The Paik/Abe Synthesizer, by George Fifield

There are a few moments in history where a major advance in the arts is also an advance in engineering and directly responsible for a major acceleration of popular culture. The invention of the Paik/Abe Synthesizer is one of those perfect moments.

The Paik/Abe Synthesizer is the first machine designed to distort existing video. It was built in Boston at WGBH-TV in 1969 by Nam June Paik and Shuya Abe.

At the time Paik was an artist in residence at the public television station. He had come the previous year as part of a contingent of artists invited to create a revolutionary broadcast television show called "The Medium Is The Medium." It grew out of an exhibition at the Howard Wise gallery in New York. The idea was to have these new video artists take over a television broadcast studio to make video art. The producers Pat Marx and Ann Gresser successfully approached the Ford Foundation for funding. But at the time broadcast television was an insular institution, to say the least, and finding a television station that would allow these artists in was difficult. Marx and Gresser had seen an article in Newsweek about a TV show on Boston public television called "What's Happening, Mr. Silver" produced by Fred Barzyk. This was a weekly program hosted by Tufts University professor David Silver. The episode mentioned in Newsweek was called "Madness and Intuition."

During the production of it, Barzyk recalled, "I used every film chain, every video tape machine, I had groups of thousands of slides being projected. I had a guy on a motorcycle circling two old people from an old people's home. I had two guys sleeping in bed. I gave [director] Dave Atwood instructions that whenever anybody got bored they just yelled out and we would change to what ever else was there without rhyme or reason, assuming that everything would make sense by the time it all came out. Twenty-two minutes into the show I got up and left. As director I just walked out. One lady called up [the station] afterwards and said, 'Don't ever do that again, you've given me brain cancer.'"

With this kind of creative exploration about the structure of Television already in place, WGBH was recognized from the outside as a place where artists might be allowed some freedom to play. Barzyk, producer Olivia Tappen and Dave Atwood were invited to New York and arrived with 100 lbs of 2" inch tape of their work to show the Wise Gallery artists. Everyone got along and the artists came to Boston.

In March 1969, "The Medium Is The Medium" aired nationally featuring six artists, Allan Kaprow, Nam June Paik, Otto Piene, James Seawright, Thomas Tadlock and Aldo Tambellini. Each of them made a short video using WGBH equipment. Paik's contribution, "Electronic Opera #1" pioneered the idea of interactive television in his by exhorting viewers to "close one eye" or "close one eye half way" and finally, "Turn off your television set".

"Nam June Paik showed up in [rubber] boots and with about twenty old TV sets." Barzyk remembers, "I asked him why he was wearing the boots and he said, 'Oh, I get electrocuted otherwise.' He asked if I could get a nude woman to dance over a picture of Richard Nixon. I went as far as I could on public television. I had a dancer who was willing to do it in pasties and a g-string. But that shook up the station too, because this was definitely not what they expected. However with the Ford Foundation supporting this show and getting national recognition they had to pay attention. Reluctantly, but they had to pay attention."

Later Paik introduced Barzyk to Howard Klein at the Rockefeller Foundation, who had seen the importance of this new medium some time before. Klein had already worked with a number of artists and institutions, like Paik and KQED in San Francisco, funding video experimentation. When he added WGBH and later WNET in New York to the process, he was able to design an entire program, the Rockefeller Artists-In-Television Project, to cover the various grants. And Paik became a WGBH Rockefeller Artist-In-Television.

Barzyk recalls working with Paik in that summer of 1969, "Nam June's vision was immense. His language was somewhat limited and his communication with engineers (and his ideas had a lot to do with engineering) were threatening to a lot of people. Nam June had an engineer friend in Tokyo, Mr. Abe, and he came to me with an idea that he would create a machine for himself that would be away from the requirements of the [WGBH] engineers. I remember he and I had lunch with Michael Rice [president of WGBH] and we laid out this huge piece of paper which tried to describe the synthesizer and what it was like and what it was going to do. I don't think Michael really understood, but he knew that Nam June would be gone for three months and we got the money needed to send him to Tokyo and to develop and devise this thing and bring Mr. Abe to help set it up here in the United States." Paik returned from Japan in the spring of 1970 and made the synthesizer over the summer.

What Paik wanted to accomplish was to make video as malleable as paint. He realized that all the broadcast studio equipment in the world was still not enough to accomplish his vision of "video wallpaper. Nam June Paik saw television as the canvas for the next generation of electronic artists. The synthesizer itself was designed to do exactly what all the WGBH engineers prided themselves on avoiding. It contaminated the video signal.

By wiring up seven old black and white surveillance cameras to a colorizer and scan modulator, Paik and Abe were able to distort the color and misshape the image on the television screen. In the early sixties, Paik had displayed old television sets with huge horseshoe magnets sitting on top. This wild distortion of the magnet on one TV was exactly the effect Paik wanted on everyone's TV. With the synthesizer, he was finally able to achieve it.

Paik himself described the Synthesizer; "Is sloppy machine, like me." The original Synthesizer is a jumble of old video equipment that probably looked scavenged back in 1970. Starting with seven old black and white surveillance cameras, the Synthesizer is a colorizer and scan modulator combined. Each of the seven video signals is passed through its own non-linear amplifier and then through a matrix into a RGB to NTSC color encoder. This meant that one camera acted as the red input, one green, one blue, one as red and green, one as red and blue, etc. Aiming the cameras at roughly the same object gave overlapping color images. David Atwood, who was Paik's roommate in Boston that summer, said simply, "The engineers hated the thing."

The Synthesizer debut in a four hour broadcast television show called "Video Commune - The Beatles from Beginning to End" on WGBH, channel 44 on August 1, 1970. Paik took advantage of a licensing agreement that WGBH had which gave them rights to air all Beatles songs. So he created four hours of a wildly colorful broadcast performance to a soundtrack of Beatles music. Susan Dowling, later director of the New Television Workshop, described Video Commune as "All the images on the show - surreal landscapes (crushed tin foil), eerie abstractions (shaving cream), bursts of color (wrapping paper) - were transmogrified by the Synthesizer at the very moment of broadcast: "live" television at its most unexpected." Interspersed with the Synthesizer video and Beatles music were clips from a tape of Japanese television, in Japanese, with no subtitles.Viewers in Boston had never seen anything like it.

After Video Commune aired the engineers came out and said, "You guys blew up the color filter on the Channel 44 transmitter and if we ever do this again, we have to have more control."

Later Paik left Boston and built many more Synthesizers, including ones for the Experimental Television Workshop in upstate New York and for WNET in New York City.Atwood described his job as the mediator between the WGBH engineers and the Synthesizer. He tells the story about the Green Frog. In the Synthesizer room was a large container in the shape of a green frog. It contained numerous video cables of different lengths that he had collected around the station. After Paik left, when artists like Ron Hays created a new show on the Synthesizer and it was scheduled to air the engineers would always say something like, "We can't air that, its 60 degrees out of phase." Atwood knew that by adding cable to the output of the Synthesizer, he could change the phase by 2 degrees a foot. So he would go into the Synthesizer room and pull thirty feet of cable out of the frog and add it to the output. Then he would return and say, "Look at the phase now, how is it?" The engineer would then have to air the work.


Today the original Synthesizer is the Kunsthalle in Bremen, Germany, in a large frame built by Paik himself, which is covered by a jumble of vintage televisions which show the various videos made with the synthesizer and their date of production. Wulf Herzogenrath, director of the Bremen Kunsthalle explains that he insisted that the dates be there, so the MTV generation of kids who came into the room realized that these modern looking videos were made before they were born, not last week.

By exhibiting a simple machine this way, Herzogenrath showed that he understood the importance of the Paik /Abe Synthesizer to world culture in a way that few in Boston or the rest of the United States did. It represents the vision of an artist who sees a medium of communication and understands that to make art with it you must first subvert it.
Until NamJune Paik the medium of worldwide broadcast television was the engineers temple. Artists were not invited. Yet by 1970, this "vast wasteland," as it was called, had transformed our culture, becoming the most powerful form of communication in the world.

Paik revolutionized that. The handful of videos he made with the Synthesizer had an effect far beyond their audience. Suddenly the idea of video art made sense in a way that it hadn't before. Video became a canvas that the artist could literally paint on. The freedom of creative thought that Paik's creation spawned spread like wildfire. The Paik/Abe synthesizer and others like it were used by an entire generation of artists interested in the formal beauty of the abstract video image. Suddenly artists started inventing new electronic tools as fast as they needed them, twisting video signals through a whole new language of feedback and colorization, processing and disruption.

above copied from: http://davidsonsfiles.org/paikabesythesizer.html

Interview with Allan Kaprow

Interview with Allan Kaprow
Conducted by Susan Hapgood
Encinitas, California, August 12, 1992

Susan Hapgood: Dore Ashton once called your work “Neo-Dada.” Do you remember what the context was?

Allan Kaprow: She reviewed my last real exhibition, two environments that I had in succession at the Hansa Gallery in 1958. A number of the sculptures were assemblages made out of a variety of things—light bulbs flashing on and off, things that moved, paintings whose surfaces were broken up into literally separate planes in space. In other words, they were prototypes for the next step, the environmental. Her review called my work “Neo-Dada.” I took exception to that because I really had none of the sociopolitical attitudes of the Dadaists. I remember one thing Ashton said in the review: “Me thinks he doth protest too much.” But I wasn’t protesting at all. I think that’s what I objected to. I was really just having fun.

SH: You said in your essay for the New Forms—New Media catalogue that critics made erroneous references to Neo-Dada to describe objects, environments, and Happenings. Can you elaborate?

AK: Dada was a common reference point. To the extent that people would comment on what we were doing in that particular show or elsewhere, they would speak about Dada. It was mainly in conversation. Frequently, I thought, we were wrongly associated with Dada. Anti-art isn’t something the Dadas invented. There’s a whole thread of “life is better than art” dating at lest to the time of Wordsworth, right through Emerson and Whitman, to John Dewey and beyond, emphasizing art as experience, trying ot blend art back into life—this tradition influenced me very much. But anti-art is an old Western theme.

