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January 20, 2004
I want to pick up on this---the Stephen David Ross interview conducted by Rick over at Artrift. I have let this important interview slip.
We had got as far as discussing the fourth part of the interview, where Stephen David Ross was talking about the intensity and transfigurative experiences of art that are not only disturbing but threatening; and then connected them to Nietzsche's concept of the Dionysian, which identified suffering with existence.
The fifth part of the interview is a David Ross quote on mimesis.This is the quote:
"I wish to consider the extreme possibility that the distinction between great art and other art, high and low art, whatever and wherever that distinction may be, betrays the responsibility in art expressed by mimesis, to take every difference seriously…I think that we will never be able to tell at any time whether a work we consider poor, or weak, or broken, may not be found to be wonderful at some time in the future, because of changes in the nature of art, and the world. And second, more extreme, the distinction between good and bad, high and low, betrays art and the good…In its different works, popular, folk, kitsch art reveals the gift of the good because it opens, reveals, interrupts, touches heterogeneity, differences among individuals and kinds, everywhere in nature. Even familiar works hung on motel walls interrupt the blankness of empty space, ask us if we notice them at all why they are there, what they reveal, and what might illuminate that space instead. The possibility of art, high, low, mediocre, whatever – all distinctions that do not bear on poiesis or mimesis – bears the touch of the good in relation to the “finest differences,” differences beyond differences, toward heterogeneity. This bearing, expressing, of heterogeneity belongs to art as mimesis, is the gift of beauty." (Ross, GB,p. 93-94).”
Mimesis. I've always struggled with that aesthetic category, especially after reading Dialectic of Enlightenment where it was an integral part of a complex interplay of mimesis, negativity and utopia.
In that text Adorno & Horkheimer use mimesis as counter rationality to a calculative instrumental rationality that has swept all before it modernity. Mimesis has a wider connotation than the conventional understanding of mimesis as the idea of art as an imitation of nature. It is connected to their thesis of a fissure or divorce between sign and image with sign operating in the domain of science and image in the domain of art. What they say is this:
"As a system of signs, language is required to resign itself to calculation in order to know nature, and must discard the claim to be like her. As image, it is required to resign itself to mirror-imagery in order to be nature entire, and must discard the claim to know her....The separation of sign and image is irredemiable."
The argument is that though social practice is increasingly dominated by instrumental rationality, the institution of art is not totally permeated by instrumental rationality.
If instrumental rationality is a form of identity thinking (ie., it subsumes the heterogeneous under the sign of sameness), then art is a refuge for the experience of the non-identical. The mimetic aspect of autonomous art lies in its expressing aspects of reality through its innovative form that were not perceivable before. Through mimesis art establishes a critical relation with social reality.
That is one account of Stephen Ross's conception of art as mimesis that expresses difference. I lot of what Ross says I do not understand, eg., "The possibility of art, high, low, mediocre, whatever.... bears the touch of the good in relation to the “finest differences,” differences beyond differences, toward heterogeneity."
What does "differences beyond differences, toward heterogeneity" mean?
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I am puzzled by the Stephen Ross's remark that “I wish to consider the extreme possibility that the distinction between great art and other art, high and low art, whatever and wherever that distinction may be, betrays the responsibility in art expressed by mimesis, to take every difference seriously…”
There seem to be at least two rather large assumptions here.
First is that art has anything to do with mimesis - a very debatable proposition.
Second, that it is peculiarly the responsibility of "art expressed by mimesis" to “take every difference seriously”. If this is in fact a “responsibility” (and to whom, or what?), why is it reserved to mimesis alone? If you thought, for example, that art was about expression or even “significant form”, why would you not, equally, have to “take every difference seriously” (whatever that means exactly)?