‘Art’s Philosophical Work’ reviewed by Daniel Fraser


Art’s Philosophical Work

Rowman & Littlefield International, London, 2015. 296pp., £19.95 pb
ISBN 9781783482900

Reviewed by Daniel Fraser

About the reviewer

Daniel Fraser is a writer and critic living in London. He has written for Ready Steady Book, the …

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In Art’s Philosophical Work, Andrew Benjamin attempts to found a materialist aesthetics which radically reconceives the nature of the work of art in terms of his own relational ontology. In doing so, he describes the work of art as precisely that which works, its existence as a work is a continual process of work. This difficult text seeks to explicate this idea through an engagement of philosophy with art’s history (4) providing new methods for considering the particularity and materiality of an artwork.

The book is divided into two parts, the first of which develops Benjamin’s materialist philosophy through the interaction between the work of materials, their ideational after-effect and time. This takes the form of a philosophical response to the history of art refocused on the work of the work of art, and is guided by the recurrent motif of the hand/instrument relation within works of art themselves. The second part of the book looks back on the history of the philosophy of art, examining previous philosophical attempts to understand artworks in terms of both what they offer to Benjamin’s materialist project and their problematic indifference to the active ‘work of materials’ which serves as Benjamin’s locus of attention.

The trajectories discussed in the early part of the book attempt to orientate the complex terminology Benjamin uses in his analysis. A recurrent theme in his work is the idea of relationality as “anoriginal” i.e. the already present, already at hand, nature of relationality and mediation. Mediation is always already present. Benjamin’s task in the first chapter of the book is to show that the notion of the art as document reaches its limits when one tries to engage philosophically with art’s history. This necessitates a move away from the exemplary notion of a work of art (and with it both Heidegger and Derrida), with its affective givenness, and towards an active one defined by the work’s work, the activity of materials, of matter (7, 8). The central concern of this new active materialism is the work’s mattering (10) a term Benjamin uses to identify the co-presence of the ideational and the material. Benjamin illustrates this approach through readings of Poussin’s Cephalus and Aurore (15), the figure of Niobe (36), and a powerful examination of Piero della Francesca’s fresco The Torture of the Jew (44). In each case, close attention is paid to art’s self-staging, how art presents its own process, and the continuously discontinuous presence of potentiality (46-7). The ontological status of the work of art is posited as a nexus of interaction between the material and the ideational.

The motif which re-presents art’s self-staging, the interaction of materials and the ideational, that Benjamin focuses on is that of the hand/instrument relation. In the second chapter of the book he examines this motif through an approachment of the differing interpretations of Dürer’s Melancholia I offered by Walter Benjamin and Aby Warburg.

In its quest to avoid the trappings of both the ideational and the empirical, Benjamin’s ontology posits the work of art as a nexus of interaction between the two, an interaction which he goes on to develop through the motif of the hand/instrument relation. Central to this process is Benjamin’s approachment of the differing which forms the subject of the second chapter. The female figure in Dürer’s engraving holding the compass forms an inherent complexity which refuses any form of synthetic universality: the relation figures instead as a plural event (58). The hand/instrument relation, for Benjamin, stages the complex relation between contingency and necessity that defines potentiality (79). Emphasising this relation allows for the consideration of Melancholia’s unproductivity, the constancy of the oscillation between production and non-production, and as such she awaits – estranged from production (80).

The final chapter of the book’s first part, ‘On Hands’, generalises the potentiality of the hand/instrument relation in terms of the capacities of the instrument, inscribing the centrality of production into art (96). In doing so, Benjamin asserts that the reproduction highlighted in Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility opens up not a fetishisation of the present and future but the necessity of the recognition of art as produced and as such the after-effect of the technical (98). The work of art works as a site of irreducibility, a complex economy, one inextricably bound up with colour. The presentation of the hand, the history of being at hand, entails an undoing of the primacy of context, refusing its unity, whilst simultaneously referring to a context of its own. Benjamin compares this to Walter Benjamin’s reference to quotation as an interruption of context (101). This undoing renders terms for interpretation such as depiction and description inadequate as they do not capture the possibility that the image’s appearance, its finitude, is an after-effect of the work of an economy within which meanings are only ever the after-effect of the work of materials.

