Karsten Harries

TheBroken Frame Three Lectures

The Catholic University of America Press Washington, D.C.

Contents

Illustrations viii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction xi

First Lecture: Light Without Love i

Second Lecture: Decoration and Decadence 33

Third Lecture: The Broken Frame 64.

Notes 91

Index 97

vii

Illustrations (Following page 66)

r. Johann Esaias Nilson, Der liebe Morgen 2. Nilson, Der gesegnete Mittag 3. Nilson, Der gute Abend 4.. Nilson, Die fröhliche Nacht 5. Ph. F. von Hetsch, Allegory of Württemberg 6. Nilson, Die Nacht 7. Nilson, Neues Caffehaus 8. Nilson, Das edle Gartenwerck 9. Nilson, Das Gartenwerck auf dem Land

io. Francois Cuvillies, Ornamental Fantasy from Livre nouveau de morceaux de fantaisie

ii. Hogarth, False Perspective 12. Jacques de la Joue, Naufrage

viii

Acknowledgments

Two years ago Jude Dougherty, Dean of the Catholic University of America's School of Philosophy, invited me to give three lectures that would allow me to develop my critique of the approach that has shaped much of our think-ing about art and architecture. Without that invitation this little book would not have been written.

Each of the three lectures has a different prehistory. The first originated in a public conversation with Professor Mi-chael Fried of Johns Hopkins University in March 1986. I owe special thanks to Professor Fried and to Professor Wil-liam Desmond of Loyola University, Baltimore, who had brought us together.

The second lecture represents a further development of ideas first presented under the title, "Dekoration, Dekadenz, Denken," as part of the Bloch-Lukäcs Symposium held in April 1985 in Dubrovnik. A symposium on Hermann Broch held at Yale in November 1986 gave me an opportunity to approach the same issue from a different perspective) I would like to thank the participants in both symposia, es-pecially its organizers, Professor Gvozden Flego of the Uni-versity of Zagreb and Stephen D. Dowden of Yale University.

A first version of the third lecture was part of the inter-disciplinary colloquium, "Tradition and Change in the Arts of the Eighteenth Century," held in October 1984 at the University of Colorado. I am grateful to the colloquium's organizer, Professor Nancy Hill, for her insight, hospitality, and friendship. This last lecture depends on the accompa-

ix

Acknowledgments

nying illustrations, some of them published here for the first time. I would like to thank the Staatliche Graphische Samm-lung of Munich for furnishing me with photographs of engravings by Johann Esaias Nilson and granting permission to reproduce them.

David J. McGonagle, Director of The Catholic University of America Press, Susan G. Needham, the book's copy ed-itor, and Peggy Leonard, Staff Editor, deserve special thanks for their care and attention.

The book's dedication does not begin to express what it owes to my wife, not just its title, which she generously relinquished, having found a better one for her study of eighteenth-century fragments, but much more that only she can know.

Introduction

The history of modern art can be told as a story of art's emancipation from all nonaesthetic concerns. The divorce of art from religion in the early modern period provides an obvious introduction; the progressive attack, first on alle-gory, than on representation, and finally on all meaning, might be chapters; the emergence of the art-work as an ideally self-sufficient beautiful presence that should no long-er mean but simply be could provide an effective conclusion.

One could tell such a story and be confident that much would support it. The ideal of the art-work as an auton-omous aesthetic object, serving neither church, nor state, nor love, serving only art, has indeed presided over the progress of modern art. That ideal helps to define mo-dernity's aesthetic approach to art. Not that this approach has gone unchallenged: art for art's sake has always had its passionate critics. Nor can the complexity of the historical development with its many strands and fitful starts be re-duced to such a simple, linear account; other currents and concerns must be recognized. But passionate criticism tes-tifies to the strength of what is being criticized; and if his-tory is inevitably caricatured by such all-too-neat accounts, our caricature could yet claim to have captured the dom-inant theme on which modern artists have given us ever more rigorous variations. Think of a minimal sculpture by Donald Judd or a painting by Frank Stella: does the best art of the fifties and sixties not offer itself to us as the cul-mination of a development that has its origin in the very

xi

xii Introduction

essence of art? Has art not finally come into its own, pur-sued now only for art's sake?

But suppose the struggle for aesthetic autonomy has given modern art its direction; and suppose, further, that this struggle has been won: where then is art to turn, now that it has rid itself from all that enslaved it? To the extent that art has successfully seized its supposed telos, it also finds itself at an end—a dead end?

When one has become uncertain of one's way, one does well to pause, to review one's progress, to question pre-suppositions and goals. The uncertainty and confusion that are part of the present state of the arts invite thus a recon-sideration of the aesthetic approach to art and beauty that for more than two hundred years has helped shape both the theory and the practice of art. The following three lectures are part of such a reconsideration. In its own way, each examines the aesthetic approach, inquires into its presup-positions, and suggests an alternative.

But if some version of the aesthetic approach today is generally accepted and taken for granted, is this not be-cause it seems so obviously right? Is the very point of works of art not to provide occasions for aesthetic de-light—where, following Kant, aestheticians have tended to insist on the profound distance that separates the disinter-ested satisfaction granted by the beautiful from the nec-essarily interested pleasure we take in what answers to bodily need, to love, or to moral concern? Many philos-ophers, however, from Plato down to Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, have had a very different understanding of beauty and art.

And when we think of beauty, do we not often link it to love, which is never free of interest and desire? And when we think of art in its highest sense, do we not still tend to

Introduction xiii

think of works that have more than a merely aesthetic func-tion? Christian art, for example, sought to place beauty in the service of the Divine Word: consider a medieval altar piece or a baroque church, the Divine Comedy or one of Bach's oratorios. While all these works have qualities that allow a modern aesthete to enjoy them as aesthetic objects, such an approach fails to do justice both to the spirit that once gave rise to them and to the character of our own appreciation. Although prominent for the better part of western history, the religious function of art has been by no means its only one. We can thus speak of a political or social function of art: the palace of Versailles served the public representation of the majesty of the king; similarly, the palazzi of renaissance merchants helped to articulate the social position of their owners and thus made a contribution to the articulation of a social ethos. It would be easy to go on. All I want to insist on here, however, is that the iden-tification of the art-work with the aesthetic object must be questioned.

But have there not always been aesthetic interest and artistic creation that answered to this interest? That must be granted. Also that aesthetic considerations helped shape all objects that we would call art. Yet this does not mean that works of art are no more than aesthetic objects. Only rarely in the history of art has aesthetic sensibility been allowed to become autonomous. Usually it has been forced to serve other socially and personally significant concerns. The attempt to purify art from such service would seem to be a characteristically, although not uniquely, modern con-cern. In its emphasis on purely aesthetic values modern art would appear to be the exception rather than the rule. To understand this exception, we have to understand what motivated the modern pursuit of art for art's sake, which culminated in the substitution of the aesthetic for the sa-

xiv Introduction

cred. The first lecture attempts an interpretation of this substitution.

The history of ornament testifies to a universal and ir-repressible aesthetic impulse. All the same, what I have called the aesthetic approach would seem to leave little room for ornament. Ornament cannot become a pure aesthetic object without dying as ornament; by its very essence ornament is an impure art form, at least if we allow the aesthetic approach to determine the meaning of purity: for to succeed as such, ornament must serve the ornament-bearer; its beauty cannot be separated from such service. This, however, is ruled out by the autonomy and self-sufficiency demanded of the aes-thetic object.

As the aesthetic approach has difficulty making sense of ornament, so it has difficulty making sense of architecture. In both cases the problem is essentially the same: on the aesthetic approach every successful work of architecture must be considered an impure work of art: If they are to have a function, buildings must be more than just aesthetic objects. Works of architecture thus come to be understood as func-tional sheds that are also works of art. The architect builds, but he does something more, adding to what he builds certain features designed to give it an aesthetic appeal. Or-nament now becomes mere decoration, an aesthetic extra that no longer stands in any essential relationship to the building that supports it and for that very reason, no matter how beautiful such decoration may seem when judged as a self-sufficient aesthetic presence, seen in its context it must seem arbitrary. A consequence of the aesthetic approach is the disintegration of the architectural whole into a functional and an aesthetic component.

The second lecture considers this disintegration and links it to that disintegration of life which to Nietzsche meant

Introduction xv

decadence. The decorated sheds of the nineteenth and twen-tieth century invite an interpretation of both decoration and the aesthetic approach as phenomena of decadence.

All serious consideration of the rise of the aesthetic ap-proach leads back to its eighteenth-century origin. The third lecture follows that lead. Not that it attempts to sum up either the theory or the practice of art in the eighteenth century. All that it attempts is an interpretation of a little-known ornamental engraving that occupies the threshold between rococo and modern art. But unimportant and pe-ripheral as Nilson's Der liebe Morgen is, it yet exhibits this threshold in a way that not just illuminates the aesthetic understanding of beauty and art, but returns us to an older, richer, and more ambiguous understanding that may help us to orient ourselves. Ornament here points a way: its beauty invites us to look again. Thus, like a frame, ornament serves to re-present the ornament-bearer.

Can something like this be said of all beauty? Does all beauty serve re-presentation? The aesthetic approach would not hear of such service: if beauty re-presents at all, it would insist, the beauty of a pure work of art can only re-present itself. Such art can no longer be figured by the frame.

But should there be good reason to hold on to that figure, we might want to say: The beauty of modern art is the beauty of a broken frame.

First Lecture

Light Without Love unla

1

Two passages by Giorgio de Chirico can introduce these reflections: the first, dating from 1912, is from his "Medi-tations of a Painter."

Let me recount how I had a revelation of a picture that I will show this year at the Salon d'Automne, entitled Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon. One clear autumnal afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the middle of the Piazza Santa Croce in Florence. It was of course not the first time I had seen this square. I had just come out of a long and painful intestinal illness, and I was in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity. The whole world, down to the marble of the buildings and the fountains, seemed to me to be convalescent. In the middle of the square rises a statue of Dante draped in a long cloak, holding his works, clasped against his body, his laurel-crowned head bent thoughtfully earthward. The statue is in white marble, but time has given it a gray cast, very agreeable to the eye. The autumn sun, warm and unloving, lit the statue and the church facade. Then I had the strange impression that I was looking at all these things for the first time, and the composition of my picture came to the mind's eye. Now each time I look at this picture I again see that moment. Nevertheless the moment is an enigma to me, for it is inexplicable. And I would like to call also the work that sprang from it an enigma.'

The picture makes present that past enigmatic moment in which it is said to have its origin. De Chirico links this moment to a dislocation brought about by poor health: recovering from a prolonged illness, the painter found him-

2 Karsten Harries

self, as he puts it, "in a nearly morbid state of sensitivity," which let him look at things he had seen many times before as if he were now seeing them for the first time. The es-trangement from the world brought about by this near-morbidity tears away the veil familiarity has cast over them and transforms them into all but mute, but precisely because of this moving presences, their strange visibility enhanced by the light of the autumn sun, which is said to be `warm and unloving."—How are we to understand the importance with which the painter invests this experience? And why the dissociation of light and love?

The second passage, dating from the following year, is from "Mystery and Creation":

I remember one vivid winter's day at Versailles. Silence and calm reigned supreme. Everything gazed at me with mysterious, ques-tioning eyes: And then I realized that every corner of the palace, every column, every window possessed a spirit, an impenetrable soul. I looked around at the marble heroes, motionless in the lucid air, beneath the frozen rays of that winter sun which pours down on us without love, like perfect song. A bird was warbling in a window cage. At that moment I grew aware of the mystery which urges man to create certain strange forms. And the creation seemed more extraordinary than the creators.2

This passage, too, describes a remembered aesthetic expe-rience, really just a fleeting moment of illumination that saw familiar things mysteriously transfigured. Once again the origin of art is located in such transfigurations of the familiar and once again de Chirico emphasizes the quality of the light: if the first passage speaks of the "autumn sun," which, "warm and unloving," lit the statue of Dante and the facade of Santa Croce, the second speaks of the frozen rays of "the winter sun which pours down on us, like perfect song." Both dissociate love from the light of a sun that, low in the

Light Without Love 3

sky, casts long shadows hinting at its approaching disap-pearance, at cold and darkness.

Particularly question-provoking is the simile that joins the frozen rays of the winter sun which "pours down on us without love" to "perfect song." Is the perfect work of art like the sun? And why does de Chirico associate such per-fection no longer with his own art, painting, but with music? The sun's light allows us to see. Does a perfect work of art also let us see? How are beauty and visibility linked? And why dissociate light and love? By emphasizing "without love" de Chirico reminds us of the traditional association of beauty with love, from which he so emphatically takes his leave. What prompts this leave-taking?

De Chirico speaks of remembering what would seem to be experiences very much his own, but such remembrance intertwines with recollections of texts by Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. The first passage is indeed preceded by a quote from Parerga and Paralipomena, where Schopenhauer observes:

To have original, extraordinary, and perhaps even immortal ideas, one has but to isolate oneself from the world for a few moments so completely that the most commonplace happenings appear to be new and unfamiliar, and in this way reveal their true essence.3

De Chirico accompanies this observation with the comment: "If instead of the birth of original, extraordinary, immortal ideas, you imagine the birth of a work of art (painting or sculpture) in an artist's mind, you will have the principle of revelation in painting.4 This substitution links the aesthetic experience in which art is said to originate to a defamiliar-ization of the familiar that also means its detemporalization. Aesthetic experience suspends time.

Even more relevant, if not cited by the painter, is a passage from The World as Will and Representation:

4 Karsten Harries

Light is the largest diamond in the crown of beauty, and has the most decided influence on the knowledge of every beautiful object. Its presence generally is an indispensable condition; its favorable arrangement enhances even the beauty of the beautiful. But above all else, the beautiful in architecture is enhanced by the favor of light, and through it even the most insignificant thing becomes a beautiful object. Now if in the depth of winter, when the whole of nature is frozen and stiff, we see the rays of the setting sun reflected by masses of stone, where they illuminate without warm-ing, and are thus favorable only to the purest kind of knowledge, not to the will, the contemplation of the beautiful effect of light on these masses moves us into a state of pure knowing, as all beauty does.5

Beauty must be seen; this requires light. But beyond being in this sense the necessary presupposition of beauty, at least in the visual arts, light, according to Schopenhauer, has the power of transforming even the most insignificant thing into a beautiful object. Beauty here means heightened vis-ibility. Light thus grants beauty; grants beauty even to what is already beautiful, rendering it even more so.

As the architectural example makes clear, like de Chirico, Schopenhauer is thinking not just of light, but of a special light. He, too, speaks of the winter sun, which illuminates masses of stone without warming them. Schopenhauer links warmth to life. The dissociation of light from warmth invites a dissociation of sight from its usual servitude to life, to the will. Yet, when light is thus experienced as lacking warmth, some awareness of what is lacking remains, an awareness of the indifference of this light to the requirements of life:

Yet here, through the faint recollection of the lack of warmth from those rays, in other words, of the absence of the principle of life, a certain transcending of the interest of the will is required. There is a slight challenge to abide in pure knowledge, to turn away from all willing, and precisely in this way we have a transition from the feeling of the beautiful to that of the sublime.6

Light Without Love 5

Like Schopenhauer's divorce of light from warmth, de Chirico's divorce of light from love places aesthetic expe-rience in opposition to life and its interests. What is excluded, however, continues to haunt us with its absence. This tug of life lets Schopenhauer say that beauty here is not yet altogether pure, but carries a trace of the sublime, a trace of lost warmth, lost love. To understand this beauty we have to understand it as purer than the sublime.

Schopenhauer's understanding of beauty as the object of a pure knowing that delivers us from the tyranny of the will depends on Kant's definition of the beautiful as object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction. Kant's definition in turn looks back to Baumgarten's understanding of the beau-tiful as sensible perfection. I mention these names here only to suggest that de Chirico's divorce of light and love is not at all idiosyncratic, but representative of an approach to beauty and art that for at least two centuries has helped shape not only aesthetic theory, but, as I shall try to show later on in this lecture, the practice of modern art.

This approach, however, is challenged by the way beauty, ever since the Greeks, has been linked to both light and love. Those who would deny that beauty has anything to do with Venus are reproved by the story of Pygmalion. As Nietzsche observes,

If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant's favor that, under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues `without interest," one may laugh a little at their expense: the experiences of artists on this ticklish point are more "inter-esting," and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an "unaesthetic man." Let us think the more highly of the innocence of our aestheticians which is reflected in such arguments; let us, for example, credit it to the honor of Kant that he should expatiate on the peculiar properties of the sense of touch with the naivete of a country parson!'

6 Karsten Harries

Freud has made such naivete difficult for us moderns. Ed-mund Burke's definition of beauty as "that quality or those qualities in bodies by which they cause love, or some passion similar to it,"8 while itself charmingly naive like so much in his Enquiry, is not easily dismissed.

All this suggests that we must distinguish a beauty that is "purer" than the sublime—purer because it has denied the divinity of Venus—from one less pure—although we may want to question the presupposed understanding of "purity."9

2

In the Critique of Judgment Kant offers us what proved to be the enormously influential explanation of the beautiful as object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction. To judge something beautiful is to refer it to such a disinterested pleasure. Somewhat reluctantly Kant calls such judgments "aesthetic."

Kant received the term "aesthetic" from a by then well-established tradition inaugurated by Baumgarten. "It has become customary," writes Kant, "to call a mode of rep-resentation aesthetic, that is, sensible, meaning by this the relation of a representation not to the faculty of knowledge, but to the faculty of pleasure and pain."10 As stated, the definition does not specify what pleasure or pain. It thus leaves room for distinctions between different kinds of aes-thetic representations. To the variety of pleasurable states would correspond a variety of aesthetic judgments, such as "this is pleasant," "this is beautiful," "this is sublime," "this is good."

The aesthetician will want to restrict the meaning of "aes-thetic" and insist, as Kant himself does, that aesthetic plea-sure proper is different from the pleasure we take in the

Light Without Love 7

merely pleasant, on the one hand, or in the good, on the other. Aesthetic judgments, accordingly, are distinguished from judgments that pronounce something "pleasant" or "good" because they elicit some positive bodily or moral feeling. Aesthetic experience leaves the world alone; it does not want to appropriate or in any way change it. Constitutive of aesthetic satisfaction is what Bullough called psychical distance, a "cutting-out of the practical sides of things and of our practical attitude to them,"" that puts these things, so to speak, in a frame. Thus framed they acquire an aura of unreality along with increased visibility.

Most of the time we are prevented from really seeing the things around us by the way we are caught up in the world; just what is closest to us and most familiar, such as the shoes we are wearing or the ceiling of our living room, is only half seen or not at all, calling itself to our attention only when something goes wrong: a shoe loses its heel or a spreading stain on the ceiling tells us once again it is time to call the plumber. But here our perception is too obviously concerned to permit a purely aesthetic response.

Familiarity is said to breed contempt; it also breeds blind-ness. Kandinsky thus likened the established and accustomed to a black hand placed over our eyes. Beauty lifts that hand.12 Tearing down the preconceptions familiarity has placed be-fore things, it unveils or reveals them. Kant's insistence that the pleasure occasioned by what we call beautiful be entirely disinterested makes essentially the same point. Kant ties interest to desire, desire to reality. Thus hunger can be stilled only by real food, moral outrage satisfied only by real change. Aesthetic pleasure, by contrast, asks nothing of reality and lets it be.

Such letting be also suspends our usual involvement with time. Care and concern usually place us beyond the present; we are ahead of ourselves in hope or fearful anticipation,

8 Karsten Harries

behind ourselves in anxious reconsideration of what has happened. Kant's disinterested satisfaction is neither pro-spective nor retrospective. It allows us to exist in the present, open to what presents itself. Inseparable from such openness is a sense of plenitude, of being at one with ourselves, that contrasts with our usual cares. We get here a hint of why human beings should be so very interested in the pursuit of disinterested satisfaction.