SH: What about the cynical side of Dada?

AK: The cynical side was not present. IF you talk about freedoms—for example, the freedom to employ open processes or the freedom to use a variety of objects and materials from the everyday world—these were derived from the prototypes of Dada. But to ascribe to me protest and cynicism—not at all.

SH: How else was the term “Neo-Dada” used?

AK: Well, it was generally thrown around as a criticism. No one said, “Oh, isn’t it wonderful that you’re a Neo-Dadaist.” It was a criticism, not a joyous utterance.

SH: Did the active role of the audience as participants in Happenings bear any comparison to Duchamp’s insistence that the viewer creates the meaning of the work?

AK: Well, Duchamp gave that speech in Texas in 1957, I think. That’s where he made the famous statement that the work of art is essentially a composite of meanings added to by posterity, whatever the artist may have put down first. I didn’t read it until somewhat later. Then he gave a talk at the Museum of Modern Art where he also spoke more on the same lines, if I remember rightly. I did not attend, but it was recorded and published. But he also said something else about the rash of neo-Duchampian shows. He said, “When I selected my first objects, I did not have in mind whole shows of shovels and bottleracks, because that would have killed the point.” And he implied that younger artists who were just buying out hardware stores were doing the wrong thing: they would overdo it. I think we all learned from those little hints from Duchamp. A key feature was discreetness, a timing and restraint that many of us didn’t learn well enough.
Duchamp was personally very helpful to us, no question. He came to our Happenings, most of them. He certainly came to mine, and he brought friends, Ernst and Richter and Huelsenbeck. And, in my case, Duchamp later acted as a reference in my getting a number of grants. So he was very helpful, both practically and intellectually.

SH: In a 1967 interview, you said that Schwitters conceived Happenings but never did them. Were you referring to his descriptions of Merz theater?

AK: What I learned about Schwitters was simply what was available to me through books: about his plans for theater, about his performances, about his wordplay. But I never heard or saw any of them. So, as far as I knew, most of them were cabaret-style performances, not Happenings. As much as they may have been capable of being Happenings, they never evolved to that point.

SH: Why do you believe artists used detritus and junk in their art?

AK: It was clearly part of transforming reality. It gave everyone a sense of instant involvement in a kind of crude everyday reality, which was quite a relief after the high-art attitude of exclusion from the real world. It also allowed us to give up a certain kind of seriousness that traditional art-making required. What’s more, the materials were available everywhere on street corners at night. And if you didn’t sell these environmental constructions, you’d just throw them back into the garbage can. Why not just thow them out? At once, the process in its fullest would be enacted. It was very liberating to think of oneself as part of an endlessly tranforming real world.

SH: The element of getting away from tradition, couldn’t that be called an anti-art gesture?

AK: Yes. Now I know it could be, but I didn’t then. At that time, I didn’t like the idea of giving up a sense of art.

SH: In retrospect, there does seem to be some subtle protest.

AK: But the protest was not against society, it was against traditionalism in art. You might remember that this was during the Eisenhower years, and there was a powerful conservatism operating that began to repudiate Abstract Expressionist attitudes and anything attached to the European tradition of art. Even Art News and editor Tom Hes were going all out to celebrate a return to the figure and the “sanity-in-art” movement. “Sanity” meant reverting, nto only to the figure, but to European prototypes of painting and sculpture; supposedly, this would reinstate humanitarianism and the great traditional values that had been forgotten. That was what we were implicitly protesting against. Under the aegis of de Kooning, even many of the Hofmann students who had been abstract artists were reverting. Matisse and German Expressionism were recalled again. To me, that seemed less interesting than experimental work. So you could say we were protesting, some of us.

SH: Did Rauschenberg’s comment about working in the gap between art and life relfect a prevalent attitude at the time? Was it a prescription that artists followed?

AK: No, it became famous later on, but I would be very surprised if anybody even knew about it when it was first uttered. It was basically a prevalent attitude. I’ve tried to rephrase the attitude myself, not wishing to act in that gap, if there is one, but pushing it more toward the life side. I’m not too interest in gaps.

SH: One of the earliest Neo-Dada artists was Jean Follett, whow as also one of the first artists to make junk sculpture when she integrated gritty found objects in her works in the early 1950s. What do you remember about her?

AK: I met her in 1947 when I was a student at Hans Hoffman’s School of Fine Arts in New York. She stood out from all the other students; her drawings looked like Picabia drawings and they were unlike the very strong Hoffman style. Hofmann would often literally draw over our work, but he never touched Jean Follett’s. He would get to Jean and he would just look at it, and almost invariably say, “Ja, das ist sehr gut, sehr gut” [Yes, that’s very good, very good].
In 1949, two Hofmann students (Wolf Kahn and Felix Pasilis) organized a group show of certain graduates of the school at a kind of semi-private gallery in their loft at 831 Broadway—I don’t think there was a name. That’s where I first saw Jean’s sculptures. Shortly thereafter, this same group got together—and Richard Stankiewicz was very helpful—to form the Hansa Gallery, which was named party to elicit the Hanseatic League, a loose federation of medieval North German states, and partly to honor Hans Hofmann. I joined Hansa in 1952.
Anywya, Jean Follett’s work impressed everybody. But we also thought she was “crazy” because she put huge prices on them, prices that seemed astronomical! But we thought that she was absolutely a wonderful artist, very very powerful. Her show was one of the most widely attended. Even Leo Castelli came to the gallery, as did Clem Greenberg. I know that Dubuffet came to New York for a show at that time, and somehow or another she got him to come to her studio and he was mightily impressed.

SH: Do you remember when you first read Motherwell’s Dada anthology?

AK: Yes. I was at Columbia in 1951 and ’52, taking classes with Meyer Schapiro. I was most interest in Mondrian at the time; and we were just getting used to Abstract Expressionism, which had peaked by then. Dada wasn’t particularly interesting to most artists. Motherwell’s anthology, The Dada Painters and Poets, came out in 1951, but I didn’t read it immediately. It was a little later before I was really very immersed in it. Probably within the year. And once I read it, of course, I found Dada, as presented by Motherwell, to be much more interesting than Surrealism. Then there followed a whole lot of publications and artists’ revived interest in Dada.
I didn’t meet Rauschenberg until 1952, but he was another important link to Dada. As was George Brecht, who was my neighbor in the early 1950s. I was teaching at Rutgers at that time, and George Brecht was working for the Personal Products Division of Johnson & Johnson, in New Brunswick [New Jersey]. And Bob Watts was part of the Art Department at Douglass College, the Women’s College of Rutgers. George Segal was also a neighbor. All of us lived in the New Brunswick area.

SH: Did you talk to Brecht about Motherwell’s anthology?

AK: Well, he had an earlier interest in Dada. He was doing work at that time—which I remember very vividly—that encouraged chance operations. For example, he once brought an eight-by-four-foot masonite panel and several boxes of wooden matches over to the farm where I was living. He laid out this panel on the driveway and casually threw matches over the surface. Then he tossed a lit match among them and they all burst into flame in some kind of random pattern. Then we lifted up the panel and the matchsticks fell off, leaving burn marks. This was his way, one of many, of trying to produce paintings that dealt concretely with what he felt Pollock was all about. He even wrote an essay on chance, which dealt with his interpretation of Pollock, essentially saying that Pollock was interest in giving up organizational techniques. But Brecht was more interested in a kind of randomized dispersion principle. I remember him showing me tables of random numbers. For him, Dada was a celebration of chance, or the appearance of chance.

SH: This is before John Cage’s class.

AK: Right. He joined Cage’s class just a bit before I did. In fact, we used to drive into New York City together. But I had known Cage earlier. Not well, but over the years I’d met him here and there and was part of the periphery of his circle, because I was familiar with Jasper [Johns] and Bob [Rauschenberg] and a lot of the musicians that Cage knew, like composer Morton Feldman. It was a very small group of people in those days. I attended Cage concerts as early as 1948, when he was diddling around with the prepared piano, and all kinds of toys and gadgets to make noise. I made a decision then to concretize my work by having a real action or activity take place. For example, hammering a nail or blowing your nose would be self-evident. It wouldn’t just be the isolated feature of one sense being recorded.
Cage’s teaching was sophisticated philosophically. From his own sensibility and from Zen Buddhist readings, he learned that he experience of the present is a combination of receptivity and action. For Cage, concreteness wasn’t the isolation of one feature of a situation, framed out of context; it was actually an experience, like that [hits table]. That sense of the experiential moment was a clarifier for me. Once I realized how simple the whole thing was, it was only a matter of taking off as fast as I could in the direction of Happenings. (I did my earliest ones in his classes in 1957-58.)

SH: Did Cage talk directly about Dad in the class?

AK: He mentioned it now and again. I know that he was familiar with all of those people and certainly he knew Duchamp.

SH: Is it fair to say that by the latter half of the 1950s there was a major shift of interest among arrists from Surrealism to Dada?

AK: Surrealism was interesting to the previous generation of New York School painters, and we sort of “got it” through over-saturation. But it was their thing, and very European. When Dada came along, there were few objects to see, it all seemed really far-out, although we didn’t necessarily understand its sociopolitical programs. We did not think, as the Dadaists did in 1916, that the world had gone crazy and there was no redemption in sight—its current of cynicism. Rather, we felt that here was freedom to put the real world together in weird ways. It was a discovery, a heady kind of appetite for debris, for cheap throwaways, for a new kind of involvement in everyday life without the judgments about it, either social or personal.

SH: Did John Cage’s ideas about chance develop directly out of his knowledge of Dada and Marcel Duchamp?

