Michel Henry

Kandinsky and the Meaning of the Work of Art

translated by Michael Tweed

The question of the meaning of the work of art can only be tackled if one first resolves the question of its nature or, as we say, its site. So it is a question of knowing in which dimension of being the aesthetic object arises, what status it has when recognizing the entire content of the specific experience known as art. Otherwise, this unavoidable problem leads to an aporia. On the one hand the work of art is an imaginary reality. Here we adopt the brilliant guidelines provided by Husserl in paragraph 111 of Ideas Book One. i In the aesthetic contemplation of Drers print The Knight, Death and the Devil we are not directed towards the engraved plate any more than towards the figures that appear in black lines upon it, but rather towards other realities that are portrayed or depicted in represented realities, (les realits figures) and which comprise not the engraving as an object of the world, but the engraving-object as a work of art, its aesthetic reality. Thus we make an essential distinction between the material elements that serve to support a work of art, which belong to the real world of perception, similar to all other real things and, on the other hand, the work of art as such, which no longer has its place in the world but actually outside of it, as we say, in that it is a pure imaginary creation. The tiles of a mosaic, the wood or copper of an engraving, the canvas of a painting, the colours that cover it, form part of the world that surrounds us. But in the aesthetic experience (whether the creators or spectators) these material elements are only used to give shape to a reality of another order, the reality represented by the painting, engraving or mosaic. One can perceive a paintings canvas, examine its grain, its cracks, which is what you do if you want to date it precisely. In the case of a painting on wood you would assume it is Flemish if it is oak, French if it is walnut and Italian if fir. At the beginning of the aesthetic vision, when the canvas or wood becomes a painting and penetrates the actual dimension of the painting, these material elements are neutralized, no longer being perceived nor presented as objects of the world, but as entities that have no other function than to produce the reality represented in the painting that is also neutralized, belonging no more to the real world than the elements that represent it, forming with them a single, new dimension of being inside of which they are lnked by relations of resemblance and which is the ontological dimension of art. As to the difference between this and the real world of perception, I will offer only a single proof: a very small real space on the canvas can represent an immense space, like that of the landscapes discovered through the windows of some old Flemish painters. Generally, the entire painting can be viewed as a window, as a hole in the real world, a hole or window through which the gaze finds itself borne into a radical elsewhere. In traditional painting the difference that we are talking about between the real and the imaginary, the elsewhere in which it has effectively thrown us, finds its first expression in the fact that the painting is constructed in such a way that it causes an illusion, that of a three-dimensional space or, if you prefer, of depth where however there is, in the real world of perception, only the flat surface of a wall, board or canvas.

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In addition, every aesthetic work appears, one must remember, as a totality and is intelligible only as such. In a painting each colour has value only according to all the others, whether they are contiguous or tied to it, in respect to a distance from or opposed to the canvas, by some subtler relation. It is the same for every form, every volume: each element in what, for this reason, we call a composition is necessary to its appearance and so is granted a precise meaning. Now, here is the important point that should be stressed: this composition is an aesthetic composition, the relationships of which it is made, the elements between which these relations arise, are themselves aesthetic in nature, they are situated within this principal dimension of irreality which is that of the painting. When the painter puts a colour on the canvas, he does not examine it, he looks at the composition, he looks at what in it corresponds to this feature or that spot, in short its aesthetic effect, which is integrated into the ensemble of effects, i.e. in this Whole that is the painting. Thus facing a painting by Frans Hals one must step back to the place where his broad brushstrokes suddenly transform into the blush of a cheek or, on the face of the officer of Hadrians army who slowly turns toward us, into the Eye of Life that gazes at us across time. The aesthetic composition is thus not a kind of palette that the canvas has become due to the effect of the strokes of the brush or knife, but is only possible starting from there. Each of the compositions plastic elements being shaped from a material element, they presuppose the existence of one. To the plastic totality of the composition that is the painting itself an organic unity of the substrate necessarily corresponds, to the particular resemblance that is established each time between a part of the canvas and its aesthetic equivalent corresponds the overall resemblance of the painting and of its support. This offers itself as a continuum, it has a kind of unity. This is not an internal unity, which is only that of the painting, since the material disposition of the colours is determined by the aesthetic effect that it produces. For this reason, moreover, this disposition is necessary in its own state. It is the continuum presented by the material substrate of the painting that causes the analogon of this disposition to emerge from it, the basis from which it could emerge and unfurl in its own dimension of existence. That is why this continuum must at all costs be preserved, restored and recreated when it has been damaged or destroyed. The restoration of an artwork must be done according to the aesthetic unity of the work and not of the whole by taking into account the support itself, for example by removing everything that had been redone in the past in order to conserve only the elements that belong to the original work. The scientific restoration of artworks as practiced today, for example, by removing the reconstituted parts from previous restorations of frescoes, replacing them with empty spaces, that is with trails of white plaster, basically results in their criminal destruction as can be seen in many places like Daphne, Serbian monasteries, Arezzo, Florence, etc. This scientific restoration (employing processes such as carbon-14) proceeds from a gross materialism that does not recognize the true status of a work of art as unreal, as a pure imaginary creation. To this concept of the work of art that strives to recognize, through a precise phenomenological analysis, a specific field of existence, is opposed another the authority of which is not only one of the greatest artists of our time, but also the strength of its own evidence, namely the thesis that the ontological dimension in which art moves is that of sensibility. Lets consider these crucial statements by Kandinsky, It is through

