Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

1
Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty

• Thingly Art
• and
• Fleshly Art

2
Martin HeideggerThe Origin of the Work of Art
3
The Thinging of Things

• It is mere things, excluding even use-objects,
  that count as things in the strict sense. What
  does the thingly character of these things then
  consist in? It is in reference to these that the
  thingness of things must be determinable. (pp.
  155-56)

4
(No Transcript)
5
(No Transcript)
6
(No Transcript)
7
(No Transcript)
8
(No Transcript)
9
Heidegger The Thing

• We are called by the thing as the thingIf we
  think of the thing as thing, then we spare and
  protect the things presence in the region from
  which it presences. Thinging is the nearing of
  worldThings are compliant and modest in number,
  compared with the countless objects everywhere of
  equal value

10
Equipment

• The equipmental quality of equipment consists in
  its usefulness. But what about this usefulness
  itself?The peasant woman wears her shoes in the
  field. Only here are they what they are.That is
  how shoes actually serve.

11
(No Transcript)
12
Thing vs. Device
13
The Technological Device

• Only a means to an end, an instrument
• No particularity, modular, one is no different
  from another, mass produced without handwork
• Mass-produced and modular
• Control of nature and surroundings
• Minimalist and geometric

14
Devices

• Split means from end. I dont care how you heat
  my house, as long as it is heated.
• The means is machinery that supplies the end as a
  commodity in a safe, easy, instantaneous and
  ubiquitous manner
• The means is concealed and shrinking, the end is
  relatively fixed and expanding.
• The means is unfamiliar, the end is familiar.

15
Devices, cont.

• Reduces the world to resources, machinery,
  commodities
• Disburdens, disengages, distracts. We do many
  things but are numb to the actual world
  surrounding us. (technological irony or veiling.
• Artificial materials, no sense of earthliness
• Abstract and lacking intimacy we are indifferent
  to its thingliness.
• Examples stereos, lighting systems, cars, home
  videos, stairstep machines.

16
Thing vs. Device
17
Things

• Interweave means and ends. I appreciate my clay
  raku cup, because the way in which it was made
  fits in with my awareness of what it means to
  drink from it.
• Gathers and Illuminates the World
• Engages us mentally, physically, socially. We
  become heedful of our lives and the world about
  us.
• Examples cellos, mountain paths, canoes,
  dramatic performances.

18
Technological Heedlessness
Technology, even as it multiplies our chances to
visit or learn about the living world, interrupts
our actual contact with it. It makes us heedless
of things. Instead of being attentive to the
world, we become preoccupied with the innumerable
devices that technology supplies us. The natural
world only seems meaningful to us, if we can find
a way to explore it with a computer, or a jet
ski or an all terrain vehicle. Weston calls this
veiling. When the world is veiled
technologically, we no longer are still enough to
let natural beings come forth to teach us what
they are. And we are unable to recognize
when damage to the earth has actually occurred.
19
Prison Built on a Reclaimed Mountaintop
20
Filled In Hollow Is This Environmental Art?
Thingly Art?
21
The Place of the Work

• Where does a work belong? The work belongs, as
  work, uniquely within the realm that is opened up
  by itselfIn the work there is a happening of
  truth at work.We now ask the question of where
  to view the work.

22
(No Transcript)
23

• The temple-work, standing there, opens up a
  world and at the same time sets this world back
  again on earth, which itself only thus emerges as
  native ground.The temple, in its standing there,
  first gives to things their look and to men their
  outlook upon themselves. This view remains open
  as long as the work is work, as long as the god
  has not fled from it.

24
(No Transcript)
25
(No Transcript)
26
(No Transcript)
27
(No Transcript)
28
(No Transcript)
29
(No Transcript)
30
(No Transcript)
31
(No Transcript)
32
The Worlding of World

• The work opens up a world. Its installing is
  not a bare placing but erecting in the sense
  of dedication and praise. By the opening up of
  a world, all things gain their lingering and
  hastening, their remoteness and nearness, their
  scope and limits.

33
Robert Smithson Spiral Jetty
34
Filled In Hollow Is This Environmental Art?
35
(No Transcript)
36
Found Freedom
I enjoy the freedom of just using my hands and
found tools--a sharp stone, the quill of a
feather, thorns. I take the opportunities each
day offers if it is snowing, I work with snow,
at leaf-fall it will be with leaves a blown-over
tree becomes a source of twigs and branches. I
stop at a place or pick up a material because I
feel that there is something to be is covered.
Here is where I can learn. I need the shock of
touch, the resistance of place, materials and
weather, the earth as my source.
37
Maurice Merleau-PontyEye and Mind
38

• Inevitably the roles between the painter and the
  visible are reversed. That is why so many have
  said that things looks at them In a forest, I
  have felt many times over that it was not I who
  looked at the forest. Some days I feel that the
  trees were looking at me, were speaking to meI
  think that the painter must be penetrated by the
  universe and not want to penetrate itI expect to
  be inwardly submerged, buried. Perhaps I paint
  to break out.

39
(No Transcript)
40
(No Transcript)
41
(No Transcript)
42

• The mirrors ghost lies outside my body, and by
  the same token my own bodys invisibility can
  invest the other bodies I see. Hence my body can
  assume segments derived from another, just as my
  substance passes into them man is mirror for
  man. The mirror itself is the instrument of a
  universal magic that changes things into a
  spectacle and spectacle into things, myself into
  another and another into myself (p. 296)

43
(No Transcript)
44
(No Transcript)
45
(No Transcript)
46
(No Transcript)
47
(No Transcript)
48

• Things have an internal equivalent in me they
  arouse in me a carnal formula of their presence.
  Why shouldnt these correspondences in their turn
  give rise to some external visible shape in which
  anyone else would recognize those those motifs
  which support his own inspection of the
  world.The animals painted on the walls of
  Lascaux are not there in the same way as the
  fissures and limestone formations. But they are
  not elsewhere I would be at great pains to say
  where the painting is that I am looking at (p.
  292)

49
(No Transcript)
50
(No Transcript)
51
(No Transcript)
52
(No Transcript)
53
(No Transcript)
54

• Quality, light color, depth, which are there
  before us, are there only because they awaken an
  echo in our body and because the body welcomes
  them.
• Depth is the new inspirationThe enigma consists
  in the fact that I see things, each one in its
  place, precisely because they eclipse one
  another, and that they are are rivals before my
  sight precisely because each one is in its own
  placeCezanne came to find that inside this
  space (of his painting), a box or container too
  large for them, the things began to move, color
  against colorWe must seek space and its content
  as together.

55
(No Transcript)
56
(No Transcript)
57
(No Transcript)
58

• Da Vinci The secret of the art of drawing is to
  discover in each object the particular way in
  which a certain flexuous line, which is, so to
  speak, its generating axis, is directed through
  its whole extent.
• M-P Neither the contour of the apple nor the
  border between the field and meadow is in this
  place or that, that they are always on the near
  or the far side of the point we look atThey are
  indicated, implicated and even very imperiously
  demanded by the things, but they are not
  themselves things.

59
(No Transcript)
60
(No Transcript)
61
(No Transcript)
62
(No Transcript)
63
(No Transcript)
64
(No Transcript)