Clocks and Calendars: Dalí—Darboven But is it possible in the notion of the time in this condition to achieve a break with the previous paradigm? The works of modern and contemporary art can be signposts to attempt to interpret the events of the moment. There are two possible examples of the relationship between the “presentation” of temporality in painting and photography: the surrealist works by Salvador Dalí, especially the oil painting titled La Persistance de la mémoire from 1931, and the conceptual works of the German artist Hanne Darboven (Madox, 1990; Pohlen, 1983). These works have been selected because they explicitly point to the problem of modern and contemporary art in discussing temporality. This concerns, of course, clocks and calendars. The mechanism of the clock as a decorative mechanical timing device appears as a constant in artistic works from mannerism to photographic conceptual works today. Dali’s clocks are set in landscapes from “critical-paranoid” solitude to dream places as a kind of illustration of psychoanalytic exercises from Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. The durability of memories is opened in the landscape of molten clocks. It is not the breakup of the temporal system but the disappearance of the possibility of the disappearance of the permanent structure of matter. Time is timed within the material world of the symbol. It is not the subjective space of mechanical objects, but the “dream time”, the pure virtuality of the spiritual encounter of man, nature and the cosmic consciousness of time. Unlike de Chirico’s metaphysical painting of time as a broken past of myth, Dalí’s painting depicts real space without depth and the mythical background of the narrative. In the landscape of melting clocks, the work and the event of art denotes a symbolic act of pointing to the trans-material structure of Being. What happens in time is the object’s distance; it is its obsolescence, albeit the loss of fullness and strength. So, it is an imaginary artistic act to preserve the memory as a true matrix of real-time versus an hour like a fiction that shakes the passage of everything that is. The clock is a novel mechanism of time as images of the world. Undoubtedly, it is a symbolic representation of the object’s rule of matter. The obsession with melted clocks and the amorphous mass in transformations was Dalí’s sublime experience of the relationship between the imagination of dreams and the loss of the fixed identity of the subject. The memory of the Being-in-­ presence of matter decomposing takes place as a timed event that is impossible to show directly. Therefore, the overall painting of the radical surrealistic imagination might be somewhat different from the imbalance of time in the decomposition of the subject. The surrealistic time of modern painting makes the ultimate moment of preservation of objectivity an illusion and the paranoid fantasy of dreams a chaotic order of unconsciousness. The perception of such a time is not a lifetime of memories but of the time of the classical modern illusion of the moment mediated by the intersection of the inner landscape. Surrealism with Dalí in his paradigm of an artist portraying a time of a molten subject opens up space for the ultimate deconstruction

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of the “durability of memory”. Dali’s clocks are a disturbing system of signs of the over-real world, which no longer has any realistic object except the imaginary amazement of the subject’s critical paranoia. In contemporary conceptual art, the case of German artist Hannah Darboven testifies to the already changed paradigm of the work-event. Using an abstract series of numbers, the artist is not interested in the number as a mathematical problem but as a sign of timing and measuring Being. Time makes the essential existential structure of human life the content of consciousness and the meaning of Being itself. In the 1970s, different texts began to be incorporated into kinds of numeric letters. From Heine to Sartre, the texts transpired by an artist in his conceptual work are examples of deconstructions of the “big narratives” of modernity. Numerical system research and musical measurements in remarks that replace the image with the word-tone-symbol show the possibility of matching reality as a visible form of temporal prosthesis. In his work Kulturgeschichte 1880–1983, Darboven does not follow the external history of modern Europe as a calendar of long duration. The letter and the number, the tone and the music decode the temporal structure of penetration into the dematerialized and de-realized spaces of the world as a new spectacle of events at the time of the disappearance of the symbolic order of signs of the modern era. If molten gospel clocks still represent the remainder of a subject with which an artist meets in imagination and dreams as a workshop of the unconscious work of memory, Darboven’s work transforms time into a pure letter of différance (Derrida) that reveals the openness of meaningless history without a subject. There is no difference between the clocks and the calendars as the “subject” of the intervention of art practice in dealing with the problem of time, nor is it a reference to the paradigm shift in the world of visual arts. Differences are evident only as differences in consciousness about different approaches to temporality that is neither objective nor subjective. The time of surrealistic painting and the time of conceptual art (Dalí—Darboven) are two different times that arise from two different epochal features of Being. In the former case, it is the discontinuous continuity of modern art as the aesthetics of works, and in the latter case, the continuous discontinuity of contemporary art as the aesthetics of events. Art as an exceptional possibility of defining the meaning of the battle is in no case suppressed by the possibilities of the technology of its time. Thanks to the experience of the primary openness of the worlds, the game of the destruction/deconstruction of history is opened as pictures and letters, words and numbers, music and physical actions in a simple run that no longer has its place. Instead of the feast of mythical and religious times, art at the time of the moment of events, when a computer virus can become an artistic event, it becomes an obsessive game of cosmic and human time.

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6.4  Conclusion The discovery of epochal differences between worlds shows only that the clock and the calendar do not mean the same for a medieval, modern and post-historical man. Historiated times of our age deprive us of any possibility of understanding the image of the world of art of old times as the time of “great art”. Heidegger gave special attention to art in his last texts. In his analysis of Cézanne and Klee, he came to the insight that the essential difference of truth corresponds to the essential history of Western art (Seubold, 1997: 234). Such an attitude opens a possible horizon for an understanding of time as a moment of contemporary art. The truth in art is the truth of the times of art in the world. But do we still know what we are talking about when we think the contemporary world is a global spectacle of aesthetic objects and events? Is this world more than its true image?

References Belting, H. (2002). Das Ende der Kunstgeschichte: Eine Revision nach Zehn Jahren (2nd ed.). C.H. Beck. Danto, A. C. (2000). The Madonna of the future: Essays in a pluralistic art world. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Grau, O. (2003). Virtual art: From illusion to immersion. The MIT Press. Lübbe, H. (1992). Im Zug der Zeit: The Aufenthalt in der Gegenwart. Springer. Madox, C. (1990). Salvador Dalí: Eccentric and genius. Benedict Taschen. Mersch, D. (2002). Ereignis and Aura: Untersuchungen zu einer Ästhetik des Performativen. Suhrkamp. Pohlen, A. (1983). Hanne Darboven’s time: The content of consciousness. Artforum, 21(8). Sartwell, C. (2003). Contemporary art: The state of the afterlife shock. Fortress, 1–2. Seel, M. (2003). Ästhetik des Erscheinens. Suhrkamp. Seubold, G. (1997). Das Ende der Kunst und der Paradigmenwechsel in der Ästhetik: Philosophische Untersuchungen zu Adorno, Heidegger und Gehlen in Systematischer Absicht. K. Alber.

