Elaine Martin Re-reading Adorno: The 'after-Auschwitz' Aporia in Forum addresses the issue of art after catastrophe. The argument is simple.

Because representation necessarily mediates between an ethical subject — and its reader, there is inevitably a moral peril involved in its artistic rendering. Representation after all requires a medium, medium implies the imposition of form, and form raises the question of literary and visual language as the means of representation. The writer in the aftermath of a catastrophe is confronted with an irresolvable aporetic situation: there was a moral obligation to bear witness to the awful yet the writer was constantly threatened with speechlessness due to the constraints which this event of unimaginable magnitude imposed upon conventional language that had become compromised. The artist or the writer is thus forced to express a horror of unimaginable magnitude by means of an impaired and misappropriated visual or linguistic medium, which seemed to be completely incommensurate with its subject of representation. The crisis of aesthetics thus acquired an ethical dimension.

Adorno is one philosopher who grappled with this aporia---the post-Auschwitz aporia, or the imperative to represent the egregious crimes of Auschwitz and the impossibility of doing so. Adorno’s ‘dictum----"It is barbaric to write poetry after Auschwitz" is generally interpreted as denouncing all art after Auschwitz as invalid with silence the only response. Elaine Martin presents the argument that leads to the aporia:

All-encompassing instrumental rationality fused with irrational ends, technological domination and the reduction of all thought to the calculation of the efficiency of means - these Enlightenment and capitalist tendencies (for Adorno, as a member of the Frankfurt School, the perilous legacies of modernity) had their apotheosis in the Nazi death camps. Absolute reification has halted the process of self-reflection. As a form of supposedly free and individual expression it is irreconcilable with the fact that fascism not only integrated the individual, but along with it those cultural spheres presumed to be autonomous. In the concentration camps human life had been rendered indifferent and by extension expendable. This freedom of individual expression is thus but a façade and a denial of the fact that the death camps brought an end to the very idea of the autonomous subject.

The pictorial turn ---the historical development and recent explosion of the production and dissemination of visual media (the advent of photography, film, digital imagery etc.)--- is associated with the new interlocutors of the visual, who have taken this visual cultural field as their object. One expression of this critical discourse is the emergence of new academic departments devoted to the study of visual culture from the ashes of the discipline of art history in an attempt to cope with the pictorial turn.

A sampling of the books in this exponentially growing field might include, among others, the following: Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (1990); Rosalind Krauss's The Optical Unconscious (1993); Susan Buck-Morss's The Dialectics of Seeing (1989); Lucien Taylor's edited collection Visualizing Theory (1994); Barbara Maria Stafford's Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (1991); Lisa Cartwright's Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture (1995); and Vision and Visuality (1988) edited by Hal Foster) and Martin Jays' Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought.

The latter shows that a great deal of recent French thought in a wide variety of fields, is in one way or another imbued with a profound suspicion of vision and its hegemonic role in the modern era- the clear embodiment of Western Enlightenment rationality in the eye metaphor. The reference is to as the Cartesian perspectivalism of the modern scopic regime, and the Renaissance perspective in the visual arts. In doing so Jay has brought the question of the visual to the forefront of critical thinking.

Cartesian perspectivalism is the e dominant scopic regime of modernity, and this scopic regime combines Descartes’ self-reflexive subject of representation—the I of ‘I think therefore I am’—with the Renaissance notion of vision and representation demonstrated in single-point perspective (whereby the world is seen as though through a single unblinking eye). The result is an ‘ocularcentric’ world view that privileges and equates the I with the eye. In Jay’s analysis, knowledge, perception, identity, language and vision are shown to be intricately related.

One aspect of contemporary city life is the significance of 'aesthetics' in the redevelopment or urban regeneration. Streets are designed to look visually coherent and attractive; green spaces and public art are planned; benches and rubbish bins are designer items, trees are planted to soften the space and provide shade. The everyday is changing, in motion, it is flowing.

We are surrounded by the everyday , steeped in it. It is something we can know and understand naturally, something we can safely take for granted? It is to the everyday that we consign that which no longer holds our attention. Things become ‘everyday’ by becoming invisible, unnoticed, part of the furniture.

This urban space of city life is what we daily experience (ie the perception of the external world by the senses) within our everyday lived patterns and practices of the residents in in shaping personal “attachments to places”. There is an interplay between the private, or personal (we perceive sights, sounds, smells, tastes) and the public ‘senses’ of sense as in a commonality among private sensuous interpretations.

The demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact

A centra claim in analytic aesthetics is that photography is or might become an art has been resisted for generations on the ground that photographs are essentially mechanical products, whereas artistic representations in forms of which painting is the paradigm engage the essentially free and imaginative human creator. Some critics have regarded photographers as mere technicians who assist an automatic process where nature 'draws its own image' upon a light sensitive form. Photographers are akin to organ grinders who simply press buttons to run musical mechanisms. Organ grinders are not considered to be musicians.

