Art As Human Practice by Georg W. Bertram

Author:Georg W. Bertram
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

5.Interpretive activities in dealing with artworks

The dynamic structure of the artwork described up to now does not, however, simply exist on its own. This dynamic also is inherently made up of those practices that recipients develop in dealing with artworks. The structure of artworks is configured precisely in relation to these practices. Through their self-related constitution, they challenge forth the practices by which recipients respond to them. In order for this challenge to take effect, recipients have to enter into the artwork and confront themselves with the self-relational dynamic of the artwork. The self-relation of the artwork is in this sense to be taken as a moment within an interaction, as a moment within the interactive relation that constitutes it. The artwork demands to be reenacted, and in its dynamic it is constitutively bound up with this reenactment. It demands practices by which recipients articulate the structures of the artwork.

The challenge issued by artworks thus has the character of being essentially practical: for example, when a recipient follows the relations within a picture with her gaze, this leads to specific pathways of gazing that are oriented toward the self-referentially established relations within the artwork.28 The activities of the recipient develop by being guided by these relations. To this degree we can say that artworks demand a certain behavior. Employing another one of the central concepts from Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, we can characterize this behavior as mimetic.29 A behavior is mimetic when it appropriates things in a differentiated manner. We would understand such a mimetic behavior falsely if we think of it mainly as passive (as Adorno sometimes suggests).30 Recipients have to be active in order to be guided, so that aesthetic practices always have two sides: On the one hand, these practices reflect a dynamic that gets its impetus from the artwork by following it, but on the other hand, these practices also involve the recipient in new activities, and thus new approaches and interventions. Gadamer captures this by writing that the recipient always has to be a fellow player (Mitspieler): They have to receive the ball that is passed to them and pass it back.31

Recipients are always just as productive as producers in their dealings with artworks because of how their own activities develop. Artworks that do not stir some activity cannot unfold any effect. This is especially true of artworks that are unfamiliar to the recipients. Let us take the example of a painting that is new for someone contemplating it. In such a case, this person will have to cultivate her visual activities further. If she does not become active in her seeing, she will not be able to follow the painting. This activity always consists in the recipient developing her own impulses in dealing with the artwork, for example, by choosing a specific starting point, or bringing up conflicting points within the constellation of the work, or comparing the work to established ways of dealing with it. Our own impulses also have a special relevance, since we use them to act within the framework of a history of receptions.

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