Architectural Materialisms by Maria Voyatzaki

Author:Maria Voyatzaki
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Figure 8.1 The aesthetic spectrum as published by Max Dessoir. On the left is the original German version from his 1906 Ästhetik und allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft; on the right, the diagram as published in the 1970 English edition Aesthetics and the Theory of Art (which mistranslates Niedlich as ‘pretty’ instead of ‘cute’).

On the other hand, when we compare Dessoir’s circle to Dilthey’s spectrum, some terms are missing, and some of the positionings are rather unconvincing. For instance, it is difficult to imagine the sublime and the beautiful as being adjacent to one another in the same way that beauty and the cute are, nor akin in the way of the sublime and the tragic, whose link was thoroughly established by Schiller and Schelling. Nor can we imagine the sublime and the beautiful being as close as the ugly and the comic, though Dessoir’s positioning of the ugly is again an enormous improvement on Dilthey’s. The comic and the ugly have an intimate relationship that we recognise from a long history, starting with dwarves, hunchbacks and jesters in the European courts, hilarious and pitiful Falstaffs in the theatre, and the dumme August and stumbling clowns in the circus. Similarly, from the eighteenth century onwards, we witnessed the explosion of caricature, the ultimate science of elasticity – elongating noses, thickening lips, bulging eyes, widening heads, shrinking chins and so on – which culminates in our own fabulous Mr Bean, who is blessed with the most elastic face ever. As with Dilthey, we are for the moment only concentrating on the organisational geometry of the aesthetic system, and therefore we can overlook the misplacing of certain categories and the resulting sequential order. Crucial at this point is that Dessoir closes the linear sequence into a circle by merging the ends, creating a continuity of aesthetic values.

It is no accident that the circular system looks like a colour wheel, as Dessoir himself remarks: ‘the whole fabric of aesthetic feelings can take on various tints. . .’33 Probably he chose six tints34 for his aesthetic circle because it resembled Goethe’s colour wheel of 1809 (see Figure 8.2, left), who, unlike Newton, based his colour scheme on gradations as much as on opposites (or what Goethe called polarity). The English edition of Dessoir’s book adds spokes to the circular diagram, making it look even more like a wheel. Dessoir, who explicitly mentions Dilthey’s Poetry and Experience as the main source of his ideas, admirably managed to join the two ends of the spectrum, like the ouroboros biting its own tail. Above all, he writes, his goal was ‘to arrange the primary forms in such a way that the transition from each to the two adjacent ones occurs with conceptual ease, and those opposed in content are opposite in position’.35 Again, it is an order that explains the two dimensions of existence in a way that a straight spectral band cannot. We can read the circle rotationally, following the gradual change from beautiful to cute to comic to ugly, and we

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