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July 8, 2003
Rick's fourth entry on Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, is very brief.
It consists of an image (an engraving) entitled The Dragon Devouring the Companions of Cadmus by Hendrick Goltzius, a Baroque engraver and painter.
Under this engraving is a brief sentence from the Sontag text.Rick quotes Sontag thus:
It seems that the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked. (Sontag, p.41)
And Rick asks:
"Is Ms. Sontag right about this? "
It is hard for me to answer this question. I do not have sufficient knowledge of art history. Nor am I an art historian. And I have just been advised by my bookshop that it will take six weeks for Sontag's book to arrive.
So I am going to take a different tack and bring art and aesthetics together by briefly highlighting the way of knowing of the aesthetic in relation to other ways of knowing (eg., science)
The first tack starts from what I find most striking about the Goltzius image: it is an image of the sensuous human male body. This image shows that the concern with the body is not just the concern of a fashionable postmodernism. The body is a traditional part of the concerns of art.
The centrality of the body in art is what is implied by the Sontag quote.
And aesthetics as well. It was born as a discourse of the body with Alexander Baumgarten. This modestly opens up the world of the material body not mind or the theoretical and abstract reason; the body as the site of lived, sensous experience. It recognizes that the world of perception and experience based on the world striking the body cannot be grasped through abstract scientific laws; it has its own way of knowing through the desiring body as a sensibly experiencing organism.
Normally, bodiliness in art is about (masculine) pleasure and desire. In the Hendrick Goltzius engraving we do not just have a powerful beautiful body:--we have a mutilated body, one that has been wounded from being devoured.
It is, if you like, wounded from the inscription of social power on the human body.
My second tack is to turn to Adorno to uncover the significance of the mutilated body in art. Why Adorno? Well he argues that the language of asethetics is to lend a voice to human suffering; it is the expression of suffering in a damaged life. In his Aesthetic Theory Adorno says:
"...rational cognition has one critical limit with its inability to cope with suffering. Reason can subsume suffering under concepts; it can furnish means to alleviate suffering; but it can never express suffering in the medium of experience. For to do so would be irrational by reason's own standards." (p.27)
Art's conception of truth is couched in the language of suffering.
So what we get with Adorno is a form of systematic theory (aesthetics) that is integrated with expressive concerns.
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