Some such understanding of aesthetic experience has often been taken for granted. It readily leads to the conclusion that everything can be experienced aesthetically. As Panofsky explains,

We do this, to express it as simply as possible, when we just look at it (or listen to it) without relating it, intellectually or emotion-ally, to anything outside of itself. When a man looks at a tree from the point of view of a carpenter, he will associate it with the various uses to which he might put the wood; and when he looks at it from the point of view of an ornithologist he will associate it with the birds that might nest in it. When a man at a horse race watches the animal on which he has put his money, he will associate its performance with his desire that it may win. Only he who simply and wholly abandons himself to the object of his perception will experience it aesthetically.13

Aesthetic beholding may be defined in terms of such aban-donment, an abandonment denied to the interested eyes of a lover. Such abandonment transforms our sight; it brings with it the freedom to attend just to what lies before our eyes. Inseparable from the transformation of some quite ordinary thing into an aesthetic object is its increased visi-bility. Beauty may be said so to re-present the beautiful that, no matter how familiar, it presents itself to us as if for the first time. This power of beauty to render visible lets us understand not only why light should figure beauty, but also why the light should be without love.

Light Without Love 9

3

As the story of Pygmalion teaches, this approach to beauty is only one approach and invites challenge. Listen to the derisive words of Nietzsche's Zarathustra:

"This would be the highest to my mind"—thus says your lying spirit to itself—"to look at life without desire and not, like a dog, with my tongue hanging out. To be happy in looking, with a will that has died and without the grasping and greed of selfishness, the whole body cold and ashen, but with drunken moon eyes. This I should like best"—thus the seducer seduces himself—"to love the earth as the moon loves her and to touch her beauty only with my eyes. And this is what the immaculate perception of all things shall mean to me: that I want nothing from them, except to be allowed to lie prostrate before them like a mirror with a hundred eyes."14

In an unpublished note dating from about the same period we read that since Kant all talk of art and beauty "has been muddled and dirtied by the concept `without interest'."15 Nietzsche is altogether unwilling to accept the unreality that on the aesthetic approach is the other side of the plenitude of the beautiful. Instead he insists that beauty is "where I must will with all my will; where I want to love and perish that an image may not remain a mere image." He has "the purest will," Zarathustra teaches, "who wants to create be-yond himself."16 The paradigm of beauty here becomes a person, who fills another with love, a love that in the end wants to embrace and procreate.

Heidegger has argued that Nietzsche's charge (that Kant, by claiming that aesthetic appreciation is disinterested, "muddled and dirtied" beauty) rests on a misunderstanding. Like so many other thinkers, Heidegger insists, Nietzsche was misled by Schopenhauer's appropriation of Kant's for-mulation. Heidegger offers his own reading of what Kant

io Karsten Harries

meant when he insisted that the satisfaction we take in the beautiful be disinterested.

To take an interest in something means: to want this something for oneself, that is, to possess it, to be able to use and control it; what we are interested in is always something to which we bring definite expectations and for which we have definite plans. When we take an interest in something, we place it in the context pro-vided by what we are up to in relation to what we intend and want to do with it; just what we take an interest in is never taken for itself, as the thing it is, but always with an eye to something else.'7

Interest prevents us from granting the space that would permit what we encounter to show itself as it really is. Far from taking leave from reality, in aesthetic experience we open ourselves to it. By freeing ourselves from our usual involvment with things, we allow them to come before us as just the things they are. Beauty is this pure presencing.18 Such self-liberation, Heidegger insists, does not mean that the will is put out of commission; quite the opposite. Aes-thetic appreciation requires a supreme effort on our part: setting ourselves free, we also set things free so that they can present themselves to us "purely": as the things they are.

Heidegger's disagreement with Schopenhauer's interpre-tation of Kant does not appear to me to be as deep as he would have us believe. Schopenhauer might indeed have said something very much like Heidegger: it does indeed require a supreme effort to deny our self-centered will and thus to open up the space that allows for an epiphany of the being of things. Even more questionable is Heidegger's assertion that "had Nietzsche, instead of simply trusting in Schopenhauer's guidance, inquired of Kant himself, he would have had to recognize that Kant alone grasped the essence of what Nietzsche in his own way would have us understand

Light Without Love u

as the decisive character of the beautiful.19 In support of this claim Heidegger cites Nietzsche's continuation of his "im-possible remark about Kant":

In my view what is beautiful (observed historically) is what is visible in the most revered human beings of an era, as an expression of what is most worthy of reverence.20

Heidegger finds in this remark support for his claim:

For just this, what is to be appreciated in its appearing by a pure appreciation, is for Kant the essence of the beautiful, although unlike Nietzsche he does not extend the meaning directly to all that is historically significant and great.21

But Heidegger's appropriation of Nietzsche is here more questionable than Schopenhauer's of Kant. Nietzsche does not speak of a reine Würdigung, a "pure appreciation": What is the adjective "pure" (rein) here to exclude? Interest? Nor does Nietzsche speak of what "is to be appreciated in its appearing." I would suggest that what Nietzsche calls the Verehrungs-Würdigste, what is most worthy of our admiring reverence, may not at all be divorced from interest and love. What Nietzsche here means by reverence has little to do with freie Gunst, that free, unconstrained favor that Kant opposes to inclination (Neigung) and respect (Achtung) .22

"Respect" comes closer to the meaning of Verehrung (rever-ence)—although that word should make us think of Ver-ehrer, which means also an admiring suitor.

Instead of looking to Kant, we would do better to turn to Plato, for example to that passage in the Phaedrus where Socrates, having described what we call beauty as a celestial form come down to earth, privileged among the other forms by its visibility, speaks of the amazement that seizes us when we see a beautiful person, someone having a god-like face or form: "And at first a shudder runs through him, and again the old awe steals over him; then looking upon the

12 Karsten Harries

face of his beloved as of a god, he reverences him, and if he were not afraid of being thought a downright madman, he would sacrifice to his beloved as to the image of a god."23

Nietzsche's "impossible remark about Kant" returns us to that much older understanding of beauty which links light and love.

4

That Socrates's description of the effect of beauty is not at all an isolated example is demonstrated by a passage in Xenophon's Symposium, which, as Ernesto Grassi has shown, may be read as an early phenomenological account of the power of beauty. Xenophon here describes how the beauty of young Autolycus affects those assembled.

A person who took note of the course of events would have come at once to the conclusion that beauty is in its essence something regal, especially when, as in the present case of Autolycus, its possessor joins with it modesty and sobriety. For in the first place, just as the sudden glow of a light at night draws all eyes to itself, so now the beauty of Autolycus compelled everyone to look at him. And again, there was not one of the onlookers who did not feel his soul strangely stirred by the boy; some of them grew quieter than before, others even assumed some kind of a pose. Now it is true that all who are under the influence of any of the gods seem well worth gazing at; but whereas those who are pos-sessed of the other gods have a tendency to be sterner of coun-tenance, more terrifying of voice, and more vehement, those who are inspired by chaste Love have a more tender look, subdue their voices to more gentle tones, and assume a supremely noble bearing. Such was the demeanor of Callias at this time under the influence of Love; and therefore he was an object well worth the gaze of those initiated into the worship of this god.24

Like Plato, and perhaps like most of us still, Xenophon does not choose a work of art for his paradigm of beauty.

Light Without Love 13

Paradigmatically beautiful is the human person, although Xenophon calls the power that seizes us when we are struck by such beauty divine. Beauty is an epiphany of something divine. Touched by it, we are seized by a power that tran-scends the merely sensible.

Several elements of this account have proven recurrent themes in discussions of the beautiful. Beauty is said to be "in its essence something regal." That is to say, beauty has a right to rule; what gives it that right is our need to subject ourselves to its authority. Precisely such subjection lets us come home to ourselves.

A necessary condition of the authority of the beautiful is the distance that separates it from the commonplace. That distance makes visible: like a suddenly lit light in the dark the beauty of young Autolycus forces all to look at him. We have already considered the simile that links beauty to light. But what are we to make of Xenophon's claim that beauty, while it bids mortals be silent, yet fills them with love, challenging de Chirico's association of beauty with an un-loving light. Can love ever be disinterested? How are love and beauty linked?

An answer to this question is provided by Plato's Sym-posium, which antedates Xenophon's by just a few years. Plato here defines beauty as the object of love or eros. Eros helps constitute human reality and determines what human beings most deeply want. To define beauty as the object of eros is to understand it thus as the object of our deepest concern.

In the Symposium a first sketch of the erotic nature of man is provided by the myth of man's original state told by Aristophanes. Primeval man, we learn, was "globular in shape, with rounded back and sides."25 The sphere here functions as a figure of the plenitude and perfection of these imagined original beings, who, however, cannot have been

~4 Karsten Harries

altogether perfect: some sense of lack is presupposed by their pride, which turned against the gods and dared to scale their heavenly abode. To punish such prideful self-assertion Zeus split these proto-humans into two. We are the frag-ments of this original mankind, seeking our other halves and in the other our own lost unity. The beauty of the beloved is a figure of this forever-lost whole. Aristophanes thus provides us with an analogue of the Christian account of the fall, a similarity that led subsequent thinkers, such as John Scotus Eriugena, to fuse the two accounts: before the fall mankind was at one with itself,26 but in his present fallen state man is denied such plenitude, even as the dream of it haunts him. Love has its origin in this loss. Our own frag-mentary being opens up the space that allows beauty to appear.

The comic expression that Plato's Aristophanes gives to this myth should not lead us to overlook its psychological truth. I would like to single out especially the role it ascribes to pride. Not content with the limited perfection granted to them, Aristophanes's circle-men aspire to the self-suffi-ciency of the Olympians only to become less than they were. Such aspiration figures the difficulty we have accepting our embodied, temporal existence and all that reminds us of it: our vulnerability and mortality, sexual desire and the need for force. We will, yet lack, power. Willing power, we find it difficult to forgive ourselves our lack of power; the inability to accept our death-shadowed existence gives rise to what Nietzsche's Zarathustra calls "the spirit of revenge," which he defines as "the will's ill will against time and its `it was.' "27 To the extent that such revenge rules our being, our fun-damental project must be, as Sartre would have it, the project to become God.28 But this is impossible and, as Aristophanes teaches, a project that has to alienate us from ourselves: Never will we be the foundation of our being. What the

Light Without Love is

spirit of revenge demands—to be, but free of the rule of time—is self-contradictory. The self-love that would have us be God has to refuse the gift of love, whose acceptance alone makes us fully human. Thus proud Narcissus, who, in love with himself and disgusted by the very thought of being embraced, would rather die than be touched by the nymph Echo, perishes as he vainly tries to embrace the beauty of his own reflection in the pool's mirror.

Like the story of Pygmalion, the Narcissus myth speaks of a love that refuses to let be, that wants to embrace. But if Venus grants Pygmalion his timid prayer, transforming the ivory statue that his dread of women had led him to create into a living body, transforming the artist into a husband and father, Narcissus's pride will embrace only his own beauty, first rendering him motionless, "like a statue carved from Parian marble," and then consuming him, caus-ing him to fade away into nothing.29 If the first story places beauty in the service of love, the second links it to a self-love that refuses love and would hear nothing of procreating. Given its negative connotations, it is surprising that it is the story of Narcissus that Leon Battista Alberti, whose On Painting helped set the course of renaissance and post-ren-aissance art, offers as a parable of the origin of painting: "I say among my friends that Narcissus, who was changed into a flower, was the inventor of painting. Since painting is already the flower of every art, the story of Narcissus is most to the point. What else can you call painting but a similar embracing with art of what is presented on the surface of the water in the fountain?30 Is this to say that the art of the painter originates in the same pride that caused Narcissus to perish, only that the painter escapes his precursor's fate by substituting the creation of an art-work for the futile attempt actually to embrace himself? Just before mentioning Narcissus, Alberti had remarked that "any master painter

16 Karsten Harries

who sees his work adored will feel himself considered an-other god." Settling for illusion, Alberti's painter succeeds where Aristophanes's circle-men failed.

Alberti's saying invites us to understand aesthetic appre-ciation as a figure of that impossible self-embrace that is the telos of Narcissistic pride. But is this not the telos of love itself? Does not beauty always carry an aura of unreality, of the impossible, of death? Even Plato's understanding of beauty as the object of eros would seem to link the appeal of beauty to the promise of a redemption from the burden of time—and that means: of life. Is this not what Diotima teaches the young Socrates?

The aim of love, she says, is the perpetual possession of the good. If we are to gain such possession we must find a way of escaping from the tyranny of time. Love demands eternity. On its lower levels it seeks semblances of eternity by making sure that something of the individual will survive him, children most often, but also reputation and works that we have created, such as works of art. But love will not finally be satisfied with such counterparts of true eternity: it would dwell in timeless contemplation of the beautiful itself.

On this Platonic view all beauty in time is illuminated by an invisible beauty that transcends time. The beauty of a person or of a work of art is only a figure of a perfection, denied to us by our temporal being, to which we are yet bound by that in us which transcends time, by the spirit. Sensible beauty thus fills us with love, with a longing for eternity that yields to a desire to create something beyond ourselves, something that will outlast us. For Plato, too, the most obvious, if not the highest, form of such creation is procreation. Following Plato, works of art have thus been understood as figurative children, aesthetic rapture as a sub-limated form of sexual fulfillment.

Light Without Love 17

I would like to underscore the essentially figural nature of beauty in this Platonic view: what we call beauty ges-tures towards a higher, invisible beauty, towards a perfec-tion denied to us by our temporal existence. It is this figur-al quality that lets Jacques Maritain say that beauty would "like to believe that paradise is not lost," that "it has the savor of the terrestrial paradise, because it restores, for a moment, the peace and simultaneous delight of the intel-lect and the senses."31 There is, however, a crucial differ-ence between this and the Platonic view: the beauty of paradise is not thought against earth and time. Paradise suggests not the abolition but a transfiguration of time that allows for an affirmation of the body that is free of the spir-it of revenge. Inseparable from this figural quality of the beautiful is its essential ambiguity: to use Maritain's lan-guage, on the one hand, beauty is a figure of paradise. As such it awakens more than it stills longing and love. On the other, it has itself the savor of paradise; it not so much awakens longing and love as it stills them. As such it can usurp the place of paradise.

To translate into a different vocabulary: on the one hand, beauty figures a reality that promises to deliver us from our present, defective state of being, bearing the utopian promise of future happiness; on the other, in time it actually seems to lift the burden of time, if only for a time. On the one hand the beautiful points beyond itself; on the other it offers itself to us as a self-sufficient plenitude.

That this offer is a temptation that we humans should resist is hinted at by the ending of Diotima's discourse:

But if it were given to man to gaze on beauty's very self—unsullied, unalloyed, and freed from the mortal taint that haunts the frailer loveliness of flesh and blood—if, I say, it were given to man to see the heavenly beauty face to face, would you call his, she asked me, an unenviable life, whose eyes had been opened to the vision,

i8 Karsten Harries

and who had gazed upon it in true contemplation until it had become his own forever?

But are we granted everlasting possession of this disem-bodied beauty? Just as in the Republic the philosopher is not allowed to dwell on the plain of truth, but has to return to the cave, so Diotima concludes her speech with a descent into the visible that replaces the subjunctive of wishful think-ing with the indicative:

And remember, she said, that it is only when he discerns beauty itself through what makes it visible that a man will be quickened with the true, and not the seeming virtue—for it is virtue's self that quickens him, not virtue's semblance. And when he has brought forth and reared this perfect virtue, he shall be called the friend of god, and if ever it is given to man to put on immortality, it shall be given to him.32

Not by gazing on beauty's very self do we become worthy of divine friendship, but when, filled by what we have glimpsed with love, we take our place in the world and bring forth and rear perfect virtue. Love is "a longing not for the beautiful itself, but for the conception and generation that the beautiful effects."33 The spirit of revenge does not want to hear of such love. It wants to seize beauty's promise of a plenitude that would rob time of its sting. Such seizure would substitute the aesthetic for the sacred.

5

To gain a better understanding of the nature of this sub-stitution, let us take a second look at that aesthetic approach to beauty and art which for the sake of a secular redemption has divorced beauty from love. Consider Frank Stella's de-scription of his goals as a painter:

I always get into arguments with people who want to retain the old values in painting—the humanistic values that they always

Light Without Love 19

find on the canvas. If you pin them down, they always end up asserting that there is something there besides the paint on the canvas. My painting is based on the fact that only what can be seen is there. It really is an object. Any painting is an object and anyone who gets involved enough in this finally has to face up to the objectness of whatever it is that he's doing. He is making a thing. All that should be taken for granted. If the painting were lean enough, accurate enough, or right enough, you would be able just to look at it. All I want to get out of my paintings, and all that I ever get out of them, is the fact that you can see the whole idea without confusion.... What you see is what you see.34

A number of points deserve to be underscored.

z. According to Stella, a painting should so capture our attention that we feel no need to look for something "besides the paint on the canvas." It should not present itself to us as a sign, a representation, a symbol, or an allegory. It should not be illuminated by some higher beauty, but, like de Chir-ico's winter sun, "pour down on us without love."

a. To so capture our attention, a painting should allow us to "see the whole idea without confusion." It should be "entirely visual."35 There should be nothing about it that strikes us as superfluous, while it should be impossible to add anything to it without weakening or destroying the aesthetic whole.

3. Such completeness demands that the observer transform himself into a pure eye. All he is expected to do is to open himself to it, to "just look at it." The painting demands that we keep our distance from it and let it be. Such a distanced beholding is very different from love and from the inevitably interested way in which love discloses things.

What Stella says of a painting can be generalized and read as a first description of the aesthetic object. We thus obtain the following three pointers:

r. The aesthetic object "should not mean, but be."

20 Karsten Harries

2. The aesthetic object should be a self-sufficient, self-justifying whole.

3. The aesthetic object requires the aesthetic subject, the subject that has become a pure beholding.

To answer those who would question the weight I have placed on a single example, hardly weighty enough to draw from it a general characterization of an approach that may be said to have shaped modern art and reflections about art, let me return to the origin of the term "aesthetic." As already pointed out, the term belongs to the eighteenth century; we owe it to Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten's dissertation, Meditationes de nonnullis ad poema pertinentibus of 1735, in which he attempted to show how, within the framework established by the philosophy of Descartes, Leibniz, and their successors, room could be made for a philosophical study of art, more especially of poetry.36 Philosophical aesthestics is thus part of the somewhat questionable legacy left to us by the Enlightenment, which sought to subject all authority to reason and at the same time witnessed the emergence of a distinctly modern approach to art, which we can trace both in the theorizing of the period and in its artistic production. For the time being I want only to call attention to the link that seems to tie together the prestige modernity has accorded to reason and the establishment of the aesthetic as a self-sufficient domain. I shall return to this link in the next lecture.

In his dissertation Baumgarten defines "aesthetics" sim-ply as "the science of perception."37 That definition makes no reference to beauty. Baumgarten coined the term as a contrasting analogue to "logic," the science of knowledge. Logic is to aesthetics as reason is to taste, or as science is to art. Of science we demand truth and truth demands clar-ity and distinctness or what Baumgarten called intensive clarity; of art we demand a different kind of clarity, one addressed to sense and imagination; Baumgarten speaks of

Light Without Love 21

extensive clarity. Think of the clarity of an argument, on one hand; of the way a particular configuration of shapes and colors captures our attention, on the other. While Baumgarten defines aesthetics as the science of perception, in his dissertation he is concerned, not so much with per-ception as such, as with a particular kind of perception, with perception of the beautiful. Baumgarten founds modern aesthetics by both appropriating and transforming the tra-ditional understanding of beauty, casting it in a funda-mentally Cartesian, and that is to say, more subjective, key. In keeping with many other thinkers of his time, Baum-garten defines beauty as sensible perfection. On this view, beauty belongs not so much to reality as to its appearance to a finite subject. Aesthetic experience may thus be defined as perception of perfection.