Chapter 7

Figures of Resistance: Painting After the End of the Avant-garde

7.1  The Black Cross of the Retro-Avant-garde The fundamental feature of our age can be described with the paradoxical figure of the apocalyptic return. After the euphoria of the end of the possibilities and the reality of a historically-epochally completed world, we enter into a situation that no longer determines the self-production of a new one, but a new return to the sources that have already been fulfilled. The timelessness of what happened there was not something. On the contrary, it has not always been history that has been pursued in various ways to be revived in the present. Call it a replay effect. This was noticed at the beginning of the philosophical explanation of the concept of post-modernism as a kind of continuation of the historical avant-garde by other means (Kamper, 1988). When Slovenian philosopher Tine Hribar analytically demonstrated and reached the concept of the retro-avant-garde in the mid-1980s for an ontological determination of NSK’s total art (Laibach, New Collectivism and the Scipion Nasice Sisters Theatre), it was a hint at the fundamental difficulties in understanding contemporary art appropriate to the theory of discourse. The retro-avant-garde rests on the assumptions of the radicalized aspirations of the neo-avant-garde that, with the original avant-garde, potentials the image of the socialization of the life of art in the service of the totalitarian ideology of real socialism. The 1980s in Eastern Europe marked a kind of twilight of the Soviet type of totalitarianism. Returning to avant-garde sources was, therefore, an attempt at semiotic criticism of the sign of state-institutional pacification of neo-avant-garde art in Eastern Europe for the legitimacy of the political-ideological system of communism itself. The retro-avant-garde was not just a hint of the end of the avant-garde aspiration to revolutionize the social conditions of art production, but also the imminent bringing of the avant-garde idea—like the aesthetic and ideological paradigms of art—to its limits. The emblematic image of such a paradoxical movement, but only of its necessary possibilities, works on the assumptions of the avant-garde idea of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_7

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overcoming fiction and illusion in reality and the world of life, surely the reinterpretation of Malevich’s suprematist sign of painting—the black cross on the white surface. Instead of the square, which lost its revolutionary function and symbolic significance for the entirety of neo-avant-garde art at the beginning of the 1960s, the black cross opened traumatic places of semiotic pictures of totalitarian ideology. It did not refer to any mystical connection with the symbol of Christianity, even less to the possibility of so-called alternative gnostic or distinct pseudo-religious icons of Satanic sects. The meaning of this auto-referential semiotic approach was simple in finding a new tradition that could subversively and critically still defy the system of the ideological iconoclasm of the totalitarian practice of realistic socialism on exhortation. The NSK and especially the IRWIN group themed this term as something inexperienced for avant-garde art. How can we, with the help of the iconoclastic strategy of the retro-avant-garde, radically realize the idea of changing society through new art practices? Malevich’s Black Cross could no longer have any connection with the “red” system of subjugating new art as a legitimation ideology of communism. The superior sign of the signs was used as an iconoclastic hammer to devastate the image of a society based on the perversion of the original ideas of communism. It was the simultaneously iconic turn of the neo-avant-garde which lost its true meaning in the continuing inability of revolutionizing and other feelings. That search for the image as a subversive sign of the total revolution of the social conditions of real socialism was a legitimate retro-avant-garde procedure. Returning to the sources of the historical avant-garde as a movement of the permanent criticism of the ideology of totalitarianism and its institutional image (the essence) was a turning point in understanding the relationship between what is happening and what is happening now. Malevich necessarily needed to be rediscovered as a new icon for new goals of a radical relationship between life and art. The retro-avant-­ garde denotes a turning point in the realm of post-modern theory and its images open the way to today’s euphoria of the great return to fiction, illusion and the image’s realities in the era of the biopolitics of art. It was, of course, the icon of a cluster of ways to reveal the possibility of a new image that corresponds to the euphoria of return after the end of the art. In the sign of retro-avant-gardism, it is the essence of the historical relationship between art and the world. Symptoms of such a hermeneutic situation are everywhere. It should be evident that the talk of the retro-avant-garde cannot be just from the insight into the flawed ideology of modern progress. As in the cases of the theory of deterministic chaos and of visual arts, we witness the paradoxical self-­ determination of the necessity/contingency of the big narrative for the return to the image after its end. The apocalyptic tone in philosophy, paraphrasing Derrida, represented a retrospective of the time of this Being realized as a real opportunity for the event in the new order of phenomena (Derrida, 1999). If in contemporary theories of the nation in the age of globalization, it speaks of the end of both the nation and the rule of transnational corporations, then it is self-evident that the end of modernity at the same time assumes the return to nationalism to be certain. The same goes for all the phenomena of the historical world: the return of religion in

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secular society, the return to nature in an eco-fundamentalist worldview, the return of humanism in the age of biopolitics and post-humanism. Contemporary theories of art as interdisciplinary attempts to open what will be art in the age of digital world speak of the iconic turn in analogy with the philosophical exploration of performativity languages have collectively named the linguistic turn (Sachs-Hombach, 2005). Heidegger’s attempt to think of the consequences of this turn (Kehre) necessarily reveals itself as a new return to the primordial one that allows the boundaries of our scientific-technical era to be overcome. Therefore, the talk of returning to painting in this context is self-explanatory, as the talk of the return of figuration to be the subject of the new painting is the underlying reason for contemplating the conditions under which the reverse and apocalyptic return to the origin of the event is taking place.

7.2  How Are Objects Observed? How should we understand the retrospection of the pictorial of the image and the tendency of the return of figurative painting? It would be superficial to point out the saturation and fatigue of the audience through the hyper-production of video installations, performances and multimedia projects. It would also be inappropriate to say that we have an aspiration to nostalgia and the return to the traditional image if a contemporary artist decides to examine the possibilities of painting with the already obsolete media of painting. Painting is not conservative, just as cyber-art need not necessarily be progressive art. The question of media representation and art events in the retro-neo-avant-garde situation of exceeding the boundaries of the depicted and accomplished overrides the traditional metaphysical question of the truth in painting (Derrida) and the sense of the image in the era of its virtual-digital power. There is something entirely different. Figures of media resistance from seemingly yesterday’s world as pictorial figures point to the transfiguration of the image in the pluralistic art world (Danto, 1999). What is the image’s transfiguration? Certainly, in this concept, it is along the lines of the analytical philosophy of art which regiment the figure by overcoming in-picture; geometric shape-like models are a good example for Cubism painting. It is beyond the boundaries of the separation of high and low culture on the social level of understanding contemporary art. At the aesthetic level, however, the image’s transfiguration marks the crossing of boundaries between works of art, objects and things from the surrounding world and events of conceptual and performative art. Arthur Danto applies the concept of the transfiguration of everyday life as an expression of the common language of the world’s thought of life primarily in the new reality art images of our time, which are derived from Pop Art’s approach to reality. Such an approach requires insight into the medial mediation of reality. We cannot catch true everydayness by the cognition of what is real in itself but in the reality of a medially-produced picture of the reality that has precipitated in Pop Art and especially Warhol’s concept of painting as a real illusion of objects

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from everyday life (Foster, 1996). The image’s transfiguration, therefore, assumes a different notion of figures and figurative painting even after the end of the avant-­ garde. The consequences are visible in the contemporary world of art as an artificial space of images without a world. With the image’s transfiguration, no figure, no mere visible determinants of a human being disappear. What has disappeared has long since disappeared. It is the world and the human as the subject of the self-­ restitution of the world. The painter in the new situation of a retro-avant-garde or iconic turn is no longer one who opens the world’s worldhood but the object of the transfiguration of the image itself. Speaking in the sociological language of the theory of identity, its identity might be variable and reversible, as in the very concept of post-modern identities. Full openness and individualization of lifestyles in culturally pluralist societies have their proper expression in building an image of identity. Therefore, artistic styles can no longer be, because the world of life is designed from the aesthetic reality of the subject world. What survives in the era of pluralism and the disappearance of artistic styles is not an illusion of the autonomy of art towards other spheres such as society, politics and culture, but the image or visual identity of persons, objects and things. Through the image of itself, the language of visual communication is developed among the networked participants of the communication process. Contemporary art, therefore, in all its media—“progressive” or “conservative”— gains legitimacy only from the paralogical communication of the process of opening to the unqualified by the irreducible Other. Since it is no longer a society constituted as a realized utopia of the avant-garde but the world of spectacle as the networked cultural identity that connects the variability of form and fluidity (flow) in a relationship without a fixed place in the social hierarchy of roles, the problem of defining the boundaries of identity construction therefore arises. Nothing is more definable in anything else, but only becomes believable out of its autopoiesis. The figures of post-referential painting and figuration today no longer point to a transcendental signifier which gives meaning to, for example, the figure of the screaming Pope by Francis Bacon or eccentric and hyper-realistic portraits in paintings by Lucian Freud. Going back to painting is therefore not a reaction to hyper-production and trivia of event art that stimulates and provokes shocking social events in its performative-­ conceptual turn. The turn, in this case, cannot be nostalgia for the traditional image. The retro-neo-avant-garde approach to image transfiguration stems from something that goes beyond this painting. The media is not a message, as in McLuhan’s informationally closed circle of autoreferences of meaning. The medium through which the painting no longer presents in the work of contemporary artists, or more than the need to build the world of cultural identities as the visual identity of someone or something, necessarily appears as an iconoclastic means of deconstruction of an ideologically produced reality (Weibel, 2002: 570–670). Philosophical criticism as a contemporary theory of iconoclasm paradoxically responds to this phenomenon. In the background of the reign of the image as an iconic turn or pictorial turn, there is a paradox of the post-modern age of the second