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sensibility alone that one manages to reach the truth in art. And again, Art acting on ones sensibility, it can only act by sensibility. Thus the famous laws of the beautiful, being those of sensibility, only have the appearance of ideal, objective, mathematical laws. Even though one might succeed in giving forms, and the relationships that arise between the plastic elements of a composition, a rigorous mathematical formulation, it would never be more than an ideal approximation of proportions and equilibriums that occur within sensibility and which find in it, and in its own laws, their possibility, the demands to which they respond, their ultimate reason. That is why, as Kandinsky said, Balances and proportions are not outside of the artist but within him. ii Only, if art arises from sensibility, if art inscribes in sensibility its own laws and the demands to which they strive to find a response, does the work of art not at the same time have its place in the real world, which is precisely the sensible world, a world given to sensibility and defined by it, by its forms and content? Thus we find ourselves caught in the aporia that desires the work of art to both belong and not belong to the real world. Before trying to overcome this difficulty, the solution of which will allow us to understand the true nature of the work of art as well as its meaning, we should consider several implications of the definition of art such as finding its essence in sensibility and in the dimension of being that it circumscribes. In this regard a bit more should be said about sensibility itself and about the world that it is the condition of. Sensibility is the Opening of this world, the transcendence in and by which the first Outside is born, this foreground (avant-plan) of light that is the entire world such as it is. Sensibility is the Ek-stacy of Being. Since this transcendence inhabits each of our senses they are able to constantly overflow themselves towards what constitutes their related object (the seen, heard, touched) and reach it, in and through this process of transcendence, and thus in the ek-static Dimensional where appears to us everything that offers us its face, a facet or aspect of its being, all that is given as ob-ject. However, sensibility by no means exhausts its being in this pure relation to a world considered in the capacity of and as sufficient in itselfa relation of which the phenomenality would be reduced to that of this world and its sudden apperance. In any relation of this kind, actually, in all affection by any being whatsoeveraffection making an ob-ject from itreigns the trait of affectivity, which is neither added nor contingent, but on the contrary determines sensibility as its own Ground and what makes it ultimately possible. Thus our attitude toward things is never reducible to a pure gaze or to its insensible or indifferent displacement. This gaze is never a simple seeing, but precisely a sensing, a feeling of things, because the seeing that opens us to things is above all and necessarily a seeing that feels itself seeing sentimus nos videre, as Ren Descartes said, that experiences itself and affects itself before being affected by the world, in such a way that the actual phenomenality of this original auto-affection is affectivity itself as such. That is why the world is by its very nature a sensible world, because the relation to the object is ultimately the Ek-stacy of Being in which the entire world is founded and the relation itself auto-affects itself in its very transcendence, so that within it, on the ground of this auto-affection that originally reveals it to itself, such a relation is by necessity an affective relation: a sensibility. That is why Kant seeking the conditions of every possible experience, i.e. of every possible world, began his investigation with a transcendental Aesthetic, specifically by an analysis of sensibility. No doubt this analysis