Following a by then old tradition, Baumgarten under-stands perfection as self-justifying harmony. A manifold may be considered a perfect whole when all its parts are seen to be necessary.38 Such necessity is demonstrated when we can give a reason why every part of the manifold has to be just as it is. Think of a well-constructed proof in geometry, or of a well-made machine. Works of art, however, do not allow for such demonstration. When we feel or sense that every part of an object is just as it should be, but cannot translate such feeling into clear and distinct understanding, Baumgarten speaks of "beauty." Beauty is the presencing of perfection. It is recognized not by reason but by taste.

The far-reaching implications of this view are brought out by an analogy Baumgarten offers his readers: a successful poem, he tells us (and we can extend his point so that it applies to any successful work of art), is like a world.39 "World" here must be understood as Leibniz understood it: as a perfectly ordered whole, having the principle of its order, or, as Baumgarten calls it, its focus perfections, in God. In this best of all possible worlds nothing is superfluous,

22 Karsten Harries

nor is anything missing. Baumgarten demands that the same be true of a work of art. It, too, should be understood as a perfect whole, having its focus perfections within itself, more precisely, in its integrating theme.

We should note that the link between beauty and love has here been severed. No longer does beauty have anything to do with sexual desire. The paradigm of beauty is no longer a person, but an artifact. To be sure, Baumgarten still be-lieves in God and in the infinite perfection of his creation. The cosmos may be considered the archetypical art-work. But Baumgarten is also convinced that our finitude makes it impossible for us to experience its perfection; we expe-rience only its fragments. The perfection of creation can be thought only in necessarily inadequate abstractions that, just because they are abstractions, necessarily lack beauty.

But if the infinite perfection of the cosmos is too complex to be experienced by us, the much more limited perfection of a work of art is proportioned to our faculties. The beauties created by the godlike artist compensate us for the inacces-sibility of the beauty of God's creation.

The understanding of the artist as a second god is of course not original with Baumgarten. We can trace it back at least to Plato. And in Plato already we find the obser-vation that the artist purchases his godlike status at the price of truth. Art is content with fictions, with appearances of perfection. But these appearances may so absorb our at-tention that they let us forget reality and its deficiency or its promise. To understand the work of art as a perfect whole is to declare the figural character that had long been thought constitutive of the beautiful unimportant, indeed, an obstacle to a full aesthetic experience. For should the integrity of the art-work not be such that to add anything or to subtract anything from it would be to weaken the aesthetic whole? From this it follows that while the work

Light Without Love 23

of art may draw its material from the external world, this material should be so fully integrated into the artist's fic-tion that we can forget its origin. That fiction should give us a sense that everything in it is as it should be. Thus it should contrast with the arbitrary and often meaningless appearances of everyday life. Presenting itself to us as a plenitude that is just as it should be, the beautiful art-work delivers us from that sense of contingency and arbitrariness that is so much part of our life and again and again lets us wonder: why this and not that? To understand beauty as sensible perfection is to insist on the autonomy of the art-work that would serve only beauty, that is, be only an aes-thetic object. The point of such a work is not to refer be-yond itself, to express some edifying thought or to represent some cherished object or person. To praise it for being true or to condemn it for being false is to have missed what matters: that it present itself to us as an absorbing, self-justifying presence.

The self-sufficiency of the aesthetic object demands of the spectator that he leave it as it is. In an important sense there is nothing for him to do except to allow himself to become absorbed in its presence. Such absorption satisfies because it gives us a sense of being at one with ourselves, even if such plenitude is bought at the price of reality. No longer does anxious anticipation lead us to an uncertain future. Within time the burden of time has been lifted.

What matters here is not Baumgarten's dissertation, but the approach to art and beauty that it presupposes and reinforces—an approach, I have suggested, that continues to shape our thinking about art. Recall the threefold char-acterization of the aesthetic object that I drew from Frank Stella's statement of his artistic goals. What Baumgarten has to tell us is not so very different. His understanding of the work of art as a microcosm implies that:

zq Karsten Harries

i. The art-work should so capture our attention that the beholder is prevented or at least discouraged from referring it to something other.

z. To so capture our attention, the art-work must present itself as a perfect, and that is to say as a self-justifying, whole.

3. The art-work's perfection demands of the beholder that he surrender himself to it.

6

I have claimed that ever since the eighteenth century this aesthetic conception of the art-work has presided over much of modern art as its elusive telos. Modern art's resistance, first to allegory, then to representation, and finally to all meaning, may be understood as an ever more resolute at-tempt to incarnate the ideal of a pure aesthetic object.

In support of that claim let me call your attention to Michael Fried's discussion in Absorption and Theatricality of the new emphasis on unity in both painting and criticism of the second half of the eighteenth century. Fried's state-ment that "for Diderot pictorial unity was a kind of micro-cosm of the causal system of nature, of the universe itself; and conversely the unity of nature, apprehended by man, was like that of a painting, at bottom dramatic and expres-sive,"40 invites comparison with Baumgarten's simile linking the art-work to the world established by the philosophers. What Fried calls "the supreme fiction of the beholder's non-existence" 41 may be understood as a necessary corollary of the kind of perfection of the art-work insisted on by the aesthetic approach; his discussion of absorption may be used to flesh out what is only hinted at in my discussion of that beholding demanded by an approach to the art-work as aesthetic object.

Fried has himself insisted on the parallels that link his

Light Without Love 25

discussion of the art of painters like Louis, Noland, Olitski, and Stella, or sculptors like David Smith and Caro—art that "treated the beholder as if he were not there"—to his inter-pretation of French painting in the age of Diderot.42 The understanding of what a painting should be, which was inaugurated by the painters and critics of that period, pro-vided the strongest artists of the next two centuries with a continuing challenge. Fried speaks of "a revolution or at least a profound change in the ontological status of the class of objects we call paintings."43 My suggestion, that paintings (and not only paintings) come to be understood ever more resolutely as aesthetic objects, may be understood as an attempt to characterize this revolution.

That this revolution continues to shape thinking about art is demonstrated by Fried's much-discussed plea for an anti-theatrical art in "Art and Objecthood." In that essay, too, we meet with the presupposition that a work of art should present itself to the beholder as a whole. Fried thus praises pictures by Noland or Olitski, or sculptures by David Smith or Caro, because "at every moment the work is wholly manifest."44 If we are to experience a work as thus manifest, we may not experience it as a sign, for signs are constituted as such by what they signify, by what is absent from them. Such absence discourages absorption in what presents itself. To experience a work as wholly manifest is to experience it as a plenitude that, as such, asks nothing of the beholder and, because it asks nothing of him, allows him to forget himself. Fried thus opposes what he calls literalist sensibility, which pursues the art object's objecthood, because what matters to it is not simply an object, but "an object in a situation—one that, virtually by definition, includes the be-holder,"45 that is to say, what matters is the circumstances in which the beholder encounters the work of art, or what Fried calls the "theatricality" of objecthood. But "theatre

26 Karsten Harries

and theatricality," Fried insists, "are at war today, not simply with modernist painting (or modernist painting and sculp-ture), but with art as such."46

But how are we to understand "art as such?" Is aesthetics to give us the answer? Have we not, by turning to aesthetics, already committed ourselves to what I have called the aes-thetic approach? I hope to have shown that the reduction of the work of art to an ideally pure aesthetic object on which this approach insists is anything but unproblematic.

But if, as I have insisted, this aesthetic approach has pre-sided over the progress of modern art, what need or concern has elevated the aesthetic object into the telos of art? What lets human beings, and, more especially, what lets us mod-erns, so value objects that occasion an aesthetic beholding?

We find hints of an answer in Fried's discussions of the temporality of aesthetic beholding: to those eighteenth-cen-tury painters and critics who resisted rococo theatricality, concern for the unity of the art-work meant also a concern for instantaneousness. Such concern is presupposed by the emphasis they placed "on the tableau, the portable and self-sufficient picture that could be taken in at a glance, as op-posed to the `environmental,' architecture-dependent, often episodic or allegorical project that could not."47 Fried speaks of the then widely shared conviction that a painting "had to first attract (attirer, appeler) and then to arrest (arreter) and finally to enthrall (attacher) the beholder, that is, a painting had to call to someone, bring him to a halt in front of itself, and hold him there as if spellbound and unable to move.48 The concern with absorption, and more generally the aesthetic approach, presuppose a concern with time. When we are fully absorbed, time seems to stand still for us, and just this is what is most deeply desired. Consider what Fried has to say of Chardin's genre paintings. These paintings, he suggests, "come close to translating literal du-

Light Without Love 27

ration, the actual passage of time as one stands before the canvas, into a purely pictorial effect: as if the very stability and unchangingness of the painted image are perceived by the beholder not as material properties that could not be otherwise, but as manifestations of an absorptive state—the image's absorption in itself, so to speak—that only happens to subsist."49 The stillness of the image beheld magically Conquers the actual passage of time. "Images such as these," Fried continues, "are not of time wasted but of time filled as a glass may be filled not just to the level of the rim but

:slightly above)."50

Recognition of the fundamental importance of time also colors Fried's discussion in "Art and Objecthood" of more recent art. Part of his critique of theatrical art is his resistance to art that would make an awareness of the actual passage of time part of the aesthetic experience. Thus a cube by Tony Smith "is always of further interest; one never feels that one has come to the end of it; it is inexhaustible."51 Similarly, Fried questions "Morris's claim that in the best new work the beholder is made aware that `he himself is establishing relationships as he apprehends the object from various po-sitions and under varying conditions of light and spatial context.' " Here, Fried suggests, "a presentment of endless, or indefinite, duration" is made part of the aesthetic expe-rience.52 To this conception he opposes the very different concerns of what he calls modernist painting or sculpture. "It is as though one's experience of the latter has no dura-tion—not because one in fact experiences a picture by No-land or Olitski or a sculpture by David Smith or Caro in no time at all, but because at every moment the work itself is wholly manifest.... It is this continuous and entire pres-entness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though if only one were infinitely more acute, a single in-

z8 Karsten Harries

finitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything, to experience the work in all its depth and fullness, to be forever convinced by it."53

Fried's celebration of presentness, "not of time wasted but of time filled," suggests that first of all and most of the time we do not experience time as thus filled, but as strangely empty. Schopenhauer's discussion of the essential emptiness of time comes to mind:

In time each moment is, only in so far as it has effaced its father the preceding moment, to be again effaced just as quickly itself. Past and future (apart from the consequences of their content) are as empty and unreal as any dream; but present is only the boundary between the two, having neither extension nor duration. In just the same way, we shall also recognize the same emptiness in all the other forms of the principle of sufficient reason, and shall see that, like time, space also, and like this, everything that exists simultaneously in space and time, and hence everything that proceeds from causes or motives, has only a relative existence, is only through and for another like itself, i.e., only just as enduring.54

But this emptiness is suspended by the magic of art, which carries with it the illusion of time filled. Consider Schopen-hauer's description of aesthetic beholding:

Raised up by the power of the mind, we relinquish the ordinary way of considering things, and cease to follow under the guidance of the forms of the principle of sufficient reason merely their relations to one another, whose final goal is always the relation to our own will. Thus we no longer consider the where, the when, the why, and the whither of things, but simply and solely the what. Further, we do not let abstract thought, the concepts of reason, take possession of our consciousness, but, instead of all this, devote the whole power of our mind to perception, sink ourselves completely therein, and let our whole consciousness be filled by the calm contemplation of the natural object actually present, whether it be a landscape, a tree, a rock, a crag, a building or anything else. We lose ourselves entirely in this object, to use

Light Without Love 29

a pregnant expression; in other words, we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as a pure subject, as clear mirror of the object, so that it is as though the object alone existed without anyone to perceive it, and thus we are no longer able to separate the perceiver from the perception, but the two have become one, since the entire consciousness is filled and occupied by a single image of perception.55

Schopenhauer understands the gift of genius as simply the gift of such beholding. The works of genius invite the be-holder to participate in this state.

Why human beings should desire such a state should be evident from what has been said. For Schopenhauer, human reality, like all reality, is marked by a profound lack: what we most deeply want is denied to us by what we are:

Essentially, it is all the same whether we pursue or flee, fear harm or aspire to enjoyment; care for the constantly demanding will, no matter in what form, continually fills and moves consciousness; but without peace and calm, true well-being is absolutely impos-sible. Thus the subject of willing is constantly lying on the re-volving wheel of lion, is always drawing water in the sieve of the Danaids, and is the eternally thirsting Tantalus.56

Man's temporal existence is a burden to him. Art seems to lift that burden: "We celebrate the Sabbath of the penal servitude of willing; the wheel of Ixion stands still."57 It is to be expected that this view of art should have led Scho-penhauer to attack allegory in painting, or to praise "those admirable Dutchmen who directed such purely objective perception to the most insignificant objects, and set up a lasting monument of their objectivity and spiritual peace in paintings of still life.58

Schopenhauer's reflections on time lead to the heart of the aesthetic approach. By its very nature the aesthetic object demands to be thought against time. I have suggested that the self-sufficiency of the aesthetic object demands of the

3o Karsten Harries

beholder that he leave it as it is. In an important sense it gives him nothing to do; he should only allow himself to be captured by its presence. Such capture satisfies because it gives the one so captured a sense of being at one with himself. No longer does love bind him to reality, leading him beyond the present to an uncertain future. Think once more of Kant's determination of the aesthetic object! The point of his determination of the beautiful as the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction becomes clear when we keep in mind that interest always looks beyond the present moment to the future. Our usual ways of encountering things, governed as they are by cares and concerns, are essentially interested. Only he who transforms himself into a pure eye lives in the present. And just because the aesthetic object presents itself as a plenitude that absorbs our interests as blotting paper absorbs ink, does it allow us to exist in the present and to forget the tyranny of time. "Presentness is grace."59

7

But are we ever granted such grace? Is what Fried calls "presentness" more than an elusive ideal that haunts us but inevitably withdraws when we try to seize it. Time does not stand still in aesthetic experience. All that art can do is gesture towards such a standing still. Instead of effecting stillness, it can only furnish semblances of stillness.

Fried hints at this. Note how, in the passages I quoted above, he retreats from the indicative to the subjunctive: "It is this continuous and entire presentness, amounting, as it were, to the perpetual creation of itself, that one experiences as a kind of instantaneousness: as though, if only one were infinitely more acute, a single infinitely brief instant would be long enough to see everything. ..."60 "If only one were

Light Without Love 31

infinitely more acute ..." If only there were a plenitude that would let the wheel of Ixion stand still, a light pure enough to quiet love. That lament returns in the statement by Stella that I used to characterize the aesthetic approach: "If the painting were lean enough, we would be able just to look at it." But of course, it will never be lean enough, we will never be granted completely innocent perception. The dream of creating an art object self-sufficient and dense enough to absorb all our attention, full enough to allow us to experience it in a way unclouded by meanings, by words, by absence, by love remains a dream. No art object can have the required plenitude and density. Meanings will always get in our way. The idea of presentness is itself such a meaning. The mod-ernist works praised by Fried do not so much grant pres-entness as they signify it. Signifying presentness, they mean a secularized grace.

InAbsorption and Theatricality Fried touches on this theme of secularization, when he says of Chardin that he "secu-larized the absorptive tradition—more accurately, it is in his genre paintings that the process of secularization begun in the previous century (chiefly in the Low Countries) and continued by Watteau and De Troy was brought to com-pletion,"61 or when he quotes Diderot's description of his experience of a work by Robert: "One is no longer at the Salon or in a studio, but in a church, beneath a vault."62

The place where the aesthetic experience takes place is here sanctified; it becomes a new church; aesthetic experience takes the place of religious devotion, beauty the place of the sacred, as paintings become icons on which the holy is a zero.63 That is to say, the presentness and plenitude that modern art pursues carry the aura of man's deepest concerns and hopes. Only if we keep in mind the way absorption and presentness secularize traditional religious themes, the way they allow for a reoccupation of the place left vacant by a

32 Karsten Harries

dead God, will we understand what has supported the aes-thetic approach: the continuing need for redemption from the terror of time. The beauty of truly modernist painting, as Fried understands it, offers at least a semblance of such redemption.

But beauty need not be thought against time, where to think beauty against time is also to divorce light from love. Such thinking presupposes that "spirit of revenge" in which Nietzsche located the deepest source of human self-aliena-tion. For we cannot affirm ourselves except as embodied selves, that is to say, as vulnerable and mortal, to be over-taken by time. If we cannot forgive ourselves our own tem-porality, if we cannot make our peace with time, we also will not be able to make our peace with all that binds us into time: with our bodies, our sexuality, with a beauty that is linked to love. It is the spirit of revenge that bids us think beauty against time and separate light from love.

Second Lecture

Decoration and Decadence Int

r

The Austrian novelist Hermann Broch begins his study of Hugo von Hofmannsthal and his age with this observation:

The essence of a period may be read off its architectural facade, and, for the second half of the nineteenth century, that is to say for the time of Hofmannsthal's birth, this would seem to have been one of the sorriest in world history; it was the period of eclecticism, of the false baroque, the false renaissance, the false gothic. Wherever western man then determined the style of life, it turned into bourgeois confinement and at the same time bour-geois pomp, into a solidity that meant suffocation as well as se-curity. If ever poverty was covered up by wealth, here it happened.'

The architecture of Hofmannsthal's time, we can say, using a term made popular by Robert Venturi, was one of dec-orated sheds. Often quite functional structures were buried beneath an aesthetic veneer. Broch would have us under-stand these decorated sheds as the signature of an age that turns to the aesthetic to hide its poverty: in the disintegration of the architectural whole into a functional and a beautiful component, each going its own way, the more profound disintegration of modern life into more or less autonomous spheres (a disintegration that finds expression in such slo-gans as "business is business," "war is war," "art for art's sake") becomes visible. The problem of decoration, which is also the problem of architecture, offers itself thus as a

33

34 Karsten Harries

figure of the problem of art, which is also the problem of the good life.

The quoted passage is typical. Many of Broch's generation reacted with similar disgust and contempt to the architecture of their fathers. Such scornful attacks are inseparable from the spiritual situation that allowed modern architecture to arise and to flourish. Finally the modern age was to find its own proper style, an architecture that would heal the rift separating beauty and reality, form and function, art and technology. Once again building was to be all of a piece, allowing for a dwelling in harmony with the modern world. Think of the hope that led to the establishment of the Bauhaus.2

Today such hope, too, belongs to the history of archi-tecture. Modernism has failed to live up to its promise. This failure has taught us to appreciate once again the decorated sheds of the nineteenth century. The same architecture that to Broch seemed so full of lies, a cynical attempt to cover up spiritual emptiness with borrowed splendor, speaks to us of possibilities of a more genuine dwelling denied to us by the shape of our world. The age that build Vienna's Ringstrasse now seems quite wonderful, if forever lost—lost to a past from which we are separated by two world wars, by Auschwitz and Hiroshima, a past that we now endow with something like the beautiful aura of a fairy tale, or rather of an operetta: the Danube always blue; chestnut trees blooming endlessly in the Prater.

Disappointed by modernism, disappointed especially by the austere architecture of glass, steel, and concrete with which modernists hoped to replace the decorated sheds of their fathers, depressed by the "jungle of straight lines" that "has grown up surreptitiously, unnoticed," faced with "the moral uninhabitability of functional, utilitarian architec-ture,"3 we, the children of these modernists, have learned

Decoration and Decadence 35

to delight in the decorated sheds of our grandfathers, as they delighted in the stronger architecture of the past; have learned to love an architecture that to Broch demonstrated cynicism and the decadence of the age.

But was he wrong? Or have we only become more re-signed? Perhaps more cynical?