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half of the twentieth century.1 After the break with traditional painting in media painting, which is already seen in the Russian avant-garde with Malevich, in the 1960s, art entered radically into a social event with a constructive turn of the picture into the very subject world that determines science, technology and society as a realized image of the world of life in the aesthetic of everyday life. This is evidenced by actionism, performative art, conceptual art and art installation. Painting moved into an event of life without showing it or imitating it but materializing it in the transfiguration of objects. The death of nature and the death of man, as historical-epochal events of the end of metaphysics, do not mean the definitive end of the image of nature and man as a pre-dictated world that is replicated in the spectacle of global capital. The visual culture of the scene and the presence of the event destroy the image with the means of the iconoclastic strategy of the avant-garde. In the place of an image as a work, a procession event or a visual act of anticipating a new reality occurs with new media—photography, film, video, digital images (Rebentisch, 2003). The performance of the body in the presence of the surrounding world as a place of the musealization of events does not require more painting than as its substitute basis for the self-reliance of “new images of the world”. The painting from that moment becomes a passatism and a regressive medium of the present Being. Body figures and the human face in motion live on stage and screen as live images of absolute presence. In the art event, it determines the relationship between the artist and the artist’s public. The time of video and cybernetic technology in the state of electronic reproduction finally destroys the aura of the genius of artwork and artists. Visual culture 1  In the request for the ultimate liberation of visuality from the reign of the symbolic construct of language as a text or the liberation of an image of iconology as an ideology of a sign that draws from the cultural sources the likeness of what appears in the picture to be seen because of the effect of the ideological function of language, Mitchell opposes his pictorial turn to Rorty and the philosophy of language derived by Wittgenstein. For him, the image has primacy in the semiotic sense of language. He is in the image of the “Other”, artificial, arbitrary production of a man who distorts the “natural” image. Language and its meaning system is death for the picture. Such a turn, however, is just a continuation of the same story that Wittgenstein tells in philosophy, post-­structuralism and semiotics. Mitchell does nothing radically in relation to his predecessors in the opinion of the deconstruction of the philosophy of language as metaphysics, but that instead of the reign of the word that determines everything it establishes a more difficult liberation of the area of pure visuals. It is self-evident that words and language codes are really “unnatural” in relation to the picture in the world. This is a violent intervention in the field of visual communication. The image possesses something primordial and unmistakable, which is by no means questionable, but is controversial in Mitchell’s view that the “attached” world through the ideological character of language, or its cultural limitation to the value chain, is just something “unnatural”. And that is the time, consciousness, history and all manifestations of symbolic mediation. Such deontologism of the picture is completely beyond the fundamental setting I made in this book of a picture without a world. Mitchell’s visual semiotics cannot reach the origin of the emergence of imagery at all because of time, awareness, history and symbolic mediation setting them mound in the background. The picture has its own time. It has its own consciousness, history and immanent symbolic mediation in all the “characters” of the show. So, the picture cannot be innocent, nor is it the world of the past, but it is born and disappears with the historical world in which it appears as a credible and authentic way of experiencing and understanding the meaning of that and such a world (Mitchell, 1986).

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completes this process in a simulation of events. Finally, image illusion cannot be a pictorial image illusion but an iconoclastic moment of image transformation in pure digital vision. Therefore, this is a media-constructed event without any rootedness or subject-object relationship. Paul Klee, in his diaries, intuitively understood the essence of the iconoclastic deconstruction of painting created by being a historical avant-garde: “Now the objects perceive me.” The eagerness of objects that obscure the subject in the painting process leads to the inability to continue the image of strength based on traditional trust in the medium. It is not just an image reworked with text and speech in the performing arts of our time. The image is a textualized medium and a visual message in contemporary communication. The fear of the overwhelming picture or, expressed in the language of contemporary video artist Nam June Paik, videocracy as the ideology of intimidation in the global era creates the expected effect of an iconoclastic withdrawal into the direction of a world without media fetishism. W. J. T. Mitchell summarized this paradox as follows: The fantasy of the image, the culture with which the images are completely dominated, is now becoming a real technical option on a global scale. (Mitchell, 1994: 15).

It should now only be possible to see that a paradoxical apocalyptic return or retro-neo-avant-garde iconoclasm does not mean a resurrection of a traditional image or a new apotheosis of painting against the world of art artefacts and events in the communicative networked society of the spectacle. As the visual culture of our time is pervaded by the paradox of the adoration of the image and the fear of them, so painting after the end of the avant-garde is captivated by all its hardships (Bürger, 2001: 186–192). One must certainly be inside avant-garde iconoclasm to show the human figure ban as an inappropriate act to a cult of the new. The figurative painting represents an anomaly in the radical concept of the avant-garde. The body and the human figure are beyond the traditional aesthetics of the beautiful and sublime. Images corresponding to the new age of scientific and technical objectivity are purely abstractions of images and their transition to a monochromatic space of the illusion of visibility. Therefore, painting after the end of the avant-garde represents a paradoxical return to the human figure as a picture of the decomposed world of visualization. Roughly speaking, from Bacon, Baselitz and Kiefer to L. Freud and all contemporary painters who follow the logic of new figuratively, the body is no longer a figurative entity separated from the predecessor world of the transfiguration of the real. The body in the pictorial “depictions” of contemporary artists, still using the media of painting, deconstructs the body itself. Figurativity, therefore, is the illusion of the representation of man as a being in nature, society and culture based on the open self-regulation of life processes. Such a body is nothing other than a de-realized cyborg in the situation of losing a sense of representation of figures of human character without reference to its cultural identity.

