February 03, 2004
Franz Marc: beyond harmonious form
I'm tired of reading texts.
So an image from German expressionism to seduce the wearied eye.
An image by Franz Marc for the eye to wander over the surfaces and take delight in the play of colour.
Franz Marc, Fighting Forms, 1914 Links
For Marc appearances suggest something more beyond themselves. The phrase 'something more beyond themselves" is usually meant to mean that the abstract forms convey spiritual experiences.
The art history texts link this to German idealist philosophy. So behind appearances stands the reality of spirit.
Intrigued I ask: What does spirit mean? Which philosopher? Which texts? Which ideas?
The art historians leave it at that gesture. They always do. They quickly return to talking about the beauty of the harmonious arrangement of distinct forms; swirling colors; style of representation, spatial illusion, and so on.
Ratrely do they connect the tensions within the work of art giving expression to tensions in society. Exploring social mediation as tendencies in the art work, or the truth content of what is expressed, is just not their style.
Heres a bit of Adorno as a contrast:
"The process that occurs in art works and which is arrested in them has to be conceived as being the same as the social processes surrounding them. In Leibnizian terminology, they represent this process is a windowless fashion....All that artworks do or bring forth has its latent model in social production."
Artworks as windowless monads.
To ask questions about social mediation for Adorno is to ask about the structure of the autonomous artwork as a social monad, whose internal processes brings forth the social processes surround it.
We might find artworks as windowless monads problematic. That's fair enough. It's a diffciult concept. But at least we have stepped away from just talking about the 'harmonious arrangement of distinct forms' in a Platonic world.