What does our own "post-modern" architecture have to tell us about the spiritual situation of the age? The very word "post-modern" raises questions. Does not "modern" refer to a period extending to and including the present? If so, what sense does it mean to call buildings "post-modern"? Is this to suggest that they really do not belong to the present age? Does "post-modernism" then mean something like "fu-turism," gesturing beyond the present to a brighter future? But futurism did not define itself in opposition to modern-ity; just the opposite. While futurists looked forward to a time when the forces that already have shaped modernity would have triumphed over all that is still pre-modern in our lives, post-modernism is a phenomenon of modernity's bad conscience, of its self-doubt.'

If modernism embraces modernity, post-modernism would have us keep our distance. To be sure, post-modernists, too, know that we cannot simply take our leave from technology and the rationality that supports it. Even the most passionate critic of technology embraces it every time he picks up a telephone or gets into his car, buys a loaf of bread in some supermarket or goes to the dentist. And yet the transfor-mation of buildings into machines for living and working makes us uneasy. We demand more. So, once again we attempt to relieve the dreariness of functional architecture with borrowed decoration. The nineteenth century's eclectic historicism has its counterpart in today's equally eclectic, post-modern meta-historicism; unable to take the authority of history quite as seriously as the nineteenth century did,

36 Karsten Harries

we are more ready to play with the inheritance it has left us, uncertain about the point of such play. The look of arbitrariness of so much post-modern building, its doubly broken allegiance to engineering on the one hand, to art on the other, hints at a more profound uncertainty about the shape of our world and the kind of dwelling that it invites and permits. The following remarks pursue that hint.

2

Vitruvius insisted that we build with "due reference to durability, convenience and beauty."5 Obvious as they seem, these three requirements do not readily form a harmonious whole. The first two seem unproblematic. Think of Le Cor-busier's definition of the house as "a machine for living in."6 Such machines should last and answer to the requirements of dwelling. Not that Le Corbusier wanted to reduce ar-chitecture to a branch of engineering. In the same place he also insisted that an approach to buildings as machines can-not do justice to works of architecture. What distinguishes the architect from the mere engineer is that he is also an artist. This is the view of Geoffrey Scott, who placed himself in the tradition of Vitruvian humanism:

Architecture requires `delight.' For this reason, interwoven with practical ends and their mechanical solutions, we may trace in architecture a third and different factor—the disinterested desire for beauty. This desire does not, it is true, culminate here in a purely aesthetic result, for it has to deal with a concrete basis which is utilitarian. It is, nonetheless, a purely aesthetic impulse, an im-pulse distinct from all the others which architecture may simul-taneously satisfy, an impulse by virtue of which architecture be-comes art.'

What elevates architecture beyond mere building, on this view, is the addition of an aesthetic component that, given

Decoration and Decadence 37

utilitarian considerations, must seem a dispensable, arbitrary extra. By its very essence, beauty is useless.

This had been the point of Kant's determination of beauty as the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction, to which Scott alludes. In keeping with that determination Kant un-derstands the beauty of architecture as an essentially impure, dependent beauty. Utility has to be the architect's first con-cern. His desire to create an aesthetic object has to subor-dinate itself to and serve this end. When we judge the beauty of a building, we thus presuppose some understanding of its purpose. Just as our idea of a beautiful woman is different from our idea of a beautiful man, so our idea of a beautiful church is different from our idea of a beautiful palace.8 The beauty of buildings must serve their function.

Such service is not easy to reconcile with that disinterested pleasure promised by Kant's analysis of beauty. Is not the beautiful supposed so to absorb our attention that the cares and interests that usually disclose the world have been brack-eted? The aesthetic approach that I delineated in my first lecture helps us to understand the recurring lament over the essential impurity of architecture.

There is no need to join in this lament. It becomes un-avoidable only when pure beauty is made the end of artistic production. Just this Kant himself, notwithstanding his own analysis of beauty, refused to do. Kant had no very high opinion of the only pure works of art that he mentions: "drawings ä la grecque, leaf-work used to frame or on wall-paper, and what in music one calls fantasies (without a theme), indeed all music without a text."9 His own taste in art did not at all tend toward such "free beauties," but rather to-wards classical works that exhibited Winckelmann's noble simplicity and quiet grandeur, towards beauty that at the same time expressed the morally good. If such beauty edifies by helping to join human beings in genuine community,

38 Karsten Harries

art that pursues only beauty draws the individual out of the community and lets him withdraw into himself. Kant thus observes that "perhaps even less than others can virtuosos of taste, who not only frequently, but commonly, are vain, self-centered, and given to pernicious passions, lay claim to the honor of being committed to moral principles.i0 That an individual has dedicated himself to beauty does not at all mean that he is virtuous; quite the opposite.

It is difficult to quarrel with this observation. But such easy agreement should not prevent us from addressing the challenge that Kant's ambivalent approach to beauty pre-sents to anyone who insists that art be pursued for art's or for beauty's sake. If his analysis of beauty as object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction stated the telos that has guided the aesthetic approach of modern art, Kant also knew about the self-isolation, the loss of community, the indif-ference to the demands placed on us by others that has to attend aesthetic pleasure as he had determined it.

From the ideal of a pure art serving only beauty follows the broken appearance of an architecture standing uncer-tainly between art and technology. Ruskin's The Seven Lamps of Architecture allows us to understand this connection. His distinction between work and leisure provides the key: our leisure time we should fill with activities that justify them-selves; here there can be no talk of wasting time; leisure does not reckon with time in a way that allows it to be wasted. Work on the other hand demands that it be done as efficiently as possible, demands that we make good use of the available time.

Very much a child of the nineteenth century, Ruskin affirms the rationalization and organization of work that have shaped our modern world. Yet he also knows that the more such organization determines our ways of working, the more insistent will be the demand for free time, for

Decoration and Decadence 39

activities and experiences that do not serve some end, but justify themselves. The enjoyment of art has long offered paradigms of such experience. The separation of work-time and leisure-time mirrors itself in the separation of utility and beauty, and this in turn in the separation of functional building and beautiful decoration. Ruskin thus defines ar-chitecture as the art of decorating functional buildings with beautiful, and that is to say superfluous, useless features." Just such superfluity transforms functional buildings into architecture. To judge architecture by criteria of economy and efficiency is to misunderstand its essence. Ruskin thus calls the spirit that leads to great architecture "most unrea-soning and enthusiastic." It is "perhaps best negatively de-fined, as the opposite of the prevalent feeling of modern times, which desires to produce the largest results at the least cost.12 Architecture is here placed in opposition to modernity, which left unchallenged would replace the ar-chitect with the engineer. But just because the reality of our world, a world shaped or perhaps misshaped by economic considerations, would have us disregard beauty, we need architecture, need it for our "mental health, pleasure, and power."13

Ruskin knows that functional building has no need for superfluous decoration. And given buildings whose mean-ing is exhausted by their function and which therefore can be understood as machines—think of factories or silos—Ruskin, too, does not want to hear of decoration and con-demns it with a vehemence that anticipates the modernist critique of decoration. Ruskin already calls it "a general law, of singular importance in the present day, a law of simple common sense,—not to decorate things belonging to pur-poses of active and occupied life. Wherever you can rest, there decorate; where rest is forbidden, so is beauty. You must not mix ornament with business, any more than you

4o Karsten Harries

may mix play. Work first, and then rest."14 But not all build-ings serve the "purposes of active and occupied life." Thus churches and houses invite ornament, for there we rest after the week's or the day's work is done.

It is, however, difficult to separate work and rest this sharply. Is not time, too, a resource with which we have to reckon. Don't we all have too little time? To be sure, Hei-degger insists that the authentically existing human being always has time,'s that authenticity does not reckon with time as economy and efficiency demand; but this only places his ideal of an authentic existing in opposition to modernity. What Ruskin calls "the prevalent feeling of modern times" would have us subject time, too, to rational planning. It will not stop before the house. Leisure time, too, must be organized. Houses, too, are no more than complicated ma-chines, whose successful design will depend on our ability to specify what it is that constitutes successful living. Should we not banish decoration from these machines, too, just as Ruskin would banish it from railroad stations? From this perspective it is easy to agree with Adolf Loos's condem-nation of ornament as crime, since ornament depends on wasted time, time that should have served socially more productive ends.

What Ruskin has to say about railroad stations hints at what is lost when houses are thus reduced to machines:

The whole system of railroad travelling is addressed to people who, being in a hurry, are therefore, for the time being, miserable. ... It transmutes a man from a traveller into a living parcel. For the time he has parted with the nobler characteristics of his hu-manity for the sake of a planetary power of locomotion. Do not ask him to admire anything. You might as well ask the wind. Carry him safely, dismiss him soon: he will thank you for nothing else. All attempts to please him in any other way are mere mockery, and insults to the things by which you endeavor to do so. There

Decoration and Decadence 41

never was more flagrant and impertinent folly than the smallest portion of ornament in anything concerned with railroads or near them. Keep them out of the way, take them through the ugliest country you can find, confess them the miserable things they are, and spend nothing upon them but for safety and speed.16

It is easy to criticize Ruskin. His caricature does not begin to do justice to the reality of travel. That builders of railroad stations should have refused to heed his advice and insisted on architecture is easy to defend, even on Ruskin's own terms. But more important is something else: Ruskin is right to insist that first of all the railroad is meant to save time. Such reckoning with time Ruskin considers incompatible with what he calls "the nobler characteristics" of our hu-manity. For the sake of greater power, we speed things up, allow ourselves to be transformed into "living parcels," things that are assigned their place by the transportation system. It is easy to see why Ruskin should have insisted that beauty is necessary for our mental health. That reckoning with time that would speed up not only travel, but all sorts of work, has to empty life of meaning, forcing us to experience our-selves and what we are now doing instrumentally as serving a very different mode of life, where we are not thus alienated from ourselves but at one with ourselves, precisely because we are not in a hurry. Beauty allows for such experience. Just because "the prevalent feeling of modern times" lets us judge things in terms of economy and efficiency, we need to complement it with an art that serves only beauty.

3

Suppose we grant this need. Must we then also grant that we need architecture as Ruskin understands it? Was Adolf Loos not right to refuse the uneasy compromise between utility and beauty attested by the nineteenth century's dec-

42 Karsten Harries

orated sheds, appealing both to the requirements of utility and to the requirements of beauty?

That rational consideration of utility leaves no place for decoration Loos argues with evangelical fervor in his man-ifesto, "Ornament and Crime." Ruskin himself would have given a sympathetic hearing to the considerations advanced: is ornament not frightfully wasteful of time better spent on education, food, and medicine. (To be sure, Ruskin would have beautiful decoration serve our mental health, but of just what sort is that service?) Does a decorated shed serve life better than gingerbread shaped like a heart feeds the hungry? Children might delight in such things, but not an adult living in the twentieth century. A rationalist puritanism lets Loos link ornament to cookery exhibitions that value the appearance of food over its nutritional values. Those truly of the twentieth century will grant food only an in-strumental value. We need to eat if we are to live. The same goes for building. We satisfy these needs most economically when we refrain from ornament.

Loos insists that "the evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian objects," and if the evolution of culture is governed by that economic imperative that derives its authority from what Ruskin took to be "the prevalent spirit of modern times," it is difficult to disagree. We can understand Loos's annoyed surprise when his call for a pure architecture, free of ornament, met with a rather hostile reception; instead of being overjoyed, people

hung their heads. What depressed them was the realization that they could produce no new ornaments. Are we alone, the people of the nineteenth century, supposed to be unable to do what any Negro, all the races and periods before us have been able to do? ... Then people walked sadly about between the glass cases and felt ashamed of their impotence."

Decoration and Decadence 43

Why such sadness and bitterness? Why the fondness for ornament? The case against ornament seemed so obvious. How could reasonable people disagree?

If two people live side by side with the same needs, the same demands on life and the same income but belong to different cultures, economically speaking the following process can be ob-served: the twentieth-century man will get richer and richer, the eighteenth-century man poorer and poorer. I am assuming that both live according to their inclinations. The twentieth-century man can satisfy his needs with a far lower capital outlay and hence can save money.18

To his fellow Viennese Loos held up England and the United

i States as shining examples. Even their culinary culture seemed to him exemplary. Doesn't too great an interest in food betray a lack of moral fiber? How can we justify spending a great deal of time preparing a meal when this is not really necessary? Would our time not be better spent working in some soup kitchen? We should welcome fast food chains and TV dinners. Haute cuisine and ornament are equally a waste of time. Architects and cooks should think like en-gineers, not like decorators.

The economic argument is only part of Loos's against ornament. He also suspects beneath ornament an eroticism he found repulsive.

The first ornament that was born, the cross, was erotic in origin. The first work of art, the first artistic act which the first artist, in order to rid himself of his surplus energy, smeared on the wall. A horizontal dash: the prone woman. A vertical dash: the man penetrating her. The man who created it felt the same urge as Beethoven, he was in the same heaven in which Beethoven created the Ninth Symphony.

But the man of our day who, in response to an inner urge, smears the walls with erotic symbols is a criminal or degenerate. It goes without saying that this impulse most frequently assails

q.4- Karsten Harries

people with such symptoms of degeneracy in the lavatory. A coun-try's culture can be assessed by the extent to which its lavatory walls are smeared. '9

Loos longs for a cool environment that has left ornament and with it the erotic origin of art behind. The naked white wall appears as a symbol of the victory of logos over eros. The passion with which Loos pleads for this victory suggests a barely repressed fascination with the anarchic power of the erotic. In genuine ornament something dark, irrational manifests itself. It must not be permitted to subvert the rationalist foundation of modern culture. Somewhat like Pentheus in Euripides's Bacchae, who refuses to acknowledge the power of Dionysus, only to be destroyed by it, Loos insists on building based on reason alone. That he, too, is vulnerable to the power of Dionysus is shown by his as-sociation of ornament with obscene graffiti. We consider obscene only what moves us, but in a way in which we feel we should not be moved. Loos's experience of the obscenity of ornament presupposes a conflict between claims placed on him by his own erotic nature and the very different demands tied to his self-image as an enlightened modern, committed to the Cartesian project of relying on reason to gain mastery over nature, including human nature.

While Loos insists that ornament has no place in a truly modern society, he also knows that the society in which he lived could not be considered truly modern in this sense. Nor can our own. We still cling to ornament, as we still spend time and money on fancy food, and still disfigure the walls of our lavatories. Loos would have been unable to give very high marks to our post-modern culture; and he would have been especially disturbed by its celebration of an architecture of decorated sheds. Not that Loos did not recognize the significance that ornament once had and continues to have in the life of many people; and as a self-proclaimed aristocrat he does not want to impose his val-

Decoration and Decadence 45

ues on those not yet ready for them. It would be cruel to deprive them of something in which they find significance. Thus Loos claims to understand "the Kaffir who weaves ornaments into his fabric, ... the Slovak peasant woman who embroiders her lace, the old lady who crochets won-derful things with glass beads and silk." The aristocrat Adolf Loos

lets them be; he knows that the hours in which they work are their holy hours. The revolutionary would go to them and say: `It's all nonsense.' Just as he would pull down the little old woman from the wayside crucifix and tell her: `There is no God.' The atheist among the aristocrats, on the other hand, raises his hat when he passes a church.'20

Perhaps no sentence in Loos's manifesto renders his message as questionable as this one: "The hours in which they work are their holy hours." Not yet has work here been opposed to leisure, beauty to utility. Loos here suggests that living ornament presupposes and figures an integrated mode of life that had to be sacrificed to the economic imperative that rules the modern world. We have lost the whole together with the holy. Loos is more than ready to accept that sac-rifice. But his reference to the holy hints at how much has to be surrendered.

4

Today, when modernity and modernism are coming un-der increasingly critical scrutiny, it is easy to sympathize with those of Loos's contemporaries who, saddened by their inability to create a living ornament, hung their heads and looked back nostagically to the Middle Ages, or just to the age of Maria Theresia, which, although on the threshold of the modern world, still found convincing expression in a lavishly ornamental style. One of these contemporaries was

46 Karsten Harries

Hermann Broch, whose strident critique of the decorated sheds of his native Vienna introduced this lecture. That critique notwithstanding, Broch sided with those who, rid-iculed by Loos, lamented the death of ornament.

This lament presupposes that we can distinguish two kinds of decoration. Some such distinction is indeed hinted at by Loos, who, while he insists that someone who, although he belongs to the modern world, still creates ornament, is a degenerate, yet has a soft spot for the ornament created by those with whom the modern world has not yet caught up. Ornament, which presupposes that work has not been op-posed to leisure, is here opposed to mere decoration, the product of a doing that understands itself as artistic precisely because it has opposed itself to mere work.

Broch approaches the distinction by considering the re-lationship of the aesthetic elements that are to transform buildings into architecture to the structure that supports them. In the case of mere decoration that relationship is more or less arbitrary. As Ruskin teaches, decoration is essentially a beautiful addition, an extra, that like a decal, often looks as if it could be peeled off without serious loss to the functional shed it is supposed to beautify. Decoration thus possesses greater aesthetic autonomy than ornament. But just this tends to give the decorated shed as a whole a look of arbitrariness. Why choose a particular vocabulary? Why neo-gothic? Why not neo-renaissance or neo-baroque? Or why not try something altogether new and therefore more interesting? The relationship of decoration to the building it should serve is in constant danger of becoming as arbitrary as that of a panel painting or a sculpture to the room in which they happen to be.

If to decoration belongs such arbitrariness, genuine or-nament is said to stand in a more intimate relationship to the ornament bearer. The spirit that animates it is the very same spirit that has shaped the architectural whole. "Or-

Decoration and Decadence 47

nament is only the last, most differentiated expression for the unified and unifying thought of the whole."21 The last formulation is misleading in that it suggests that the whole to which ornament gives expression is adequately under-stood as a particular building. Broch was thinking rather of an integrated way of life finding expression in a histor-ical style. Think of period styles, for example, of roman-esque or gothic. Such styles are said by Broch to "permeate in the same way all the different ways in which the life of an epoch finds expression," not just the way an epoch builds, but also the way it thinks or worships.22 As gra-phologists attempt to read in the seemingly merely deco-rative flourishes of a person's handwriting his entire char-acter, Broch attempted to read in the architectural style of a particular period and place an integrated way of being in the world. So understood, style both expresses and rein-forces a shared ethos. It has an ethical function. And so does ornament, which Broch calls the abstract expression or "formula" of a style; as such it is also the "formula" of an epoch and its life. Style provides Broch with the middle term that allows him to understand ornament as the expression of a coherent life world.

This gives it what Broch calls its almost "magical" im-portance.23 In an architecture that has substituted decoration for ornament we can read the disintegration of a unified way of life. The death of ornament means not just the falling apart of architecture into aesthetically self-sufficient deco-ration and functional shed; such disintegration figures our disintegrating world, of which the divorce of beauty and utility is just one aspect. By the same token all genuine ornament carries the promise of a integrated way of life, a promise of full humanity and that means also of genuine community.

Broch was by no means the only one to connect ornament with the promise of a more humane mode of existence. Thus

48 Karsten Harries

the conservative art historian Hans Sedlmayr offers a very similar valuation of ornament in his influential Der Verlust der Mitte.24 He, too, laments the inhumanity of an archi-tecture that has banished ornament and interprets the death of ornament in the late eighteenth century as a symptom of a culture whose center will not hold. His reflections prepare for post-modern attempts to return to ornament.