AK: No. He claimed that his interest in chance derived from his study of Zen Buddhism, even though Zen Buddhism has no tradition of chance whatsoever. I think for Cage it was the open sense of an unwilled grander design in the universe, one in which an experience is more important than knowledge of the grand design. For me, Cage’s teaching was a real gift, an opening-up rather than a prejudice or a gimmick. But it was threatening to a lot of people because it meant losing control.

SH: Did everyone read books on Zen? And which books were the most widely read?

AK: The grand message-bearer of Asiatic philosophy and religion to the Western world was Daisetzu Suzuki, a transcendentalist and former student of John Dewey. He ws an admirer of Ralph Waldo Emerson and all the American philosophers, and he felt that their work represented a kind of analogy to the Japanese view of the world. Suzuki was really the bridge, more than anybody else. Cage attended Suzuki’s lecutres on Zen Buddhism in the Philosophy Department at Columbia University. Those lectures and readings certainly helped Cage clarify his own point of view. Now I didn’t attend those lectures. In Cage’s case, the whole notion of chance was a result of putting together a lot of the readings: Thoreau, Emerson, anarchism, as well as Asiatic philosophy and the I Ching.
So the answer to your question about how the chance operations eveolved is: through Cage, as well as an awareness of Dada. He was very informed about Dada, a real intellecutal. I’m sure he was aware of Duchamp’s use, and Arp’s use, of chance operations. I remember reading in Motherwell’s Dada anthology, and also in the Lebel book, how Duchamp made part of the Large Glass by shooting paint-dipped matches out of a toy cannon: where they landed was where there marks went. In any cause, the question is a complex one that, to my knowledge, has never been asked—how did the system of chance operations evolve? All I know is that by the time I met Cage, I mean, when I was going to the class, it had already been worked into a system.

SH: Wasn’t your interest in the Gutai Group related to this idea of chance? Do you remember how you heard about the Gutai activities?

AK: Alfred Leslie told me about an article he had read in the New York Times [Ray Falk, “Japanese Innovators,” New York Times, Dec. 8, 1957, p. 24ff.]. It was in the Sunday paper, but I hadn’t read the Times that particular Sunday. Leslie saw I was moving into a kind of wild spatialized collage/assemblage mode, and he said, “Hey, did you read about this?”

SH: So the article was sort of a passing curiosity, then?

AK: Oh, it was a prominent article! Brecht must have heard about it, because the work he was doing paralleled the various Gutai environmental and action-type pieces. He must have read the article in the Times, and I would guess that Bob Watts would have, too.

SH: Your own article, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock” [Art News, Oct. 1958-, was published the following year and also created something of a stir, didn’t it?

AK: Well, I got some feedback from people in my circle, like my editor, Tom Hess, who took a rather dim view of my very eccentric interpretation of Jackson Pollock as someone whose work led to conventional repetition or to what many felt was a kind of Dada junk.
It was written in its entirety after Pollock died in 1956, but then I reworked it slightly later. I gave it to Hess in 1958, within a month of finishing the rewrite. But he held on to it for reasons of caution before he published it. Then he finally made up his mind to publish it, and I asked for it back to correct a few errors.

SH: I think the part about art employing any materials necessary is very impressive considering that it was written in 1956. Were you familiar with Schwitters’s work by this point?

AK: Yes. What was unusual was the jump that I made from quasi-painting work, like Schwitters’s, in which the common metaphor of art and the world was closure, to a kind of environmental phenomenon, open to everything because it was so big. That was a really extreme leap. Painting seemed unnecessary to anyone who wanted to experiment. I didn’t, of course, say that it was over; it certainly wasn’t. So in the Pollock article, I proposed that artists could go in one of two directions: to further develop action painting, or to work environmentally in lifelike situations.

SH: Oldenburg was supposedly especially struck by that article.

AK: Yes, he told me that later, but I didn’t know him then. The first time I met Claes was at a party at George Segal’s farm. He didn’t say anything about the article, but did tell me how interested he was in what I was doing. There were some performances at the farm that day, and he was definitely very curious. That probably had something to do with his decision to become a Happener.

SH: In the Pollock article, you use the term “concrete art.” And in a brochure for a Hansa Gallery show the same year [1958], you juxtapose the words “abstract” and “concrete.” How were you using those terms?

AK: I borrowed them from music. Musique concrete was a postwar phenomenon, partly inspired by John Cage, but more well-known in France and Germany. There was simultaneously an interest in Europe in the non-abstract aspects of music and in the specific, identifiable sounds of somebody hammering or flushing a toilet. Tape recordings were new in those days, a product of the war. With tape, you could make a recording of your footsteps and then manipulate it as much as you wanted. The French were not interested in making these sounds into abstract music but in retaining their very specific concrete identity. So that’s what I had in mind: that musique concrete would then suggest a parallel in art—art concrete.

SH: Dick Higgins has said that the general nature of the performances at the Reuben Gallery were different from those at the E-pit-o-me Coffee shop, and that the latter were more allusive. Is that true? Was there a significant difference?

AK: What I do remember from the few times that I went to the E-pit-o-me was that he performances tended to be more like cabaret performances than Happenings. They were prototypes of what we would call “performance” today, where you get the auteur or auteuse, the singular actor or acress doing a number. But the Happeners—at least Claes, myself, Red Grooms, and Whitman, Vostell, and later Knizak, I think—were much more involved in the phisical materiality of things, pushing furniture around, hiding things, moving people in and amonst environmentally filled areas; like a literalization of, say, the clottedness of an Abstract Expressionist painting.

SH: Supposedly in 1961 you had a disagreement with Oldenburg about Happenings. Is that worth talking about?

AK: It wasn’t all that terrible. One day, after some wonderful performances at one of our storefronts, in the days when we were still in a group, Claes and I were walking down the street. He said to me that he had heard from Jim Dine or Bob Whitman that I didn’t think his work was a Happening. And I said, “Yes, I don’t think it’s a Happening, I think it’s expressionist theater. But don’t get me wrong, I think it’s wonderful theater!” So we had what amounted to a real parting of the ways right there, not necessarily cordial. Then, weeks later we were in a show at Martha Jackson Gallery [in May 1961] called Environments, Situations, Spaces. That’s where I did my tire environment Yard in the back yard. Well, the gallery organized a little supper for us on the evening of the opening. And each of us delivered a little speech, probably inspired by the old Dadaists. In any event, Claes said something that cast a pall over what we were doing. And I got the impression—though it might have been my sensitivity—that it was criticism directed at me. So I wrote him a somewhat angry letter and said, “Okay, I’ll take you on anytime”—something foolish like that—“and we’ll see where it goes from there.” The next few years we went in different ways: Claes became famous and I withdrew more and more from the art-exhibiting world, although I was hardly suffering.
I suspect our disagreement was more over theoretical interest. I wanted to deine what I thought were the experimental possibilities in art at that time. For example, he rehearsed people well after I gave that up. He had specific time slots for the pieces, at a time when I was seeing that as a dead end. He confined the performance area while I dispersed it. He definitely had audiences, when I was trying to integrate everything. Really, it was like two guys talking two different languages who, I believe, had admiration from one another.

SH: Do you agree that by 1961 there was a shift toward a cleaner, slicker look in art, especially in the work of emerging Pop artists?

AK: Sure. One of the things that happened was that the Abstract Expressionists were finally beginnign to make a sizeable impact on the market. Nothing like today, but for artists in those days to sell soemthing for three or four thousand dollars was a bonanza. But the idea that an artist could in fact make a living off art had never been even remotely thinkable before, certainly not for experimental artists. Now there was a different idea. I remember one particular article in Fortune magazine that advised collectors how to make more money buying modern art than they could in the stock market. And they actually gave tables of appreciation over a five-year period. Like, buy Larry Rivers because it was no longer affordable to buy Pollock or Newman or de Kooning. And the art market began to pick up everywhere, including a market for work by younger artists.
Symbolically, Pop art developed when Andy Warhol discovered he could move from the commercial world, in which he was quite a figure, to the fine art world and not suffer a disruption of identity. He just had da more sophisticated audience at that point. And, therefore, it was probably no accident that my friend Roy Lichtenstein gave up the Abstract Expressionist paintings he was doing at the time for something that was always present in his work but latent: the investigation of popular imagery and methodology. And as it turned out, it was very marketable.

SH: Do you recall why Yves Klein's 1961 show of blue monochromes at Castelli was boycotted?

AK: Well, I think that he was not well-received, but that is largely through hearsay. I gather this not from the show, because I didn't see it, but from the reviews. He was repudiated for two reasons: one was his showmanship, and the other was his reputed association with a conservative political group, the Chevalier de la Croix [in 1956 he was made a chevalier, or knight, of the Order of Saint Sebastian], or something like that. He was both star and impresario, a dual role that has great tradition in Europe, but which in America was associated with Broadway, razzle-dazzle, and the lowest common denominator.

SH: When did you become aware of the Nouveaux Realistes?

AK: I became aware of the New Realists when Pierre Restany organized the show in New York in 1962. It was at two different places. One was a rented storefront on 57th Street, and the other was Sidney Janis's gallery nearby. I became very interested, and in fact went to Paris the next year; there was a whole new set of people I wanted to meet. I did, in fact, and they were all very helpful. I met Spoerri right away. And Emmett Williams, who was living there at the time, and Jean-Jacques Lebel, and Robert Filliou. I became part of what I thought was an international association of artists. A number of the Japanese artists were in Paris then, so it was very international.

SH: Did you feel that there was a strong American chauvinism against Europeans between 1958 and 1962?