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7.3  Mediation of the Society of the Spectacle As its true concern is not what such a painting can still give all the art of the end of the avant-garde, if anything, but how painting in a figurative turn of the retro-neo-­ avant-garde designates the world of culturally conflicting groups in the visual communication of the global age, the boundaries of the image’s mediation at the time of the rule of video-logical paradigms should be a fundamental problem. This was evident in the attempts from Lucio Fontana to Yves Klein towards the deconstruction of the monochromatic image from the aspect of the situational or actionist approach to the subject of the image and the process of artistic creation (Klotz, 1999: 12). Penetration in the life of the image was the total project of extruding the external and internal moments of reality and illusion. The phenomenological interpretation of the eye as an intuitive-present media image seen within the limits of its perceptual possibilities, especially in the analyses of Roman Ingarden, raised the issue of the intersubjective feature of the artistic process in which the Other was a subject open to its own original viewing experience. Authentic figurative painting of the retro-neo-avant-garde can no longer be understood in the light of the phenomenological notion of the image. It stems from the important status of the image in the digital age. It is not, however, the original reminder of the original act of the artist as a genius, but a replication of the replicated and changed reality of the post-­ industrial society of information, communication and visual simulation of events. Since Warhol, painting in the post-modern turn has been an avant-garde idea. All that is the subject of the surrounding world becomes a medium of the universal banality of everyday life. Ready-mades and industrial landscapes are no longer objects. They are the form, content and meaning of any picture of the modern era. Thus, the figurative retro-­ neo-­avant-garde relationship to the world is to be applied in painting as well as in contemporary performance art, conceptual art, installation art, video art and cyber-­ art. It does not resurrect the living dead man through the mercy of other media. He has been revived already. And that should be the painting of the human figure because of the need for the illusion of the authenticity of that art as a work and event of individual authorship. That is a reason why we can name it by replaying the effect of the end of the avant-garde. In the place of the collectivism of the artistic practice of the neo-avant-garde movement, confidence in the inscrutability of individual artistic creativity is restored. This might be an important point of change of orientation in the space-time of contemporary art today. Collectivism is individualized. But the artist does not become a subjectively perceived governor of the nihilism of the global age. The return to the painting of figuration as well as any other return to our times, irrespective of nature, human or goddess, has represented an illusion as a new way of constructing a lifestyle. Nature in such an illusory return denotes a redesigned environment. Religion, anyway, becomes fundamentalism as a means/purpose of collective identity. Also, the human enters an open area of the recombination of

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animality, machine and abstraction of humanity. He is not a “new man” who has utopianly captured a historical avant-garde, imagining it within the limits of collective and individual consciousness changes after the revolutionary revolution of society. He is a new post-human creation. An image of the ego corresponds to the hybrid ontological status of the animal, machine and man. The human, at least, defined as a biopolitical entity and a cyborg with an angel face, is remarkably performed in Wim Wenders’ movie Wings of Desire. The contemporary art of painting at the time of the end of the avant-garde assumes the basic medium of its mediatized role in the changing world of cultural identities. We should determine this media as the society of the spectacle in its final stage of realization. Like painting after the end of the avant-garde and the paradoxical return of the figurative to the sign of the metamorphosis of the human figure through genetic technology and aesthetic surgery, so the phenomenology of the society of the spectacle completed the theory of illusions of reality under the conditions of global reigns. Actionism as the basis of performative art and within it, as well as action painting, coincides with the situationist movement and the shift to the total kinetics of new media—experimental film and video installations (Fischer-Lichte, 2004). The last great utopia of social change in the world of capitalist production—students’ counter-culture and movement of 1968—was irrelevant to the end of the avant-garde and to the arrival of the time of spectacle of the image of the event. Therefore, the main theoretical programme for such a paradoxical case of the retro-­ neo-­avant-garde revival of painting in the era of the strategy of iconoclastic film-­ video-­ art transmedia experiments can be found in the art performed by the situationist movement, with Guy Debord as its theoretical guru and leader (Debord, 1995). The 1960s are the key to understanding the setting for the apocalyptic return of contemporary art to its source—the spirit of the historical avant-garde (Jimenez, 2005). This is the time when speaking about the end of art becomes more than rhetoric. Heidegger, in his famous lecture at the conference titled “Kierkegaard Vivant”, described the concept of Ereignis as a reference-frame for the essential relationship between Being and time. The title of the lecture emphatically suggests a way of thinking directed to a new historical situation—“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” (“Das Ende der Philosophie und der Aufgabe des Denkens”) (Heidegger, 1969). However, the problem of the end of the historical epoch, taking place as planetary spectacle images, by no means should not be understood in terms of the end of its epochal-making opportunities. The metaphorical state of affairs was pinpointed by T. S. Eliot when the speech about the end of art was described with the expression “Not with a bang, but with a whimper”. Painting at the time of the spectacle of the image of the world is an iconoclastic attempt to deconstruct the idea of ​​the end of art. Neglecting art by overcoming its separation from life requires demolishing the idea of an ​​ institution of art as the desacralized sphere of the modern age. All that remains of art in this collision with the social power of institutionalization might be its overcomplicated, critical, utopian, subversive function.

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Debord defines the spectacle as the total power of the alienated social power that arises in the logic of the exchange value. The fetishism of goods is equal to fetishism or iconophilia. The spectacle at its highest stage of alienation has led to the fragmentation of the quality of human life and its transformation into the subject. Between the reification and the fetishism of the image/goods is the area of art redesigning the social and natural environment. Art as religion is found in the system of total mobilization as the spectacular spiritual power of visual culture. The relationship between things is, thus, mediated by the ideological illusion of exchange of equal values. Debord has modernized Marx’s discovery of commodity fetishism as a secret of the entire mechanism of ideological reproduction of the material and spiritual conditions of capitalist production by introducing the concept of spectacle. The relationship between things is mediated by the ideological illusion of image exchange. At the time of the spectacle, the world is a socio-cultural sphere for completing the process of a visual rule in the world. The transformation of a man as a passive observer into a thing represents his true end. The spectacle is, therefore, political power, the way of articulation of social relations, the holistic economy of the post-modern age and the art of the end of the avant-garde. It is mirrored by the iconoclastic strategy of visual culture. The paradoxical way of its representation is that in “image wars”, contemporary art does not aim at fracturing the image at all but its physiological character. All media are spectacular images only of the means/ purposes of the transparency, presence and performance of the global capital spectacle: photography, film, video, new digitization technologies. Film, sport and art were debuffing spectacle elements. Hence, the painting of the cultural industry of the spectacle as a “materialized ideology” that overcomes all other particular ideologies can only be an illusion of self-expression of the world but one which is essentially determined by its social ontology. Painting no longer displays anything. It does not participate mimetically in the creation of new worlds. Painting performatively and conceptually rests on the assumptions of an iconoclastic spectacle as a universal event of the world that has its image/icon endlessly reproduced and replicated like Warhol’s secularized Madonna of the post-modern age—M. M. If the painting has represented, as Peter Weibel affirms, “only one type of image, mediation, and representation” in the plurality of others that make up the pluralist world of contemporary art, then it cannot be said that it might either be paradigmatical for the spectacle of the world or a relic of the historical past (Weibel, 2002: 630). The obsolescence of painting as a media representation of events in the world without depth and surface, where the paradoxical interdependence of fractal structures is dominated, stems only from the significant historical situation. It is about the obsolescence of the notion of a new one. The avant-garde is therefore not only a new art of media-communication technology but an already obsolete idea in the realized iconoclasm of the spectacle of the contemporary world. Any attempt to return to sources ends only as a retro-avant-garde effect of keeping the outdated ideas of changing the social order of power from the world of art to life.

