Abstract
I conclude my discussion of Adorno’s aesthetic theory by considering a single work of art, the particular type of aesthetics this artwork generates, and the impact of that aesthetics on critical theory. Tacita Dean’s The Russian Ending, 2001, consists of twenty black and white3 digitally manipulated photogravures, which are themselves based on found postcard images, collected by the artist on various visits to European flea-markets. Most of the images in the suite of prints depict natural or man-made disasters, catastrophes, deaths and accidents — circa WWI. The Russian Ending is neither cheerful viewing nor light entertainment.
And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognise who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”1
The revolution is thoroughgoing. It is still journeying through purgatory.2
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Notes
Calvino, I. [1972], Invisible Cities, Trans. William Weaver (London: Vintage, 1997), 165.
Marx, K. [1852], ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,’ Karl Marx: Selected Writings, Ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 345.
Deuchar, S. ‘Foreword,’ Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 7.
‘The relic, as dislocation from an original signifying context which is now lost, is central to Dean’s work: we are shown objects and places that are charged with a meaning that we cannot fully read, often depicting a failed or abandoned vision.’ Wallis, C. ‘Introduction,’ Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 9.
Dietrich, D. ‘The Space in Between: Tacita Dean’s Russian Ending,’ Art on Paper, Volume 6, Number 5, May–June 2002, 49. Hereafter cited in the text as SB.
Deuchar, S. ‘Foreword,’ Tacita Dean: Recent Films and Other Works (London: Tate Publishing, 2001).
Hobsbawm, E. ‘Interview,’ Interviews: Volume II, Ed. Hans Ulrich Obrist (Milan: Edizioni Charta, 2010), 87.
Pichler, W. ‘Horizon and Line of Fate (with Tacita Dean and Leo Steinberg),’ Essays on the Work of Tacita Dean: Wolftam Pichler, Peter Bürger, Douglas Crimp and Achim Hochdörfer, in Tacita Dean: Seven Books Grey (Göttingen: Steidl, 2011), 10.
See: Keats, J. ‘Letter To George and Tom Keats, 21, 27 (?) December 1817,’ The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, Volume I (London: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 193.
See: Keats, J. ‘Letter To Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818,’ The Letters of John Keats: 1814–1821, Ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, Volume I (London: Cambridge University Press, 1958), 387.
Fitzgerald, F. S. K. [1936], The Crack-Up, Ed. Edmund Wilson (New York: New Directions Books, 2009), 69.
Adorno, T. W. [1967], ‘Charmed Language: On the Poetry of Rudolf Borchardt,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 208.
See: Kaufman’s (NCD 366). According to Adorno, Schoenberg possessed an ‘intellectual ear’ (AS 157), and a ‘speculative ear,’ comparable to Bloch’s ‘speculative head.’ See: Adorno, T. W. [1965], ‘The Handle, the Pot, and Early Experience,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 215–6.
Adorno, T. W. [1964], ‘Beethoven’s Late Style,’ Trans. Wieland Hoban, Night Music: Essays on Music 1928–1962, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (London: Seagull Books, 2009), 16.
Jarvis writes that ‘there is no artless cognition. This is not an aestheticization of reason but an account of what reason is like.’ Jarvis, S. Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 230.
Adorno’s ‘uninhibited scepticism regarding reason,’ for Habermas ‘perceive [d] cultural modernity from a similar experiential horizon [to Nietzsche], with the same heightened sensibility, and even with the same cramped optics that render one insensible to the traces and the existing forms of communicative rationality. The architectonics of Adorno’s later philosophy, in which his Negative Dialectics and Aesthetic Theory mutually support one another, are also evidence of this — the one, which develops the paradoxical concept of the nonidentical, points to the other, which deciphers the mimetic content hidden in avant-garde works of art.’ Ultimately, Adorno had a limited understanding of reason (i.e., purposive ‘rationality in the service of self-pres-ervation gone wild’), and could only counter the ‘objective violence’ and domination of this form of instrumental reason by aestheticising reason. The boundaries between art and reason become blurred, which does damage to both. Habermas, J. [1985], The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, Trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987), 129, 112, and 114. David Roberts believes Adorno aestheticises reason, ‘philosophy becomes “aesthetic theory”’ (AE 16).
Adorno, T. W. [1955], ‘Benjamin’s Einbahnstrasse,’ Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Notes to Literature: Volume Two, Ed. Rolf Tiedemann (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 323.
Adorno, T. W. [1961], ‘Vers une musique informelle,’ Trans. Rodney Livingstone, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music (London: Verso, 1998), 303.
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© 2014 James Hellings
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Hellings, J. (2014). Anti-Conclusion: The Russian Ending. In: Adorno and Art. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137315717_11
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