The Speechless Image: Gadamer and the Claim of Modern Painting

Abstract

Since the publication of Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer's reflections on art have increasingly sought to address the provocation of aesthetic modernity.1 He readily acknowledges that the simultaneous emergence of such phenomena as hermetic poetry, atonal music, and abstract art points to a genuine revolution that took hold of European art shortly before the First World War.2 For him, the advent of modern art poses the following question: it is it that such works of avant-garde art can exert a claim upon us as powerful and as authoritative as that of the classic or traditional work?3 The issue for hermeneutics is to comprehend this claim and our responsibility in light of it. What prompts this issue for Gadamer's hermeneutics is the unintelligibility of so much avant-garde art. The opaque yet insistent presence of the work of artists as diverse as van Gogh, Mondrian, Matisse, and Pollock testifies to the quality of modern painting. Standing there impassively, self-contained in their brute silence, such works seem to withdraw in the face of any effort to penetrate them. Here we seem to encounter the strange speechlessness of an art poised at the very limits of intelligibility. At this limit the pictorial image falls silent and the claim of modern painting becomes problematic. Faced by the picture that stares at us with its eloquent mute gaze, hermeneutic understanding seems to falter. Here the task of finding a common is not facilitated, but frustrated; likewise the fulfillment of sharing a common meaning is not redeemed, but repudiated. In this way modern painting challenges both the competence of hermeneutic understanding and the claim of hermeneutic universality. In the presence of the speechless image philosophical hermeneutics thus appears to encounter its own limit. Nevertheless, such works arrest and address us. Speaking specifically of modern art, Gadamer says that we have to understand how it comes about that the work addresses us.114 This, I believe, marks the crux of his interpretation of modern painting. Ultimately Gadamer is concerned to show that even the unintelligibility of modern art does not invalidate his conception of the work of art as a hermeneutic phenomenon. To the contrary, the quality of modern painting actually confirms the hermeneutic experience of the work of art as a communicative event. Whenever we genuinely experience a work of art something happens; we find ourselves addressed by the other, the work, and responsible to its claim. This remains true even where we are addressed in the of avant-garde art. So while it may appear to refuse meaning, the speechless image is still a communicative event that calls upon us to respond. What Gadamer finds most provocative about modern art is the fact that so many of its major works appear to be impenetrably enigmatic. Indeed, it has been argued that unintelligibility is characteristic of the most authentically modern-i.e., avant-garde art.5 Gadamer even asserts that modern painting constitutes an unintelligible language in which we seem to encounter the rejection of meaning rather than its expression.6 His aim, however, is not to explain away the unintelligibility of avant-garde art, but rather to understand it is possible to be addressed by such works. In this respect, his reflection upon modern painting is best interpreted as a response to its enigmatic character (Adorno). With such works it does not seem to be merely a matter of an inadvertent obscurity that can be overcome once its idiosyncratic codes have been mastered. Modern art, Gadamer asserts, offers us a pictorial code that we try to read on account of the meaning it expresses, but it is written in an inexplicable and indecipherable sign language.7 It is this dual aspect of modern painting that constitutes its character. Here we find ourselves addressed, but in a pictorial idiom that is virtually unreadable. …