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unfolds on a plane that is still that of factuality, it encounters sensibility with the birth of the world without truly understanding the reason for the sensible character of this birth. But this reason is there for us: the world is a sensible world because the relation to the world is affective according to the innermost possibility of its ek-static deployment. Consequently if we assume that the proper site of art is in sensibility, that it consists of putting sensibilitys powers to work, then we must say: art in no way constitutes a separate domain, reserved to artists, aesthetes or specialists, on the contrary it suffuses the world, every possible world in general, insofar as it is a sensible world, taking its source in sensibility and borne by it. Thus the concrete world where humankind dwells falls entirely under the categories of aesthetics and is only comprehensible through them. It is necessarily a beautiful or ugly world; if it is neither one nor the other, it is in a kind of neutrality that is only one aesthetic determination among others, a certain state of the sensibility with which this world is endowed in principle. Moreover it is a fact well-known by historians, anthropologists, ethnologists, etc., that one of the principle activities in all forms of civilization known up to now, except perhaps our own, is art, the productions of which are often all that remain to us of this amazing past. Why then is it like this, why does every culture include art as one of its essential dimensions? Because every possible world, and consequently ours, is by necessity an aesthetic world, because every human as an inhabitant of this world is potentially an artist, one in any case whose sensibility functions as the transcendental condition of this world and its emergence. A world that is aesthetic by its very nature, an art inherent to every culture, such are the first two implications of the thesis according to which the work of art arises from sensibility and belongs to it. Because we are in the aporia, one sees that the definition of the aesthetic object as pure imaginary creation leads on the contrary to this consequence drawn by Sartre from his reading of Husserlthat, being foreign to the real world of perception, the field of art is as such neither beautiful nor ugly. This is a difficult thesis to support, particularly today. We basically live in the era of technique, which ravages the world of our daily existence, disfiguring its landscapes, its sites, cities and monuments bequeathed by the past, causing the horrible and hideous to appear everywhere. How would this devastation of the universe, which we are the powerless witnesses of, be possible if, as sensible, this universe was not suffused, at least in a virtual way, with aesthetic categories? Similar evidence comes to light when one probes deeper into the reasons for which technique plunges our world into this abyss of ugliness: because it proceeds from an entirely new knowledge, which appeared during Galileos time and of which the assumptions and decisions came to overthrow the humanity of humankind, making it what it is today, European man, whose model however imposes itself on the entire world. So as to attain an objective knowledge of the world, Galilean science decided to abstract its sensible qualities, sensibility itself, to retain, as constituents of its true reality, only the geometricizable forms of things, their ideal properties susceptible to lending themselves to a mathematical and as such rigorous determinationthe same for all, the universally valid, the objective, the scientific, instead of its sensible, subjective, individual and changing apparitions. By thus defining a world-of-science as the only true, real world, it hypostasized not only an abstractioninsofar as this world of science necessarily deals with the real sensible world of which it is only an idealization and which grants it its only possible meaningit again eliminated everything which causes this world to be an

