Abstract
In this chapter, I discuss the revelatory experience of art and “wonder.” Heidegger argues that the work of art opens a world to its audience in a way that allows the audience to contemplate it. There is always an opacity to art works—a medium that both attracts its audience and keeps them at a remove, which inspires a mood of wonder that allows the consideration of the structure of the world of human experience itself. In this way, art can reveal conditions for human experience through a distanced captivation that allows for phenomenological inquiry. I argue, further, that art which grows out of specific social situations and identities can offer insight into shared background conditions of human experience—these art works are revelatory because of not in spite of a socially specific starting point. Feminist art provides one example. I also use the work of Eva Hesse to make this point—exploring the way her understanding and depiction of existential absurdity was shaped by her experiences as a Jewish woman and also her chronic and terminal illness.
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Notes
- 1.
Julian Young coined this term and identifies Hubert Dreyfus as its main proponent. Young himself does not endorse it (Young 2004). Iain Thomson presents a modified version of it in which there are three world-disclosing possibilities of the work of art, one of which is its potential for “fundamentally transforming an historical community’s ‘understanding of being,’ its most basic and ultimate understanding of what is an what matters” (Thomson 2011, 44).
- 2.
Taylor Carman offers a clear and concise critique of any notion that art can radically remake a culture: “frankly it is hard to see how any such authoritative work of art can precede and precondition the dawning of the world to which it belongs…The Greek Temples of Athena and Hera in Paestum, Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes, and the Romanesque cathedral in Bamberg were all surely parasitic on the worlds that brought them into being” (Carman 2003, 576). However, it seems highly plausible that, by reflecting back the style of a world in a “glamorized” way the work of art can reinscribe a culture. Similarly, in reflecting back a culture in a denigrating and negative way or in a way that that unsettles status quo norms (as one might see in the work of an artist like Nan Goldin), it could change one’s commitments and move the needle on communally held norms.
- 3.
Thomson’s own resolution is to propose three different “levels” of world disclosure in the work:
(1) micro-paradigms he will later call ‘things thinging,’ which help us become aware of what matters most deeply to us; (2) paradigmatic artworks like Van Gogh’s painting and Hölderlin’s poetry, which disclose how art itself works; and (3) macro-paradigmatic ‘great’ works of art like the Greek temple and tragic drama (works Heidegger also sometimes calls ‘gods’), which succeed in fundamentally transforming an historical community’s ‘understanding of being’ (its most basic and ultimate understanding of what is and what matters, which ontotheologies can then work to universalize and secure for an epoch, as we saw last chapter). (Thomson 2011, 44–45)
- 4.
According to art historian and close friend, Heinrich Petzet, Heidegger almost wrote a second part to The Origin of the Work of Art inspired by the work of Paul Klee whose work was “of crucial significance for Heidegger” (Petzet 1993, 147). Although Heidegger’s notes on Klee were far less developed than some had presumed, they nonetheless reveal a great “enthusiasm for Klee’s opus” and the extent to which he took the artist’s work seriously (Seubold 1993). Heidegger’s own writing on Cézanne reveals his esteem for the painter (Heidegger 2009).
- 5.
Meyer Schapiro tried to track down the exact Van Gogh work to which Heidegger refers. “In reply to my questions, Professor Heidegger has kindly written me that the picture to which he referred is one that he saw in a show at Amsterdam in March 1930” (Schapiro 1994, 136).
- 6.
Heidegger is almost certainly thinking of a painting that does not, in fact, depict the shoes of a peasant woman, but depicts Van Gogh’s own boots (Schapiro 1994). A lot has been made of this mistake (Horton 2009), but it really doesn’t have any bearing on Heidegger’s analysis. As we’ll see in the final paragraphs of this section, one essential element of the work of art is the preserver—the person who witnesses and recognizes ontological truth. As long as there is a revelation about the conditions supporting human experience and existence, it doesn’t matter whether or not one’s interpretation of what is depicted ontically is correct.
- 7.
- 8.
If an artist creates something that does not find preservers “this does not at all mean that the work may also be a work without preservers,” but nor does it mean that what has been created isn’t a work; “Being a work, it always remains tied to preservers” (Heidegger 1977, 192). The work that is not preserved has a deficient form of preservation—it is a work waiting for preservers. Some works are preserved for a while and then forgotten. These, too, have a deficient form of preservation. “Even the oblivion into which the work can sink is not nothing; it is still a preservation. It feeds on the work” (Heidegger 1977, 192).
- 9.
One can see the resonance here with formal indication. It is only in the experience of the work and the transformation that I myself undergo in making sense of that experience that the artwork produces a phenomenological effect. Taylor Carman has persuasively argued that there is a strong link between Heidegger’s conception of signs in his early work (Being and Time) and the work of art in his later writing—namely that the former anticipates the articulation of the work of art (Carman 1991). I agree that there is a strong connection, and I think it comes from the fact that both methodologies have their origin in formal indication.
- 10.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Danaë, 1612, Saint Louis Art Museum.
- 11.
Orazio Gentileschi, Danaë 1621–1623, Getty Museum.
- 12.
Female studio models were rare before the nineteenth century as women’s bodies were generally deemed uglier than men’s and male artists were only rarely exposed to the nude female form in a studio setting (Garrard 1989b, 532, ftn 37).
- 13.
- 14.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1612–1613, Museo Capodimonte.
- 15.
Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, 1598–1599, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica.
- 16.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Judith, 1625, Detroit Institute of Arts.
- 17.
See Garrard’s article on Artemisia’s Allegory of Painting for more on this (Garrard 1980).
- 18.
Existential absurdity is not the realization that our lives are in fact meaningless, but that nothing external to our continually asserting our values and commitments provides our lives with meaning. There is, in short, nothing external to human activity itself that gives value and meaning to human lives.
- 19.
Surrealists, for example, are especially associated with the absurd. However, it also animates the work of many post-surrealist movements and artists including many in Hesse’s social circle (e.g. Yayoi Kusama, Sol LeWitt, Lee Lozano, Anna Maria Maiolino, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol).
- 20.
- 21.
I borrow the application of this distinction to phenomenology from (Crowell 2011).
- 22.
Even after they had separated and Doyle was living with another woman, he would still call up and ask her to do these tasks. In her diary she recounts one incident: “He still (night of 14) April does not have his W-2 form. ‘Eva what do I do?’ I angry” (Hesse 2016, 505). (See also Hesse 2016, 363, 413, 432, 434, 438, 462, 468, 475)).
- 23.
For example, her early journal entries hint at her aspiration to be a mother: “I am looking forward to having children, home and all these rich significant relations with real meaningful touches of life” (Hesse 2016, 164). Only a few years later she seems to have come to the conclusion that being both artist and mother were impossible. Lucy Lippard recounts an episode in which Eva “took my son Ethan for a walk and enjoyed it, saying, already in the past tense, ‘it would have been nice to have a little boy’”(Lippard 1976, 73). Eva was only thirty when she said this and had not yet received her cancer diagnosis.
- 24.
Hesse Archive (note 9), box 2, item 6) Quoted in (Swartz 1997, 39).
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Ward, K. (2024). Art as Standpoint Method. In: Standpoint Phenomenology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55456-8_7
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