Life and Art

Abstract

Dennis Schmidt's book, Word and Image: Heidegger, Klee, and Gadamer on Gesture and Genesis (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), is an intense and extraordinarily rich work that moves across history of aesthetics from Kant to Gadamer. It traces with extraordinary insight movement of thinking that responds to artwork and to what painting lets shine forth in of appearance. It also offers to us a genuinely original understanding of aesthetic life and of space of painting that has opened up for our times. The fact that first line of text is about what gave birth to and shaped is no accident. This is all about birth and genesis and new forms of life and about movement that shapes and belongs to this life. I say this without forgetting that it is a about painting. I am tempted to suggest playfully a new title for this book. If I did, it would be something like: Life and Art: Toward an Ethics of Generation and Creativity. But author would no doubt respond that title he did choose, Between Word and Image, says exactly this. Everything hinges on that is so prominently announced in his title. This is about movement and enlivening that occurs between word and image and between image and word, about a doubling of word and image, about possibility of a translation between word and image.As I have already suggested, for me central theme of is relationship of art and life and therefore about how art has capacity to intensify human life and thereby revitalize our experience of life in general. If Schmidt is correct and if his insights take hold, and if modern art has impact on us that it has had on him, then there is hope for us in a increasingly dominated by our desensitization toward and objectification of life-world in which we dwell. This is a theme from Heidegger that Schmidt takes very seriously. Schmidt comments on Heidegger's brief encounter with Klee's artworks and writings and highlights possibilities Heidegger glimpsed for a rekindling of deep connection between techne and phusis, between art and life, that for Heidegger flashed up in Klee's work. He elaborates on what Heidegger sees as difficulty of our times that inhibits any genuine engagement with painting. Schmidt identifies this obstacle to engagement as the still-unthought essence of technicity, essence of production in age. think that essence, one needs to begin by thinking destitution, abandonment, of being in historical present (80). Heidegger saw a renewed possibility for this kind of thinking, that is, for thinking abandonment, in works of Paul Klee, but he never followed up on this insight. Schmidt declares: To pursue possibilities [in Klee's paintings] that Heidegger so abruptly abandons, is intention of this book (80). For Schmidt, works of Klee are, for reasons he shows, exemplary artworks through which we can learn something about modern art in general that may provide an opening in these destitute times for a non-objectifying, life-affirming sense of production. They have potential to break through closure of our times and rekindle our love for and wonder in face of of world (142). Heidegger worries about age of machination that threatens to close us off to possibility of art, and, despite exceptional art of Klee, he is concerned that it is precisely non-objective, abstract art that announces and inscribes this collapse. In contrast, Schmidt sees non-objectivity of modern art as a site for optimism about appearance because it refuses any claim to capture and objectify what cannot be grasped and comprehended. It is for this reason, for example, that Schmidt asserts as a basic conviction of his that nothing less than work of art will suffice 'after Auschwitz' (11). I wonder what Schmidt would say in this regard about Blanchot's work, and whether he shares with him sense that art has to enter into this devastation and stay with it in order to address depth of absence and loss that is indicated by word Auschwitz. …