AK: To be as fair as I can, I would have to say that there was simply a very grateful sense that, at last, American artists were not deriving form somebody else. It was nice to feel that one was coming out of something personal. But we did not repudiate others, because obviously and logically they had just as much right to their ethos as we did ours. As I said, for us, the international sense of community was far more interesting than isolation. Some of us, after all, had a historical sense of what isolation had done back in the 1930s and '40s, and we didn't want to repeat that kind of silliness. So I was aware of some of the jingo-ism in the art world, particularly the distinctly nationalistic way in which Rockefeller and others resuscitated modern art, taking it from being the bad boy of American culture to being the exemplar of freedom. It was packaged for all over the world as a repudiation of Communism. Now this kind of turnaround was offensive to a lot of us, although we weren't taking positions of ideology either.
I think I shared the common attitude that some of the European work seemed tame, and precious. However, much New Realism was a breakthrough for the Europeans, Yves Klein, Vostell, Vautier, Spoerri, Tinguely, Filliou . . . hold up very well today.

SH: In retrospect, what effects and influences do you think Happenings had on immediately subsequent art?

AK: Well, the effect must have been indirect, if at all, because very few people actually saw them. But if you can say things are in the air, that sometimes you don't have to read the book because you get the whole idea just from gossip, then in this case permission was in the air. It's possible to say with some caution that the Happenings allowed a good bit of Fluxus to take place, just as Gutai provided some justification for the early Happenings. You can also say that earthworks, particularly earthworks that were site-specific, were given their permission by the earlier example of Happenings, although they had nothing to do with each other directly. I think Happenings--especially things going on in multiple spaces at different times that were not physically connected--gave permission to conceptual art, the "live in your head" approach. Unfortunately, now there's a kind of new piety that's being brought to bear by critics and historians upon our work which was so irreverent at the time!

Interview from Susan Hapgood's "Neo-Dada: Redefining Art 1958-62"

"Anti Form," Robert Morris

Artforum (April 1968)

In recent object-type art the invention of new forms is not an issue. A morphology of geometric, predominantly rectangular forms has been accepted as a given premise. The engagement of the work becomes focused on the particularization of these general forms by means of varying scale, material, proportion, placement. Because of the flexibility as well as the passive, unemphasized nature of object-type shape it is a useful means. The use of the rectangular has a long history. The right angle has been in use since the first post and lintel constructions. Its efficiency is unparalleled in building with rigid materials, stretching a piece of canvas, etc. This generalized usefulness has moved the rectangle through architecture, painting, sculpture, objects. But only in the case of object-type art have the forms of the cubic and the rectangular been brought so far forward into the final definition of the work. That is, it stands as a self-sufficient whole shape rather than as a relational element. To achieve a cubic or rectangular form is to build in the simplest, most reasonable way, but it is also to build well.

This imperative for the well-built thing solved certain problems. It got rid of asymmetrical placing and composition, for one thing. The solution also threw out all non-rigid materials. This is not the whole story of so‐ called Minimal or Object art. Obviously it does not account for the use of purely decorative schemes of repetitive and progressive ordering of multiple unit work. But the broad rationality of such schemes is related to the reasonableness of the well-built. What remains problematic about these schemes is the fact that any order for multiple units is an imposed one which has no inherent relation to the physicality of the existing units. Permuted, progressive, symmetrical organizations have a dualistic character in relation to the matter they distribute. This is not to imply that these simple orderings do not work. They simply separate, more or less, from

what is physical by making relationships themselves another order of facts. The relationships such schemes establish are not critical from point to point as in European art. The duality is established by the fact that an order, any order, is operating beyond the physical things. Probably no art can completely resolve this. Some art, such as Pollock's, comes close.

The process of "making itself" has hardly been examined. It has only received attention in terms of some kind of mythical, romanticized polarity: the so-called action of the Abstract Expressionists and the so-called conceptualizations of the Minimalists. This does not locate any differences between the two types of work. The actual work particularizes general assumptions about forms in both cases. There are some exceptions. Both ways of working continue the European tradition of aestheticizing general forms that has gone on for half a century. European art since Cubism has been a history of permuting relationships around the general premise that relationships should remain critical. American art has developed by uncovering successive alternative premises for making itself.

Of the Abstract Expressionists only Pollock was able to recover process and hold on to it as part of the end form of the work. Pollock's recovery of process involved a profound rethinking of the role of both material and tools in making. The stick which drips paint is a tool which acknowledges the nature of the fluidity of paint. Like any other tool it is still one that controls and transforms matter. But unlike the brush it is in far greater sympathy with matter because it acknowledges the inherent tendencies and properties of that matter. In some ways Louis was even closer to matter in his use of the container itself to pour the fluid.

To think that painting has some inherent optical nature is ridiculous. It is equally silly to define its "thingness" as acts of logic that acknowledge the edges of the support. The optical and the physical are both there. Both Pollock and Louis were aware of both. Both used directly the physical, fluid properties of paint. Their "optical" forms resulted from dealing with the properties of fluidity and the conditions of a more or less absorptive ground. The forms and the order of their work were not a priori to the means.

The visibility of process in art occurred with the saving of sketches and unfinished work in the High Renaissance. In the nineteenth century both Rodin and Rosso left traces of touch in finished work. Like the Abstract Expressionists after them, they registered the plasticity of material in autobiographical terms. It remained for Pollock and Louis to go beyond the personalism of the hand to the more direct revelation of matter itself. How Pollock broke the domination of Cubist form is tied to his investigation of means: tools, methods of making, nature of material. Form is not perpetuated by means but by preservation of separable idealized ends. This is an anti-entropic and conservative enterprise. It accounts for Greek

architecture changing from wood to marble and looking the same, or for the look of Cubist bronzes with their fragmented, faceted planes. The perpetuation of form is functioning idealism.

In object-type art process is not visible. Materials often are. When they are, their reasonableness is usually apparent. Rigid industrial materials go together at right angles with great ease. But it is the a priori valuation of the well-built that dictates the materials. The well-built form of objects preceded any consideration of means. Materials themselves have been limited to those which efficiently make the general object form.

Recently, materials other than rigid industrial ones have begun to show up. Oldenburg was one of the first to use such materials. A direct investigation of the properties of these materials is in progress. This involves a reconsideration of the use of tools in relation to material. In some cases these investigations move from the making of things to the making of material itself. Sometimes a direct manipulation of a given material without the use of any tool is made. In these cases considerations of gravity become as important as those of space. The focus on matter and gravity as means results in forms which were not projected in advance. Considerations of ordering are necessarily casual and imprecise and unemphasized. Random piling, loose stacking, hanging, give passing form to the material. Chance is accepted and indeterminacy is implied since replacing will result in another configuration. Disengagement with preconceived enduring forms and orders for things is a positive assertion. It is part of the work's refusal to continue aestheticizing form by dealing with it as a prescribed end.

Formless: A User’s Guide, Excerpt, Rosalind Krauss

Published in: OCTOBER 78 MIT Press, Cambridge Mass.,1996

A User’s Guide to Entropy[*]


X MARKS THE SPOT. Sometime in 1965 Bruce Nauman made a plaster cast of the space under his chair. Perhaps it was late in the year, after Donald Judd’s ”Specific Objects” essay had appeared, or perhaps earlier, for example in February, in relation to Judd’s review of Robert Morris’s Green Gallery exhibition, or in October, after Barbara Rose had published “ABC Art,” her own bid to theorize Minimalism.[1] In any event, Nauman’s cast, taking the by-then recognizable shape of a Minimalist sculpture, whether by Morris or Tony Smith, or Judd himself, was more or less cubic, grayish in color, simple in texture . . . which made it no less the complete anti-Minimalist object.

Several years later, when the tide against Minimalism had turned, and the attack on Minimalism’s industrial metaphor—its conviction in the well-built object, its display of rational tectonics and material strength—was in full swing, this reaction would move under the banner of “Anti-Form,” which is to say a set of strategies to shatter the constructed object and disperse its fragments.[2] But Nauman’s cast, which he repeated the following year in two other forays—Shelf Sinking into the Wall with Copper-Painted Plaster Casts of the Spaces Underneath (1966) and Platform Made up of the Space between Two Rectilinear Boxes on the Floor (1966)—acting well before anti-form, does not take this route of explosion, or dismemberment, or dissemination. It does not open the closed form of the fabricated object to release its material components from the corset of their construction, to turn them over to the forces of nature—gravity, wind, erosion— which would give them quite another articulation, one cast in the shadow of natural processes of change. Rather, it takes the path of implosion or congealing, and the thing to which it submits this stranglehold of immobility is not matter, but what vehiculates and subtends it: space itself.

Nauman’s attack, far more deadly than anti-form—because it is about a cooling from which nothing will be able to extricate itself in the guise of whatever articulation—is an attack made in the very name of death, or to use another term, entropy. And for this reason, the ambiguity that grips these residues of Nauman’s casts of interstitial space, the sense, that is, that they are object-like, but that without the title attached to them like an absurd label, one has no idea of what they are, even of what general species of object they might belong to, seems particularly fitting. It is as though the congealing of space into this rigidly entropic condition also strips it of any means of being “like” anything. If the constant utilitarian character of Minimalist objects—they are “like” boxes, benches, portals, etc.—or the more evocative turn of process works, continued to operate along the condition of form, which is that, having an identity, it be meaningful, it is the ultimate character of entropy, Nauman’s casts force us to realize, that it congeal the possibilities of meaning as well. Which is to say that this conception of entropy, as a force that sucks out all the intervals between points of space, not only understands the “Brownian movement” of molecular agitation as slowed to a stop, but also imagines the eradication of those distances that regulate the grid of oppositions, or differences, necessary to the production of meaning.

Although he never, himself, pushed his own concerns with entropy into the actual making of casts, Robert Smithson had always considered casting as a way of theorizing entropy, since he had written about the earth’s crust as itself a giant cast, the testimony to wave after wave of cataclysmic forces compressing and congealing life and all the spatial intervals necessary to sustain it. Quoting Darwin’s remark “Nothing can appear more lifeless than the chaos of rocks,” Smithson treasured the geological record as a “landslide of maps,” the charts and texts of the inexorable process of cooling and death.[3] For each rock, each lithic band is the evidence of whole forests, whole species that have decayed—“dying by the millions”—and under the pressure of this process have become a form of frozen eternity. In a movingly poetic text, “Strata: A Geophotographic Fiction,” he attempted to prize apart these layers of compression, alternating blocks of writing with strips of photographs showing the fossil record trapped within the magma of the rock, as the demonstrative presentation of wave after wave—Cambrian, Silurian, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Jurassic—of wreckage.