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aesthetic world. Organizing social activity in light of the infinite possibilities in which the sensible world is rooted is not however part of that world. We say that a tree is green, that the street is noisy, that ugliness causes us to sufferbut in the things themselves there is neither colour, nor sound, nor suffering. Colour, sound, suffering can only be felt, experienced, or lived, where something feels and experiences itself so as to be able to feel and experience anything else: in the previously described essence of auto-affection as absolute subjectivity, as Life. To definitively clarify the site of the artwork, we should distinguish in a rigorous manner what we will call the original-being and the constituted-being of the sensation or impression. The original being of the impression is its experiencing itself, the selfimpression in which it feels itself without any distance, in a primitive feeling that is its actual affectivity. And so it is always through pain that we know pain, through colour that we know colour, etc. The impression originally given to itself by its affectivity is however susceptible to being given to us a second time by a regard, by an intentionalitythat is produced when it slips into the past and that the first division (cart) of time separates us from, that a retention pro-poses to us as everything just past, when it appears in the following world as one of its sensible qualities: the green of the tree, the sound of the street. Here it should be repeated however that the sensible quality of the real objective thing is only possible as the pro-jection in resonance or tone, that invisible subjecttivity of life where the impression, whether of colour or form, draws its original being. The musical character of these metaphors should not mislead us. They refer purely and simply to the absolute subjectivity of which every impression is originarily a modality, which serves every time as the basis for its objective constitutionfor its noematic appearance. The proof of this is the fact that these terms are habitually associated with that of interiority, which for Kandinsky always qualifies the original abstract content of art, namely and specifically life. And basically it is always a question of its interior, of inner sonority, of inner resonance or even of intrinsic living tensionall radically subjective elements that comprise the whole, outside of the world, in the invisible of our Night, both the principle of our being and that of art. Only in music did Kandinsky discover this intention and capacity to immediately reproduce the hidden determinations of the Soul, thus recognizing in it, in its indifference to all objective reality the most immaterial art; he then assigned painting the same task: to no longer express the world but, like music, the ground of Being and of Life. It is by conceiving of his task in the image of what music has already realized, and not as that of expressing music (this would to the contrary be the purpose of an artist like Auguste von Briesen) iii that painting is going to conquer its metaphysical and precisely saving signification for modern culture and, hence, becomes in its turn, consciously and deliberately, abstract. If what is said above true, then we will have grasped the crucial distinction Kandinsky established between two essentially different meanings of the concept of the pictorial elementand by which one must understand the colours and forms from which all paintings are made. On the one hand, each of these elements, grasped in its apparent immediacy, is presented as an objective content: this point that we see, this line with its many possible variationsstraight, curved, broken, etc.these colours with their infinite shades and nuances. On the other however, the analysis of these elements brings to light

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the decisive fact that each of them, every kind of point or line, every colour, is related to a subjective impression that is characteristic to it and that Kandinsky correctly calls its inner sonority, its inner value, its deep sonority, in short its inner or abstract content. This principal reference of each objective element to a specific subjective determination puts us in the presence both of the means and aims of art, it clarifies in a startling manner both what we call the site of the work of art, as well as it ultimate meaning. Art, in short, has no other goal, no other meaning than to express those subjective determinations that constitute the ground of our being and perhaps of being itself, the soul of things and of the universeif it is true that all entities, all objective appearances have their own inner resonance and initially repose within it. It is because this subjective dimension of Being is identical to the essence of the universe and the abstract content, in other words absolutely real, that art wants to express it, that Kandinsky could call it cosmic depth and say that the genesis of a work of art is of a cosmic character. iv Thus to paint is not to navely represent an external object which guides one like a prior visible given, with properties that would actually belong to it and that would be readable: its noematic form and colour. Instead to paint is to return to this invisible reality that is indissolubly that of the world and of humankind itself: that is truly what art has been assigned to represent. Consequently to paint is no longer to be guided by any external model the imitation of which would remain moreover senseless (since the model is always superior to any copy), it is to choose and most often to invent objective elements of which only the subjective equivalent matters, of which the inner resonance is actually the same as what one wants to express; it is to construct, using those representative minima such as points, lines, surfaces and other elements falsely called geometric, and using colours too, a composition the inner vibration of which is the sentiment that constitutes its prototype as well as its exclusive end. But if the content of art, its abstract, cosmic content, becomes intelligible to us, it is the way to express this content, it is the nature of this expression that is yet to be clarified. We know what we want, said Kandinsky, in the Confrence of Cologne, far more often than we discover how to realize it. As to the question of arts meansin regard to paintingwe are however in a position to give a confident answer. If each objective elementform, colour considered under their external appearanceis accompanied by a specific subjective determination that acts as its support, is it not advisable to highlight those specific tonalities that mark the reverberation within us of each type of object, the inevitable and precise way that we have of living it? And this task itself is dual. First it is a question of revealing or rather experiencing this inner tonality of which our daily activities, caught in their exclusively practical ends, have caused us to lose consciousness. In addition, it is a question of these inner tonalities having been made sensible anew, of somehow taking inventory while disentangling the laws of their possible combinations. Kandinskys theoretical writings consist specifically in the systematic study of subjective tonalities in which colours and forms are presented to us, in the discovery of their relationships, similarly subjective and which constitute the foundation of every conceivable work of art that Kandinsky significantly calls a composition. The description of the subjective tonality that accompanies each objective element has given rise to wonderful analyses in Kandinskys writings. If, for example, one considers a letter, one sees that it appears as a total form, which has, as such, a