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The end of the mimetics of painting marks the moment when the human body and its figures in the painting as they were “depicted”—from the decomposition, cyborgization or biogenetic replication of the original image to the image and possibility of God—no longer refer to anything other than the autopoietic essence of the culture of spectacle. The fetishism of the goods/image does not have the clutter of its secret in the discovery of some hidden code for transforming everything that is in the picture. On the contrary, the resolution of the mystical form in which the image appears as the fetishistic spectacle of visual culture is in the event of what has already been accomplished. The work of contemporary art surpasses the medium in which this experience occurs, from Malevich’s image of improbability and Duchamp’s ready-mades up to L.  Freud’s decadent outdated portraits of techno-­ morphic civilization with spectacle pictures. Picture painting is not in fashion again. What is happening in front of our eyes has already occurred in the avant-garde idea. The image of a retro-avant-garde turn assumes a mystical form of a contemporary global spectacle that no longer has a society but a fractal and fluid world of cultural identities. New art imagery represents only a flashback of what has already passed away. All that is worthwhile for the return of figurative painting strikes and returns to the abstract image. New abstraction is no longer a “new” image of abstraction. In the emphatic takeover of the notion of the new from the historical avant-garde, it is a retro-avant-garde renewal of the idea of an abstract image. New abstraction, therefore, assumes a new tradition of neo-avant-garde for its origin. Images as “aesthetic things” do not conflict with the concept of neo-Dadaist paintings of ready-mades as objects for aesthetic pleasure. All individual return projects are already happening; regardless of whether they are fiction, illusion, ornament, figuration or abstraction, they are always exaggerating the obsolescence of the new as the material, expression, means and purpose of art.

7.4  Conclusion: Duchamp’s Last Act Returning to painting after the end of the avant-garde is a vain attempt to reinvent something that has no new place in the world. Abstract painting and post-referential painting are two expressions that point to the foundation of modern and neo-avant-­ garde imagery. While it is first referred to a true or fictional destiny, another must produce its new subject from the media-specific fictional reality of the society of the spectacle. The reference became an autopoietic sign system. Post-referential painting assumes what the abstract picture in the new context is missing. It is a new concept of the world. But it is not built not because it is not possible as a fiction or illusion of the world at all, but because of abstraction and the loss of any reference to the world without the possibility of the image that opened a new meaning. The numerous attempts at a theoretical justification of the narrative of the return and the

References

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turn of the painting in the new painting of abstraction or figuration are therefore failed constructions for art’s drive today at the time of the spectacle of art events.2 Painting can no longer be abstract or figurative. It is a credible medium of images from an obsolete world. Great painters have always been more than painters and more than chroniclers of their time. When Francisco Goya left the concept of court painting and plunged into the dark and anxious maze of the reality of his spark of the horror of the war in Spain of his time, it was not just an act of the artist transforming himself into the encounter with traces of blood and ashes. It was a moment of crossing the sea between one and the other world, but the world nonetheless. The image disappears with its world when it can no longer visually open all its essential dimensions when it comes down, as in the case of Mitchell’s pictorial turn, only to the void of its visibility. Time, awareness of time, history and the symbolic translation of all dimensions of the image in the sense of understanding the Other maintain an image in its essence. There are no paintings without a picture of the world. The painting of the world without pictures (historical avant-garde) and pictures without the world (biopolitics of art in the age of “transgenic art”) can only mark the memory of the image as the primaeval light of the new world. That time has already come to pass. It might be cynical to say that the iconoclasm of contemporary art worships it only because it knows this is no longer the time of the picture. The imagery of this now retrieves the life of images from a scientifically generated world. So, the last figure of resistance to painting has long since been removed from the chessboard. Marcel Duchamp withdrew this at the moment when the urge was placed at the centre of the world of life as a challenge to the aesthetic pleasure of the observer and as a boundary between art and life. Painting after the end of the avant-­ garde is just an iconoclastic strike at the boundaries of Duchamp’s act. There is nothing behind it.

References Bürger, P. (2001). Das Altern der Moderne: Schriften zur Bildenden Kunst. Suhrkamp. Danto, A. C. (1999). Philosophizing art: Selected essays. University of California Press. Debord, G. (1995). The Society of the Spectacle. The MIT Press. Derrida, J. (1999). Donner la mort. Galilée. Fischer-Lichte, E. (2004). Ästhetik des Performativen. Suhrkamp. Foster, H. (1996). The return of real. The MIT Press. Heidegger, M. (1969). Zur Sache des Denkens. Max Niemeyer.

2  In the practice of culture as a global spectacle of contemporary art that requires the constant involvement of active participants—actors, users, commentators, the association of the theory of art and its accompanying cultural capital subjects in major world cities—there is the phenomenon of a new form of boredom. Interactivity that no longer appeals to the Other in an artistic event on the stage, where the painting is attracted to that enchanted circle of critics-curators-public who critically respond to the appeal for communication, becomes inter-passivity (Pfaller, 2002).

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Jimenez, M. (2005). La querelle de l’art contemporain. Gallimard. Kamper, D. (Ed.). (1988). Postmodern oder der Kampf für die Zukunft. Suhrkamp. Klotz, H. (1999). Kunst im 20. Jahrhundert: Modern, Postmodern, Zweite Moderne (2nd rev. ed.). CH Beck. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1986). Iconology. Image, text, ideology. Chicago University Press. Mitchell, W. J. T. (1994). Picture theory. University of Chicago Press. Pfaller, R. (2002). Die Illusionen der Anderen: Über das Lustprinzip in der Kultur. Suhrkamp. Rebentisch, J. (2003). Ästhetik der Installation. Suhrkamp. Sachs-Hombach, K. (Ed.). (2005). Bildwissenschaft: Discipline, Themen, Methoden. Suhrkamp. Weibel, P. (2002). An end to the end of art? On the iconoclasm of modern art. In B. Latour & P.  Weibel (Eds.), ICONOCLASH: Beyond the image wars in science, religion, and art (pp. 570–670). ZKM/The MIT Press.

Chapter 8

Conclusion

The main themes and aims of this book have been about understanding aesthetics, contemporary art and the end of the avant-garde in close connection with the techno-­ genesis of virtual worlds, but not from the metaphysics of the beautiful and the sublime. Thus, I dealt extensively with the problems of the theory of contemporary art such as the body in the space and time of digital technologies, as well as various problems in visual studies and image science (iconic turn). This book intended to exhibit the fundamental reasons for the disappearance of the picture in the era of virtual reality, starting from the notion of contemporary art as realized iconoclasm. In a critical dialogue with current aesthetics, philosophers and theoreticians of art endeavour to understand the essential moment in which art has no world for its “image”. In the Introduction, I argued that iconoclasm is not a religious-aesthetic-political dispute about the ban of depicting the human figure or bodily figures, but is rather a keyword of avant-garde art that has changed our consciousness of reality and the world at large. The inherent difficulty in the process of deconstructing historical consciousness from the point of view of the image is seen in the fact that the fundamental proposition is based on the radical critique of how avant-garde graces its “big narrative” of the destruction of all historical traditions. It is the destruction of the notion of life as a social construction, the destruction of the notions of modernity, post-modernism and society through culture. The iconoclasm of contemporary art completes the image of the end of the human. The avant-garde and neo-avant-­ garde have not opened a new world but decomposed the social and cultural assumptions of their own survival. All that remains in this adventure of images without the world is reduced to the establishment of art as an event at the time of “madness without a consolation” (Heidegger) of modern technology. The iconoclasm of life itself which is no longer primordial life but the biogenetic occurrence of the cyborg’s life in the virtual art of the present takes over the power of rulership over everything else that has the features of art. The picture without the world no longer has its truth or its beauty. So, the process of the aestheticization of everyday life has confirmed © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4_8

