The Gift as Art: An Interview with Stephen David Ross - Pt. 10

  James Coignard, "Tête en A B", Mischtechnik und Collage auf Papier um 1975, Galerie Boisseree

"Now the figure appears like some kind of unpronouceable letter within a system of signs from which it is born, as well as giving it its meaning.  Like some kind of life-giving breath that expands in space and volume (Pleynet, James Coignard, p. 28-29)".

Rick Visser:  As an artist, I very often feel ‘besieged by all these powers and threats’, many more than the short list you mention.  Much of this is a function of a personal path  that has a need to understand and come to terms with theses powers, some internal, some external, all powers that would wish to enlist art, my art, for exclusive representation in their particular ‘gallery of power’, art that is not even my art.  The image of Odysseus comes to mind, the image of Calypso and the image of Odysseus tied to the mast – as a very real experience.  I suppose some artists just ‘go to it’ without many of the conflicts I feel.  In many cases, I admire them and wish sometimes that my path were simpler or more direct.  But each artist must make her or his own way through.  To a certain degree; in a very real way, the path becomes the work.  I think it is important that you said art has no place of refuge.  This is how I experience it much of the time.  Camus, in his essay, ‘Create Dangerously’, wrestles with these same questions, exposes some of the same conflicts.  I am more interested in those who wrestle with the question than those who seem to have resolved it in one way or another.  I am interested in the refugees.  I think of Luce Irigaray when she says, “It is blindly, with no project, that those who dare all advance.  Released from the spell of the fear of being without shelter.  Holding nothing back, giving themselves to the measureless open.” (Luce Irigaray, ‘The Forgetting of Air in Martin Heidegger’, p.176)

Rilke always had the deepest regard for works of art.  I sense in him something beyond the question of art for art’s sake when he speaks about one of the liberties of communication that are acceptable to him in regard to art: ‘in showing one another what one has become through one’s work and thereby supporting and helping and (in the humble sense of the word) admiring one another.’ (Rainer Maria Rilke, ‘Letters on Cezanne’, p.5)

In him, I always sense the gift and the good of which you so often speak, something that goes beyond the question of art for art’s sake.  I also appreciate the emphasis you continually give to the multiplicity of images.  It is this proliferation that interests me -- proliferation, mutation, permutation, and kaleidoscopic faceting – forever teasing any attempt to pin art down into a specimen box, wings still intact, frozen glory to admire (under glass).

I know you are working on a new book related to aesthetics.  Can you say something about where you are headed in this book?  Or am I jumping the gun?

Stephen David Ross:  With respect to the struggle that is art, of course some, even many, artists do not struggle, or engage in a different struggle. Art, perhaps, is many struggles. And it is not alone in struggling, though artists may feel isolated and unloved. The question has to do with the struggle, the nature and the intensity of the struggle. But let me put this aside for a moment to address the image and the proliferation.

A moving impetus behind The Gift of Beauty [GB] was to be able to think about art and aesthetics beyond the boundaries of art, yet not from another bounded place. I mean not only the institutional forms and practices of art‑‑museums, galleries, and recognized artists‑‑but the restrictions of whatever art called us to beyond art to science, nature, and the world. Beauty served that purpose, both for me and historically. Throughout the world and for the Greeks, beauty has transcended every limit set up for it. Beauty appears at once as the apotheosis of the limit, the superlative of superlatives, and as beyond measure, beyond superlatives and achievements. And if that were not enough, through time other terms came to resonate with beauty to express its transcendences‑‑the sublime, horrific, traumatic.

In The World as Aesthetic Phenomenon, I mean to extend this sense of the aesthetic and beauty beyond art to the world, as Nietzsche suggests, in terms of the image, after Blanchot, in terms of exposition following Levinas. The gift of beauty, the expressiveness of things, the world as aesthetic phenomenon, become the proliferation of the image. I'm interested in the production and dispersion of images as the expressiveness of things‑‑that is (my mantra), as exposition: exposure as expression, calling; as aisthêsis, mimêsis, poiêsis, catachrêsis, technê; as image, aesthetics, beauty, art; calling as giving. I mean to understand the expressiveness of things as calling and as giving from the good, that is, as ethical. I see the exposition of things as calling us to respond to them and to care for them, to cherish them, insofar as they always promise more than we take them to be, promise more than they are. This always more is beauty, aesthetics, expressiveness, exposition. It is also betrayal. Things are always more than we take them to be, and that is what I mean by the image. It proliferates, multiplies, because that excess reveals itself in the image, as the image and its proliferation. It also dominates, restricts, coerces, violates‑‑again as the image and in the images that proliferate. Betrayal is this excessiveness in which the radiance of the image does violence to itself and to others.