We meet with essentially the same lament among Marx-ists. Consider, for example, this statement by Ernst Bloch:

Every genuine artist loves ornament, even if genuine ornament does not as yet return such love to an epoch stunted by mecha-nization and Kitsch. The purification [of architecture] of the atroc-ities of the nineteenth century is being presupposed, this indeed as conditio sine qua non; but beyond this purification stands as task a world of expression that continues rather than destroys the plenitude of what has been relegated to a dead past. A vehement will to color, form, and ornament pervades the world that has been liberated from mechanization, even if as yet that will has by no means been blessed and has not liberated itself from its de-pendence on and derivation from what was itself dependent and derivative. This will proves that the light which shone throughout history, until the invasion of machine-produced goods, which still fills all our museums, did not go out with the Bauhaus and similarly empty exultation.25

The last sentence suggests that Bloch takes the decorated sheds of the turn of the century to have been more filled with light—even if this was only a borrowed light—than the lean architecture so noisily celebrated by evangelical modernists. To be sure, Bloch grants the need to rid ar-chitecture of what he himself calls the atrocities of the nine-teenth century. He does not deny legitimacy to the mod-ernist critique of the decorated shed. But this critique becomes unimportant, given modernism's more profound failure to develop an architectural practice capable of addressing what

Decoration and Decadence 49

the modernist Sigfried Giedion called the main task facing contemporary architecture: "the interpretation of a way of life valid for our period."26 Bloch, linking such interpretation to the creation of a living ornament, is forced to recognize that so far attempts at such creation have remained impure and derivative.—One thinks of the hopes and expectations awakened by post-modernism. But do we find here ground for optimism? Does the hope for a return to ornament remain, as Loos would insist it must, an anachronistic, uto-pian dream? ... Does the ornament of the past offer us more than an idle promise?

5

Loos had no doubt about what we moderns have gained by forsaking the more integrated way of life that, he would grant, is a presupposition of the ornamental styles of the past: a higher standard of living, better health, better ed-ucation. It would be irresponsible not to value these. And Loos adds another very different reason for welcoming the divorce of work and leisure, beauty and utility, enforced by the rationalization of modern life: Only this divorce has allowed us to create an art of a purity unknown to other cultures:

[a]nyone who goes to the Ninth Symphony and then sits down and designs a wallpaper pattern is either a confidence trickster or a degenerate. Absence of ornament has brought the other arts to unsuspected heights. Beethoven's symphonies would not have been written by a man who had to walk about in silk, satin, and lace. Anyone who goes about in a velvet coat today is not an artist, but a buffoon or a house painter. We have grown finer, more subtle.27

According to Loos we no longer need ornament because we have something better: instead of ornament we have our

5o Karsten Harries

art. And this art, he claims, could rise to its present height only because ornament and the culture that once supported it have perished. The death of ornament is said to be a presupposition of modern art. Not that modern art killed ornament, but it presupposes an approach to beauty and to the art-work that leaves no room for ornament.

In the first lecture I sketched the aesthetic approach that has presided over the evolution of modern art. On that approach art must take its leave from reality. Beauty should not serve utility; nor should it serve love. Beauty should exist only for beauty's sake. That such beauty is denied to ornament that functions effectively as such is evident: to succeed as ornament, ornament must serve the ornament bearer. Where ornament aspires to the self-sufficient pres-ence of a pure aesthetic object it dies. This death is demanded by the aesthetic approach, which would replace ornament with art for art's sake.

Of this art Loos demands more than decoration, and that is to say also, than architecture can offer. It is not surprising that with the rise of the aesthetic approach music should have been elevated into the paradigmatic art. The other arts come to be measured by its abstract purity.

Why, we may ask, separate work from leisure in this way, why oppose periods when the business of life so preoccupies us from others that allow us to lose ourselves to art? Loos may be quite right to claim that only this divorce has carried the other arts to previously unsuspected heights. If aesthetic purity provides the measure of height, we have to grant this; have to grant also that, so understood, the other arts had to leave architecture far beneath them. But do we really work just to go to a concert or to forget the dreary routines of the workplace in some dusty museum? The pure art that Loos celebrates demands not only that we take leave from work, but from reality, from its joys and sorrows, its suc-

Decoration and Decadence si

cesses and failures. We sense the gloomy shadow of Scho-penhauer that lies over so much modern art.

But if the aesthetic approach demands the death of or-nament and demands the divorce of art and work, must we not locate the real reason for this divorce in quite another place—in the economic imperative that has come to rule modern life, in the desire to fit the working human being, as Marx puts it, with a minimum of friction into the mech-anism of production.28 The rationalization of production demands the reification of labor and of the worker. And the more this process of rationalization determines the shapes of our lives, the less we will be able to discover their meaning. This leads to demands for another life, a life that, freed from the demands placed on it by the rationalization of labor, justifies itself.

Such demands need not lead to attempts to change a reality that denies what is so deeply desired. Doesn't aesthetic experience promise what is demanded, even if it substitutes for the desired reality the imaginary realm of art? The de-mand for aesthetic purity that has guided the theory and practice of modern art may be understood as the shadow cast by the rationalization of labor, as Ersatz for lost mean-ing, a compensation that in the interest of just such ration-alization is often readily granted. In this sense art for art's sake has a political significance.

The same may be said of the false gothic, the false ren-aissance, the false baroque of the nineteenth century or of our own post-modernism. They, too, betray a profound unease with the forces that have shaped modernity, with the promise of mastery that lies at its origin and continues to govern its progress, while at the same time they channel such unease in an aesthetic direction and thus render it harmless. Decoration presupposes a profoundly broken at-titude to reality, which mirrors itself in the broken appear-

52 Karsten Harries

ance of our decorated sheds. As long as architecture remains committed to the aesthetic approach, there is no alternative to the decorated shed; for architecture cannot honor this commitment without compromise.

But did not modern architecture have its origin precisely in the refusal of such compromise? Did it not promise to heal the rift separating art and technology? And did it not keep this promise? Think of Frank Lloyd Wright or Le Corbusier, of Gropius or Mies van der Rohe. Do we not meet here with a new honesty and a strength of form that still carries conviction? Who could deny that the best works of modern architecture belong with the greatest achieve-ments of modern art?

Just here lies the problem. The attempt to rid architecture of the broken appearance that characterized, for example, so many of the facades of the nineties has to subject archi-tecture either to the hegemony of technology (and with this architecture ceases to be art) or to the hegemony of art. Thus modern architecture, no less than its nineteenth cen-tury predecessor, stands between engineering and art. Its best creations convince as successful paintings or sculptures convince, as aesthetic objects. But aesthetic objects, breath-taking as they may be, as such are uninhabitable. I remind you of Kant's determination of the aesthetic. In this sense the painter Hundertwasser was right to speak of the moral uninhabitability of modern architecture, as was Georg Lu-käcs, when he charged that modern architecture failed in its fundamental task: "to create a space for man."29

6

Let me return once more to Broch's attempt to read the spiritual situation of the late nineteenth century off its stuc-

Decoration and Decadence 53

coed facades. The sharp contrast between functional build-ing and superfluous decoration offered itself to him as a figure of the equally sharp contrast between a rationalism that demands sober attention to the facts and an aestheticism that for the sake of pleasure is willing to close its eyes to the ugliness and cruelty of the world or, what is worse, to enjoy such ugliness and cruelty aesthetically. Broch's reading recalls Schopenhauer: already in his philosophy sober con-sideration of what is the case meets with an aesthetic-mystical flight beyond the world. Far more decisively than Kant, Schopenhauer understood the enjoyment of art as a vacation from reality. Nietzsche's word, 'We possess art lest we perish of the truth,"30 invites thus a Schopenhauerian reading. Ra-tionalism and aestheticism belong together and, as Broch observes,

in all aestheticism, in all decoration, even in the most harmless, slumbers cynicism—it, too, the product of rationalist thinking—slumbers skepticism that knows or at least suspects that what is being played here is a game of cover-up.31

Decoration is a symptom of decadence. What do I mean here by "decadence?" I shall adopt

Nietzsche's characterization:

What is the sign of every literary decadence? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the sentence, the sentence reaches out and obscures the meaning of the page, the page gains life at the expense of the whole. But this is the simile of every style of decadence: every time, the anarchy of atoms, the disgregation of the will, "freedom of the individual," to use moral terms—expanded into political theory, "equal rights for all." Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms: the rest, poor in life. Every-where paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one descends in forms of

54 Karsten Harries

organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, and artifact.32

In just this way Broch understands the decadence of dec-oration. While decoration may capture our attention by its aesthetic presence, it no longer presents itself as part of an organic whole. It looks applied, composed. This distin-guishes it from the ornament produced by the stronger styles of the past. There ornament had the function of quite literally re-presenting buildings in order to make visible their essence, that is, their purpose, as well as the ideal that an-imated this purpose. In this sense the ornament of a gothic or a baroque church helps us to interpret the church build-ing as a church;33 and in this sense the ornament of a house should help us to understand it as a house. This, however, presupposes that we know what a house is—what it means to dwell, to be at home in the world. Does what Ruskin calls the prevalent feeling of modern times still allow for such knowledge? Heidegger belongs to his age with his de-scription of authentic existence as a not-being-at-home,34 as does Wilhelm Worringer, when he seeks the root of all ar-tistic creation in an anxious dread of reality.35 Both give expression to a characteristically modern understanding of reality.

To be sure, reality, as it has here been understood, should not be identified with reality. Not that we do not under-stand the poet Gottfried Benn, when he claims that be-tween 1910 and 1925 Europe knew no reality, only its dis-torted caricature.36 We may even ask: Why the temporal restriction? Have things really changed? Do we today have a more adequate access to reality? A Marxist such as Lukäcs might add that such experience of the unreality of one's world rests on a socially conditioned distortion of reality. Lukäcs thus opposes the harmonious appearance of a pri-

Decoration and Decadence 55

meval communist village or an early medieval town to the fragmented appearance of our modern environment and locates the ground of the fragmentation and thus of deca-dence in capitalism.

Here the moments, the different parts of the economy, become autonomous in an altogether new manner.... As a result of the objective structure of its economic system, the surface of capitalism appears "fragmented"; it consists of moments that tend towards autonomy with objective necessity. This of course has to mirror itself in the consciousness of those who live in this society, that is to say also in the consciousness of its poets and thinkers.37

According to Lukäcs this fragmented surface is supported by the whole of the capitalist mode of production. This is to claim that decadence, as Nietzsche understands it, de-termines the surface or the appearance of capitalism. It is this surface to which Nietzsche responds with his pro-nouncement: God is dead; or Sedlmayr with his procla-mation of the loss of the center; or Broch with his thesis of the disintegration of values.

According to Broch, too, with the death of God the value system in whose ruins we still live has lost founder and foundation, to be replaced by ever more partial value sys-tems, each following its own logic, each pursuing its own increasingly narrow ends, resisting compromise. Like strangers, these systems now stand one beside the other:

The economic system of "business in itself' beside a system of Part pour fart, a military value system beside the system of tech-nology or that of sport, each autonomous, each "in itself," each "unfettered" in its autonomy, each concerned to draw, with all the radicality of its logic, the last consequences and to break its own records. And woe, if in this struggle of competing value systems, which barely maintain their balance, one should come to dominate, growing above all the other value systems, as the

56 Karsten Harries

military system has grown in this time of war, as the economic world picture has grown, to which even war is subject—woe! For it embraces the world, embraces all other values, and exterminates them, like a swarm of locusts moving over a field.38

Despite all agreements, Broch challenges what Lukäcs has to say about the disintegration that both take to be consti-tutive of the modern world. Following Marx, Lukäcs un-derstands the capitalist mode of production as the whole that manifests itself in such fragmentation. Broch, on the other hand, considers the economic value sphere just one among many and admonishes us to preserve their hetero-geneity. Accordingly, he locates the ground of decadence, not in capitalism, but in the absolutism of pure reason which would subject all of life to its hegemony. Presupposed by this absolutism is our all-too-human desire to secure our-selves in the midst of what is by comprehending it.

We can comprehend only what is hard enough to be grasped; similarly we can comprehend only what endures: we cannot hold on to flowing water or shifting clouds. To secure ourselves we thus analyze what presents itself into timeless elements and reconstruct it as a configuration of such elements. By its very nature reason tends towards a logical, and this is to say, towards an ever more formal and empty atomism. The still-progressing rationalization of modern life has to mean its disintegration, professionali-zation, compartmentalization: war is war, business is busi-ness, art for art's sake. To quote Broch once more, "All this says the same, it all belongs to the same aggressive radicality, that uncanny, I almost would like to say metaphysical, ruth-lessness, to that cruel logical spirit that looks to and only to the matter at hand, that does not look right and does not look left."39 The ruthlessness that has to fragment the whole of life is fed by the snake's promise: you will be like God.

Decoration and Decadence S7

7

According to Sartre, every man seeks to lose himself as man to become God.40 This makes what the tradition called pride constitutive of human existence. Sartre thus returns us to an ancient tale: Was it not the devil who tempted Adam and Eve, created in the image of God, with a dream of full divinity, a dream, that, when they attempted to seize it, threatened the destruction of reality? What makes human beings vulnerable to this temptation is their difficulty ac-cepting that they are not their own author and master. Presupposed is that ill will against time that Nietzsche named the spirit of revenge. As long as this spirit is not overcome there can be no peace with all that subjects us to time. The spirit of revenge bids us escape such subjection by replacing this elusive temporal world, which threatens to defeat all our dreams of mastery, with another of which we are the authors. In their different ways both modern science and modern art have aimed at such replacement.

This attempt may indeed seem inseparable from human reality. Think of the traditional understanding of man as created in the image of God. Are we not most truly ourselves when we try to become like God? Modern rationalism thus presupposes a self-assertion that, refusing to be discouraged by the charge of pride, lays claim to truth, despite skepticism or a theological absolutism that would exclude human beings from its possession. Modern science is born of the confidence that it is possible for us to know things as they are and to use this knowledge to render ourselves "the masters and possessors of nature."

Such mastery demands objectivity. To become objective we must first free ourselves of the ways in which mood and interest distort what we experience, transform ourselves into pure spectators of what is the case. To this purification of

58 Karsten Harries

the subject corresponds the objectification of reality. Thus objectified reality knows nothing of value, just as, thus puri-fied, the subject knows nothing of love. The project of be-coming God demands a cold heart.

The objectification of reality demands also a second reduction of lived experience: Our first acquaintance with things is bound by perspective. The way they present themselves to us depends on our situation, on the place that we have been assigned by nature and society, space and time. Usually these perspectives go unquestioned; but as soon as we reflect on perspective as such, in thought at least we are beyond the limits it imposes. Thought is not bound by the tyranny of perspective. Such freedom gives rise to the demand for a more open access to things, for forms of representation less limited by perspectival distor-tion, for ever more objective modes of description. What makes our modern science superior to its Aristotelian pre-cursor is first of all its mathematical form of representa-tion, which does greater justice to this demand of reason, which has its other side in the devaluation of sense and imagination. The pursuit of truth demands critical reflec-tion about point of view and perspective that has to posit the ideal of a knowing that discloses things as they are. This ideal forces us to understand what offers itself to our sen-ses as the mere appearance of a reality that no eye, no imagination, but only a pure thinking can grasp. Our sci-ence and technology presuppose this self-elevation, which has to divorce the real and the visible. As Nietzsche ob-serves, we have no organ for the truth.4' We do not see as God sees. Indeed, the very attempt to think such sight leads to a contradiction. Our experiencing remains inevitably bound by particular situations, particular perspectives. It follows that experience can never satisfy what reason de-mands, that sight fails to give insight into what is. Nature

Decoration and Decadence 59

reveals her secret to us only in the reconstructions of our own spirit. What we see thus comes to be understood as the appearance of an invisible reality that knows nothing of the gift of light.

But is reality not confused here with a mere construction of thought? Must the twofold reduction of reality that is the price of its objectification not estrange us from the whole of life and cover up what alone deserves to be called "reality"? Should we not challenge the loss threatened by the hege-mony of objectifying reason by exhibiting the artificiality of its constructions? In this connection post-modern thinkers have liked to appeal to Nietzsche. What really is the truth that objectifying reason claims for itself? Nietzsche's famous answer:

A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorph-isms—in short, a sum of human relations, which have been en-hanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are: metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their picture and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.42

How good this sounds! Science is moved into the vicinity of art, but is it not poorer, having traded colorful pictures for pale concepts? Also more dishonest, more ignorant, since it refuses to acknowledge that its reality is only the product of an artistic creating? Humanists, made anxious by the hegemony of objectifying reason, may take comfort in such reflections. But it is a false consolation, which lacks the strength to set limits to the still-expanding rule of science and technology because it fails to recognize the reality and basis of this rule.

Descartes's promise, of a practical philosophy that allows us to understand the force and action of nature in the same

6o Karsten Harries

way in which a craftsman understands what he is able to produce, is not easily dismissed. The very real power that this practical philosophy has given us argues against such a dismissal. On this view, we understand reality to the point that we can recreate it. The model here is not the spectator-God of Aristotle, but the creator-God of the Bible. Not content with the twofold leave-taking from everyday reality that I have sketched, objectifying reason returns to it as experiment and technology. This return, which has trans-formed our life-world, must be understood in all its ambivalence.

On one hand we know, as well as Loos did, that in count-less ways objectifying reason and the mastery it has given us over nature, including our own nature, has improved the quality of life. One could cite advances in medicine; or the revolution in communications; or the impact technology has had on food production. Although countless problems still await a technological solution, who could deny that technology has helped us lift at least some of the burdens of life? There is an obvious sense in which we are less limited by our body and by the accident of its location in space and time than were our predecessors. It would be irresponsible not to affirm the liberating potential of objectifying reason.

The other side of such liberation is the often-lamented rootlessness of our dwelling. No doubt, science and tech-nology have brought us greater freedom. Both literally and figuratively, we have become more mobile. Such mobility has made us less willing to accept what happens to be the place assigned to us by nature or history, more ready to experiment. Beyond what is, the self-elevation of the spirit opens up the infinite realm of what might be. But this very real increase in freedom has given new urgency to questions about what should be our place and vocation. Kant's con-

Decoration and Decadence 61

viction notwithstanding, reason alone has not given us the answer. The same self-liberation presupposed by the objec-tification of reality lets us live our lives sub specie possibilitatis, haunted by a sense of contingency and arbitrariness, of emp-tiness and futility. Where do we find our ground and mea-sure in the infinite realm opened up by reflection? How can we justify the way we live? To such questions objectifying reason has no answer. And to the extent that it has shaped our life-world, threatening to debase human beings into mere appendages of a lifeless mechanism, into human ma-terial, a resource to be used and used up like any other, that world holds no answer either, but leaves us with dreams of lost light and lost love, with utopian dreams of an existence sub specie aeternitatis, of a full life that, like aesthetic expe-rience, would justify itself.

I am not pleading here for a romantic renunciation of science and technology. What we must resist is rather the tempting dream of replacing reality with our own construc-tions. What saves science from such temptation is its com-mitment to the truth, which sets limits to the very self-assertion in which the scientific project has its origin. That commitment presupposes a renunciation, not of man's di-vine telos—where to think that telos is to think the coin-cidence of reason and reality—but of the proud hope of replacing reality with our constructions, which would put us in the place of God.

The dream of godlike self-sufficiency is better served by art. Consider once more Baumgarten's claim that a successful work of art should be a perfect whole, which, because noth-ing in it is missing or superfluous, so absorbs our attention that we are prevented or at least discouraged from referring it to anything other. The artist who aims at such perfection aims to replace the world with his own creation.

62 Karsten Harries

And does this not suggest a response to the impoverish-ment of reality that is inseparable from its objectification? Should we not so beautify objectified reality that we can appreciate it as an aesthetic phenomenon? Does decoration not allow us to cover up the poverty of the world we have created? This returns us to Broch's observation that we can read the essence of our age off its decorated facades.

8

Is this then to argue for a resigned acceptance of the decorated shed and of the aestheticism and the decadence its presupposes? This would indeed have to be our conclu-sion, were we to equate reality with objectified reality. Then meaning could be found only in a turn to the aesthetic, in a turn to decoration or to art for art's sake. But to speak, as I have done, of a doubly-reduced, objectified reality is to deny such an equation. This denial calls for a deeper un-derstanding of reality and for a reappropriation of what Hegel called the highest vocation of art: so to reveal reality that once again it will speak to us of our place and vocation in the midst of what is.

