We arc closest to waking when we arc dreaming of dreaming.
Novalis
Most interpretations of contemporary art give the impression of being more concerned with historical justifications, or with the def- inition of a poetics or a procedure, than with aesthetic evaluation (which demands an axiological scheme as well as a critical choice that expresses itself in terms of "ugly" or "beautiful," "poetry" or "nonpoetry," "art" or "nonart," or, more shrewdly, "success" or "failure" in relation to an underlying poetics).
There are reasons for this impression; indeed, one wonders why so few of those who sense it as a bad sign dare denounce it and why so few of those who do not feel threatened by it have the courage to explain it and theorize about it.
This brings up an interesting question: Is this situation due to a choice by contemporary art critics, or does it depend on the new notion of art expressed by most contemporary works?
I myself have been guilty of an action that most defenders of axiological criticism condemn: I have tried to describe some phe- nomena of contemporary art from the point of view of the inten- tions (the poetics) underlying the artistic procedure, and of the his- torical reasons informing these intentions. In other words, what notion of art motivates most of today's artists? To what extent does this new idea reflect the development of a modern aesthetic con- sciousness? And how do these intentions become methods of pro- cedure, and, therefore, formal structures? The notion of "open work" seemed particularly effective in explaining these phenom- ena, which is why I proposed it. Obviously, such a choice automat- ically excluded all critical evaluation of the works in question. It
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was understood that I was not going to be concerned with the suc- cess or failure of a work, since my approach was not that of a liter- ary, figurative, or musical critic but that of a cultural historian. I was going to be concerned only with the works, both as projects and products of particular formal approaches capable of clarifying certain aspects of contemporary culture. Criticism had nothing to do with it. Obviously, those who condemned this kind of study for avoiding the risk of an axiological distinction between valid and nonvalid works were essentially expecting the historian of poetics to do the job of the critic. It was a little as if, during a historical
investigation of the effects of the Sarajevo assassination (how did the event influence other important historical movements such as the Allies' intervention in the war, and the Russian Revolution?), someone had suddenly wondered whether the murderer's act was moral or not. Though perfectly valid in a different context, such an ethical consideration would be totally useless to a historical analysis of causes and effects. And yet, on second thought, that sort of ob- jection is never entirely irrelevant. After all, it is fairly natural that a historian working on a particular period should center his study on the events he deems most relevant. Similarly, the cultural histor- ian who attempts a description of the artistic movements of his times is inevitably led to discuss those art phenomena which, though they may mostly interest him for their implicit or explicit poetics, have also met with his approval as finished works of art; otherwise he would not have noticed them or would not have been able to conceal the irritation, disgust, or boredom they might have provoked in him.
And yet, if our cultural historian had decided to commit himself to a critical analysis, would he have been able to work with cate- gories such as "ugly" and "beautiful," "poetry" and "nonpoetry," or would he have been able only to reiterate his description of struc- tural models and of the poetic intentions they express? Moreover, if it is possible to conduct an effective historical analysis of the poetics of the thirteenth century or of Pericles' times, albeit discriminating between critical judgment and structural analysis, is it possible to express a critical judgment of the more provocative phenomena of contemporary art without inevitably lapsing into a structural anal- ysis that would render any axiological evaluation superfluous? All this brings us back to our original question: Does a descrip
tive analysis (what some would define as a "phenomenological" discourse, with no reference to the strict Husserlian implications of the term) depend on a free theoretical choice, or is it made neces- sary by the nature of contemporary art? In other words, does the description and justification of a poetics that has come to replace the aesthetic evaluation of a work depend on the fact that the speaker wants to be considered as a scholar of poetics or, rather, on the fact that the works he is concerned with can be understood and justified only as the expressions of a particular poetics?
All this leads us to a number of problematic conclusions. No- body doubts that in order to understand a work it is necessary to understand the poetics that underlies it. The misunderstandings surrounding Dante's Paradiso,' for instance, were merely the result of the cultural myopia of certain scholars who were unable to con- sider that theological monument as the most vital and most deeply poetic expression of the medieval artist. On the other hand, it is also true that in modern art, from Romanticism to our day, poetics has not been considered only as a project aiming at the production of an artistic object (and, as such, destined to disappear once the object has been realized). On the contrary, it has become art's main subject matter, its theme, its raison d'être. Works of art have become treatises on art. "Poetry of poetry," "poetry about poetry," "poetry to the second power"—these are all examples of the same tendency. Mallarme wrote poetry to discuss the possibility of writing poetry. As we have already noted, Joyce's Finnegans Wake is its own poetics.