Smithson realized, of course, that the very act of textualizing this material was one of building spatiality back into it, of producing those oppositions and differences necessary to open the surface to the intelligibility of reading and the organization of form. He quoted the paleontologist Edwin Colbert saying: “Unless the information gained from the collecting and preparing of fossils is made available through the printed page, assemblage specimens is [sic] essentially a pile of meaningless junk.” It was the conflict between the “junk” and the “text” that seemed to fascinate him.

If fossils are nature’s form of casting, the turn taken in art world concerns in the 1970s and ’80s led away from Smithson’s attention to the natural, by moving deeper into the terrain of industrial culture that Minimalism had been exploring from the outset, although by now this had become a kind of Minimalism crossed with Pop art. For the concern was no longer with the tectonics of industrial production so much as with its logic, which is that of serialization, the multiple, and replication. And although casting is a paradigm of any process of reduplication, of spinning out masses of copies from a single matrix or mold, it was the photographic rather than the cast form of the duplicate that increasingly took hold of the art world’s imagination. For the photograph brought with it the simulacral notion of the mirage, of a reality that had been engulfed within its own technology of imitation, a fall into a hall of mirrors, a disappearance into a labyrinth in which original and copy are indistinguishable. The photograph seemed capable of raising the problem of reality in the grip of what Baudrillard would call “the mirror of production” in a way that the mere cast could not.

Itself emerging from this culture of the multiple, Allan McCollum’s work was, however, not to move along this photographic construal of simulacra. Rather, it was to cycle back to the issue of casting by entering into a relation with the very most classical enunciation of the matrix or original as a kind of ontological ideal from which all existent objects are modeled. This eidos, or form, could also be thought of as the genus that contains within itself—as a kind of ideal repertory—the “footprint” for all actualization of its form of life into species.

Proceeding, then, to an exploration of the generic, McCollum’s work became an ironic rewriting of modernist art’s own attempts to reduce individual media—painting, sculpture, photography, etc.—to their very essence as genres, or aesthetic norms. However, anti-formal to its very marrow, McCollum’s reduction was not to an abstract condition—flatness, say, or opticality—but to a generic type (“painting” as a blank canvas with a frame around it; “sculpture” as a kitsch bauble, a shape meant for mass production) that could serve as the model from which to generate potentially endless numbers of copies.

It was thus the industrialization of the eidos that interested him, as he struck a kind of blow against the reproductive as natural or ideal (the constant reclaiming of species “identity”) and presented it instead as a force of proliferation of the same, a kind of silting up of the space of difference into an undifferentiable, entropic continuum. In this sense, proliferation, as the endlessly compulsive spinning out of “different” examples, came full circle in the 1980s to join hands with the 1960s effacement of difference, as McCollum’s nightmare of mass production began to reinvent Smithson’s fantasy of mass extinction, thus bringing about a convergence of the two over the importance of the fossil record.

If the fossil as the “natural copy” fascinates McCollum, this is because it brings the generic—in the form of the industrialization of eidos—into collision with the biological genus, realized through the fossil in the form of its own genetic eradication, marked only by the mold of one or more of its members left in passing. The production of dinosaur tracks is a particularly interesting example of the natural cast, one that had fascinated Smithson as well, at the time of his “Geophotographic Fiction.”[4] Such tracks are made by the heavy animal’s having walked through mud-covered peat bogs, leaving large negative depressions that were filled in by the mud, which eventually hardened into solid rock “casts” of the footprints while the peat around these tracks reduced into coal. In the Utah sites these were revealed as the coal was removed from around them, leaving the footprints to protrude from the roof of the mine.

The specificity of these casts as evidence, their testimony to the passage at a particular time and place of the movement of a now-vanished animal, would seem, of course, to give them a particularity that is far away from McCollum’s earlier practice of the cast as a form of the “generic”: that endlessly proliferating series of increasingly meaningless signs. Working against the grain of the multiple, these casts would seem instead to have the character of something absolutely unique, something that had existed in a specific place, and to which this object mutely points: X Marks the Spot, as the title of a book on criminal deaths, reviewed briefly by Bataille,[5] put it—the trace of an utterly contingent “this.”

If, however, McCollum’s impulse is to treat these “trace fossil” footprints as though they were readymades, and to parade them both as burgeoning sets of multiples and as the gaudily colored items from the most kitsch of souvenir shops—thus industrializing not just the generic but also the genetic—this is not simply from an irreverence for the idea of primal life. It is, rather, to go back to the kind of content that Nauman had built into his casts of particular spaces—which understood the very specificity of the trace itself (the “this”) as a form of entropy, a congealing of the paradigm. Once more it is to join the proliferation enabled by the mold or matrix to the X that congeals the very possibility of space even as it marks the spot.

[*] The main body for the catalogue for the exhibition L’Informe: mode d’emploi (Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1996), from which this [excerpt] derives, is in dictionary form, divided roughly into four sections: Base Materialism; Horizontality; Pulse; and Entropy . . .
[1.]Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” Arts Yearbook 7 (1965); Judd, “Reviews,” Arts (February 1965); Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America (October 1965).
[2.] Robert Morris, “Anti-Form,” Artforum, vol. 6 (April 1968), pp. 33-35; reprinted in Continuous Project, Altered Daily: The Writings of Robert Morris (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993).
[3.] Smithson, Writings, pp. 75-77.
[4]. Not only does Smithson reproduce a photograph of dinosaur tracks (found on the Connecticut River in Massachusetts) in his “Geophotographic” text (ibid., p. 129), but he also made a work related to the idea of footprints, by photographing an array of dog tracks around a puddle of water in Bergen Hill, New Jersey. Called Dog Tracks (1969), the paw prints, with their overlapping and indeterminacy, symbolized for him the way his Sites constituted “open sequences.” See Hobbes, Robert Smithson, pp. 117-19.
[5.] Bataille, “X Marks the Spot,” Documents 8 ( 1930), p. 437.

above copied from: http://home.att.net/~allanmcnyc/Rosalind_Krauss.html

The Interartistic Phenomenon as an Intermedial Structure in the Arts by Vassilena Kolarova

The Interartistic Phenomenon as an Intermedial Structure in the Arts

Vassilena Kolarova

Original publication: Applied Semiotics. 20.7 (Feb 2008).

The overflowing of shades between literature, painting and music

In this study of the interartistic phenomenon we shall chronologically follow the development of the definitions related to this notion, and while arranging them, we shall take into account their significance for the germination of this interartistic vision, connected to the emblematic personality of Julia Kristeva, and whose chief definition is– intertextuality. We shall refer also to the works of Gerard Genette and examine the definition of transtextuality introduced by him, which he terms as literature of second degree and which by content is closer to the concept of interartistic phenomenon. Intertextuality correlates to a very wide stream of philosophical thought during the entire Twentieth Century, as a wonderful prelude, dating from ancient times.

This intellectual thought was known as early as since its emergence in the 70s and does not need any elaborate presentation in this study considering the notoriety of the „semiotic adventure” (Bart). Our study is directly affected by intertextuality and therefore we shall devote it well-deserved attention. Intertextuality embodies practice open in time, subjected to constant changes triggered by the structuring of the text as it used to appear, by complementing it to achieve finished look in the future.

According to Kristeva, poetic language is also a language of dialogue (dialogical principle – of interdiscoursivity ). The smallest unit of meaning ranges from 0 to 2, i.e. there is an interval that allows to escape from the meaning of the current language, and which gives more freedom of interpretation. The meaning of the signifier is dynamic. Generating meaning to the infinity of the paragramme may be illustrated by a triangle , reminiscent of the one of Peirce. The triangle may be viewed as three-dimensional since it is polyvalent in its connotations at each point. Thus linearity is impossible, the meaning generates.

We shall concentrate on certain excerpts from the text of Kristeva , directly relating to the interartistic problem, even though on a global level: We may find the relation between the two signifiers: picture / text or text / picture, in any field, by interpreting the literary text as artistic, in the following excerpt: “…dialogical signifiers … Each narrative... contains this dialogical dyad …, which is rendered to a dialogical relationship Signifier/Signified, The Signifier and the Signified being the one in relation to the other, each in turn, Signifier and Signified, but this is just a game of overturning two Signifiers. Only through some narrative structures this dialogue, this dual presence of the sign, this double meaning of the written text, are exteriorized in the organization itself of the (poetic) discourse, at the level of occurrence in the (literary) text.”

The textual picture is more and more visualized, stretching to infinity. Kristeva talks about the picture of text at a moment of reorganization; the picture comes to life from the shuffling of texts, which movement is realized by „rewriting with a pencil what the brush has already drawn. The pencil started to run fast from the top downwards on the white paper while following the same vertical fields whose route was preceded beforehand by the brushes. This time no moving on to the palette, no change of the tools, no rubbing of colors, would slow down the action, quickly gathering speed. The same landscape appeared in the background, but being of secondary interest, it was destroyed by the personalities in the foreground. The gestures, felt directly and immediately as alive…the silhouettes, curiously funny, and the faces with staggering resemblance had the desired expression, at times gloomy, at times cheerful... Despite the contrast of the décor, the painting recreated the exact idea of heated street traffic.