If such revelation is to be more than an aesthetic skipping over the reality of our modern world, it first must recognize the legitimacy of objectifying reason, even as it recognizes its limitation. As Heidegger observes, our attitude to ob-jectifying reason and to the power it has given us can be only a broken "yes" and "no."43 This tension must reflect itself in architecture that is truly of this age. The modernist dream of an architecture that would heal the rift separating the engineer from the artist, objectifying reason and beauty, and thus reintegrate our fragmented life into a genuine whole, has to remain a mere dream.

Decoration and Decadence 63

This is not to say that we have to return to the aesthetic approach and to an architecture of decorated sheds. Rather we have to consider the ethical function of the beautiful. That function is made especially conspicuous by ornament. It is therefore to ornament that I shall turn in my last lecture.

Third Lecture

The Broken Frame tat

1

The art historian Hans Sedlmayr suggested that works we are likely to dismiss because they lie outside the main-stream, because they strike us as mere curiosities or perhaps as exceptions that prove the rule, often reveal the deep con-cerns of a period better than more representative examples. The decision by the eighteenth-century architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux to make the sphere the basic form of an entire building provides Sedlmayr with his paradigm.

To most this thought will appear only as a bad joke, as madness; to those more sympathetic perhaps as an "experiment with form"; and—applied to the house—the thought is indeed nonsensical. If it were only that, there would be no reason to occupy oneself with the spherical building. But a nonsensical idea is not necessarily also without sense.'

Sedlmayr was not the first to insist on the sense of this nonsensical work. Before him Emil Kaufmann had called attention to the "extraordinary significance" of Ledoux's designs and interpreted them as "symptoms of their period" and at the same time as "sound enough" to inaugurate that revolution in architecture that celebrated its triumphs only in the twentieth century.2 Sedlmayr accepted this interpre-tation of Ledoux's designs as an origin of modernist archi-tectural practice, but placed it in a very different light: the utopian ideal of the building as a pure aesthetic object here triumphs over the requirements of dwelling. Small wonder

64

The Broken Frame 65

that it had to remain on paper. But even this paper triumph Sedlmayr thought profoundly questionable. His Verlust der Mitte extends such questioning to all of modern art and architecture, which seemed to him to figure a disintegrating world.

I do not want to speak to you about Ledoux's sphere; but I would like to consider in this last lecture an equally thought-provoking, equally questionable, and even more peripheral work, the engraving Der liebe Morgen (The Dear Morning) by Johann Esaias Nilson (fig. i). Dating from about 177o, it antedates Ledoux's design for the Shelter of the Rural Guards by just a few years. In this engraving the threshold that separates our modern aesthetic approach from an older approach becomes visible. It thus invites us to reflect on what is at stake when this threshold is crossed.

Since none of you are likely to have heard of Nilson, a few words about him may be in order.3 Nilson was born in 1721 in what was then still the free imperial city of Augsburg and the artistic center of the South German rococo. Both his mother and his father were artists, as were several of his children and grandchildren. When the father died in 1751, the son took over the business, and engraving was with the Nilsons very much a business. To assure the wide distri-bution of his work, mostly ornamental fantasies popular with the decorators of the time, Nilson went into publishing. The honors that followed document the esteem in which he was held: in 1761 Nilson was appointed painter to the court of the Upper Palatinate; in 1766 he became a member of the Imperial Academy in Augsburg—he was to become its president in 1778; already in 1769 he had been named the Evangelical director (there also was a Catholic director) of the Drawing Academy of the City of Augsburg, a position he held until 1786. Two years later he died, on the eve of the French revolution. His children attempted to carry on

66 Karsten Harries

the family tradition. One is reminded of so many other families in the eighteenth century, which handed down what we might consider a fine art from one generation to the next as just another craft.

2

But let me return to the engraving, produced just after Nilson's appointment as director of Augsburg's Drawing Academy had brought him into much closer contact with the leaders of the "new taste," men who in the name of both reason and nature attacked rococo artificiality and opposed to it the ideal they saw embodied in the art of the ancients.4 What the engraving represents is stated easily enough: at-tended by his placid cow, a cowherd blows his horn to offer his morning greeting to the young woman leaning out of a window whose shutter she appears just to have opened. But what draws our attention is not this rather conventional scene, but the strange monument that separates cowherd and girl: an incomplete octagonal frame supported by a crumbling base.5

An interpretation of the engraving suggests itself that exploits its many erotic allusions. Note, for example, the way the phallic horn parallels the woman's right arm, which in answer to the horn's morning call, a call presumably not to work but to love, pushes open the window's shutter. The parallels defined by horn and arm are linked by the glances exchanged by the lovers.

Puzzling is the placement of the horn's mouth: it is to suggest that the horn is responsible for the breaking of the frame and for fracturing the monument's stony geometry? Do these, too, carry an erotic meaning? Consider the horn's relation to the crack extending into the monument: the figure thus formed seems the inverse of that formed by the

1. Johann Esaias Nilson, Der liebe Morgen Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München

2. Nilson, Der gesegnete Mittag Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München

7.41;•IfTV;,1'.4,,» Mi■Hr.:,.+T■,!.n •

3. Nilson, Der gute Abend Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München

4. Nilson, Die fröhliche Nacht Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München

...,. ..r,an..-..rr,nMr

`( >„ 1,_1

QQ

0;ra:1 rrro.attu,r nrmuP a-n,

tfht lr1Ä, .9)

~[[.r 6,,, 1S°.,;■»~P.~~ä`~

6. Nilson, Die Nacht Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München

;>>,1,. ,~i~~ <~~,!vb.„w,.r,f

B. Nilson, Das edle Gartenwerck Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München

7.5■It; (A.1111'trillvt rd. IMF i,rt■ t

9. Nilson, Das Gartenwerck auf dem Land Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München

io. Francois Cuvillies, Ornamental Fantasy Livre nouveau de morceaux de fantaisie, ca. 1750

Berliner, Ornamentale Vorlage Blätter

ii. Hogarth, False Perspective Anabas, Giessen, William Hogarth 1697-1764

iz. Jacques de la Joue, Naufrege Berliner, Ornamentale Vorlage Blätter

The Broken Frame 67

woman's right arm and hand. Both hand and crack indicate the direction of a second set of diagonals, rising from right to left, that invite us to explore correspondences between them, the open shutter, and the opening in the frame.

But how does this interpretation illuminate what most draws our attention: the strange frame monument in the picture? First of all this engraving would seem to be, not about love, but about a frame, more precisely, about the ruin of a frame. What is the point of this frame fragment, which invites thoughts of Magritte's explorations of the meaning of frame and picture?

Frames re-present what they frame. Such re-presentation invites us to take a second look, bids us take leave from our usual interests and concerns and to attend to what is thus re-presented. They are devices that help establish what Bul-lough called psychical distance; they call for and serve that disinterested attitude in which Kant sought the key to aes-thetic appreciation. Frames may be understood as objecti-fications of the aesthetic attitude. Paintings are thus often given frames. The frame helps present the painting as an aesthetic object.

Not every painting requires a frame. Many works of art assert their aesthetic presence so strongly that an elaborate frame seems redundant or even worse: a rival presence. Take one of Frank Stella's paintings. Part of the evolution of modern painting has been the progressive elimination of the frame. Such elimination is closely tied to an ever more resolute turn to abstraction that transforms paintings from representations into self-sufficient aesthetic presences that no longer need the help of frames. Frame and representation in art go together.

Consider Alberti's perspective construction.6 Alberti in-vites us to think of the picture surface as if it were a window cut into a wall. The picture frame is like a window frame;

68 Karsten Harries

looking at a picture is like looking out of a window, although what we see in the frame is of course not the real world, but a fiction, an illusory second world, created by that second god, the artist. His mastery of perspective should allow us to look at his two-dimensional creation as if it were three-dimensional reality. We, of course, know better. But the painter's art invites us to suspend our disbelief. Such col-lusion with the painter demands that we bracket out the reality we inhabit and become oblivious to what lies beyond the borders of his work. The frame therefore raises at these borders an aesthetic barrier that protects the artificial world created by the painter from the reality beyond and thus protects our collusion with the artist's fiction. To do so, it may not absorb too much of our attention. It should attract it only to send it on, should invite us to look past the frame, pass through it, into the picture.

If the frame in this sense invites us to become absorbed in the picture, it also shadows such absorption with an awareness of the illusory character of the world of the pic-ture, of its distance from the real world. To heighten the power of illusion, baroque illusionism thus sought to elim-inate the frame. What we see in an illusionistic fresco should seem to possess the same degree of reality as the architecture in which we stand. The architecture of the counter-refor-mation exploited this possibility of fusing pictorial and ar-chitectural reality by creating illusions of heaven descending right into its churches. Like a play within a play, the ap-pearance of a frame in such a fresco has to call attention to the painter's art and thus to the inevitable distance that separates art and its representations from reality.

Consider this extreme example from the Neues Schloss in Stuttgart, dating from 1786; unfortunately it was de-stroyed in the Second World War (fig. 5).7 There had been little time to redecorate the palace's Marble Hall for an

The Broken Frame 69

important reception. Whimsically the painter Philipp Fried-rich von Hetsch captures something of the hurry by painting his allegory to the Duchy of Württemberg as if the painting were just being lifted into the frame already prepared for it. The angels, so familiar from baroque and rococo frescoes, have here been demoted: no longer God's messengers, they have become painter's assistants. The great tradition of il-lusionistic painting is drawing to an end. Unable to take it seriously, the artist plays with it, comments on it. Allegorical intention has been subordinated to art for art's sake. Baroque illusionism here becomes self-referential and subverts itself. Such self-subversion is characteristic of this art on the thresh-old of revolution.

Something similar can also be said of the Nilson engrav-ing. Here, too, picture and frame have been separated. In-deed the represented frame-fragment does not even await a picture. But this makes it especially odd. A frame should call attention to what it frames, not to itself. By raising a frame on a pedestal, by "framing" it so to speak, we subvert its usual function. Thus made conspicuous, the frame no longer functions effectively as a frame. Like a statue raised on a pedestal, this incomplete frame claims something of the dignity of a self-sufficient work of art. Just as in Ledoux's design of a spherical house architecture casts off its tradi-tional subservience to the requirements of dwelling, aspiring instead to the status of autonomous sculpture, so here the frame casts off its traditional subservience to the painter's art of representation, aspiring instead to the status of an autonomous aesthetic object.

There is, of course, an important difference. If a house serves dwelling, a frame serves aesthetic beholding. To make it the focus of such beholding is to invite a meditation on what it is to look at a framed picture. Art here is first of all about art. Art plays with itself.

7o Karsten Harries

3

But why is the frame broken? Why the ruinous appearance of this frame monument?

Let me return once more to the function of frames. Frames, I suggested, are devices that help establish aesthetic distance. We can say of a frame what Schopenhauer says of light, that "its favorable arrangement enhances even the beauty of the beautiful." Not that frames are indispensable conditions of aesthetic beholding. To some extent everything that strikes us as beautiful dislocates us as it asserts itself as a self-suf-ficient presence. Think once more of a painting by Stella or of Kant's definition of the beautiful as object of an entirely disinterested perception. The beautiful may be said to frame itself.

This need not be a work of art; it could be a person. In my first lecture I read you Xenophon's description of the beauty of young Autolycus: like a sovereign, Xenophon tells us, the beautiful demands submission; like a light in the dark it draws all eyes to itself; the usual chatter ceases; silence is the only appropriate response to beauty and to the divine power of eros that touches us whenever we see someone beautiful. To be sure, such enraptured beholding will not last. The symposium must go on and Xenophon concludes it on a very different note, with a pantomime of Dionysus and Ariadne that celebrates sexual union and marriage and lets those present resolve to follow the example of the divine pair.

Is something like this suggested by our engraving? The frame in the picture could then be understood as an objec-tification of the rapture with which the young woman's beauty fills the cowherd, an expression of the power of the beautiful to frame itself. This frame, however, will not hold. The power of beauty here is the power of love, and love,

The Broken Frame 71

as the horn hints, is not content to admire what it beholds from a distance, but demands entry. The broken frame might thus represent love's passage from aesthetic beholding to desire. The frame's inability to hold would find an answer in the window frame's inability to hold the young woman.

But is this interpretation really supported by the engrav-ing? Let us return to the picture. The fragment in the picture, we said, neither holds nor awaits a picture. Raised on its pedestal it is made conspicuous as a frame, more precisely as an incomplete, broken frame; this frame ruin is presented to us as if it were a sculpture. This subverts the traditional function of the frame. How are we to understand this subversion?

4

Puzzling as it may seem to us, Der liebe Morgen was not an isolated capriccio: Nilson offered it as the first of a set of four similar fantasies on the times of day (figs. i-4), which relate the day's progress from morning to night to love's progress from its awakening to its consummation.8 At the same time, each, in its own way, plays with the idea of framing. If the first engraving shows the lovers separa-ted, the cowherd calling the young woman to come out-side, the second, Der gesegnete Mittag (The Blessed Noon) joins man and woman: surrounded by their resting ani-mals, we see them eating from the same bowl. Once again a strange structure catches our attention, an H-shaped arch that frames the couple placed beneath and in front of it, while two vases decorated with putti frame a relief of bac-chantes, placed at an angle to the picture's axis, offering an oblique commentary on the lovers' preoccupation with one another. Der gute Abend (The Good Evening) once again shows two lovers separated by a frame monument very

72 Karsten Harries

the monument in the first engraving, although now the monument's base has become also a fountain, the octagon a firmly closed ring that frames the man whom we see, looking down from a balcony, beckoning the woman be-low by pointing to the closed window in the building in the background, which, like the relief in the preceding pic-ture, is placed at an angle. The last engraving, Die fröhliche Nacht (The Happy Night), recalls the first: but now both lovers appear in one window, barely separated by its mul-lion. Breaking the night's silence, villagers offer a serenade to the newly married couple. The octagonal frame of the first engraving returns, or rather its trace, for now it has become a timber-frame that all but disappears into the wall of the house that shelters the couple.

Nilson preceded this set of variations on the times of day with two others on the same theme. One of these makes few demands: rather slight borders of rocaille and foliage enclose scenes that, while they invite comparison with the later series, make no attempt to thematize the problem of the frame.9 The series does, however, serve to remind us that Nilson spent much of his career designing ornamental fantasies exploring the possibilities of rocaille framing.

More significant is a second series that illustrates the times of day with representations of verses taken from a Singspiel of the period, Karl Friedrich Brucker's "The Peace God Granted Germany,"10 Of special interest is the way Nilson encloses his scenes in firm rectangular frames, but surrounds these with a border of allegorical ornament that suggests a landscape behind the framed picture (fig. 6) in a way that anticipates Philipp Otto Runge's cycle on the times of day of some thirty years later. The romantic painter's attempt at a new art can be understood as a re-appropriation of the rococo, testifying to the incompleteness of the supposed victory of the Enlightenment.

The Broken Frame 73

Der liebe Morgen appears less strange when placed in this context. Hermann Bauer has argued convincingly that the engraving—and the same goes for the other pictures in this set—can be understood as a direct translation of a forme rocaille into classical forms. Bauer makes his point with a comparison of Der liebe Morgen with another and earlier Nilson engraving, Das Gartenwerck auf dem Land (Garden Work in the Country) ." In the latter a rocaille frame pro-vides both base and frame for a picture showing a kissing couple (fig. 9).12 Here the framed picture clearly is a picture, its pictorial reality different from the landscape, different also from the bizarre rocaille framing that recalls a rococo altar piece complete with attending figures, although these have become peasant children. Venus and Ceres preside over this altar, which has its proper place in nature, not in the church at which the spire rising behind the framed picture just barely hints. In this engraving, too, the artist's invention would seem to have gone into the frame rather than into the picture it holds or into the setting.

Bauer's suggestion that Der liebe Morgen translates the rocaille framing so prominent in Das Gartenwerck auf dem Land into a by then more fashionable, classicizing vocab-ulary helps to explain both the monument's ruinous ap-pearance and the plants issuing from the frame. Both have their counterpart in the earlier engraving. Both, as Bauer observes, had been characteristic of the forme rocaille from the very beginning. The comparison also calls to our atten-tion an obvious change: in the later engraving the frame no longer holds a picture. Not that it has quite lost its framing function. Its function is obviously to frame the woman in the window, whom we see, as does the cowherd, as if she were part of a picture. But frame and framed now seem to possess the same degree of reality. The contemporary interest in the picturesque comes to mind, which delighted in so

74 Karsten Harries

shaping a landscape that trees and hedges would subtly frame some pleasure pavilion, or an artificial ruin, or a classicizing temple. Inseparable from the picturesque is this pictoriali-zation of both architecture and landscape. The picturesque depends on a deliberate confusion of picture and reality. Instead of insisting on a sharp distinction between the two, it attempts to blur it, where such blurring is also and nec-essarily a blurring of the aesthetic boundary that helps to protect the autonomy of representational painting, and thus a blurring of the frame. This blurring results in an aesthe-ticizing of reality.

The same play with the boundary that separates picture and reality is constitutive of rococo architecture. Architec-tural elements are used self-consciously to frame architec-ture. The most obvious example is provided by the choir arch which in church after church is treated as a theatrical frame that presents to us the choir with the high altar as if it were a picture. Once more we have a confusion of picture and reality. English landscape garden and rococo architec-ture are linked by their commitment to the picturesque.13

Something very similar can also be said of the Nilson engraving. It, too, plays with the frame, although what landscape architecture and rococo church realized in the world remains confined to a piece of paper. Still, in the engraving, too, the frame possesses the same degree of reality as what it frames, but of course also as the cowherd, who observes this picture, and as the cow, placidly resting in the foreground. The engraving may be said to re-present and thus to reveal the kind of play that helps to define the picturesque. To be sure, there is a difference: here there can be no question of subtle framing. Strangely dislocated, raised on its pedestal, Nilson's frame calls attention not so much to the woman in the window as to itself: a frame that is no longer entire, a frame in ruins.

The Broken Frame 75

But what lies in ruins? Just the frame? Or is it the rule of pictorial representation that here is playfully subverted? Is Nilson offering us, to use a fashionable term, a decon-struction of the frame and with it of representational art? Do we have here a key to the essence of the picturesque as a category defining an aesthetic threshold?

5

Consider once more the woman in the window! What is the spatial relationship between her, her suitor, and the strange monument that both separates and joins them?" The house would seem to stand behind the frame. But how far behind? Compare the size of the faces! Just as if she were part of a picture, the size of her face seems to place it on the plane defined by the monument's frame. And yet this frame has to be closer to the observer. This spatial ambiguity is strengthened by the difficulty we have establishing the relationship between the monument and the house. Once again we would like to place the house behind the monu-ment; at the same time house and monument tend to fuse. It is almost as if the house rested on the same base that supports the frame. The engraving thus plays with and blurs the distinction between the three-dimensional reality that proper painting had long been supposed to represent and the unavoidable two-dimensionality of the picture plane. The incomplete frame in the picture, which frames and yet does not frame, re-presents such play and makes it conspicuous.

Once more the picturesque comes to mind. At the same time, as Bauer points out, in this respect, too, Nilson just translates conventions that had long governed the orna-mental engravings of the rococo into a newly fashionable classicizing vocabulary.15 The nature of this translation be-

76 Karsten Harries

comes clearer when we compare it with this ornamental fantasy from Francois Cuvillies's Livre nouveau de morceaux de fantaisie of 175o (fig. io). Here, too, the ornamental frame appears in a landscape. That such a frame could not possibly exist is immediately apparent. This impossibility is the result of Cuvillies's deliberate confusion of the logic of pictorial representation and the logic of ornament. On one hand simply an ornamental form, Cuvillies's frame is yet represented as if it were a thing that could share the same space with the trees and the palace in the back-ground, rise from the same ground, and be illuminated by the same light.