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characteristic happy or sad sonority. In addition, it is comprised of various oriented lines that produce in their turn such and such a subjective impression. The overall tenor of these impressions or sonorities defines the inner life of the letter. It follows that every letter produces a dual effect: it acts on the one hand as a sign having a definite purpose and serves in this regard to form words which also bear specific meanings: that is the practical, utilitarian purpose of the letter, which Kandinsky calls its external effect. And yet, it is also possible to consider the letter while forgetting its external effect, its function as a sign. One then realizes that the letter is bound by its pure form to an inner effect that constitutes its proper pictorial meaning and which can function completely independently of its utilitarian function. What is more, it is when this utilitarian function is out of sight that the inner effect that results from the single shape of the letter is felt with all its force. v Now, what we have said about a simple letter is also true for any external element whatsoever. A line for example serves in ordinary life to delimit an object and thus to signify it. But if in a painting one frees oneself from this obligation to draw a particular object, if it no longer represents any recognizable thing, then its purely inner resonance becomes perceptible, it acquires, says Kandinsky, its full inner force. Full because this resonance is no longer weakened or masked by the utilitarian meaning that effaces it as long as it functions as the sign or representation of an object. Force because, seen in and for itself, a line manifests in each of its angles, its inflections and curves, by each of its changes in direction, the effect of a force that, no longer being that of any objective process (which has vanished), basically only exists within us, in our subjective body where all real force has its effective seata force that, for this reason, Kandinsky qualifies as inner. Kandinsky has given an impressive account of the subjective reality of all objective elements in regard to movement. The mysterious and magical power of the unfathomable subjectivity of Being offers itself to be felt within us as soon as it is no longer concealed and camouflaged by the tangle of objective, practical relationships that comprise the world of daily banality. A simple movement, the simplest that can be imagined, and the goal of which is not known, already acts by itself, it assumes a mysterious, solemn importance. This action lasts as long as one remains ignorant of the external practical goal of this movement. So it acts similar to a pure sound. Any simple task, executed jointly (like the preparations to lift a heavy weight) assumes, if the reason for this effort is not known, a startling, singular, mysterious and dramatic importance. One stops involuntarily, struck as by a vision, the vision of existences belonging to another plane. vi This magical vision of another worldthat always remains on the hidden side of the spectacle and never appears within itis precisely the vision which art lays claim to, what it offers to us to contemplate or rather, as we have mentioned, to feel within us like that original reality that is both that of the cosmos and our own. The long detailed analysis of colours, which occupies a good part of Kandinskys theoretical writings, has the same goal as his analysis of form (to which moreover colour itself belongs), namely to show that any objective element and especially noematic colour, having its original reality and place of vibration (its auto-affection making an impression from it) in subjectivity, it is according to that, to its particular resonance, that each colour should be chosen, its inner necessity constitutes the only possible motivation for its inclusion within a painting. In the Conference de Cologne, Kandinsky