How can we miss to read the metaphor of textual activity in these lines, that surpasses the limitations of speech (painting with a brush), swallows it and destroys it with heated gesticulation, in its turn to freeze into a new impression that could resemble anything.” We permitted ourselves this long excerpt as citation to illustrate the mixing of the two activities. This is an imaginative route of the words to the picture. It means opening the structure of the signifying practices to the signified. When Kristeva studies Mallarme’s works, the author of the idea of the total artifact, she mentions the trans-sign. Kristeva explains that Mallarme is one of the first authors that practice the language of paragrammes, the interference of texts, words, forming a spectrum. What kind is the spectrum, literary, color or musical? And the interartistic fusion continues with other spectra. The letters play the role of space differentials, mimicking the colors of a picture. The sound, which in its turn becomes color, brings out another opening of the text … The textual dimension reveals the entire constellation of re-impersonations: “ The phonetic word, the oral expression, the sound itself become a book: less written text, the novel thus is the transcription of the vocal communication.”

From transtextuality to pure transcendence

Genette perceives intertextuality as a particular type of transcendence of the authorship – transtextuality, which encompasses numerous types of relations:

☐ architextuality , which is an impossible to classify essence of the genre, since genre is a notion incapable of being defined in practice due to its constant alterations.

☐ paratextuality , whose role is to give a natural feel to the work of art

☐ metatextuality, as a critical discourse, which we cannot do without. The critical discourse is always well-respected, if good, constructive and poetic, even if secondary and not so artistic in nature. Even Butor himself, who wrote critical essays, admits it.

☐ intertextuality, which encompasses citation, plagiarism, allusion

☐ hypertextuality, whose hypotext and hypertext are two structural components of paradigm– parody, pastiche...

What we need to highlight is the interartistic nature, more clearly expressed in the last type of relations. The remaining types of relations are less prone to interartistic influence, even though it is possible to occur in them too.

The Palimpsest is a concept with a changing characteristic, distinguished by ambiguity and requiring prolonged interpretation, which can be applied to any art, even though it more likely has literary origin (A parchment, through which you can read the previous work of art like through a mirror). This notion perfectly matches the interartistic with all its varieties interpictorial and also intermusical, interarchitectural, intersculptural waves … Genette conducts a particularly poignant and interesting study of all practices related to the interartistic analyses of the works of art with variations. The works with variations are in fact sequences of an open creation in another genre or art. Genette’s study approximates another study, just as original as the one of Umberto Eco– “The Open Creation”.

Genette uses the term transcendence in his study of the work of art as a whole , and of literature as part of art. He uses this term to bring to the foreground the idea that we never read the same book when we read it a second time, we never look at the same painting, we never listen to the same music, because the representation does not cease to change with each interpretation of the work, regardless of whether for the same reader, or for somebody else. In this case different digressions may be distinguished, leading to unchangeable interartistic wholes, since the work is always on the move... We agree with him that the work of art is an integral part of art as a whole …

We shall take as reference point the most valuable of Genette's ideas, the one about the concept of literature as art. Poeticism is a canton of the theory of art and estheticism. The fields of literature and art are hybrid. The artistic is a typical characteristic of art, felt through each subject or field relating to art. For this kind of relationship he refers to the opinion of Croce, even though his thesis as a whole does not relate to him. The literariness is included in the artistic. The genres, which are hard to determine, need to be specified, so that the vague involved in the artistic activity be reflected correctly. Genette turns the question posed by Nelson Goodman around … “ …not What is art? But When is there art? Not so much the arts as the art, …they say there is art in this and that... and even not so much art as a whole as artisticity (artisticité).» In our study we adopt the term artisticité as equivalent to artistique.

The work of art is immanent, in what it is and what it expresses. It is a whole belonging to itself. Immanence originates in the ontological status of the creation. It is a physical object in painting and sculpture. Literature and music possess the ideal immanence. Genette allocates the works into a classification similar to the one of Sauriau. The question Genette poses is whether “ …(the effective) multiplication of “ the Thinker” or of an engraving like “ Melancholy» of Durer is of the same nature as a musical or literary piece е” The answer is equivocal, due to the specific status of the work of art. Genette uses the qualification of Goodman to clarify its thesis by setting himself apart from some postulates of the American philosopher. Goodman divides the works into autographical – unique, like a painting, sculpture, performance (of tangible nature, occurring by itself) and allographic – literary text, musical composition, project of a building (of ideal characteristic ), since architecture, just like the musical piece or the literary text interpretation is always individual (one gothic cathedral would rarely be a full copy of another). In the second case the works are perceived with a reduction. The allographic works are physically multiplied into numerous copies: books, musical scores, constructions... The work generally always happens autophically in the ideal, and most of all abstract sense. The boundary between two regimes turns out to be vague and hardly distinguishable, with numerous variants. Also mixed cases exist. Testimony of this, for example, is the calligrams, which “ combine ideal text with materialistic graphicity.”. According to Goodman intermediary variants exist, as is with autographic arts with numerous or unclear subjects – for example the performances, a modern art, representing specific case. The performances are autographic due to the large number of different representations having numerical identity, but at the same time they are allographic, they have specific identity, typical for all works repeating themselves in a different way. The immanent autographic objects are prone to transformation, while the immanent allographic objects may not be transformed without changing in depth, i.e. without becoming other. Genette gives as example the mural painting of “The Last Supper” which, despite the damaging sway of time, will always remain the same creation, belonging to Leonardo.

Transcendence is the exact opportunity for the visions of interpretation to multiply to infinity, i.е for the work to cross the threshold of its imminence. Each potential author views the previous creation in his/her own unique way : “ …this scream of the work to all the rest is felt implicitly and deserves a lot, I believe the name transcendence.” The transcendence that Genette speaks about is the transcendence of the boundaries between arts that Kant examines in “Criticism of the Ability to Reason” – something we shall revisit further down. The work transcends and does not cease to alter in a continuous series of multitudes... Therefore the concern is interartistic receptiveness, also included in the semiotic process of work creation. The work is dynamic.

Kant and the concurrence of numerous arts in one and the same work

We cannot possibly overlook in this paper this great theologian in philosophy – Kant, and especially a central point in his study, which appears to be central also to ours. This point, we reckon, is of primary importance both for his fundamental aesthetics and for the clarification of the interartistic phenomenon. A valuable idea with regards to the unbreakable bond between arts in the work itself is by nature laid down in his works and this idea is extremely relevant having in mind the latest modern studies. It includes the study of the bonds being established between arts, ostensibly separated from the interartistic. This is one of the strongest points in the philosophy of Kant on art, which critics have not adequately investigated, as they should, but have abandoned themselves to the tide of the problem about the reasoning on beauty.

We may sketch, through the prism of the transcendental aesthetics of Kant, an interpretation related to the perception of the work of art, which refers to the phenomenon, as subject to the empirical intuition. The matter of each phenomenon is given to us only à posteriori (i.е. when the work of art was already created by a given author). The feeling that arises from it exists in space and time as pure intuition, which is a form à priori of sensitivity. Space presents things the way they are in our consciousness. Time allows us to perceive the phenomenon subjectively. Therefore we believe that space and time may reach a crossing point and merge their borders, at the perception of the phenomenon, bearing in mind the overlapping of two phenomenal realities. Furthermore Kant speaks of another opportunity given à priori, which approaches the idea of the synthetic reckonings given a priori. The interartistic has the quality of an a priori. The interartistic phenomenon each time may accept a different reality in the consciousness of the perceiver of the painting or any work of art where more arts are put side by side. This is possible due to the polyvalent nature of art as a specific symbolic form – a concept, which is later developed in Cassirer’s philosophy of art based on the transcendental laws of Kant. Kant gives the following triad of branching of arts: Painting-Music-Literature.

He takes as reference point this interartistic triad, from which the synthetic strands between them are weaved at a secondary level, to be given directly and to highlight their relationship when present in a given universal piece of art. Krassimir Manchev also shows the main arts in a triad: Language of gestures – musical language – plastic language, which also are intermingling at a secondary level in his chart. Any attempt to design a table of arts in complete pureness is impossible, there always remains a slight shade in the “color” of the respective art.

Peirce and the Phenomenon

The Phaneron (1.284) “ The phaneron is a synonym of phenomenon : this is something, which is present in a given consciousness, here and now, regardless of whether this thing is real or not.» Phaneroscopy, as a specific variant of phenomenology, studies the sign as a phenomenon, i.е in the context of a relationship. If we study this communication specifically in the field of art, we shall see that the phenomenological perception is of deciding importance for the interpretation of the meaning of context, regardless of the type of configuration of the interference between arts or of the kind of accumulation of arts at one and the same point in time, at the same spot – whether more or less intensified.

Polyvalence of the triangle...the appearance of the pyramid

Peirce’s triangle is expressed in a multidimensional way in art since it has polyvalent meanings, which trigger the broadening of the visual range. The different planes of the Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary combine in a pyramid. Each one of them independently recreates the relationships in the sign–between the representation, object and interpreter. The triangle expands beyond the normal boundaries of interpretation to transform into a pyramid by becoming three-dimensional.

One object of reality reflected in the painting may be interpreted in different ways depending on how the observer perceives it. The representation of the depicted object contextually changes its meaning depending on the interpretation. Meanwhile the representation of the visually depicted object enters into a relation with the representation of the visualized on the picture. Thus a complicated dynamic structure of the sign is achieved, which may be multiplied in its interpretations since what is shown on the picture, depending on the interpretation, may change its interpreter, and respectively its representation, which in its turn changes.

Likewise Kandinski breaks apart the two-dimensional space of the painting to reach the universe. This idea is valid for any analysis of a creation, literary or musical. The perception of the representation may be of a different kind– sound, visual, i. е. The pure icon, which is left in the basis of the object, analyses and characterizes it, becomes sound or visual depending on the perception. The interpreter of the painting, text or song allows an interartistic transformation into a continuum … We insist on emphasizing that we mean the interartistic, since subject of the study is the relation between arts within the work we are examining at the moment, whether painting, literary text or song... The interartistic functions during this understanding by the interpreter solely in the case of art since it is inseparable part of the creative energy itself. This meaning of the semiosis is valid for each semiotic relation, whether historical or other, but since the meaning acquires intermedial expansion , it remains outside our scope of study, unless it serves to explain the complicated interartistic structures. If, for example, we examine a painting of Kandinski, we may perceive the colors as sounds. This means the representation changes depending on our perception.