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the uncanniness of the modern image of the world. At the time of the performative-­ conceptual turn, the image of life that modern art has for it the foundation, nothing is possible or real, except a strike on the very essence of iconoclasm appropriate to contemporary art. The second chapter showed that Malevich’s intentions in art were analogously the aim of quantum theory in physics. The last act of this unique process of losing the distinction between the worldhood as a “picture” and a reality as a frame within which the “image” acquires its meaning is just in front of our eyes. The development of biotechnological research, the finding of the human genome map, a real possibility of cloning living being makes the narrative of the subjectivity of man and his irreducible identity historically outdated. In the extensive analysis and critical dialogue with many contemporary authors (Besanҫon, Belting, Bauch, etc.), I argued that iconoclasm is not merely a ban of the image in the arché of metaphysics and hence the internal logic of the action of the avant-garde’s movements. Avantgarde is, therefore, based on the hypostasis of the “new” precisely because it is identical to the experimental-innovative spirit of modern science. Their discoveries, like the theory of relativity of Einstein or Bohr’s quantum theory up to the indetermination of Heisenberg and chaos theory, are no longer self-evident as a logical sequence of previous discoveries but rather as a paradigm, which means a radical abandonment of tradition. The question of the possibility of art in such a world at the same time marks a radical doubt about the possibility of a “new philosophy of art” despite its many attempts to overcome the end of metaphysics. When the avantgarde is taken over for its founding of the metaphysics of modern science, it is in its work to confirm its self-identification in the emphatic character of this art of “immeasurability”. This transition, which in all manifestations and theoretical writings of avant-garde artists is perceived as a cut with the past, is a world without a picture where the performativity and conceptuality of art are no longer revealed. Everything is a performative-­conceptual event as a lifetime of living in its procession. The structure of the articulation of abstraction, cubism and futurism still retains a certain degree of departure from the world’s total controversy. But Dadaism is already being introduced in the space of shock art, provocation, installing artists as the provocateurs of events in the centre of life. Event art, happenings, installations and performance in the very strange language of the new opacity of speech, from the being of its scientific-­technical deployment of things (Gestell) as enframing to creatures and the construction of nature, point to the worklessness of deeds, the impertinence of the image, the loss of art (Kunstlosigkeit) of the world without pictures, to use Heidegger’s language. The metaphysical issue of the possibility of art in the avant-­garde age is therefore not a question of the possibility of “old” art but of the essence of the notion of “new” art without images. The fundamental way of survival of avant-garde art is its essential (in)ability to act as art. After the disappearance of the image, the illusion of reality as the perspective of the world, the notion of art from Plato to Nietzsche as a kind of ontological spectacle, the avantgarde interruption with the semblance of the picture in the sense of mimesis becomes an act of a real event of life in its performative-conceptual dispositif.

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The third chapter dealt with the phenomenon of visualization, as the fundamental mark for the age of media presence is the concept of the image. I tried, therefore, to outline the assumptions about the reasons for changing the mimetic-representational paradigm of the image. Within the intentions of the interdisciplinary iconic turn project, this is a necessary step towards understanding the image appropriately to our information-communication age. With the analysis of three distinct albeit orientationally related theoretical assumptions, it should be possible to set the main question for any further exploration of the phenomenon, the concept and applicable hold of a new notion of the image. Three theoretical approaches to the picture in the iconic turn project are: (1) the immanent logic of images beyond art by Gottfried Boehm; (2) the anthropology of images (Bild-Anthropologie) by Hans Belting; and (3) the general theory of image science (Bildwissenschaft) with the guiding idea of​​ the image as the communication medium by Klaus-Sachs Hombach. The deconstruction of the image should be understood in an analogous way to what the subject of the philosophical deconstruction of language is in the thinking of Jacques Derrida. We saw the way in which the main theoreticians of the iconic turn—Gottfried Boehm and Hans Belting—express their analysis. The assumption of the deconstruction of the image’s rule or the power of the “culture as the image” in our digital age when we are faced with “culture as text” which precedes this age means that visualization becomes the construction of the technical assemblage. From Nietzsche to Heidegger and Derrida, philosophy was in constant dialogue with art. The question of art in the “age of the world picture” (Heidegger) was always necessary to question the possibilities of art on the side of its historical-epochal destiny in the new era. In contrast to the feature of the scientific and technical paradigm of the world, which makes all creatures available for informational change into the matter and the power of “things”, it seems that the ontological field of art encompasses some other open possibilities to overcome this essence of technology as enframing (Gestell). The thesis I argued in the fourth chapter through three separate planes of discussion is that mimesis (μίμησις) cannot for Jean-Luc Nancy be reduced to the mere imitation of an already always existing reality. Instead, what is at issue is a creative principle of the openness of the world as meaning, starting from the possibility of imitating something that can only be (re)presented in the equation between the logos, the figure and the image. Mimesis thus (re)presents an existential event of novelty in the world. If it is impossible to ask about an event in the traditional metaphysical terms of what it is (quiddittas) but only about how it occurs (quoddittas), we cannot rely on the language of the openness of the meaning of the world without previously elucidating on the mediality of the media in Nancy’s thought. This simultaneously means that the logos and the image are connected neither via language nor via the representation of something as something (being as the singular plurality). An event occurs authentically precisely in this “elevation of the body” (levée du corps). And this is neither the truth of the “resurrection” nor the mystery of “transcendence”. In Nancy’s narrative, it becomes abundantly clear that the body (corpus) assumes the position of the unthinkable in traditional philosophical thought. The logos of the body is, thus, in its representation as a figure-image in

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what is open and therefore beyond the opposition between the “self” and the “outside”. In order to think about this “crack” between philosophy and art (logos and mimesis), it is necessary to make a decisive break with the “oblivion of the body” that is symptomatic of the entire history of Western philosophy. The fifth chapter sought to capture the important ontological moments of the differences in the approaches of phenomenology, poststructuralism and visual studies to reach the zero point of separating metaphysics and cybernetics according to my comprehension of new aesthetics, art and the technosphere. Hence, its specificity is reflected in the fact that it offered an approach that shows that art as such no longer has an autonomous position outside the logic of the cybernetic structure of the world. In this respect, it is obvious that future research must go further from the starting point that the technosphere is a new image which does not represent an already existing reality, and that the reality itself should be generated and constructed from the logic of technoscience. We could see that the inadequacy of contemporary art is strongly related to the impossibility of “revolution” and “utopia” in an already altered modern world in which the only true “revolutionary utopia” has been realized in the technological construction of the “real”. This primarily refers to the experiments in “A-intelligence” research, from which “A-life” is now being created. Instead of events that are awaiting both the neo-avant-garde movement (Situationists) and fundamentalist messianic theologians, all that is on the agenda is the order of change in the technological environment. All that with heavy acceleration might produce the preconditions for the emergence of the post-human condition. As far as art is concerned, it might not be a new definition of art for the contemporary age. It is simply that it is no longer possible and by no means self-­ evident that art can answer the question about the essence of the world as a primaeval event without its own self-destruction. The hyper-production of art artefacts, objects, installations, performative-conceptual events in the world that no longer has its worldhood in meaningful historical being, and the essence of man and beings requires a search for the response to that issue. So, what is the meaning of art in the world without a picture and in the image without the world, if only the life that overcomes the collapsed historical world through the social self-regulation of culture can be a fixed assemblage of matters? Does art have a meaning if it does not have a world that has given it a reason for survival? In the sixth chapter, I tried to show why the destruction of traditional linear time with which the avant-garde has previously been dealt with and contemporary art as a momentary event—conceptual, multi-media, virtual—leads to deconstructing time as a circle of understanding without taking one of the dimensions of time: past, present, future. The categories of works of the earlier shortened period of modernity, such as Salvador Dalí’s designations—imagination, symbolization, unconsciousness, originality and form—, have not disappeared. If there is no longer sufficient reason to interpret the work of art as something “objective”, emanating from the subject of the divine and holy, which concepts must be accessed by events of performing, conceptual and installation art? The answer must have been known in advance. They are performance, permanence, ecstasy, event, intervention, meditation and reshaping. All these are “new” terms for the mysterious but are so close