Here then are some expressions of the image:

the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. (Nietzsche, ASC, 22)

art represents the highest task and the truly metaphysical activity of this life. (BT, 31‑2)

The image sees.

The image feels.

The image acts. (Bennett, CB, 195)

The image calls.

The image gives.

The image expresses.

The image exposes.

          Here are some expressions of betrayal:

All things must make reparation to one another for their injustice (Anaximander fragment; Simplicius Phys., 24, 18 [DK 12 B 1]; trans. Robinson, EGP, 34).

The one does violence to itself, and guards itself against the other. (Derrida, PF, ix)

Humanity proceeds from domination to domination. (Foucault, NGH, 150‑1)

Human beings fight for their servitude as though it were their salvation. (Deleuze and Guattari, A‑O, 29)

The witness is a traitor. (Lyotard, I, 204)

The one betrays itself in betraying the others. (Ross, SEB, pp. xxx)

That's enough on the proliferation of the image. Let me return to art to ask what role art has in this context. In a collection of pieces on food and eating (Ron Scapp, and Brian Seitz, eds. Eating Culture [EC]. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), Laura Trippi describes several artists who work with food. One of them, Ben Kinmont, developed a dishwashing project among others, in which he went to people's homes to help them wash dishes. He describes how he thinks about this as follows:

If everyone is washing their dishes, and I'm washing my dishes, why do I even have to bother going over there to do it, other than just helping someone out and the idea of the artist being a help? The reason is there's different levels of understanding and meaningfulness that we bring into our lives. There's raw experience and as it moves and you come to understand it and experience it more and more, you can come up with a comprehension of it, then we can shape it into something that's more meaningful. My goal I suppose is to make experience more meaningful. The great thing about a gallery and the separateness of a gallery is‑‑there's all this distraction going on, it's difficult for us physically and psychologically to deal with. You go into a gallery and it's quiet, and you see something that you can focus on, that you can say, here's my moment to be quiet.  So the whole point of doing this in someone's home is that I'm doing something and they're going to look at washing their dishes differently perhaps. Even though I do it in a normal way, I don't want to make it theatrical. Through the normalcy it can perhaps also become more meaningful. It's really about life, it's about how do we have meaningful moments in our lives. The whole issue of art's separateness and parameters is that's just what we have to do in order to understand things. (p. 141)

I think there's something worth considering here. We look at art, we go into a gallery, we attend to works by artists, in order to understand, to focus, to pay attention to meanings. In short, to understand the meanings of things, sometimes of ordinary experiences, differently perhaps. I like the perhaps and I like the differently. But the meanings and understandings that come with artistic spaces, artistic works, they seem to me to be what images are all about. That is, there are images, too many images, and they do not hold still. They move and proliferate. The meanings they embody and reveal move and proliferate as well. We lose sight, we are overwhelmed, distracted, have other things to worry about. Art presents the image for us so that we can dwell upon it, pay attention to it, let ourselves be moved by it, thereby to understand, experience, feel, reflect. All this without insisting on fixing and on grasping the image. Art is a particular, poignant, intense reflection on the multiplicity and multiplication of images, on the overabundant expressiveness of things.

I return to the struggle. Kinmont sounds as if he does not address the struggle to present and to reflect. Perhaps something will be different. I think that's an important posture. Yet presentation and reflection are frequently besieged by competition and by alternatives. Not least by violators and controllers. So artists and others have to struggle to find spaces and times for understanding and meaning.

Even so, and I close this circle again, the image multiplies excessively and expressively, against every effort and power to hold it fixed and to restrict it. This is its wonder and its betrayal.

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