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recounts an important memory from his apprenticeship: Often, he said, a patch of clear blue with a powerful resonance seen in the shadows of a thicket would strike me so strongly that I would paint an entire landscape just to capture this patch of blue. It is the intensity with which he experienced the subjective reverberatopm of each colour, but also of each form that led Kandinsky to gradually abandon the objective support and hence even the very idea of a figurative painting, so as to leave the field free to the power of colour and of pure abstract form, in other words to the subjectivity of life. If the goal of art is to snatch the inner abstract content of subjective tonalities from their dissolution in objectivist perception, to instead isolate them, abstract them in order to return them to the power of their original resounding is a problem in that these inner resonances are actually never isolated any more than the objective elementsforms and noematic coloursthat correspond to them in the painting. Thus it is only on a theoretical level that one can consider each element separately in either the exteriority of its graphic or pictorial form, or in the interiority of its subjective force. In the concrete context of the artwork, on the contrary, this isolating of the element no longer exists, its particular tonality is thus no longer directly graspable. It is appropriate then, to experience it in itself, to modify its position, to bring into play its entourage. Thus, still following Kandinsky, when you consider a point located in the centre of the Original Plane (i.e. the sheet of paper or blank canvas) by simply moving this point towards one side of the Plane suffices to perceive its particular resonance as well as the mysterious latent resonance of the Original Plane itself, one and then the other which had been until then confused and, especially that of the Plane, unrecognized. The difficulties related to the grasping of the subjective tonality of isolated elements constitute nothing other, however, than the actual principles of the Kandinskian composition. It is enough to multiply the elements and their possible relations to open the infinite field of abstract plastic invention. These elements are three in number: form, colour and object (to which could be added Plane). Since each of these elements exerts, due to its subjective value, an action upon us, it is important that the artist, substitute himor herself for Nature, to consciously implement these three factors and combine their effects, i.e. the ensemble of affective tonalities that they arouse within us, in order to build the painting in conformity to inner Necessity, to what could be called the original composition within us of these various tonalities, a composition which is both cause and result of the plastic composition: a state of the Force and pathos of the Life within us. By starting from this state, i.e. from the subjective tonalities of the objective elements, the abstract artist arranges them according to principles, criteria and directions that are, in the final analysis, nothing other than the most profound urges of his or her Soul and Desire. The meaning of the work of art is to express this Soul that is thus, both that of each of us as well as the soul of the universe, if it is true that to each element of the universe, to each objective determination corresponds a pathetic determination, so that the world is the totality of these subjective tonalities which actually exists within us. As Kandinsky says, The world sounds. It is a cosmos of spiritually effective beings. Even dead matter is living spirit. vii If this is the universal meaning of the work of art, and not only that of abstract painting, though it is due only to having been grasped through examples, then the theory of abstract painting that we have briefly outlined with the help of Kandinsky is in reality a theory of every possible kind of painting. If one contemplates a classical painting rep-

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resenting a religious scene such as an adoration of the magi, a deposition, etc., one will see that the forms (for example the angle at which the figures are presented) and the colours (for example of the clothing) have no objective model and are chosen solely for their expressive power, that is for the subjective tonality to which each of these forms or colours are linked in principle. Thus traditional painting is only figurative in appearance. A truly figurative painting, i.e. one in which the principle of construction would be the pure and simple reproduction of external elements, with their ordinary, that is to say extremely weak, inner resonancelike that which developed at certain times or in certain schoolswould collapse into insignificance. One last remark to highlight the dynamism and beneficent character of artand remind us, unfortunately, how societies, like ours, that cut themselves off from art and culture in general, find themselves threatened by destruction, by the degeneracy known as barbarism. The aim of art is indeed not to express a subjective state understood as a state of fact, a state of affairs, and it is in this sense that Kandinsky could say, I do not paint the states of the soul. Art paints life, in other words a capacity for growth, for life as subjectivity, that is as experiencing itself, is the power of attaining oneself and thus of expanding oneself at each moment. That is why each eye wants to see further and each force swells, becoming more efficient and stronger. Art is the endless attempt to resume carrying each of lifes powers to its highest degree of intensity and thus of pleasure, it is the response given by life to its most intimate essence and to the will which inhabits it to its desire for excess (surpassement).

from Phnomnologie de la vie, Tome III, De lart et du politique; PUF 2004, pp. 203218 a slightly different version is available at http://www.philagora.net/philofac/henrykan.htm

Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy (first book), Kluwer, 1982, pp. 261-2 ii Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, iii see Michel Henry, Dessiner la Musique: Thorie de lArt de Briesen in Phnomnologie de la vie, Tome III, De lart et du politique; PUF 2004, pp. 241-282, iv Wassily Kandinsky, Confrence de Cologne, 1914 v cf. Wassily Kandinsky, On the Question of Form, The Blaue Reiter Almanac, Viking Press, 1974, pp147-187, vi Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, vii Wassily Kandinsky, On the Question of Form, op cit. pg. 173

translation 2008 Michael Tweed