The varied bonds, which the metaphor offers, are realized at the level of the Primary and the pure icon, because this is an undetermined condition of transformation. The perception of the representation (the primary) may be of a different kind – sound, visual, i.е. sound or visual icon with different kind of representation. The interpreter allows interartistic transformation into a single continuum … The hypoicon, which is something of the tertiary, allows incessant interpretation, where it itself becomes an interpreter. It is included in the process of receptive aesthetics, in the capacity of a work of art, which in its turn gives birth to another work of art.

The pyramid

All points of the pyramid symbolize the intersection, the commonness between the trichotomies of sign, established by Peirce (representation, object, interpreter). Therefore they may be perceived as a starting point for all elements of the sign (representation, object, interpreter). They become mutually replaceable. The representation is taken into a polyvalent context. The relation of the sign with its object describes exactly the ability of mutual replacement of the representation, object and interpreter. The pure icon falls into the category of the Primary and allows us to mentally envisage the configuration of the tangibly perceived image as a representation. If it is realized in the form of a hypoicon, which in its turn falls into the Tertiary and has the nature of a work of art, the latter, in its capacity as an interpreter, may give rise to the same sequencing. Whoever perceives the hypoicon, recognizes it as a starting point to another hypoicon (i. е. work of art). It appears like a representation offering a new configuration whose interpretation would trigger a new hypoicon, i.е. the interpretation, in its tertiary status, enables the open process of perception – creation, reading, writing. The process of perception is subordinate to the creative process, remains in the basis and proves the unity of the triad – representation, object, interpreter. The icon is unstable.

The metaphor

Peirce establishes three levels of iconism within the hypoicon, which are ranking as tertiary: the Image, the Diagram, the Metaphor, whose representative nature is imposed thanks to the relationships established between two representations in parallel.

Fisette expounds an idea about the metaphor, which we share, more precisely the idea about “ … the progress of the multitudes, which become more sophisticated ( in the exact meaning of this term the analysis allows a boundlessly open field of interpretation). Something, which is exceptional”, as he insists, “is the accumulation of features belonging to two ultimate categories – to the Primary, about the virtual character, and to the Tertiary, about the aspect of mediation.” Fisette continues: “This is the densest component, the most explosive component … considering the effects from the movements of the semiosis, which would have been potentially generated.” Therefore the observer of the work of art builds a complex of plans, which are layered. In his/her consciousness the continuum of meanings, which are mutually intersecting and layering, increases. The performed analysis of the relationship between the representations shows that during the examination of an abstract painting they are different. In the painting of Paul Klee, for example, the painter expresses the melodiousness with the help of vague and broken apart forms, which seem to emerge from the depths of the most concealed parts of the soul, to fade out and find privacy. The painted object becomes different through the representation, it is hard to distinguish at perception and it establishes many relations with the sign. The continuum is infinite. The representations are different and are abundant. In the course of their relations the invisible interartistic bonds are tied. They are the foundation of each new blending between the arts and contribute to the minutest (barely perceptible) virtual perception of this multidimensional nature of arts. The analysis may acquire a metaphorical expression in the wider sense as well, i. е. Seeking metaphors of this kind may take place inside (within) the virtual sign. Because we are interested in the relation between the representations (showing the different representations in the process of interpretation of a given work of art), which is what the metaphor actually is, and not so much the individual representations by themselves. The representations are numerous thanks to the polyvalent interpretation of the observation of the painting or reading of the text. It is necessary to provide a greater proof. If proven at a higher level, during a successive stage of the analysis, effects from layering may be found also among the representations of the different arts and their mutual fusion in a particular field of art.

The metaphor of Peirce, as he perceives it and expounds it in his theory, is most consistent with our understanding of the interartistic phenomenon, because it reflects it in the definition, which the semiotic gives it – remarkable upon the transfer in an exceptional way particularly of the idea of arts communication, and more precisely of the principle ratio between the two virtual intermedial realities, taken in the broader sense.

Metaphor is a milestone stage in the process of achievement of a polyvalent interpretation of the sign, requiring the discovery of the cosmic space and time and their meeting point, which allows the weaving and crossing of abstract realities. Semiosis is dynamised, since it expands its field of study and puts aesthetic creativity in motion.

It is only through metaphor that the field expands to several trends and at least two realities layer up: “… the ones, which have a representative nature of representation, showing a comparison into something else, are metaphors.” A representation assumes all kinds of aspects in different contexts, hence the interpretations ad infinitum within a third field of art. Such representation, for example, is the leitmotif of the song of jazz in the novel The Nausea of Sartre:

One of these days

You’ll miss me honey

It exists concurrently as a song and as text in interartistic parallel. The representation has the ability to multiply infinitesimally. And something else, a literary citation may be a picture with words, a song, and at the same time poetry, etc. Thus, the interartistic metaphor, becoming more and more impregnated, is gradually amplified by the intensiveness of the spectrum of interpretation. The metaphor, as well as the semiotics of Peirce, is studied in its abilities to interpret the literary text .

The literary text, in its capacity of representation of the object in reality (immediate or dynamic), becomes the interpreter of a given painting, and in its turn, in its capacity of representation of the literary text, the latter is transformed into an interpreter of a given music and so on, in line with the context we are in and the immediate object, which is contextual. We are witnesses of a number of representations, obeying a timeless and spaceless axis, fully emotionally dependent on the art, from which it was extracted. The object is unreal; it is from the realm of the imaginary. Its level of functionality is variable. In the abstract art polyvalence would reach its highest level of fiction.

While situated in the field of a given art, we shall interpret the representation of the artistic object in question – for example a text presenting an image. The literary text, in the end, will always be text, no matter how much we interpret it as melody or painting. Although on the contrary, if we interpret it in a symbolic way, i.е. in a biblical way, and if we refer to the text of Saint Paul about the Only Spirit – the Holy Spirit, applicable to any gift and to the relationship between gifts, we could give a biblical interpretation to the triangle of Peirce. This is how the points of view of science and the Bible meet, the semiotic and the symbolic, which are one whole. What actually occupies us in this study is the invisible aspect of the question, the immaterial, the form, which are in the foundation of everything. This biblical optic enables us to enlarge the frame of interpretation, from the point of view of pure form, and to include any science, which is mutually replaceable by form and subject with the ones of the other art, with what the first art has entered into relation.

Cassirer – The Divine and the Symbolic Form

Speech is rendering meaning through notions. Owing to it people have the opportunity the understand each other, it is the core of all intellectual realities of man. Intuition, thanks to which we perceive the world in different ways, is caused by the creative mindset. The immediate contact with reality is recreated through art, and not through speech. The Supersensitive, the Divine in art is one of the forms of the boundless Spirit. Art communicates the idea of sensitivity. This is one of the reasons why we may claim that each great piece of work is untranslatable and could never have an equivalent, therefore interpretation invites creation. What is more, according to Cassirer, each piece of work of this scale gives a different interpretation of nature, regardless of the art to which it belongs. The poetic and lyrical in language are qualities, which normal speech does not have. The vision of reality is dynamic. It prompts us to creation, to express the emotional, to the sublime. Intuition and individuality in art are its inherent aspects. Poetical speech is incompatible with normal speech as far as art is concerned. The poet creates her/his work similar to the sculptor who shapes the stone every time in an original and exquisite way: “The works of every great poet in a sense may be compared to the creation of the alchemist who is trying to find the philosopher’s stone. … the poet must convert the ordinary metal of the everyday language into the gold of poetry… This becomes possible only with the help of the special gift the poet has to transform the abstract and ordinary words of everyday language into the recesses of her poetic imagination and to spurt them out, giving them a new shape … Art does not deceive is with the help of a conventional fabrication of words and images. It enthralls us, introducing us to its own world, the world of pure forms. Such is the real power that we find in each great genius of art.”

When Cassirer deepens his study of the work of art in “Speech and Art II,” he poses the problem of the ultimate Creation of the World, which Peirce also examines. This is an issue of extreme importance due to its fundamental genesis and creative activity. He transfers the idea of the open work of Divine creation (the creation of the world), which is forever unfinished, on the work of art. According to Peirce , God is the one who creates the World and the World itself is in a constant process of development.

The work of art is incomplete, even when finished. It remains open, because it preserves its symbolic foundation, which gives rise to successive interpretations and creative sequences, lead by Divine inspiration. Cassirer expounds the idea of the constant effort, which the human spirit devotes. He describes this movement as stages of purposefulness. Each subsequent step leads to the idea of development, of the glory of spirit.

Human culture is the realization of this progressive objectifying of human experience. Wit the help of reason (logos in Greek) we organize this human experience, which is reproduced owing to speech and art. The reflective behavior towards reality is expressed by the words of soul. The process of reasoning, “ … includes the constant use of mythical or religious, speech, art, or scientific symbols.” With the help of mythical thought man initially comes close to nature. He starts to differentiate between scientific and poetic language. The latter “ imaginary, … metaphoric speech seems to be tightly linked to the fundamental function of mythical thought.” Speech, in principle, is the essence of all intellectual and intuitive activities, but it is not the only one : “ Actually there is another symbolic world, beyond speech, beyond the speech symbols. This world is the world of art– of music and poetry, of painting, of sculpture or architecture. Speech allows us for the first time to get in touch with the world of notions.” Despite, “ During the primitive eras of human culture, this poetic and metaphoric characteristic of speech seems to have advantage over its logical, “ discourse” characteristic– poetry is the primary language of humanity …” What is even more typical and common between speech and art (we include also poetic speech), is that they do not reproduce reality in a mimicking way. Speech and art are forms by nature. Solely speech leads to the abstract and to summary, to the creation of notions, which in its turn leads to the creation of scientific speech; while art is pure intuition, the exact opposite of it (including poetic speech). Cassirer makes classification of the sensitive perceptions and presents individual intuition: “ With art we do not frame the world notionally, we present it through senses ... Art is not a reproduction of impressions; it is the creation of forms. These forms are not abstract, but sensitive.” The artist watches, and the creation, born owing to aesthetic observation, is a new, decisive stage of the general objectifying process. Cassirer refers to the thought of Kant :…” beauty is what we like in pure observation.”… “ The realm of art is a realm of pure form”. This is so, because the symbolic area most closely approximates pure form, the signifier, which is in the core of the work due to the abundance of Spirit, modeling the work. In a fit of antistructuralism, Cassirer claims “ We may say in a sense that art is speech, but speech in a very specific sense. This is not a speech of word symbols, but of intuitive symbols. The one who doesn’t understand these intuitive symbols, who cannot feel the life of colors, of figures, forms and space motives, harmony and melody, remains outside the work of art– and in this sense she/he is not only deprived of aesthetic pleasure, but loses access to one of the most profound aspects of reality.”