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to the ordinary, banal world of life, making the moment of art, which no longer has any subject in the sense of the subject matter of the real world as something lasting, present in its presence as “the eternal” as an illusion of objectivity itself. There are two possible examples of the relationship between the “presentation” of temporality in painting and photography: surrealist works by Salvador Dalí, especially the oil painting titled La Persistance de la mémoire from 1931, and conceptual works by the German artist Hanne Darboven. These works were selected because they explicitly point to the problem of modern and contemporary art in discussing temporality. This concerns, of course, clocks and calendars. The mechanism of the clock as a decorative mechanical timing device appears as a constant in artistic works from mannerism to photographic conceptual works today. The discovery of epochal differences between worlds shows only that the clock and the calendar do not mean the same for a medieval, modern and post-historical man. Historiated times of our age deprive us of any possibility of understanding the image of the world of art of old times as the time of “great art”. In the seventh chapter, the following question was raised: how should we understand the retrospection of the pictorial of the image and the tendency of the return of figurative painting? It would be superficial to point out the saturation and fatigue of the audience through the hyper-production of video installations, performances and multimedia projects. It would also be inappropriate to say that we have an aspiration to nostalgia and the return to the traditional image if a contemporary artist decides to examine the possibilities of painting with the already obsolete media of painting. Painting is not conservative, just as cyber-art need not necessarily be progressive art. The question of media representation and art events in the retro-neo-­ avant-garde situation of exceeding the boundaries of the depicted and accomplished overrides the traditional metaphysical question of the truth in painting (Derrida) and the sense of the image in the era of its virtual-digital power. There is something entirely different. Figures of media resistance from seemingly yesterday’s world as pictorial figures point to the transfiguration of the image in the pluralistic art world. What is the image’s transfiguration? Certainly, in this concept, it is along the lines of the analytical philosophy of art which regiment the figure by overcoming in-­ picture; geometric shapes like models are a good example for Cubism painting. It is beyond the boundaries of the separation of high and low culture on the social level of understanding contemporary art. At the aesthetic level, however, the image’s transfiguration marks the crossing of boundaries between works of art, objects and things from the surrounding world and events of conceptual and performative art. Therefore, painting after the end of the avant-garde represents a paradoxical return to the human figure as a picture of the decomposed world of visualization. Roughly speaking, from Bacon, Baselitz and Kiefer to L. Freud and all contemporary painters who follow the logic of new figuratively, the body is no longer a figurative entity separated from the predecessor world of the transfiguration of the real. The body in the pictorial “depictions” of contemporary artists, still using the media of painting, deconstructs the body itself. We live in a “golden age” of aesthetic visualization. That life we lead on digital platforms has become artificial and cannot exist without images. Everything that

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8 Conclusion

was foreseen in the iconoclasm as a question of the ban of a picture, starting from the ontological-religious reason, is far behind us. The problem we face is far more difficult: what if this time of absolute transparency no longer hides any possibility of returning to the mystery of the image as marked by the mythical approach to the world? Does this mean that the disappearance of a man in the post-human condition will also be the disappearance of the image as a trace of the metaphysical depth and riddle we had instead of the “ecstasy of communication”? This book has been written as an effort to ask some important questions about the aesthetics and concept of painting in a time that, in its acceleration, has no compassion for the past epochs of high art. That is why the answers to the questions are not necessarily the path that frees us from further searching for the topology of the image that still preserves the image of a man without the temptation of faith in his eternal existence.

Index

A Abstraction, 78, 92 Abstract painting, 132 Actionism, 130 Action-painting, 93 Aesthetic genius, 24 Aestheticization, 2, 135 Aesthetics, 21, 24, 90, 108 Aesthetics of the event, 115 Aesthetics of the work, 115 Aesthetic Theory, 26 Aesthetic visualization, 139 Age of digitized reality, 20 “Age of the world picture”, 39, 137 Anthropological machine, 111 Anthropology, 14 Anthropology of images (Bild-­ Anthropologie), 137 Belting’s theory of the image, 52 cognitive-visual representations, 53 the end of art history, 49 Eurocentrism, 49 historical avant-garde art, 50 iconic difference, 53 iconic turn, 52, 53 image science, 49 incorporation, 52 media and cultures, 52 mimesis, 53 science and technology, 51 visual communication practice, 51 visual information, 51 Western civilization, 50 Art, 30, 65–67, 69, 70, 82, 85, 102, 120 Being, 87

biopolitics, 110 dead nature of the body, 89 death, 118 definition, 86 modern, 88 Art history, 10 Artificial presence, 55 Artistic actionism, 93 Artistic autonomy, 21 Artwork, 102 Autonomy, 108 Autopoiesis, 6 Autopoietic visual system, 58 Auto-referential semiotic approach, 124 Avant-garde art, 1, 2, 95, 136 aesthetics, 21, 22 artistic agency, 10 beauty, 21, 28 concepts, 32 contemporary art, 7, 8 cultural evolution, 28 dead nature of the body, 98 Duchamp, 7 “the end of art”, 31 experience, 21 genius concept, 24 historicism, 29 history, 28 human figure, 128, 135 iconic turn, 25 iconoclastic strategy, 97 metaphysics, modern science, 27 modern art, 23, 33 nature, 93 new era, 26

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 Ž. Paić, Aesthetics and the Iconoclasm of Contemporary Art, SpringerBriefs in Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75305-4

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Index

142 Avant-garde art (Cont) nihilism, 30 ontological-political-aesthetic law, 28 picture without a world, 8 politico-ideological evaluation system, 27 religious-aesthetic dimension, 27, 31 resilience, 32 self-discernment, 26 social level, 98 sources, 123 spirit, 10 styles, 32 sublime, 22, 23 suprematism, 6 time, 115, 116 traditional linear time, 138 20th century, 22, 93, 98 Avant-garde iconoclasm, 6 B Beauty, 21 Bio-cybernetics, 6 Biopolitics contemporary art, 96 cyborg, 108, 110 human, 107, 108 transgenic art, 110 Biotechnological research, 5 Body, 73, 74, 76, 77, 104 Body-on-stage, 105 Byzantine art, 10, 11, 20 Byzantine iconoclasm, 16 C Clock, 119 Communication, 54, 55 Communism, 124 Conceptual art, 85, 94 Conservativism, 11 Contemporaneity, 9 Contemporary art, 7, 70, 86, 88, 95, 102, 104, 105 aesthetics, 6 art performance, 6 autonomous/exceptional self-agency, spirit, 7 avant-garde, 8, 25, 89, 130 biopolitics, 89, 109 body, 135 body-as-movement, 6 calendars, 120 clock, 119

cultural industries, Western societies, 26 Dali’s clocks, 119 Darboven, 120 de-realized space, 118 dialectical complex, 9 “the end of art”, 31 flash moment, 116, 118 hermeneutics of style, 10 history vs. avant-garde, 28 iconic turn, 117 “life-world”, 18 Nancy, 71 new materialism, 8 painting, 130 performative-conceptual turn, 117, 118 pictorial turn, 33 political subjectivation, 9 post-conceptual art, 9 post-conceptual condition, 9 post-modernism, 22 relational aesthetics, 8 self-development, 10 social-cultural activity, 87 time, 118, 121 virtual simulation technology, 99 Contemporary performative art, 103 Corpus (book), 62, 64, 66, 69, 74, 75 Critical iconology, 42 Cubism painting, 125, 139 Cultural/visual turn, 91 Culture, 43 “Culture as text”, 39 “Culture as the image”, 39, 137 Cyborg, 108, 110, 128, 130, 135 D Dadaism, 27, 71, 136 Dadaist painting, 89 Deconstruction, 126, 129 Deconstruction of aesthetics, 40 Deconstruction of images contemporary visual culture, 41 “culture as the image”, 39, 137 historical-epochal context, 40 humanities, 39 language, 39, 40 philosophy and art, 40 social sciences, 39 speech, 40 trace, 40 virtual art, 39 Deconstruction of meaning, 62 Digital, 5