A Cubist painting is a discourse about the possibilities of a new pictorial space. Oldenburg's entire oeuvre is a long discourse on the stupidity of making art in the traditional sense, a deliberate choice between artistic activity and ethical action (art as protest, as a mes- sage of salvation).
None of these examples is saying anything new. What is new, instead, is the intensity and the determination with which we must confront the consequences of this new tendency of contemporary art. Let us assume that: (I) the work of art becomes the concrete enunciation of its own poetics (and of all the theoretical problems that a poetics generally, and more or less consciously, entails: a vi- sion of the world, a notion of the function of art, an idea of human communication, etc.); (a) the most relevant way of approaching a work of art is to acknowledge the procedures that it exemplifies; (3)
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these procedures can themselves be reduced to a "model" and therefore to an abstraction, since they can be both described and explained. In this case, won't this sort of discourse exhaust all there is to say about the work? There will no longer be any need to speak of a "beautiful" or "ugly" work, since the success of the work will have to do solely with whether or not the artist has been able to express the problem of poetics he wanted to resolve.
First Hypothesis: The Death of Art
It often happens that, once the reader or viewer of contemporary art has understood what the work is all about (that is, the structural idea it wants to realize, such as a new organization of narrative time, a new subdivision of space. or a certain relationship between reader and author, text and interpreter), and particularly if he has understood it thanks to the preliminary declarations of the artist or the critical essay that introduces the work, he no longer feels like reading the work. He feels he has already gotten all there was to get from it, and fears that, if he bothered to read the work, he might be disappointed by its failure to offer him what it had promised.
I recently came across Composition No. 1, by Max Saporta. A
brief look at the book was enough to tell me what its mechanism was, and what vision of life (and, obviously, what vision of litera- ture) it proposed, after which I did not feel the slightest desire to read even one of its loose pages, despite its promise to yield a differ- ent story every time it was shuffled. To me, the book had exhausted all its possible readings in the very enunciation of its constructive idea. Some of its pages might have been intensely "beautiful," but, given the purpose of the book, that would have been a mere acci- dent. Its only validity as an artistic event lay in its construction, its conception as a book that would tell not one but all the stories that could be told, albeit according to the directions (admittedly few) of an author.
What the stories could tell was secondary and no longer interest- ing. Unfortunately, the constructive idea was hardly more intrigu- ing, since it was merely a far-fetched variation on an exploit that had already been realized, and with much more vigor, by contem- porary narrative. As a result, Saporta's was only an extreme case, and remarkable only for that reason.
But one does not need a Saporta to reach this kind of conclusion. As we all know, some interpretations of Finnegans Wake risk being more interesting, informative, and entertaining than the work it- self. Similarly, the summary of a movie, or a description of the criteria according to which it has been realized, is often more per- suasive than the movie itself. Indeed, it often happens that a work falls quite short of the expectations that its poetic intentions have aroused in us. The banal question of the neophyte confronting a work of abstract art ("What does it mean?"), a question that would seem to have nothing to do with aesthetics, criticism, or the history of poetics, is much more illuminating than it seems. The hapless viewer asks what the author of the painting wanted to do, because if he does not know this he won't be able to enjoy the painting. If someone explains it to him, then he may begin to appreciate the work. The work or its rationalization? In any case, his critical ap- proach clearly shows us (as if it were necessary) that in modern art the question of poetics has become more important than the crea- tion of the work itself, that the way in which a work is constructed has become more important than the constructed work, and that form can be appreciated only as the outcome of a formal approach.2
If these observations are true and can be applied, though with different emphasis, to all the products of contemporary art, then we have to admit that aesthetic pleasure has gradually changed from the emotional and intuitive reaction it once was to a much more intellectual sort of appreciation. This is only a hypothesis, but if it is correct there is no reason for despair. After all, didn't the medieval reader find pleasure in applying his intelligence to the dis- covery of many allegorical meanings beneath a literal surface? And wasn't this intellectual discovery colored by emotion? Throughout the centuries, the idea of art has undergone numerous changes. The intuitive spark and emotional shiver that were once thought to ac- company all aesthetic revelation are today not only dated but also limited to a particular historical period and a precise set of cultural models, even though it would be wrong to assume that they have lost all their appeal.
