Babich-Aesthetics of the Between

7/29/2019 Babich-Aesthetics of the Between

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Jeff KoonsBourgeois Bust-Jeffand /lona, 1991(Made in Heaven)

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Babette Babich, The Aesthetics of the Between: On Space and Beauty.

In: Vinzenz Brinkmann, Matthias Ulrich, and Joachim Pissarro, eds. Jeff Koons. The

Sculptor (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2012), pp. 50, 58-69.


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THE AESTHETICS OF THE BETWEENON SPACE AN 0 BEAUTYBabette Babich

Phen omenological aesthetics invites the viewer to pay attention to his or her own experience,judging, so Immanuel Kant observes, that others share th i s experience. " Isn't that beautifu l l "A phenomenological aesthetics articulates obj ective subjectivity, always from the first-personperspective. Phenomenologically, the "I" is what linguists call a shifter: the reference in everyca se depends upon the one who speaks.

As I stand, you stand . As I claim, you claim objectivity, insisting as you do upon the difference of your own perception-"Stand here, instead!" A phenomenological aesthetics is thusalways perspectival. In this way, we explore the aesthetics of the between as the dynamic ofengagement between subject and object of experience, reflection , knowledge . In question isthe between of the encounter, the between as it is met. The locus fo r our investigation here isthe museum, bu t it can also be a courtyard or a garden, a boulevard. And in an importantsense, it is also the nowhere, the non-there ubiquity of being online, being "on" Facebook,being "on" Twitter.

I stand between the where, where I find myself, and the there of the there of al l that isaround me.

Space.I can feel the around ; I feel the nothing of the emptiness between me and a given object.

As I draw closer to a wall, a gate, any boundary marking, even a velvet rope, I am faced with,confronted by, what is near me. I begin to catch sight of distance-and as Martin Heideggerreminds us, as Aristotle had already observed, echoing Homer: the nearer I am to things, themore perspicuity seems to suffer. We do not, we cannot, see things whole that are too close.Coming still closer to the wall I can, even if I do not, touch it . Thus the visual sense begins toborder the haptic , the sense of touch. As I draw near to a painting in a museum , I begin toplace myself- I am warned not to touch-to situate myself. And Heidegger is right when herepeats Aristotle'S reflections on proportion: I need to take a step back if I wish to see thepainting whole, if I ambition, and here I give myself away, to see it "as it is ."

There is where I am; there is where the painting is.Stand here, the ar t expert tells us; listen to Rudolf Arnheim , expert on ar t and vision and

perception as thinking, and note that it is best seen from this position. There are those who,violating their art-history backgrounds, nevertheless insist on creeping closer than they"should." Indeed, the museum visitor, precisely where the quotidian is what dulls the expert,is able to marvel at the surface of the artist's work, the working ofthe artwork. See! The paintis thick here; there colors change in hue.There one sees the texture of different surfaces thatvanish into the work's distance , matt board, canvas, wood. The proper form of the work withdraws, as Arnheim reminds us , like Kant, like Heidegger-it does not announce itself as form .

Walking in the presence of sculpture, things are immediately different: I am on edge. Nam-ing sculpture "an instance of frameless art," Arnheim reminds us that "the figure determinesits own fulcrum. " What is around me, where do I find myself? Phenomenologically regarded , Iam attuned to the where. There is balance ; there is mimesi s. I am mirrored by, taken by thisstatue, brought into its place, into my own space: here and there. All of this presupposes somepresence of self, to self ; al l ofthis presupposes the dynamic of the visit and the visitors aroundone , a grou pled li ke a crew of trai ned seals by a docent barki ng the truth; a pai r of lovers mo reintrigued by one another than by anything around them, laugh ing at this and then at that,catching joy, sometimes, infectious to those around them, sometimes merely embarrassing.

And there is more than that .There is what Arnheim , quoting Rudolf Otto, calls the mysterium tremendum. This phe-

nomen ological aesthetic sense is the seeing that fo r Arnheim-after Friedrich Nietzsche,after Martin Heidegger, after Edmund Husserl- is always also a thinking .63


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How do you find yourself in your world? What happens to you "in" a church, wanderingdown a city boulevard , exploring a museum?

This play with space and the playing of space on the observer is one of the reasons onepopular philosopher has issued a call for "temples for atheists ," as if museums were not already such temples. As if shopping malls were not such temples, as if our public squareswere not already such temples. Where indeed can we not find them today?

Temples fo r atheists? Las Vegas is full of them.The phenomenological philosopher of aesthetics , Giuseppina Moneta, reflects on " forms

of emptiness." These forms are seen in " the shaped spaces designed by human dwelling andthe architecture of al l ages, cristalli di rocca, as Andrea Palladio called them, more solid thanvolumes." As Moneta recalls, these "spaces speak in between columns in the Greek temple,in the vaulted vacuum of the Roman arch, in the rhythmic emptiness of the baroque."