Biblical origin

The most powerful point when the symbolic, biblical and semiotic meet, is the point when Cassirer explains the connection of art with myth – its origin. Therefore art always remains linked to the power of the mythical and religious thought: “ Only with great artists – Dante and Milton, in Messa by Bach or the Sistine Chapel by Michelangelo – do we feel this power in its full strength. The most prominent modern creators still feel this drawing force of the mythical world, captured by despair for paradise lost.” Cassirer believes that myth and art live in a world of their own, and not in the physical world. The spiritual world wraps around them. To use a maxim, if myth objectifies the imaginary, then art is an intuitive process of contemplation, language and science recreate the world conceptually. According to Cassirer art establishes a balance between powerful imagination, which is prevalent in myth and the more and more abstract conceptualization of scientific language. These opposing trends reach equilibrium in art. The genius [spirit], according to Kant’s definition, which Cassirer formulates, “ … is the one that achieves full harmony and equilibrium of all faculties of the spirit.” The essence of genius is such that it does not need scientific instruction, but we may derive ideas from its works, which find scientific explanation and correspond to notions, so that we can transfer them to others. Cassirer’s mind goes even further– he comments on the reasoning of Goethe about the invisible presence of God, which we support, with regards to art: “ The real thing, or what matches it, the Divine, cannot be sensed directly: we feel it circuitously, through an example, symbol, on the secondary level this is an individual phenomenon.” A thesis, which one more time proves that the Divine is at the source. It is the foundation and it expresses the artistic in a spiritual and pure form, which may be communicated through the content.

Distinctive features of the artistic symbolic form

The symbolic form consists of energy of spirit carrying meaning, since it is related to a sign, to which spiritual meaning belongs. Art possesses a specific spiritual energy, and hence it represents a peculiar rung of human knowledge. We shall provide the following argument: the symbolic form is perceived from a phenomenological point of view. Cassirer claims that each position of a part (of consciousness) contains a position of the whole. Since symbolic forms are divided into several wholes, they are based on a unifying center of the signifier, which includes them in a whole. Consciousness as something experienced, acquires the image of a relationships structure, i. е. one related to the structure of consciousness as a whole. Thus the different symbols emerge as a relation, but each one has its own specifics. They are situated in time and space, and at the point of intersection of the latter two. Each relationship structure, such as is the symbol linked to a given content, is part of the global transcendental structure adopted in the space-time interference with interartistic nature, i.е. timeless, where time and space have no bounds, but for a single second a whole eternity may be experienced with interartistic relationships. As a whole they are different by type from the intermedial, but are defined in the space-time context. In this case the Self is the starting point, which conscience concentrates into a special focus to define the particular interpretation. The global as spiritual energy combines the process of configurations in art, therefore inside in the symbolic form itself. Therefore we may talk about interartistic phenomenon, modeled by different relations abundant in many respects but still remaining concentrated in a single fundamental center– the signifier, regardless of their configurations. Symbol is a relation, therefore the interartistic phenomenon is a symbol expressed on energy level.

The proximity or line of succession in the ideas of Kant, Peirce and Cassirer, intimated by Wildgren , explains the symbolic form under the prism of Peirce’s semiotics of the interpreter and the boundless semiosis. The symbolic, biblical, scientific and semiotic interferences pursue one and the same center from various points of view.

Under a single polyvalent point of view we may examine one and the same phenomenon interpreting the relation of arts in particular. Our opinion runs alongside Wildgren’s and may be further elaborated more precisely in the area of art. We are talking about confronting perception that consciousness carries out at a given moment against a certain topos with regards to the creative object, which leads to the emergence of a particular symbolic form.

The phenomenon, which consciousness analyses during the interartistic perception, is transformed each time when a new observer or listener rests their eyes on a painting or text, hears the music and imagines the images in their consciousness. This is so since the symbolic form that materializes, like the interpreter of Peirce, preserves its nature of spiritual energy, spilling over in all directions, but on the other hand giving to each new perception of the painting a different interpretation, changing the configuration of context in the imagination of the receiver, i.e. always produces a different effect. Thus it becomes the embryo of a new creation.

The artistic space and time

Cassirer poses the problem about space in art as a whole and its connection to spatiality with an art and a work of art taken separately. He examines this type of connection once again with regards to the part of the whole, in order to draw the same conclusion. Intuition is put in the foreground and therefore the combination of colors and geometric stylization give rise to the idea of contrast of the painting space and thence aesthetic as compared to the scientific (cf. “Mythical space, aesthetic space and theoretical space”). It guides the creator during the depiction in painting or literature, or in music, at the time of placing the space-time frame, the contrasting and sequence of events, in interdependence, regardless of whether the image is figurative or abstract. Therefore art possesses the property to model, due to its intuitive nature. When the creator produces its work, we may talk about intuitive objectifying. Because intuition directs creative activity. The space-time movement, which is sketched little by little and constructed in the scope of a cathedral, or sounded through singing, obeys the intuitive modus, which prevails and owing to which works are pieced together. Strange is the feeling of when we look at the work piece and see it in its pure intuitive forms. The contemplation of Kant, the catharsis of Aristotle, all are definitions and illustrations of the feeling and sense released during the artistic excitement that forces us towards spiritual realms, “Beyond the oblivion” of the daily routine. In that instance the normal time and space lose their contours until recreated as new ones, but less clear-cut and more blurred, supernatural. The spiritual eternity where in that instance they meet, leads to the Divine creation. This is the rationale that causes Cassirer to explain that ordinary time and space, and the objects, are not symbolic forms. The symbolic form has the function to unite in its capacity as a founding existence, related to the origin of things, the creative spark and the perception of the work. The division into various symbolic forms is preceded by a pre-existing phase, which summarizes at a higher level this miscellaneous multitude of fields.

The pure form

Cassirer believes that art, like speech, must walk the way towards imitation of the pure symbol. Art leads to the realm of pure form. Symbolism is elevated to pure meaning. Leonardo in his “Treatise on the Art of Painting” believes that art must struggle for the perfection of nature, thus reaching pure symbolism: “ The Divine nature of painting makes the spirit of the artist transform into the image of the Holy Spirit, because it freely succumbs to the creation of different spaces.” Therefore the desire of Cassirer is to build in depth the symbolic system that Leonardo reproduces into creative synthesis, and recreates into an emblem the overall expounding of the issue so far. This idea, fully expressing the antimimetic, significant in art, is imposed by Kant when he compares art and nature. It is rather the birth of a new form of creation that acquires significance: “ Nature was beautiful when it looked like art at the same time; while art may be called exquisite only if we have the consciousness that it is art, and it still looks to us like nature.” Cassirer searches to globalize the idea of the spiritual in order to reach the essence of scientific knowledge. The more figurative art departs from the image, the more abstract art on the other hand approaches the pure form of art. The connection between reality and art becomes closer and closer since pure form unites them. They do not cease to evolve in a constant movement. Therefore the mutual complementing between the symbolic forms is due more precisely to the pure characteristic of form.

Divine Love and Gifts

Nicole Everert – Desmedt refers to Anderson’s research (1987), studying the comparison between science and God with respect to art. She compares the stages between scientific proof and the creation of the work– a link, which constantly arouses interest nowadays. Everert – Desmedt examines more precisely three stages corresponding to the primary, the secondary and the tertiary, which characterize the birth of a given creation. The primary exists in vagueness, in chaos, and this reminds of the creative experience of the creator, mentally carries us to the boundless regions of God. The secondary reaches perfection. While with the tertiary the end is never reached, it always remains open, because creation requires succession. Even till now God has not revealed Himself in full, likewise the creation may always be complemented. We arrive to the bond of first importance: God hands over to the creator with love His gift to create and participate in the evolvement of the Universal Spirit. Therefore each work of art, through its perception, gives rise to another, which is handed over with love and increases knowledge. Close to the verse about gifts of Apostle Paul and in unison with it is the verse about love; they are even bound in art. The verses about love follow the revelation about gifts. Eco is sensitive to the charm of the indescribable of each creature, to which God with love inspires gift to use to make the world better as it has to be. He sees the inseparable bond between Divine love and the gift we are bestowed. Just like in the Gospel of Apostle St. Paul, they are next to each other in unison, which is not arbitrary: “The eternal prototypes, the everlasting reasons for all that exists, the creation of Speech, all surviving by the breath of Love, sow blessings in the darkness of the primary chaos with the help of their creative gifts”

It is precisely the concentrating over particular time-space relations of the intuitive cognition within any work of art that gives birth to the interartistic phenomenon which, depending on the interpretation, initiates the creation of a new piece whose nature is interartistic. Every single art in a unique way enters into dialogue with the rest of arts, because each art by itself is unique.

The interartistic phenomenon may be applied to any work of art, which touches several arts. The total structure, which combines all arts, this absent structure, which is hunted along the border between the signs, can be found in each work of art. It is the component, which gives a complete, unique sparkle to the creation.