“If the world… is basically a system of meanings into which we are always already thrown, the artwork founds a world insofar as it founds a new system of meanings… it represents a new perspective, a proposal to arrange the world in a different manner...” |
The Truth of Art
Can we speak of a “truth” of art? And if so, what would it be? How would it be?
In some of his writings from the 1960s, Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo suggested that the truth of art is something that inheres in the encounter between the person confronting the work and the artist, an encounter in which the artist, through the artwork, opens a view into a world different from the world of the person confronting the work. Through his or her interpretive relationship to the work, the person confronting the work is brought into contact with that potentially radically other world, with accordingly transformative consequences. Vattimo holds that in confronting the work, we may be put in a position to confront more than our own taste or experience reflected back to us; instead, we may encounter something truly other and intimately unfamiliar. This truly other truth isn’t a propositional truth or a discursive truth; rather, it is a truth that is to be found in what Vattimo describes as “a radical novelty at the level of being-in-the-world” (ACT, p. 50), a truth that communicates itself in a meeting of the different worlds of the artist and his or her audience, through the artwork. I want to suggest that the path toward this nondiscursive, transformative truth leads us through territory staked out by André Breton in his notions of the evocative object and convulsive beauty.
Art’s Ontological Bearing
The kind of art to bear this truth is art that has what Vattimo called an ontological bearing. An artwork has an ontological bearing or aspect to the extent that it reveals something of the historically specific ways in which we—as a culture, a social group of whatever sort—frame and make sense of that something—that world—in which we are immersed. Art’s ability to provide this opening to the world is, in effect, what gives it its ontological dimension and ultimately its claim to truth. As such, it has the potential to, as Umberto Eco put it in Kant and the Platypus, unsettle us:
Can we speak of a “truth” of art? And if so, what would it be? How would it be?
In some of his writings from the 1960s, Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo suggested that the truth of art is something that inheres in the encounter between the person confronting the work and the artist, an encounter in which the artist, through the artwork, opens a view into a world different from the world of the person confronting the work. Through his or her interpretive relationship to the work, the person confronting the work is brought into contact with that potentially radically other world, with accordingly transformative consequences. Vattimo holds that in confronting the work, we may be put in a position to confront more than our own taste or experience reflected back to us; instead, we may encounter something truly other and intimately unfamiliar. This truly other truth isn’t a propositional truth or a discursive truth; rather, it is a truth that is to be found in what Vattimo describes as “a radical novelty at the level of being-in-the-world” (ACT, p. 50), a truth that communicates itself in a meeting of the different worlds of the artist and his or her audience, through the artwork. I want to suggest that the path toward this nondiscursive, transformative truth leads us through territory staked out by André Breton in his notions of the evocative object and convulsive beauty.
Art’s Ontological Bearing
The kind of art to bear this truth is art that has what Vattimo called an ontological bearing. An artwork has an ontological bearing or aspect to the extent that it reveals something of the historically specific ways in which we—as a culture, a social group of whatever sort—frame and make sense of that something—that world—in which we are immersed. Art’s ability to provide this opening to the world is, in effect, what gives it its ontological dimension and ultimately its claim to truth. As such, it has the potential to, as Umberto Eco put it in Kant and the Platypus, unsettle us:
"by destroying our consolidated certainties, by reminding us to consider things from an unusual point of view, by inviting us to submit to the encounter with the concrete and to the impact with an individual in which the fragile framework of our universals crumbles." (KP, p. 35)
Eco’s description of the creatively unsettling--“convulsive,” to use a term that gets us slightly ahead of ourselves—effects of the artwork neatly captures what it is that an artwork can do to those who meet it on its own terms and enter into its world.
In order for the artwork to confront us with something radically not ourselves, it must convey a world other than our own—a world as the artist apprehends it, interprets it, represents it, and conveys its meaning. The artwork must, in other words, disclose the existential structures of the artist’s world, which is to say what he or she asserts or projects about him/herself into the worlds of overlapping and interlocking social groups or communities to which he or she belongs. (Thus to speak of a world is to simplify for the sake of convenience. In truth, every person inhabits multiple worlds and sub-worlds, corresponding to the different facets of his or her identity.) A “world” in this sense isn’t an explicit worldview, although it may include that, but rather encompasses the fundamental concerns and structures of significance through which an individual engages him- or herself within the surrounding environment. It is an experiential, interpretive framework determined as much by affective engagement and unreflected-on prejudgments as it is by an explicitly articulated understanding.