Such play had been characteristic of rocaille from the very beginning. Thus Juste-Aurele Meissonier, who has perhaps the best claim to having originated this mode of ornament, blurs frame and framed. Two-dimensional ornament under-goes a metamorphosis and becomes three-dimensional ar-chitecture; architecture becomes strangely malleable and re-turns to ornament. As the normal separation between frame and framed is denied, so is the separation between pictorial representation and ornamentation. Ornament is pictorial-ized; pictorial representation ornamentalized. Such confu-sion of modes was of course not original with Meissonier. Such blurring had been characteristic of arabesques and grotesques ever since the renaissance, which in turn had appropriated Roman models. The grotesques of Jean Berain, for example, delight in the metamorphosis of flat framing ornament into representations of three dimensional archi-tecture. Meissonier transformed this approach into the style rocaille by making the shell and shell fragments the generative source of his designs. Preserved, indeed exaggerated, is the fusion of ornament and picture.16

That measured by the rules of pictorial representation such fusion has to lead to nonsense is evident. Another Nilson

The Broken Frame 77

engraving, his Neues Caffehaus (New Coffee House) of 1756, lets the rocaille frame invade the picture (fig. 7).i7 Rather like ivy, rocaille wraps itself around the architecture without really transforming it. The engraving brings to mind Ven-turi's celebration of the decorated shed. But here decoration has become strangely aggressive, almost sinister. One thinks of an octopus that has found its prey: rocaille here seems to attack the very modest architecture of the house, threat-ening to displace it, placing itself before the house, de-manding our attention, much as the frame monument in Der liebe Morgen places itself before the woman in the win-dow and demands our attention in its own right. Just as the latter subordinates interest in the framed to interest in the frame, so the former subordinates interest in the shed to interest in the ornament. Precisely because rocaille is or-nament that again and again refuses to accept that subor-dination of ornament to the ornament-bearer that would seem to be the very point of ornament, rocaille is ornament at the limit of ornament.

The architecture of the period shows that this approach to ornament was not confined to fantasies condemned to exist only on paper. We find the same tendency towards autonomous ornament in the architecture of the period. Instead of ornament serving the architectural elements that support it, wall and ceiling come to be treated more and more as just foils for the decorator's fantastic play, as if they were no more than empty sheets of paper. The other side of the emancipation of ornament from its service to the ornament-bearer is the discovery of the beauty of white walls. The overly ornamental architecture of the rococo places us on the threshold of an up-to-then unknown nakedness in architecture. Think once more of Ledoux.

78 Karsten Harries

6

Just as the ornament of the Neues Caffehaus refuses to serve the ornament-bearer, so the rocaille frame in the pic-ture refuses to respect the normal subordination of the frame to what it frames. Once again such insubordination of the frame did not remain on paper, but shows itself in the architecture of the period.

As Nilson's Neues Caffehaus and the other examples I have given show, the ornament of the rococo is closely linked to the frame. I think the point can be extended and gen-eralized: I would like to suggest that the function of or-nament and frame is fundamentally the same: to re-present in order to render more visible. Both should have an aes-thetic presence that attracts our attention. Both thus invite a distanced, aesthetic beholding; both single out and make conspicuous.

To say that the function of ornament and frame is to re-present what is ornamented or framed is to say also that our attention should not be captured by the former, but pass on to the latter. Ornament and frame should serve to re-present. As we have seen, in the art of the rococo both ornament and frame often refuse such service. By translating a rococo ornamental fantasy into a classicizing vocabulary, Der liebe Morgen renders this refusal conspicuous. But, as Hans Sedlmayr points out, ornament cannot become an aesthetic object in its own right and yet continue to function as ornament. The transformation of ornament into a self-sufficient aesthetic object is both its death as ornament and its rebirth as art for art's sake.'8

The same is true of the frame: a frame cannot become a self-sufficient work of art and continue to function effectively as a frame. By presenting us with a broken frame, if you will, with the corpse or the ruin of a frame, Der liebe Morgen

The Broken Frame 79

bids us attend to the meaning of this decay: What is it that here lies in ruins? Just a frame?

Earlier I linked frame and representation. Implied by the elevation of the frame into a self-sufficient aesthetic object is a refusal of the hegemony that perspectival representation had enjoyed ever since Brunelleschi and Alberti. Consider once more Nilson's Neues Caffehaus, the way Nilson places the flag that crowns his coffee house before its rocaille frame, which in turn is allowed to invade the picture. Such per-spectival nonsense invites comparison with Hogarth's False Perspective, (fig. ii) which precedes Nilson's Caffehaus by just two years. The satiric intent of the Hogarth, meant to serve as a frontispiece of a book on perspective, is obvious. (To add an historical footnote: in 1757 the Imperial Academy of Augsburg, of which Nilson was to become a member, "ear-nestly desired" Hogarth to "accept the diploma of counsellor and honorary member of their academy." Hogarth did so with pleasure. )19

But if the pedagogic intent of the Hogarth appears clear enough, the point of the impossibilities of the ornamental engravings of the rococo is much less apparent. One is not surprised to learn that these engravings provoked the ire of enlightened critics, who insisted that art, too, must accept the hegemony of reason, who were convinced that art should be representational and that perspective offered the key to correct representation, convinced that art should represent only the possible, and that a proper painting demanded a proper frame.

Nilson appears to have taken such criticism to heart. This, at least, is suggested by another engraving, contemporary with Der liebe Morgen, which shows the artist, next to a classicizing urn, tearing a sheet showing a forme rocaille. Hermann Bauer speaks of "a public peccavi by which the professor of the academy distances himself from his life's

8o Karsten Harries

work."20 In Der liebe Morgen we thus no longer find rocaille. It has yielded to an apparently more acceptable vocabulary. I find it difficult to take this renunciation very seriously. The rococo dandy in the picture is hardly the contrite sinner. It is almost as if, tearing his rocaille, Nilson were having fun at the spectator's expense. Der liebe Morgen supports this impression.

At first glance the engraving may seem to support the claim that the artist had renounced his earlier career as a rococo engraver. Rocaille has been given up. Its organic freedom has been traded for the stony geometry of the monument's base and the octagonal frame. And Nilson ap-pears to have heeded the dogma dear to Enlightenment aesthetics that the artist represent only what is possible, that the imagination must allow reason to clip its wings. Curious as this frame monument is, someone might actually try to contruct something of the sort.

But the longer one looks at the engraving, the more con-fusing it becomes. As we have seen, Nilson's commitment to perspective is quite superficial. He plays with perspective as he plays with the inherited symbolism, as he plays with the idea of the picture as a representation of what might possibly be the case. This playfulness links him to the rococo rather than to the Enlightenment.

Bauer is right to suggest that what we have here is a translation of a rococo ornamental fantasy into a more up-to-date vocabulary. This translation not only preserves, but makes conspicuous, what is essential: Der liebe Morgen offers us an interpretation of rococo ornament as essentially a broken frame, a frame that both does and does not frame, a frame on the threshold of becoming a self-sufficient aes-thetic object. The frame here disputes first place with the master it once served. The breaking of the frame is at the same time the emancipation of a purely aesthetic interest

The Broken Frame 8!

from an interest in representation. Thus it prepares for the triumph of an abstract art for art's sake. Playfully Nilson challenges those of his contemporaries who insisted on rep-resentation in art and wanted to subject art to their reality principle: art is a work of the imagination; it is play, and first of all it is a play with art, with the aesthetic attitude figured by the frame.

To understand the significance of this challenge, we should keep in mind that what fragments the frame is nothing other than the attempt to emancipate the aesthetic from its service to pictorial representation. The power that breaks the frame is the assertion of the autonomy of the aesthetic. Nilson's engraving invites us to attend to the ambiguity of this as-sertion: elevated into an autonomous aesthetic object the frame turns out to be less than a frame—a frame fragment, a frame in ruins. To become whole again the frame has to once again serve.

But if, as I have claimed, the aesthetic attitude is figured by the frame, must we not understand Nilson's frame ruin as a figure of the ruin of the aesthetic approach? Must the attempt to assert the autonomy of the aesthetic then subvert itself? Does the deconstruction of the frame figure the de-construction of art for art's sake?

Keep in mind the date of Nilson's engraving; also that our aesthetic approach to works of art and architecture as occasions for a distinctly aesthetic pleasure is part of our inheritance from the Enlightenment. In my first lecture I pointed out that such an approach is not at all self-evident. If artists and craftsmen have always been sensitive to the aesthetic side of human experience, this has not been the main focus of their activities. The primary concern of the artist was not to create a beautiful object; rather, together with religion, art helped man to interpret his place and vocation in the world. Beauty served such interpretation.

8z Karsten Harries

Like a frame or an ornament, it was to open our eyes and to let us attend to what mattered. The point of art was not to offer a pleasure that justified itself.

The shift to a more purely aesthetic approach is part of the early modern period. The art of the rococo occupies the threshold that both separates and links the old and the new. Nilson's Der liebe Morgen thematizes this threshold. Thus it gestures towards art for art's sake.

7

It may seem that I have placed altogether too much weight on what is, after all, a not terribly significant, peripheral creation. But I would reiterate here what I said in the be-ginning: often it is just the peripheral and seemingly insig-nificant that allows us to understand the deepest concerns of a period.

That also goes for philosophical texts. Let me call your attention once more to that remark in the Critique of Judg-ment, where Kant cites ornament, together with musical fantasies, as an example of what he calls "free beauty."21 Not that he singles it out for high praise. Quite the opposite. If this may seem surprising, given the way modern art was to pursue such freedom, more surprising is his choice of just this example: is not ornament much more obviously a de-pendent art form than painting or sculpture? Indeed, Kant's understanding of free beauty would have one question an architecture of decorated sheds as essentially impure. But, despite such considerations, advanced already by the En-lightenment, Kant nevertheless can think only of ornament when he tries to give an example of free beauty in the visual arts. The reason for this is both obvious and significant: painting and sculpture in Kant's day were bound by the rule of representation. Given that bond there was no easy path

The Broken Frame 83

leading from painting to the kind of free beauty demanded by Kant's analysis. Ornament was not tied to the rule of representation as painting and sculpture were. The creator of ornamental fantasies was granted a freedom denied to the more serious painter or sculptor. And although in one sense obviously a dependent art form, the relationship of ornament to the wall or ceiling that supports it can be as external as that of a drawing to the paper used by the artist. Do we not often appreciate ornament in a way that lets us forget the architectural support and allows us to appreciate it simply as an aesthetic presence? Is this not in fact how we appreciate much of the ornament of the rococo? And this is how Kant would appear to have appreciated the ornament he mentions as an example of free beauty. The architectural function of ornament has here been bracketed. Ornament is understood as a free art sui generic, where, to underscore a point already made, such freedom does not mean that Kant thinks highly of it. Quite the opposite: just this freedom renders art problematic for Kant, who prefers art that takes seriously its ethical function. When ornament is thus liberated and casts off its servitude it ceases to function as ornament, perhaps to be reborn as art for art's sake. Rococo ornament exists on the threshold of such emanci-pation; the same threshold is the place occupied by the little Kant has to say about ornament.

8

I have suggested that the aesthetic approach demands both: the liberation of painting from its representational function and the transformation of ornament into an abstract art suigeneris. Here we have a key to the meaning of modern art, which may be understood either as an ornamentalization of painting or as ornament developing into an autonomous

84 Karsten Harries

aesthetic object. A look at the development of art in the years just preceding the First World War supports this sug-gestion. Here I can do no more than give a few hints. I would invite you especially to look at the painters associated with art nouveau. Consider, for example, the work of Gustav Klimt: Here, too, we find paintings that, like the ornamental fantasies of the eighteenth century, play off the logic of ornament against the logic of representation. Two-dimen-sional, abstract, ornamental areas draw our attention. Klimt's patterns are often geometric; we see tapestries of colored rectangles, circles, triangles, and spirals. Set into these car-petlike surfaces are faces, hands, and bodies, modelled with great care, beckoning, yet also threatening in their three-dimensionality.

Klimt's work also illustrates another tendency of the art of the period: the attempt to make the frame an integral part of the painting. This may seem to conflict with my earlier claim that the elimination of ornamental frames is a decisive characteristic of modern art. Here we seem to have just the opposite. But the opposition is only apparent. When the frame becomes an integral part of the painting it no longer functions as frame meant to re-present the painting. It has itself become an integral element of the aesthetic object and now helps to liberate it from the rule of representation.

Let me add just one other, more peripheral, example. Just before the turn of the century the Munich painter Adolf Hoelzel had begun to experiment with nonrepresentational forms, experiments that were to influence Kandinsky's turn to abstraction.22 Tellingly, he called his experiments abstract ornaments. Just as Loos was trying to banish ornament from architecture, ornament became self-sufficient and autono-mous. Both belong together. Ornament dies as ornament to be reborn as abstract art.

The Broken Frame 85

We may consider modern art the culmination of a rev-olution that took place in the eighteenth century. If Loos wanted to banish ornament from architecture, he had his predecessors among the architects of revolutionary France. Emil Kaufmann can thus discuss Ledoux as the first modern architect. Similarly, modern art's turn to free beauty is pre-figured by the ornamental fantasies of the eighteenth cen-tury. They place us on the threshold that both separates and links the old and the new. An engraving like Nilson's Der liebe Morgen deserves our attention as a thematization of the historical threshold to a world that has divorced the ethical and the aesthetic. Its broken frame invites us to consider the framing function of all beauty as well as what is lost when the frame is broken.

To frame something is to re-present it. To attribute a framing function to beauty is to claim that beauty serves re-presentation. Re-presentation invites us to look again; it renders visible. The concept of re-presentation thus returns us to that aspect of beauty which let it be figured by light.

The re-presentational function of beauty is made con-spicuous by the beauty of architecture, especially by its or-nament. Traditionally the function of ornament has been to re-present architecture and its elements, just as an orna-mental bracelet is meant to re-present the arm it circles. Such re-presentation reveals the being of the re-presented, be it a part of the human body, or be it a vertical or a horizontal, light or matter, stone or wood, a window or a door. Re-presentation lets us attend to the silent speech of things. When this re-presentational, perhaps I should say this on-tological, function of the beautiful gives way to a beauty that claims our attention only for beauty's sake, when the art object is elevated into a self-sufficient work of art, art itself has to decay. Paradoxically, the very attempt to free beauty and to render art autonomous condemns it to become

86 Karsten Harries

a mere fragment of what it once was. Nilson's frame ruin figures that ruin of art that is art for art's sake.

9

For one last time let me return to Der liebe Morgen. My first interpretation of it exploited its obvious erotic content. The present interpretation of it as a thematization of the threshold that separates the modern aesthetic approach to art from an earlier one would seem to have lost sight of this content by suggesting that the engraving is not so much about love as it is about art. But a threshold bids us look in two directions. Only when we do this, do we begin to do justice to the engraving's essential ambiguity, an ambi-guity that it shares with so much rococo art, especially with the rococo engravings from which it derives.

In my book on the Bavarian rococo church I tried to show that its style lies ambiguously between faith and aestheticism, between art for the sake of the sacred and art for the sake of art. Something very similar can also be claimed for the style of the secular rococo, although the divinity it serves is not found in the Bible. As Sedlmayr has suggested, the central figure of the style rocaille is Venus, as Boucher painted her:

Her attributes—rock and conch, coral and reed, water, wave, and foam—constitute the treasury of rocaille ornamentation. Her ele-ment, water, determines the fluidity of forms. Its movement, the wave, suggests the pattern of surging and plunging, its colors, the deep cool blue of the sea and the white of glistening spray, together with the roseate hue of the conch and the iridescence of mother of pearl, produce a typically rococo color harmony.23

How could the Catholic Church appropriate a vocabulary so very much of this world? But we must keep in mind how intimately the sacred and the erotic are linked, how readily

The Broken Frame 87

one figures the other. We should not be surprised that the Virgin Mary, who may be said to preside over the sacred art of the rococo, shares so many of her attributes with Venus, including the seashell, in which rococo ornamen-tation has its origin.24

I would suggest that this derivation of rocaille has not only a formal aesthetic, but also a symbolic, significance. The style rocaille carries an aura of the erotic: the play of rocaille figures Dionysian powers and, as this fantasy by Jacques de la Joue suggests, such play threatens to over-whelm the ship that reason has built (fig. 12). The victory of rocaille is the shipwreck of reason. Small wonder that the ornamental engravings of the rococo so provoked critics who, committed to the Enlightenment, committed to the project of rendering man the master and possessor of nature, including his own nature—think of Descartes's discussion of the passions of the soul, meant to help us defeat their anarchic potential—wanted to banish the irrational from art, wanted to banish especially the irrationality of love.

But can de la Joue's Naufrage (which after all, like so many similar ornamental fantasies, offers just another playful variation on the theme rocaille, to be enjoyed, to be sure, but not to be taken too seriously), can this playful repre-sentation of a shipwreck support such an interpretation? If anything triumphs here over reason, is it not the artist's own playful imagination that refuses to submit to the rules gov-erning proper pictorial representation—a refusal that, as we have seen, is part of this genre?

That must be admitted. But does this rule out other inter-pretations? I would suggest that in this engraving the imag-ination triumphs over the logic of representation and, more-over, the engraving offers us a reflection on this triumph and interprets it for us. The shipwreck in the picture may be read as a comment on the way pictorial representation

88 Karsten Harries The Broken Frame 89

suffers shipwreck on the reef of ornament. The raging sea would represent the artist's imagination. The sea, however, is also an attribute of Venus. The tossing waves are an image of the seething passions. Their erotic meaning is underscored by the amorous water spirits in the foreground. With strong metaphors we often cannot decide what is vehicle and what is tenor. So here it is difficult to decide whether the aesthetic play is only a vehicle of the erotic, or whether it is the tenor, the erotic only its vehicle. Such ambiguity is characteristic of the ornamental engravings of the rococo, which strangely join superficiality and depth.

If Der liebe Morgen translates such a rocaille fantasy into a very different vocabulary and thereby makes conspicuous the essence of such fantasy, we should expect that this am-biguity, too, will be rendered conspicuous. This is indeed the case. And because it is, an interpretation that explores its erotic content must coexist with another that would see it as a mere occasion for aesthetic play, a self-referential play with the aesthetic, with art, with the frame.

IO

Nilson's Der liebe Morgen is a curiosity, if you will a joke, a diversion without significant progeny. But Nilson's am-biguous play with the frame playfully leads us to the am-biguous essence of the beautiful itself. I touched on that ambiguity already in my first lecture. I there called attention to Maritain's remark that beauty, while a figure of paradise, has itself the savor of paradise and as such can usurp its place. This is to say that while beauty on one hand gestures towards a perfection denied to us by our present death-shadowed existence, filling us with love and the desire to realize something of that promise in our own life, on the other hand it itself possesses a perfection that in time prom-

ises to lift the burden of time, if at the cost of reality. This ambiguity of the beautiful finds expression in Kant's Critique ofJudgment as the tension that separates the beauty of what Kant calls the ideal, which is said by him to arouse great interest, and that purer beauty which is the object of an entirely disinterested satisfaction. More generally, it finds expression in the tension between the ethical and the aes-thetic aspect of beauty, between that aspect of beauty which invites us to consider it a figure of what most profoundly interests us and another that promises a disinterested sat-isfaction that in time lets us forget the burden of time. What I have called the aesthetic approach seeks to eliminate such ambiguity by resolutely embracing the latter.

In my first lecture I offered a sketch of this approach and of its understanding of beauty and art. The second lecture linked this approach to decadence; at the same time I tried to show that the aesthetic approach may be understood as the shadow that accompanies the rationalism that has shaped our modern world. The association of modernity with deca-dence invites a critical rethinking of the evolution of modern art and architecture. Inevitably such a rethinking will return us to the eighteenth century, which places us on the thresh-old of our modern world. With my third lecture I wanted to point to what is to be gained by a return to this threshold: a recovery of the rich ambiguity of the beautiful, which joins light and love, beauty and time.

Notes

Acknowledgments 1. Karsten Harries, "Decoration, Death, and Devil," Hermann Broch:

Literature, Philosophy, Politics. The Yale Broch Symposium 1986 (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House,1988), pp. 279-297.