In order to explain this, and draw the elements of Benjamin’s materialism together, we must turn to time. This is best expressed by the author’s reading of Jan Gossaert’s St Luke Painting the Virgin. Benjamin argues that the double mediation of the hand/instrument relation – the hand of St Luke on the instrument and the guiding hand of the archangel mediating that relation – is opened up by the open hand present in Lissitzky’s 1924 Self-Portrait. In other words, the interpretive potential of art’s self-staging of its own materiality was not available to be seen by the contemporaries of Gossaert, despite its integral presence in the work of art itself. This relation relies on a refusal of the hold of historical time as continuity and periodisation and is founded on an instability that precludes any attempt to articulate the work as an original and self-referring singularity (121). Time (history), art and work are thus articulated in this relational ontology in a manner which undermines any notion of art as ‘Modern’ if that implies a process of continual progression. Instead, for Benjamin, there are a set of interpretive and critical practices which demand to be thought of as modern.

The second part of the book turns from a philosophical response to the history of art to an examination of the history of the philosophy of art. Consisting of five inter-connected essays, it seeks to elaborate how the materialist project of the first three chapters emerged whilst exposing the limitations of previous philosophical considerations of the work of art. These limitations in each case, though in different forms, are articulated as stemming from the continual resistance, of thinkers from Heidegger to Lyotard to Derrida, to the inherent materiality of the work of art.

This reading of relational ontology alongside previous elaborations of the work of art begins with Heidegger, sculpture and the investigation of art and space (156) before moving on to examine Derrida’s writing on Artaud’s drawings and Atlan’s pictures, locating their concerns as remaining within the framework of ekphrasis (170), a mode of formal analysis.

The following two chapters, on Lyotard and Sallis, map the place of colour in Benjamin’s relational materialism. Building on Schelling’s position in Philosophy of Art whereby the author asserts colour as holding an opposition between the sensible and intelligible, Benjamin, argues that to escape this idealism requires a distancing of this opposition (197). In Lyotard’s writing he finds this distance in a process of withdrawal enacted by the overabundance of the material (colour) which prevents the understanding, the philosophical, from reasoning with it. This withdrawal however gives primacy to the particular over the relational and the distance is ultimately effaced in the positioning of the philosophical as that which effaces distance. Withdrawal is always already a form of drawing Benjamin writes: the singular marks an intersection of lines (205). In the section on Sallis, and his engagement with Hegel, Benjamin turns to the question of colour’s presence, developing the idea of the potential overcoming of the sensible/intelligible distinction through the recognition of colour as an essential part of the work of art’s self-staging as art. Mattering and colour absorb the work’s ideational content, becoming the work’s work (224). Colour is therefore operative within the work’s complex economy, working with mattering and the content of the picture to open up a plural sematic economy beyond the sensible/intelligible dichotomy.

In the closing pages Benjamin turn to Herder and the orientation of hands and eyes, examining how the latter’s concerns with touch present a potential position beyond the sensible/intelligible opposition. Though touch ‘brings the opposition of sensation and cognition into play’ (250) it does so in a way which questions the determination of the subject/object relation played by the former opposition. This notion of touch, which concerns the materials of an artwork without reduction to the empirical, Benjamin concludes, offers much to the building of the materialist philosophy of art which Art’s Philosophical Work has been attempting to draw.

Art’s Philosophical Work presents a radical and complex attempt to re-think the relationship between philosophy, history and art. Benjamin’s relational methodology is one which draws on a huge variety of aesthetic sources that requires detailed attention in order to grasp beneath its theoretical difficulty. And, despite the continual evocation of the labour process in his explication of materials and their work, Marx’s presence in the book is marked by its absence. However, in seeking to found a pluralist ontology of art articulated through work as the interaction of the ideational and the material, Benjamin’s work opens up the potential for a materialist engagement with art of both critical and political importance.

29 June 2016

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