I want to emphasize that although a person’s world is rooted in a common ground of culturally and historically available meanings, it is inhabited in ways that necessarily are unique to that person, given his or her own sets of circumstances, personal history, temperament and dispositions, moods, desires, concerns, and so forth. Each person’s world is consequently an individual variation on a common world. To use a linguistic metaphor, each person’s world represents an idiolectical variant of a shared language. This common world is like a koiné, or language held in common by a group, which must be assimilated by the individuals who inhabit it. As such it is like a given ur-text to be read, interpreted, responded to, and paraphrased in one’s own way—in one’s own idiolect.
An artwork, to the extent that it provides an opening into the artist’s world, discloses that world as both koiné and as idiolect. I would thus modify Vattimo’s terminology to say that such an artwork has an onto-idiolectical bearing. It work gives us the artist’s world to the degree that it represents the artist’s good faith disclosure of him- or herself within the world, using what the world always already provides in the guise of materials, formal vocabularies, traditions and histories of critical interpretation, and so on. These pre-given resources serve as the means toward the disclosure of the artist’s world to the extent that they have been assimilated, interpreted, and re-presented in a way that reflects the artist’s own project. They must, in other words, be translated from the koiné into the artist’s own idiolect. Hence the artwork’s “radical novelty at the level of being-in-the-world” is something that can only be had on the basis of the network of correspondences and associations that are the artist’s own and which are imported into the work through the idiolectical uptake of the pre-given.
In essence, art’s ontological bearing is made possible by its idiolectical bearing. It is through his or her idiolectical transformation and consequent affective imprinting of available methods, materials, formal structures and conventions, and so forth, that the artist expresses, that is to say makes manifest, his or her world. Given all this, I would suggest that the onto-idiolectical artwork is really something like the object Breton described in “Crisis of the Object.” Although Breton was describing found or already-existing objects, his basic idea carries over to created artworks. For Breton, these objects embody a meaning constituted by the poetic imagination rather than the rational faculty, rendering them the carriers of what he described as “latent possibilities” or evocative power (SP, p. 279, emphasis in the original). This evocative power derives, in turn, from what Breton, citing Paul Eluard’s phrase, described as a physics of poetry. It is through a similar physics of poetry that the artist works an imaginative transformation of the pre-given and gives the created work an onto-idiolectical bearing.
The “Truth” of Art and the Ineffable
To the extent that the artwork carries the evocative power that Breton ascribed to the poetically transformed object, its truth will consist as much in its affective and imaginative force as in its aesthetic and conceptual content. But this is just another way of saying that it represents a world. For one’s world is affectively saturated. It is not a neutral place. What makes my world particularly mine are the concerns that motivate the concrete choices I make, the values things have for me, the affective power things carry and the unique correspondences linking them together based on my past history, my present desires, and my future needs, and the imaginative and affectively engaged way in which I live all of this. My way of projecting myself into the world is my way of imagining myself within that world as well as grasping what that world means to me. It is here, in this locus of affect and imagination, that my world is irreducibly mine, and hence other to another. Although irreducibly mine, it is not something uncommunicable or otherwise incomprehensible to others. For my world is my world to the extent that it is rooted in my assimilation and interpretation of the common world, the koiné that sets the limits of intelligibility within which we who share that common world can know each other.
There is, however, something of the inaccessible here, something akin to what Breton, in a different context, memorably referred to as the “uncrackable kernel of night” within us. If the truth of art is truly world-manifesting and is “true” to the extent that it somehow conveys the artist’s way of being-in-the-world, then something about it will hold itself just out of reach. Much of our being-in-the-world has been forged beneath the threshold of awareness and is the product of a logic that follows its own logic; in effect, the existential structures of our world rest on a foundation sunk deep into subterranean territory. Which means that something of the onto-idiolectical meaning of the artwork will evade the artist’s own grasp. Inevitably, there will be areas that haven’t entirely given up their secrets, like those parts of the ancient world that cartographers left blank or designated with the phrase “hic sunt leones.”
