Of course, at the theoretical level, Pareyson’s analyses assume an optimum aesthetic experience. Nevertheless, what this view of interpretation stresses is the intimate relationship, within a work, between genesis, formal properties, and the possible reactions of the interpreter. These three aspects, which the formalists of New Criticism insist on keeping distinct (even though they seem to devote all their attention to the second, to the exclusion of the other two), are inseparable in the aesthetics of formativity. A work consists of the interpretive reactions it elicits, and these manifest themselves as a retracing of its inner genetic process—which is none other than the stylistic resolution of a «historical» genetic process.
VIII. Two Hypotheses about the Death of Art
We arc closest to waking
when we arc dreaming of dreaming.
NovalisMost interpretations of contemporary art give the impression of being more concerned with historical justifications, or with the definition of a poetics or a procedure, than with aesthetic evaluation (which demands an axiological scheme as well as a critical choice that expresses itself in terms of «ugly» or «beautiful,» «poetry» or «nonpoetry,» «art» or «nonart,» or, more shrewdly, «success» or «failure» in relation to an underlying poetics).
There are reasons for this impression; indeed, one wonders why so few of those who sense it as a bad sign dare denounce it and why so few of those who do not feel threatened by it have the courage to explain it and theorize about it.
This brings up an interesting question: Is this situation due to a choice by contemporary art critics, or does it depend on the new notion of art expressed by most contemporary works?
I myself have been guilty of an action that most defenders of axiological criticism condemn: I have tried to describe some phenomena of contemporary art from the point of view of the intentions (the poetics) underlying the artistic procedure, and of the historical reasons informing these intentions. In other words, what notion of art motivates most of today’s artists? To what extent does this new idea reflect the development of a modern aesthetic consciousness? And how do these intentions become methods of procedure, and, therefore, formal structures? The notion of «open work» seemed particularly effective in explaining these phenomena, which is why I proposed it. Obviously, such a choice automatically excluded all critical evaluation of the works in question.
It was understood that I was not going to be concerned with the success or failure of a work, since my approach was not that of a literary, figurative, or musical critic but that of a cultural historian. I was going to be concerned only with the works, both as projects and products of particular formal approaches capable of clarifying certain aspects of contemporary culture. Criticism had nothing to do with it. Obviously, those who condemned this kind of study for avoiding the risk of an axiological distinction between valid and nonvalid works were essentially expecting the historian of poetics to do the job of the critic. It was a little as if, during a historical investigation of the effects of the Sarajevo assassination (how did the event influence other important historical movements such as the Allies’ intervention in the war, and the Russian Revolution?), someone had suddenly wondered whether the murderer’s act was moral or not. Though perfectly valid in a different context, such an ethical consideration would be totally useless to a historical analysis of causes and effects.
And yet, on second thought, that sort of objection is never entirely irrelevant. After all, it is fairly natural that a historian working on a particular period should center his study on the events he deems most relevant. Similarly, the cultural historian who attempts a description of the artistic movements of his times is inevitably led to discuss those art phenomena which, though they may mostly interest him for their implicit or explicit poetics, have also met with his approval as finished works of art; otherwise he would not have noticed them or would not have been able to conceal the irritation, disgust, or boredom they might have provoked in him.
And yet, if our cultural historian had decided to commit himself to a critical analysis, would he have been able to work with categories such as «ugly» and «beautiful,» «poetry» and «nonpoetry,» or would he have been able only to reiterate his description of structural models and of the poetic intentions they express? Moreover, if it is possible to conduct an effective historical analysis of the poetics of the thirteenth century or of Pericles’ times, albeit discriminating between critical judgment and structural analysis, is it possible to express a critical judgment of the more provocative phenomena of contemporary art without inevitably lapsing into a structural analysis that would render any axiological evaluation superfluous?
All this brings us back to our original question: Does a descrip tive analysis (what some would define as a «phenomenological» discourse, with no reference to the strict Husserlian implications of the term) depend on a free theoretical choice, or is it made necessary by the nature of contemporary art? In other words, does the description and justification of a poetics that has come to replace the aesthetic evaluation of a work depend on the fact that the speaker wants to be considered as a scholar of poetics or, rather, on the fact that the works he is concerned with can be understood and justified only as the expressions of a particular poetics?
All this leads us to a number of problematic conclusions. Nobody doubts that in order to understand a work it is necessary to understand the poetics that underlies it. The misunderstandings surrounding Dante’s Paradiso,’ for instance, were merely the result of the cultural myopia of certain scholars who were unable to consider that theological monument as the most vital and most deeply poetic expression of the medieval artist.
On the other hand, it is also true that in modern art, from Romanticism to our day, poetics has not been considered only as a project aiming at the production of an artistic object (and, as such, destined to disappear once the object has been realized). On the contrary, it has become art’s main subject matter, its theme, its raison d’être. Works of art have become treatises on art.
«Poetry of poetry,» «poetry about poetry,» «poetry to the second power»—these are all examples of the same tendency. Mallarme wrote poetry to discuss the possibility of writing poetry. As we have already noted, Joyce’s Finnegans Wake is its own poetics. A Cubist painting is a discourse about the possibilities of a new pictorial space. Oldenburg’s entire oeuvre is a long discourse on the stupidity of making art in the traditional sense, a deliberate choice between artistic activity and ethical action (art as protest, as a message of salvation).
None of these examples is saying anything new. What is new, instead, is the intensity and the determination with which we must confront the consequences of this new tendency of contemporary art. Let us assume that:
(1) the work of art becomes the concrete enunciation of its own poetics (and of all the theoretical problems that a poetics generally, and more or less consciously, entails: a vision of the world, a notion of the function of art, an idea of human communication, etc.);
(2) the most relevant way of approaching a work of art is to acknowledge the procedures that it exemplifies;
(3) these procedures can themselves be reduced to a «model» and therefore to an abstraction, since they can be both described and explained. In this case, won’t this sort of discourse exhaust all there is to say about the work? There will no longer be any need to speak of a «beautiful» or «ugly» work, since the success of the work will have to do solely with whether or not the artist has been able to express the problemof poetics he wanted to resolve.
First Hypothesis: The Death of Art
It often happens that, once the reader or viewer of contemporary art has understood what the work is all about (that is, the structural idea it wants to realize, such as a new organization of narrative time, a new subdivision of space. or a certain relationship between reader and author, text and interpreter), and particularly if he has understood it thanks to the preliminary declarations of the artist or the critical essay that introduces the work, he no longer feels like reading the work. He feels he has already gotten all there was to get from it, and fears that, if he bothered to read the work, he might be disappointed by its failure to offer him what it had promised.
I recently came across Composition No. 1, by Max Saporta. A brief look at the