But if this is what Art means to contemporary aesthetics, then the intensely self-analytical trend I have just described can certainly be seen as a sign of the decline of art—more than that, of a concrete example of its death.
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According to Piero Raffia, "the avant-garde is a trick of history meant to hasten the 'death of art,' or, rather, art's transition from the cultural function it fulfilled in the past to a completely different one. In order to express this concept I have used a metaphor (a 'trick of history') which, however, should not be taken to mean that most avant-garde ideologies are not aware of what is happening. Quite the contrary: most of them are so aware of it that it is all they can speak about . . . This change manifests itself as a surplus of rational self-consciousness in relation to the creative process and the kind of artistic pleasure it is supposed to produce . . . Today's art demands an increasingly keener critical awareness, an 'ideolog- ization' of itself . . . This has resulted in a paradoxical imbalance between what the works actually say and the doctrinal surplus that justifies them."'
We can understand how this phenomenon, or this coincidence of phenomena, may, for the sake of description, be defined as "the death of art," but this is not enough to explain what in fact the phrase means. Should it be taken as a facile Hegelianism, implying the dissolution of art into philosophy, or should it instead be seen as the premise of a more subtle speculation? I have in mind the sort of speculation, more philosophical than aesthetic, that one finds in an essay such as "La questione della `morte dell'arte' e la genesi della modema idea di artisticity" (The question of the 'death of art' and
the genesis of the modern idea of artisticity), with which Dino For- maggio opens his book L'idea di artisticita.'
In this essay, Formaggio shows how the elements that have pre- occupied us in the preceding pages—that is, the emergence of a poetry of poetry and of the critical awareness of this phenome- non—were already present in Schiller, Novalis, and Hegel, not to mention HOlderlin. The careful analysis that he devotes to these authors and to the evolution of the notion of the "death of art" shows that it would be much too simplistic to believe in "a histori- cal end of art," and that it would be much more reasonable to understand the formula in the Hegelian sense of "the end of a cer- tain form of art," part of a historical development in which the advent of a new idea of "art" must appear as the negation of what the same term meant for the preceding culture.
In the course of his essay, Formaggio quotes a page by De Sanctis (1817-1883) in which the famous Italian critic clearly showed how
the idealistic nineteenth century was very much aware of this pro- cess. Rather than interpreting it as a symptom of impending death, however, De Sanctis chose to see it as the beginning of a new devel- opment born out of dialectic negation. "What's the point of com- plaining about the state of art and wishing this or that? Science has infiltrated poetry and is here to stay, because this fact corresponds to the current condition of the human mind. We have never been able to look at something beautiful without immediately wonder- ing whether it is also reasonable—and here we are already in the midst of criticism and science! Not only do we want to enjoy, but we also want to be conscious of our enjoyment; not only do we want to feel, but we also want to understand. Today, honest poetry is as impossible as honest faith. Just as we are unable to speak of religion without being irked by doubts ('But is it really true?'), so are we unable to feel without philosophizing about our feelings, or to see without trying to understand our vision. All those who re- sent Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and Leopardi for constructing, as they see it, a "metaphysics in verse," remind me of those priests who rail and rant against philosophy and bemoan the loss of faith. Unfortunately faith is gone, and poetry is dead. Or rather, since both faith and poetry are immortal, what is dead is one of their particular ways of being. Today, faith springs out of conviction, and poetry out of meditation. They are not dead; they are only dif- ferent."'
Obviously, the situation described by De Sanctis is not our cur- rent one; but aside from the fact that it certainly contained the seeds of our situation, what matters in this statement is the dialectic con- fidence and the lightheartedness with which the great critic ac- cepted the crisis of a notion of art which, until then, had seemed the only possible one. We, too, should be capable of this confi- dence, even though what lies ahead may for the moment seem quite uncertain. Formaggio is clearly capable of it when he posits, at the very basis of his notion of art, the Hegelian concept of the "dialectic death, within the artistic and aesthetic activity, of certain figures of consciousness, and through this their constant transformation and regeneration in an ongoing self-consciousness." Formaggio sees all contemporary art as stirred by a movement of mortal self- consciousness, recognizable in its "fundamental intention to start again from zero," in its intensely self-reflective attitude. But he sees
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this as a positive movement: death as "the death of death," negation as "the negation of negation." All this should lead us to conclude that, even if the proposed hypothesis were valid (by which I mean the prevalence of poetics over poetry and of the abstraction of a