What this ultimately means is that in the final calculation the complete ontological truth of art will be ineffable. And yet its very ineffability is just what makes it strange and unsettling, and gives it its evocative power. Through its resistance to complete assimilation, it would show itself to be the alien thing that it is—news from another world, delivered in a slightly foreign dialect whose rhythms and intonations hint at emotions only partly decipherable. This capacity to resist complete assimilation is what allows it to offer us what Vattimo describes as that “something” that is other than “the phantasm of (our) taste” (ACT, p. 129). And perhaps even of the artist’s own taste, to the extent that the work’s meaning lies partly beyond (or beneath) the artist’s own grasp.
Dialogue & Reciprocity
How can this something that exceeds the limits of our own taste realize its potential as a transformational force? Vattimo’s answer is that it is through dialogue, which is “above all a kind of reckoning with...the alterity of the other” (ACT, p. 51). The confrontation with the work represents a moment in which the person in the presence of the work comes into contact with it through his or her own world, with its own unique structures of meaning, which are not the artist’s. Thus a translation from one idiolect to another is in order. I want to emphasize that dialogue is a reciprocal activity; it takes the form of a circular exchange of mutual interpretation between the artist and the person encountering the work. In interpreting the work for him-or herself the latter also interprets the work back to the artist, and in the process potentially opens up a new perspective, one that may reveal hitherto hidden layers or nuances of meaning in the work of which the artist him- or herself was previously unaware. In this dialogue, the worlds of both the work’s creator and its receiver are potentially unsettled and transformed.
The relationship between these alien worlds, as mediated by the artwork, is a relationship that is dialectical in the ancient sense of an exchange of views leading to new perspectives. Unlike ancient dialectic though, this dialogue, at least in its initial stages, unfolds through imagination rather than discursive reason. Why such a dialogue must begin with imaginative interpretation rather than with discursive reason has to do with the nature of the object interpreted. Something formed by the physics of poetry will lend itself to poetic interpretation. If the world the work represents and conveys really is one whose “irreducible alterity” is permeated by imagination and affect, it will at least initially defy the application of the usual tools, rational and otherwise, with which one navigates one’s own, familiar world. The work’s resisting the easy terms of its receiver’s world will produce an interpretive crisis that can only be overcome by a re-imagining of those terms, after which the work’s meaning can take its place within the now-altered affective economy of the receiver’s world. Subsequently, to be sure, this imaginative encounter may be subjected to rational analysis, but it is the initial shock—affective, imaginative, and ontological--of the intuitive confrontation that provides the condition for the possibility of rational analysis.
In the end, the interpretive encounter with the work entails a double movement of transformation. The receiver is transformed by his or her encounter with the alien world projected by the artwork, while at the same time, the artwork is transformed by its being interpreted through the alien world of the receiver. The artwork becomes a mediating object standing between artist and audience, a channel through which meanings can pass and meet to produce a kind of composite that is neither one nor the other, but instead is a unique meaning of the one as seen through the other.
Is the Truth of Art “Convulsive”?
Given all of the above, I want to suggest that there can be a “convulsive” moment in the interpretation of the artwork, where “convulsive” means something like what Breton meant when he asserted that beauty will be convulsive. Breton had in mind the kind of revelatory shock provoked by an encounter with the catalytic force of the incongruous or uncanny—a force he saw epitomized in Lautréamont’s famous image of the meeting of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table: the “very manifesto,” Breton claimed in Mad Love, “of convulsive poetry” (ML, p. 9). Breton articulated his idea of convulsive beauty in some detail; for present purposes I would leave aside the specifically Surrealist qualities he ascribed to convulsive beauty—its eroticism, its paradoxical combination of movement and rest, its overtones of magic—and simply retain its core meaning of a profoundly moving and unsettling experience fraught with personal significance, one in which the ordinary logic of the everyday is suspended or overturned and one’s world breaks open to take on a deeply affecting and unexpected meaning. An experience that entails the overturning of the “natural” or taken-for-granted way we ordinarily interpret our world.