Index Dogma of existence, 64 E Eikon, 13, 14 “Endisms”, 10 “The end of art”, 26–32 The End of Art History (Book), 49 Ereignis, 130 Eurocentrism, 49 Event, 63, 66, 67, 69, 70, 72, 79, 80, 82, 86 Existence, 64, 102 F Fetishism, 106, 131 Figurative painting, 116 Figures of media resistance, 125, 139 G Gnosticism, 11 The Ground of the Image (book), 66, 69, 78 H Historicism, 29 History of art, 10 History, technical arts, 68 Human body, 99, 105 Human figure, 128–130, 135 Humanities, 39 Hyperglobalism, 94 I Iconic turn, 20, 37, 50, 52, 91, 125 avant-garde art, 43, 45 Boehm’s image analysis, 42 contemporary theory of art, 45 iconic difference, 47, 48 image, 42, 43, 45, 47 image-in-world, 44 imagination, 48 language, 43, 44 logos, 48 metaphor, 45, 46 meta-theory, 42 neo-avant-garde art, 46 19th century, 42 perspectivism, 46 pictorial turn, 42 picture, 38, 46, 137 post-modern/cultural turn, 43

143 Iconoclasm avant-garde (see Avant-garde art) Besanҫon, 10 Byzantine art, 10, 11, 20 contemporary art aestheticization process, 2 avant-garde development, 1 body, 2 Duchamp, 2 iconic turn, 1, 2 neo-avant-garde, 1, 2 pictures, 1, 2 virtual reality era, 1 eikon-imago, 15 endisms, 10 historical representations, 10 icon concept, 14 Judaism/Islam, 15 modern art, 11 movement, 16 origin, 16 religious-aesthetic nature, 12 religious framework, 15 Western art history, 16 Image, 5, 14, 63–65, 69, 72, 76 abstraction, 78, 132 aesthetic things, 132 communication medium, 54–56, 59, 137 contemporary art, 42 culture, 38 iconic turn, 126 information media, 57, 59 language, 42 logos, 38 medial communication, 38 mimesis, 58 New Era, 57 pictorial turn, 38, 126 reflection, 57 representation, 57 visual culture, 42 visualization, 37 Image of the world, 44, 45 Image science (Bildwissenschaft), 18, 42, 49, 55, 137 Imagination, 14 Incarnation, 10 Individualization, lifestyles, 126 Interdisciplinary, 125 L Language, 42, 43, 62, 101 Language-picture, 20

Index

144 “Life-world” (Lebenswelt), 17 Linguistic turn, 19, 42, 125 Logos, 47, 48, 62, 64, 137 M Malevich’s suprematism, 100 Material substrates, 79 Media, 54, 125–128, 131 Media-communication technology, 131 Media painting, 127 Media-virtualized reality, 5 Melting clocks, 119 Metamorphosis of the body avant-garde, 90, 91, 93, 95–98 modern/contemporary art, 98 non-avant-garde, 90, 91, 93, 95–97 performative art, 99, 100, 102, 104, 105 spectacle and virtual art, 105, 106 virtual simulation technology, 99 Metaphysical articulation of language, 136, 137, 140 Metaphysics, 67, 82, 95 Meta-theory, 42 methexis, 79 mimesis, 13, 41, 50, 53, 55–58, 136, 137 art, 65, 73 authentic logos, 73 Being vs. art, 65 body, 63 logos, 74, 75, 77 methexis, 79–81 Nancy, 63 technical and poetic dimensions, 71 Modern art, 10, 23, 33, 87, 88, 92, 94 Modern image of the world, 22 Modernism, 94 Modern science, 136 Modern technology, 2, 87, 111 Modernity, 79, 93, 138 The Muses (book), 63, 65, 66, 68–70, 72 N Nature, 24, 93 Neo-avant-garde art, 80, 86, 93, 95, 97, 100, 101, 104, 115, 123, 124, 129 Neo-Dadaism, 96, 98 Neo-Dadaist paintings, 132 Neo-Marxism, 105 Neo-modernism, 90, 97 New image, 37 Non-human body existence, 88 Non-pictured world, 5

O Ontology of the body, 76 Ontology of the image, 78, 80 The Origin of the Work of Art (book), 86 P Painting, 120, 126, 127, 130, 131, 139, 140 action, 93 avant-garde, 128 contemporary art, 130 Cubism, 125, 139 Dalí, 119 the end of the avant-garde, 126, 128–130, 132, 133 figuration, 129 human figure, 129 iconoclastic deconstruction, 128 media, 125, 128, 131 mimetics, 131 passatism, 127 post-referential, 126 process, 81 retro-neo-avant-garde, 126, 129, 130 world without pictures, 133 Performance art, 103 Performative art, 99–102, 104, 105 Performative-conceptual art, 106 Performative-conceptual event, 136 Perspectivism, 100, 103 “Phenomenology” of the world, 18 Philosophical criticism, 126 Photography, 117, 119 Physical existence, 104 Pictorial turn, 20 Picture, 5, 30, 38, 136 Picture without a world, 8, 88, 99, 101, 111 Planetary technology, 67 Pluralism, 126 Pop Art, 117, 125 Post-colonialism, 97 Post-human condition, 138 Post-modern art, 22 Post-modern games, 95 Post-modernism, 91, 94, 118 Post-modern re-semanticization, 96 Post-referential painting, 126, 132 “Power of imagination”, 20 R Reactionism, 11 Ready-mades, 109 Real-virtual community, 54

Index Religious art, 12 Repoliticization of art, 109 Resilience, 32 Retro-avant-garde, 123–126, 132 Retro-neo-avant-garde, 126, 128, 129, 139 Romanticism, 106 Russian constructivism, 98 S Science of art (Kunstwissenschaft), 33, 49 Self-reliance, 127 Semiotic-communication image model, 55 Socialism, 124 Social revolutionary action, 92 Social sciences, 39 Society of the spectacle, 91, 105, 106, 111 Space-time art symbol, 106 Suprematism, 6, 12, 59 T Technical inventions, 5 Technoscience, 138 Technosphere, 67, 71, 72, 138 Time, 115, 119 Topology of art, 118 Trace, 40 Traditional ontology, 19

145 Transfiguration of the real, 128 Transgenic art, 110 V Video-centrism, 38, 56, 58, 59 Violence, 80 Virtual art, 39, 92, 106, 108 Virtuality, 109 Virtual reality, 1, 135 Visual art, 54, 101 Visual communication, 53, 59, 126, 129 Visual culture, 42, 127, 131 Visualization, 37, 128, 137 Visual language, 43 Visual media, 48 Visual studies, 42, 43 Visual text, 43 Vitalist-social avant-garde, 91 W Western (modern) civilization, 98 Western metaphysics, 62, 78, 91 Western painting, 77 Western religions, 10 “World” art, 17 Worldhood of the world, 17–21 World-picture, 56, 58 World without a picture, 103