Digital photography undercuts that argument. Artists have taken advantage of developments in digital technology to produce large-scale colour images that often resemble or allude to painting. Such photography is considered to be a pictorial arts such as painting (style, expression, originality, depiction, intention, and the like) and that pictorial photography as largely continuous with the conventions of figurative painting. If photography has become trendier than painting, then digital-imaging techniques undermine the confidence in the objectivity (mechanical nature) of the image-forming process.

Recently it has been argued by analytic aestheticians (Roger Scruton in "Photography and Representation") that photographs are not even representations, and a fortiori that photography is not a representational art. It is photography's mechanical nature prevents it from being an art of representation. This implies a transparency--Scott Walden in "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism" states that we see nothing in a photograph but the objects that are photographed. Photographs are 'transparent,' by which is meant that in looking at photographs we "quite literally" see their subjects.

The claim that photography is not a representational art refers to a logically ideal photography, which he defines as having a purely causal and non-intentional relation to its subject. An ideal photograph of x implies that x exists and that it is, roughly, as it appears in the photograph. Yes, there is an intentional act involved in taking the photo, but it is not an essential part of the photographic relation. The appearance of the subject, therefore, is "not interesting as the realization of an intention but rather as a record of how an actual object looked". That implies that in so far as the photographer manipulates the image in some way, going beyond the 'ideal' photographic process, for example in a photo-montage, or digital techniques, then she becomes a painter.



Stamatina Dimakopoulou couples the Baroque and the Postmodern with melancholy and the concept of the fold as mutual traits in her article ‘Remapping the Affinities between the Baroque and the Postmodern: The Folds of Melancholy & the Melancholy of the Fold in E-rea. The following quote at the beginning of her article summarizes her understanding of the affinities between Baroque and the Postmodern:

Both the Baroque and the Postmodern are seen as breaks from and continuations of the culture of the Renaissance and of the culture of modernity, respectively; both are seen as periods of crisis or moments of transition, ushering in the end of a previous cultural dominant, and inaugurating new beginnings. The Baroque and the Postmodern find their most striking manifestations in forms and experiences that articulate intermediary spaces where tensions, antinomies and opposites remain unresolved. They perform tropes of the singular, and the multiple that resist the rationalist dualities of self and world, the universe and the particular.”

Steve Giles, in Making Visible, Making Strange: Photography and Representation in Kracauer, Brecht and Benjamin in New Formations, (June 2007) says that:

By the early 1920s--in western Europe and the USA, at any rate--there had developed two clearly articulated but polarised discourses on photography, namely the documentary and the fetishistic, the scientific and the magical, which betray their roots in the aesthetic theories of the 1880s and 1890s. (7) On the one hand, we have the photographer as witness, producing images of reportage which ostensibly provide empirically verified and verifiable information. On the other hand, we find the photographer as seer, using imagination to transcend empirical reality and express inner truths.

Instead of being construed as a mediator of a prior or pre-existing reality, whether external or internal, the visible surface of the painting came to be seen as an autonomous entity in its own right. The dispute between Realism/Naturalism and Romanticism/Symbolism, which had turned on the nature of the truths that art should mediate, was thereby transmuted into a more radical confrontation concerning the very essence and possibility of representation as such.

Deleuze and Guattari’s engagement with the arts in What is Philosophy? holds that the essential affinity between art and philosophy resides precisely in the notion of “creativity,” that is, the creation of concepts in philosophy and the creation of what they term “percepts” and “affects” in works of art. Their work seeks to emphasise not the conditions under which a specific work of art is created but rather how the work of art can reveal something to philosophy about the conditions of creative activity, of creative practice itself.

In Contemplative Immersion: Benjamin, Adorno & Media Art Criticism in Transformations (No. 15 November 2007) Daniel Palmer makes the following observation about art criticism:

One important way in which the experience of art becomes more than a private affair is in the form of art criticism, when critics – professional or amateur – publish or discuss their reaction to a work in newspapers, magazines and online. Art criticism is an interpretive portal between art production and broader engagement by others. Yet art criticism today is widely held to be in crisis. ... In an age defined by pluralism, art criticism has become piecemeal and ad hoc, driven by the market and curatorial fashion; art criticism’s authority is weak, its rationale is unclear and its impact diminished. Yet one wonders if conventional notions of art criticism are premised on obsolete aesthetic assumptions. In theory, art criticism assesses the aesthetic excellence of works of art, just as in the popular imagination the critic is first and foremost someone who judges. But a survey of visual art critics at American newspapers ....is particularly interesting in this respect; it ranked judgement well behind education as the perceived task of the critic. Since minimalism, conceptual and performance art in the 1960s, aesthetic judgements about artworks have become more difficult if not obsolete. In the absence of “skill” as an accepted quality of good art, no clear criteria for evaluative judgement have emerged. This is intensified in media art that further devalues the material qualities of individual media and heightens the value of audience participation.