If the artwork induces a shock brought on by the meeting of the two worlds of the artist and of the person encountering the work, if, as an onto-idiolectical object it is the kind of evocative object Breton hypothesized, then it essentially does what convulsive beauty must do: reconfigure the way the world is interpreted by opening up the possibility of new and otherwise unthought-of ways in which the world can present its meanings, meanings to which we are present in a state of openness or disponibilité, to use one of Breton’s terms of art. We see the work, see how it frames its world, and re-see our own world rearranged into a startlingly new configuration. We become sensitized to the world as the locus of possible meanings that overflow the narrower possibilities we previously were used to seeing in it, possible meanings that penetrate deep into the subsoil in which the existential structures of our own world are rooted. We can conclude by saying, in paraphrase of Breton’s famous dictum, that the truth of art will be convulsive, or it will not be.
In order for the artwork to confront us with something radically not ourselves, it must convey a world other than our own—a world as the artist apprehends it, interprets it, represents it, and conveys its meaning. The artwork must, in other words, disclose the existential structures of the artist’s world, which is to say what he or she asserts or projects about him/herself into the worlds of overlapping and interlocking social groups or communities to which he or she belongs. (Thus to speak of a world is to simplify for the sake of convenience. In truth, every person inhabits multiple worlds and sub-worlds, corresponding to the different facets of his or her identity.) A “world” in this sense isn’t an explicit worldview, although it may include that, but rather encompasses the fundamental concerns and structures of significance through which an individual engages him- or herself within the surrounding environment. It is an experiential, interpretive framework determined as much by affective engagement and unreflected-on prejudgments as it is by an explicitly articulated understanding.
I want to emphasize that although a person’s world is rooted in a common ground of culturally and historically available meanings, it is inhabited in ways that necessarily are unique to that person, given his or her own sets of circumstances, personal history, temperament and dispositions, moods, desires, concerns, and so forth. Each person’s world is consequently an individual variation on a common world. To use a linguistic metaphor, each person’s world represents an idiolectical variant of a shared language. This common world is like a koiné, or language held in common by a group, which must be assimilated by the individuals who inhabit it. As such it is like a given ur-text to be read, interpreted, responded to, and paraphrased in one’s own way—in one’s own idiolect.
An artwork, to the extent that it provides an opening into the artist’s world, discloses that world as both koiné and as idiolect. I would thus modify Vattimo’s terminology to say that such an artwork has an onto-idiolectical bearing. It work gives us the artist’s world to the degree that it represents the artist’s good faith disclosure of him- or herself within the world, using what the world always already provides in the guise of materials, formal vocabularies, traditions and histories of critical interpretation, and so on. These pre-given resources serve as the means toward the disclosure of the artist’s world to the extent that they have been assimilated, interpreted, and re-presented in a way that reflects the artist’s own project. They must, in other words, be translated from the koiné into the artist’s own idiolect. Hence the artwork’s “radical novelty at the level of being-in-the-world” is something that can only be had on the basis of the network of correspondences and associations that are the artist’s own and which are imported into the work through the idiolectical uptake of the pre-given.
In essence, art’s ontological bearing is made possible by its idiolectical bearing. It is through his or her idiolectical transformation and consequent affective imprinting of available methods, materials, formal structures and conventions, and so forth, that the artist expresses, that is to say makes manifest, his or her world. Given all this, I would suggest that the onto-idiolectical artwork is really something like the object Breton described in “Crisis of the Object.” Although Breton was describing found or already-existing objects, his basic idea carries over to created artworks. For Breton, these objects embody a meaning constituted by the poetic imagination rather than the rational faculty, rendering them the carriers of what he described as “latent possibilities” or evocative power (SP, p. 279, emphasis in the original). This evocative power derives, in turn, from what Breton, citing Paul Eluard’s phrase, described as a physics of poetry. It is through a similar physics of poetry that the artist works an imaginative transformation of the pre-given and gives the created work an onto-idiolectical bearing.