First Lecture: Light Without Love i. Giorgio de Chirico, "Meditations of a Painter," in Theories ofModern

Art: A Source Book by Artists and Critics, ed. Herschel B. Chipp (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 1968), p. 397.

2. Giorgio de Chirico, "Mystery and Creation," in Chipp, Theories of Modern Art, p. 4.02.

3. "Meditations of a Painter," p. 397. 4. Ibid. 5. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, tr.

E. F. J. Payne, (New York: Dover, 1969), vol. I, p. 203. 6. Ibid. 7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, 6, in Basic

Writings of Nietzsche, tr. and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 54o. See also the introduction to Udo Kultermann, Kleine Geschichte der Kunsttheorie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buch-gesellschaft, 1987), pp. 1-13, entitled "Pygmalion and das Symbol des Künstlers," with useful bibliographical footnotes.

8. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J. T. Boulton (New York: Columbia U. Press, 1958), p. 38.

9. The claim that the sublime, which, having taken its leave from love and from its attachment to and involvement with the world, yet remains haunted by it, stands in between a beauty that joins love to light and another than divorces them, invites a historical reading: the preoccupation with the sublime in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century stands in between two very different conceptions of beauty.

io. Immanuel Kant, Erste Einleitung in die Kritik der Urteilskraft, par. VIII. Kant criticizes Baumgarten's coinage in a much-quoted footnote to the "Transcendental Aesthetic," Critique of Pure Reason, B 36.

91

92 Notes

1i. Edward Bullough, "Psychical Distance as a Factor in Art and an Esthetic Principle," in A Modern Book of Aesthetics: An Anthology, ed. Melvin Rader (New York: Holt and Rinehart, 1952), p. 404.

12. Wassily Kandinsky, "über die Formfrage," Der Blaue Reiter (München: Piper, 1912), p. 136.

13. Erwin Panofsky, "Art as a Humanistic Discipline," Meaning in the Visual Arts (Garden City: Doubleday, 1944), p. u.

14. Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Immaculate Perception," in Zarathustra, tr. Walter Kaufmann, The Portable Nietzsche (New York: Viking, 1959), p. 234.

15. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Worke. Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Giorgo Colli and Mazzino Montinari, vol. 10 (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), p. 243.

16. Nietzsche, "On Immaculate Perception," in Zarathustra, p. 235. 17. Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht als Kunst, Ges-

amtausgabe vol. 43 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1985), p. 127. 18. Ibid., p. 128. 19. Ibid., p. 129. 20. Nietzsche, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 1o, p. 243. 21. Heidegger, Nietzsche: Der Wille zur Macht, p. 129. 22. Ibid., p. 131. See also Kant, Critique of Judgment, A 15/B 15. 23. Phaedrus 251 a, tr. B. Jowett. 24. Xenophon, Symposium, tr. O. J. Todd, in Xenophon, vol. 4,

Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, Mass. and London: Harvard U. and Heinemann, 1979), pp. 537-8. See also Ernesto Grassi, Die Theorie des Schönen in der Antike (Köln: Du Mont Schauberg, 1962), pp. 54-61.

25. Plato, Symposium, 189 e., tr. Michael Joyce. 26. John Scotus Eriugena, De division naturae, II, PL 532 A-583 B; IV,

PL 793 B-799. With his appropriation of the Aristophanic myth, Eriugena had Philo, Origen, and Gregory of Nyssa as precursors. See Dermot Brendan Moran, Nature and Mind in the Philosophy ofJohn Scotus Eriugena, (dissertation, Yale University, 1986), pp. 135-140.

27. Nietzsche, "On Redemption," in Zarathustra, p. 252. 28. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. Hazel E. Barnes (New

York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 566. 29. Ovid, Metamorphoses, tr. and int. Mary M. Inns (Hardmonds-

worth: Penguin Books, 1955), p. 85. 3o. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, tr. and int. John R. Spencer

(New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1956), p. 64. 31. Jacques Maritain, Art and Scholasticism and the Frontiers of Poetry,

tr. Joseph W. Evans (New York, Schribner's, 1962), p. 24. 32. Symposium, 211 e-212 a. 33. Symposium, 206 e. 34• Bruce Glaser, "Questions to Stella and Judd," Minimal Art: A

Notes 93

Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battock (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1968), pp. 157-158.

35. Ibid., p. 158. 36. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, tr. and int.

Karl Aschenbrenner and William B. Holther (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U. of California Press, 1954)

37. Ibid., par. 116, p. 78. 38. Baumgarten, Metaphysics, 7th ed. (Halle: Hemmerden, 1779), par.

94. "Si plura simul sumpta unius rationem suflicientem constituunt, con-sentiunt, consensus ipse est perfectio, et unum, in quod consentitur, ratio perfectionis determinans (focus perfectionis)."

39. Baumgarten, Reflections on Poetry, par. 68, p. 63. 40. Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality. Painting and Beholder

in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: U. of California Press, 1980), p. 87.

41. Ibid., p. 108. 42. Ibid., p. 105.

43. Ibid., p. 159. 44. Michael Fried, "Art and Objecthood," Minimal Art, p. 14s. 45. Ibid., p. 125. 46. Ibid., p. 139. 47. Fried, Absorption and Theatricality, p. 89. 48. Ibid., p. 92. 49. Ibid., p. 50. 50. Ibid., p. 51. 51. Fried, "Art and Objecthood," p. 143. 52. Ibid., p. 14.4. 53. Ibid., pp. 145-146. s4. The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, p. 7. ss. Ibid., pp. 178-179. 56. Ibid., p. 196. 57• Ibid., p. 196. 58. Ibid., p. 197. 59• Fried, "Art and Objecthood," p. 147. 60. Ibid., p. 146. 61. Ibid., pp. 45-46. 62. Ibid., p. 130. 63. Kasimir Malevich, Suprematismus-diegegenstandslose Welt, tr. and

ed. H. von Riesen (Köln: Du Mont Schauberg, 1962), p. 57.

Second Lecture: Decoration and Decadence

T. Hermann Broch, Gesammelte Werke, Essays, vol. I. Dichten und Erkennen, ed. and int. Hannah Arendt (Zürich: Rhein, 1955), p. 43.

94- Notes

2. See Karsten Harries, "The Dream of the Complete Building," Per-specta 17, 1980, pp. 36-43.

3. Hundertwasser, "Mould Manifesto Against Rationalism in Archi-tecture," Programs and Manifestoes, ed. Ulrich Conrads, tr. Michael Bul-lock (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1970), p. 157.

4. See Harries, "Modernity's Bad Conscience,"A A Files io, 1984, pp. 13-20.

5. Vitruvius, The Ten Books of Architecture, tr. M. H. Morgan (New York: Dover, 1960), I, 3, 2; p. 17.

6. Le Corbusier, "Towards a New Architecture: Guiding Principles," Programs and Manifestoes, p. 60.

7. Geoffrey Scott, The Architecture of Humanism: A Study in the History of Taste (New York: Norton, 1974), p. 17.

8. Immanuel Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft, A 49/ B 50. 9. Ibid., A 49/ B 49•

1o. Ibid., A 163/ B 165. 11. John Ruskin, The Seven Lamps ofArchitecture (New York: Noonday,

1974), pp. 15-i6. 12. Ibid., p. 17. 13. Ibid., p. 18. 14. Ibid., p. 115. is. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Zeit. 7th ed. (Tübingen: Niemeyer,

1953), p. 410. 16. Ruskin, Seven Lamps, pp. 116-117. 17. Adolf Loos, "Ornament and Crime," Programs and Manifestoes, p.

20. 18. Ibid., p. 21. 19. Ibid., p. 19. zo. Ibid., p. 24. 21. Broch, Essays, vol. II, Erkennen und Handeln, p. 9. 22. Ibid., p. 1a. 23. Ibid., p. u. 24. Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte (Frankfurt: Ulistein, 1959), pp.

73-74. See also Die Revolution der modernen Kunst (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1955), pp. 46-48.

25. Ernst Bloch, Das Prinzip Hoffnung (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959), pp. 448-449.

26. Siegfried Giedion, Space, Time, and Architecture, 5th ed., (Cam-bridge, Mass: Harvard U. Press, 1967), p. xxxiii.

27. Loos, "Ornament and Crime," p. 24. z8. Karl Marx, Das Kapital, Marx Engels Werke, vol. 23 (Berlin: Dietz,

1962), p. 410. 29. Georg Lukäcs, Aesthetik, Teil I. 2. Halbband (Neuwied and Berlin:

Luchterhand, 1967), p. 454.

Notes 95

3o. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1968), par. 822.

31. Broch, Gesammelte Werke, Essays, vol I, p. 44. 32. Nietzsche, The Case of Wagner, in Basic Writings of Nietzsche, tr.

and ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1968), p. 6z6. 33• See Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church: Between Faith and Aes-

theticism (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1983). 34. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, p. 189. 35. See Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraktion und Einfühlung: Ein Beitrag

zur Stilpsychologie (München: Piper, 1959), p. 49: "When Tibullus says: primum in mundo fecit dens timor, this same feeling of anxiety can be taken as the root of artistic creation."

36. Gottfried Benn, "Expressionismus," in Essays, Reden, Vorträge (Wiesbaden: Limes, 1959), p. 245.

i7. Lukäcs, "Es geht um den Realismus," Werke, vol. 4 (Neuwied und Berlin: Luchterhand, 19), p. 317.

38. Broch, Essays, vol. II, Erkennen und Handeln, p. 42. 39. Ibid., p. 19. 40. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, tr. and int. Hazel E. Barnes

(New York: Philosophical Library, 1956), p. 615. 41. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, V, par. 354. 42. Nietzsche, "On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense," The Port-

able Nietzsche, ed. and tr. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), p. 47.

43. Martin Heidegger, Gelassenheit (Pfullingen: Neske, 1959), p. 25; tr. by J. Anderson and E. Freund as Discourse on Thinking (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 54.

Third Lecture: The Broken Frame 1. Hans Sedlmayr, Verlust der Mitte (Berlin: Ullstein, 1959), p. 9. 2. Emil Kaufmann, Architecture in the Age of Reason (New York:

Dover, 1968), p. 266, n. 439. 3. See Marianne Schuster, Johann Esaias Nilson, Ein Kupferstecher des

süddeutschen Rokoko 1721-1788 (München: Neuer Filser Verlag, 1936). Also Hermann Bauer, Rocaille, Zur Herkunft und zum Wesen eines Ornament-Motivs (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962).

4. Schuster, Nilson, p. 12. 5. Bauer, Rocaille, p. 67. 6. Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, tr. and int. John R. Spencer

(New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1956), Book One, pp. 43-59. 7. Hermann Bauer discusses this painting as "a symbol of the end of

an epoch." Der Himmel im Rokoko (Regensburg: Pustet, 1965), pp. 69-71; cf. Hans Tintelnot, Die barocke Freskomalerie in Deutschland (München: Bruckmann, 1951), p. 248.

96 Notes

8. Schuster catalogue, nos. 212-215. 9. Schuster catalogue, nos. 126a-127b.

lo. Schuster catalogue, nos. 104-107. ii. See Bauer, Rocaille, p. 67. 12. Schuster catalogue, no. 45. A companion piece, no. 44 Das edle

Gartenwerck (Noble Garden Work), (fig. 8) replaces the peasant lad and his girl with a cavalier and a lady, uses rocaille with much more restraint, and lets the frame become a circle. If the former invites comparison with Der liebe Morgen, the latter does so with Der gute Abend.

13. Hermann Bauer thus interprets rococo as a "meta-style" that em-braces phenomena as different as the Bavarian rococo church and the English landscape garden. See Rocaille, p. 76.

14. Bauer remarks on the difficulty we have describing the relationship of the frame monument and window: "despite its classicistic bearing" the construction is said to be "completely illogical from a tectonic point of view." Rocaille, p. 67. We meet with the very same difficulty in every picture of this set.

is. Bauer, Rocaille, p. 67. 16. See Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church, figs. 3, 10, and is. 17. Schuster catalogue no. 80; see Bauer, Rocaille, pp. 61-62. 18. See Hans Sedlmayr, Die Revolution der modernen Kunst (Hamburg:

Rowohlt, 1955), pp. 46-48, Verlust der Mitte (Berlin: Ullstein, 1959), pp. 73-74.

19. John Ireland, Hogarth Illustrated (London: Boydell, 1791-8), vol. 3, pp. 128-134; Ronald Paulson, Hogarth: His Life, Art, and Times (New Haven: Yale U. Press, 1971), vol. 2, p. 246.

20. Bauer, Rocaille, p. 63. See Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church, fig. 219.

21. Kant, Critique of Judgment, A491B49• 22. On Hoelzel see Peg Weiss, Kandinsky in Munich; The Formative

Jugendstil Years (Princeton: Princeton U. Press, 1979), pp. 40-47. 23. Hans Sedlmayr, "The Synthesis of the Arts in Rococo," in the

catalogue of the exhibition, The Age of Rococo (München: Rinn, 1958), p. 26.

24. See Harries, The Bavarian Rococo Church, 191-205. Cf. the distinc-tion Pausanias draws in Plato's Symposium between Aphrodite Pandemus and Aphrodite Uranus (181 b—c), between an earthly and a heavenly Love, which prepares the way for Diotima's distinction between temporal and eternal beauty.

Index

absorption, 23-28, 31-32, 68 Adam and Eve, 57 aestheticism, 53, 62, 86 aesthetics, 20-2I, 26 Alberti, Leon Battista, 15, 16, 67,

79 allegory, 19, 24, 26, 69 angels, 69 architecture, xvi, 4, 33-41, 48-49,

52, 64 Ariadne, 7o Aristophanes, 13-14, 16 Aristotle, 59 art: for art's sake, xiii-xv, 33, 5o,

55, 69, 78, 81, 82, 86 art nouveau, 84 Augsburg, 65-66, 79 Auschwitz, 34

Bach, Johann Sebastian, xv baroque, xv, 54, 68, 69 Bauer, Hermann, 73, 75, 79 Bauhaus, 34, 48 Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb,

5, 20-24, 61 beauty: figural nature of, 17, 22,

88; free, 37, 82, 83; object of disinterested satisfaction, xiv, 6-7, 9-1o, 37-38; sensible perfection, 21-24

Beethoven, Ludwig van, 43, 49 Benn, Gottfried, 54 Berain, Jean, 76 Bible, 59, 86 Bloch, Ernst, ix, 4-8, 49 Boucher, Francois, 86

Broch, Hermann, 33-35, 45-47, 52-56, 62

Brucker, Karl Friedrich, 72 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 79 Bullough, Edward, 7 Burke, Edmund, 6

capitalism, 54, 56 Caro, Anthony, 25, 27 Catholic Church, 86 Ceres, 73 Chardin, Jean-Baptiste-Simeon,

27, 31 Chirico, Giorgio de, 1-5, 13, 19 community, 37, 47 cooking, 42, 43, 44 Cuvillies, Francois, the Elder, 76,

fig. 10

Dante, xv, 1, 2 decadence, xvii, 35, 53-56, 62, 89 decorated shed, xvii, 33, 45-48,

52-53, 62-63, 77 decoration, xvi, xvii, 33-46, 51-53 Descartes, Rene, zo, 44, 57, 59, 87 De Troy, Jean-Francois, 31 Diderot, Denis, 24, 25 Dionysus, 44, 7o, 87 Diotima, 16-18 distance, psychical, 7, 13, 19, 67,

70, 78

Enlightenment, 20, 72, 80, 81, 82, 87 Eriugena, John Scotus, 14 eros, 13-14, 16, 43, 44, 66, 7o, 86,

88

97

98 Index

ethical function of art, 63, 83, 89

Euripides, 44

faith, 86 fall, 14 Florence, i fragment, 71, 8i frame, xvii, 7, 67-81, 85 Freud, Sigmund, 6 Fried, Michael, ix, 24-32 Futurism, 35

Giedion, Sigfried, 49 God, 14, 15, 22, 32, 55, 56, 57, 58,

59, 61 good, 6, 7, 16 gothic, 54 Grassi, Ernesto, 12 Gropius, Walter, 52

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xiv, 62

Heidegger, Martin, xiv, 9, 10, II, 40, 54, 62

Hetsch, Philipp Friedrich von, 69, fig. s

Hiroshima, 34 Hoelzel, Adolf, 84 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 33 Hogarth, William, 79, fig. II Hundertwasser, 52

Judd, Donald, xiii

Kandinsky, Wassily, 84 Kant, Immanuel, 5-12, 30, 37-38,

52-53, 60, 67, 70, 82-83, 89 Kaufmann, Emil, 64, 85 Kitsch, 48 Klimt, Gustav, 84

La Joue, Jacques de, 87, fig. 12 Le Corbusier, 36, 52

Ledoux, Claude-Nicolas, 64, 65, 69, 77, 85

Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 20, 21, 22

Loos, Adolf, 40-50, 60, 84 Louis, Morris, 25 Lukäcs, Georg, ix, 52, 54, 56

Magritte, Rene, 67 Maria Theresia, empress, 45 Maritain, Jacques, 17, 88 Marx, Karl, 51, 56 Marxism, 48 Meissonier, Juste-Aurele, 76 metaphor, 59 modernism, 34, 35, 45, 48, 62, 64 morality, 38 Morris, Robert, 27 music, 2, 3, 50, 82

Narcissus, 15, 16 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xiv, xvi, 5,

9-12, 14, 32, 53, 55, 57-59 Nilson, Johann Esaias, xvii, 65-

66, 69, 71-75, 77-82, 85-88, figs. i, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8

Noland, Kenneth, 25, 27

objecthood, 25, 27 objectification of reality, 58-62 objectivity, 57-59 Olitski, Jules, 25, 27 ornament, xvi-xvii, 42-50, 63, 76,

82-83; death of, 46-47, 50-51, 78, 84; pictorialization of, 76

Panofsky, Erwin, 8 paradise, 17, 88 perspective, 58, 67, 79-80 picturesque, 73-75 Plato, xiv, 12, 14, 16, 22; Phaedrus,

11; Republic, 18; Symposium, 13, 17-18

post-modernism, 35, 36, 49, 51

Index 99

presentness, z8, 30-32, 70 pride, 14, 15, 16 purity, xvii, 6, 10, 37, 49, 50 Pygmalion, 5, 9, 15

rationalism, 42, 53, 56-57, 79, 89 renaissance, xv representation, 19, 24, 58, 67, 76,

79, 81, 83, 85, 87 re-presentation, xvii, 54, 67, 85 revenge, spirit of, 14, 15, 18, 32, 57 Robert, Henri, 31 rocaille, 72-73, 76-77, 79-80, 86-

88 rococo, 26, 65-66, 69, 74-75, 79-

8o, 87-88; architecture, 74, 77, 78

Rohe, Mies van der, 52 ruin, 70, 71, 74, 75, 78, 81, 86 Runge, Philipp Otto, 72 Ruskin, John, 38-42, 46, 54

sacred, xv, 18, 31, 86 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 14, 57 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 3, 4-5, 9-

II, 28-30, 51, 53, 70 science, 59-61 Scott, Geoffrey, 36 secularization, 31, 32 Sedlmayr, Hans, 48, 55, 64, 65, 86

Smith, David, 25, 27 Smith, Tony, 27 Socrates, II, I2, 16 Stella, Frank, xiii, 18-19, 24-25,

31, 67, 70 Stuttgart, 68 style, 47, 54 sublime, 4, 6

technology, 34, 59-61 theatricality, 25-26 time, 3, 15-18, 26-30, 32, 56, 60 truth, 22, 53, 58-59, 61

Venturi, Robert, 33, 77 Venus, 5, 6, is, 73, 86, 87 Versailles, xv Vienna, 34, 45 Virgin Mary, 87 Vitruvius, 36

Watteau, Jean-Antoine, 31 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim,

37 Worringer, Wilhelm, 54 Wright, Frank Lloyd, 52

Xenophon, 12, 13, 70

Zeus, 14