The “Truth” of Art and the Ineffable
To the extent that the artwork carries the evocative power that Breton ascribed to the poetically transformed object, its truth will consist as much in its affective and imaginative force as in its aesthetic and conceptual content. But this is just another way of saying that it represents a world. For one’s world is affectively saturated. It is not a neutral place. What makes my world particularly mine are the concerns that motivate the concrete choices I make, the values things have for me, the affective power things carry and the unique correspondences linking them together based on my past history, my present desires, and my future needs, and the imaginative and affectively engaged way in which I live all of this. My way of projecting myself into the world is my way of imagining myself within that world as well as grasping what that world means to me. It is here, in this locus of affect and imagination, that my world is irreducibly mine, and hence other to another. Although irreducibly mine, it is not something uncommunicable or otherwise incomprehensible to others. For my world is my world to the extent that it is rooted in my assimilation and interpretation of the common world, the koiné that sets the limits of intelligibility within which we who share that common world can know each other.
There is, however, something of the inaccessible here, something akin to what Breton, in a different context, memorably referred to as the “uncrackable kernel of night” within us. If the truth of art is truly world-manifesting and is “true” to the extent that it somehow conveys the artist’s way of being-in-the-world, then something about it will hold itself just out of reach. Much of our being-in-the-world has been forged beneath the threshold of awareness and is the product of a logic that follows its own logic; in effect, the existential structures of our world rest on a foundation sunk deep into subterranean territory. Which means that something of the onto-idiolectical meaning of the artwork will evade the artist’s own grasp. Inevitably, there will be areas that haven’t entirely given up their secrets, like those parts of the ancient world that cartographers left blank or designated with the phrase “hic sunt leones.”
What this ultimately means is that in the final calculation the complete ontological truth of art will be ineffable. And yet its very ineffability is just what makes it strange and unsettling, and gives it its evocative power. Through its resistance to complete assimilation, it would show itself to be the alien thing that it is—news from another world, delivered in a slightly foreign dialect whose rhythms and intonations hint at emotions only partly decipherable. This capacity to resist complete assimilation is what allows it to offer us what Vattimo describes as that “something” that is other than “the phantasm of (our) taste” (ACT, p. 129). And perhaps even of the artist’s own taste, to the extent that the work’s meaning lies partly beyond (or beneath) the artist’s own grasp.
Dialogue & Reciprocity
How can this something that exceeds the limits of our own taste realize its potential as a transformational force? Vattimo’s answer is that it is through dialogue, which is “above all a kind of reckoning with...the alterity of the other” (ACT, p. 51). The confrontation with the work represents a moment in which the person in the presence of the work comes into contact with it through his or her own world, with its own unique structures of meaning, which are not the artist’s. Thus a translation from one idiolect to another is in order. I want to emphasize that dialogue is a reciprocal activity; it takes the form of a circular exchange of mutual interpretation between the artist and the person encountering the work. In interpreting the work for him-or herself the latter also interprets the work back to the artist, and in the process potentially opens up a new perspective, one that may reveal hitherto hidden layers or nuances of meaning in the work of which the artist him- or herself was previously unaware. In this dialogue, the worlds of both the work’s creator and its receiver are potentially unsettled and transformed.
The relationship between these alien worlds, as mediated by the artwork, is a relationship that is dialectical in the ancient sense of an exchange of views leading to new perspectives. Unlike ancient dialectic though, this dialogue, at least in its initial stages, unfolds through imagination rather than discursive reason. Why such a dialogue must begin with imaginative interpretation rather than with discursive reason has to do with the nature of the object interpreted. Something formed by the physics of poetry will lend itself to poetic interpretation. If the world the work represents and conveys really is one whose “irreducible alterity” is permeated by imagination and affect, it will at least initially defy the application of the usual tools, rational and otherwise, with which one navigates one’s own, familiar world. The work’s resisting the easy terms of its receiver’s world will produce an interpretive crisis that can only be overcome by a re-imagining of those terms, after which the work’s meaning can take its place within the now-altered affective economy of the receiver’s world. Subsequently, to be sure, this imaginative encounter may be subjected to rational analysis, but it is the initial shock—affective, imaginative, and ontological--of the intuitive confrontation that provides the condition for the possibility of rational analysis.
In the end, the interpretive encounter with the work entails a double movement of transformation. The receiver is transformed by his or her encounter with the alien world projected by the artwork, while at the same time, the artwork is transformed by its being interpreted through the alien world of the receiver. The artwork becomes a mediating object standing between artist and audience, a channel through which meanings can pass and meet to produce a kind of composite that is neither one nor the other, but instead is a unique meaning of the one as seen through the other.
Is the Truth of Art “Convulsive”?
Given all of the above, I want to suggest that there can be a “convulsive” moment in the interpretation of the artwork, where “convulsive” means something like what Breton meant when he asserted that beauty will be convulsive. Breton had in mind the kind of revelatory shock provoked by an encounter with the catalytic force of the incongruous or uncanny—a force he saw epitomized in Lautréamont’s famous image of the meeting of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table: the “very manifesto,” Breton claimed in Mad Love, “of convulsive poetry” (ML, p. 9). Breton articulated his idea of convulsive beauty in some detail; for present purposes I would leave aside the specifically Surrealist qualities he ascribed to convulsive beauty—its eroticism, its paradoxical combination of movement and rest, its overtones of magic—and simply retain its core meaning of a profoundly moving and unsettling experience fraught with personal significance, one in which the ordinary logic of the everyday is suspended or overturned and one’s world breaks open to take on a deeply affecting and unexpected meaning. An experience that entails the overturning of the “natural” or taken-for-granted way we ordinarily interpret our world.
If the artwork induces a shock brought on by the meeting of the two worlds of the artist and of the person encountering the work, if, as an onto-idiolectical object it is the kind of evocative object Breton hypothesized, then it essentially does what convulsive beauty must do: reconfigure the way the world is interpreted by opening up the possibility of new and otherwise unthought-of ways in which the world can present its meanings, meanings to which we are present in a state of openness or disponibilité, to use one of Breton’s terms of art. We see the work, see how it frames its world, and re-see our own world rearranged into a startlingly new configuration. We become sensitized to the world as the locus of possible meanings that overflow the narrower possibilities we previously were used to seeing in it, possible meanings that penetrate deep into the subsoil in which the existential structures of our own world are rooted. We can conclude by saying, in paraphrase of Breton’s famous dictum, that the truth of art will be convulsive, or it will not be.
Works cited:
André Breton, “Caught in the Act,” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1995).
André Breton, “Crisis of the Object,” in Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row Icon Editions, 1972). Cited as SP.
André Breton, Mad Love, tr. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1988). Cited as ML.
Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, tr. Alastair McEwen (San Diego: Hartcourt, 1999). Cited as KP.
Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. Santiago Zabala, tr. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia U Press, 2008). Cited as ACT.
Gianni Vattimo, “The Ontological Vocation in Twentieth-Century Poetics,” in ACT.
André Breton, “Caught in the Act,” in Free Rein, tr. Michel Parmentier and Jacqueline D’Amboise (Lincoln NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1995).
André Breton, “Crisis of the Object,” in Surrealism and Painting, tr. Simon Watson Taylor (New York: Harper & Row Icon Editions, 1972). Cited as SP.
André Breton, Mad Love, tr. Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln NE: U of Nebraska Press, 1988). Cited as ML.
Umberto Eco, Kant and the Platypus: Essays on Language and Cognition, tr. Alastair McEwen (San Diego: Hartcourt, 1999). Cited as KP.
Gianni Vattimo, Art’s Claim to Truth, ed. Santiago Zabala, tr. Luca D’Isanto (New York: Columbia U Press, 2008). Cited as ACT.
Gianni Vattimo, “The Ontological Vocation in Twentieth-Century Poetics,” in ACT.
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Daniel Barbiero is a writer, double bassist, and composer in the Washington DC area. He writes on the art, music, and literature of the classic avant-gardes of the 20th century as well as on contemporary work; his essays and reviews have appeared in Arteidolia, Heavy Feather Review, periodicities, Word for/Word, Otoliths, Offcourse, London Grip, Perfect Sound Forever, and elsewhere. He is the author of As Within, So Without, a collection of essays published by Arteidolia Press; his score Boundary Conditions III will be appearing in A Year of Deep Listening, to be published by MIT Press in fall, 2024.
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