Perhaps the most dynamic experience of visiting a museum is the space, the space whereyou find you rself in thattemple in the midst of the everyday, the space of the between. Theseare not just the spaces of temporal intervals, the time of our lives . Rather, these are spacesbetween yourself and the display, and, in the case of a special exhibit, the space betweenthat special exhibit and the visited space. What is always there to be seen wins new l ight andone sees it as if for the first time.

Nor is the visitor supererogatory. As Walter Benjamin's analysis of the floneur shows, thevisitor, too , is part of the where, is part of the there. Thus we recall Walter Benjamin's reflectionon Charles Baudelaire-and this is an importantly romantic theme: "Empathy is the natureof the intoxication to which the flOneur abandons himself in the crowd . . . . Like those rovingsouls in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes."

The f l6neurtakes, as Benjamin writes, the very notion of marketability, self-marketability,fo r a stroll. Thus some go to galleries and to museums, for love, for beauty, for the erotic , asbeauty is the promise of happiness. Thus Alexander Nehamas quotes Nietzsche, who accordingly gives Nehamas's book it s punch inasmuch as Nietzsche quotes Stendhal in justthis erotic direction, contra the same Arthur Schopenhauer and the same Kant Nehamas engages. Out for the day, attuned to culture, one is up for the experience or life of the spectacle.Thus the visitor, too, like the goods in a wi ndow display or car or fu rniture showroom, is thereto be seen. And how better-this is the lonely-heart's advice-to find a like-minded friend orcompanion? Or as a Twitter colleague in Manchester cried, " I look fucking sexy' Anyone wannago look at ar t this afternoon maybe? In London." Indeed, such an association is perhaps themost immediate effect of art, if also the most conflicted, as Alexander Nehamas carefullydissects this point: "The erotic has always been essential to our love of the arts, but, forcomplicated reasons, it has come to seem deeply inappropriate."KOONS AND THE CLASSICAL AESTHETICJeff Koons (*1955) is difficult to classify. Part of the problem has to do with the same classificatory tension that makes exhibiting his work such a performative event. The museum itselfbecomes the working of the work. Koons's work works against, with, in dialogue with itsspaces. At the very least, this brings those same spaces into relief. It does something morethan this, however, because what Koons's work can do is to remind us of several sculptors,perhaps with the exception of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Alberto Giacometti (19011966), but also Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), that is, to bring us to think about what it isthat a sculptural work of art does. One could argue that this is David Hockney's (*1937) ambition for himself.

What Koons does that is perhaps most significant is that he does not make his work himself: he is the artist, not the fab ricator; there is in th s case no poi nt to a particu lar in sc ri pti on,an N.N. fecit. There is, as there was with Rembrandt (1606-1669), and Tilman Riemenschneider(1460-1531 ), and indeed with Polyclitus, a workshop, an entire factory of workers.

Who is the artist? Good question . We began by pointing out that the question of the spaceof the artwork is similarly relevant. What does one visit the Liebieghaus to see? What doesone see when one visits New York's Frick Col lection? Versailles? And there is an exact parallelto the question, still more difficult, differently difficult: what does one see when one travelsto Colmar to visit a Gruenewald on site? What is the site?64


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This is the question that makes a Martin Heidegger different fo r his part on the theme ofthe Sistine Madonna than many ar t historians on the same issue. For Heidegger, notoriouslyand seemingly reactionary, the claim is that "The Sistine Madonna belongs in the church ofPiacenza, not in a historico-antiquarian sense, bu t with respect to its pictorial essence. Inaccordance with this, the picture will always long to be there." Heidegger's claim is always acrucially, critically local claim, a claim of place, of the world-historical playing together oftime and space (Zeit-Spiel-Raumes).

We get some of this play of space and time in Koons.Although Koons's work lends itself to a certain comparison to the classical, such as mostpatently his Bourgeois Bust-Jef f and Ilona (ill. 1) from his series Made in Heaven (1991), any

such parallel cannot but be postmodern: one creates in homage to another world; a decidedlywhite world. In fact, as we continue to be bowled over by Antonio Canova (1757-1822) or absorbed by the Classicist era (or else by the late-Renaissance Benvenuto Cellini) , we are, likethe ancients, and should be moved by a different sensibility: such as, for example, what to usis probably the most unfamiliar world of antiquity, which is lost to us. Thus, we are confusedby what we imagine it to be and what it once was . As Friedrich Nietzsche warns us , we shouldbe on our guard against our inclination "to over-Hellenize the Hellene and conjure up fo r ourselves a work of ar t that was never at home anywhere in al l the world."

We know that the marble copies of the Doryphoros of Polyclitus (ill. 3)-so influential,even in antiquity, that it is supposed to exemplify the proportionality of the sculptural "canon"as such (although it is also argued that "the" Canon refers to a specific statue)-are copiesof a bronze. The original Doryphoros looked nothing like the marble Roman copies, as wehave them and admire them in Naples and in Minneapolis, and so on. Modern bronze reconstructions attempt (with less success in recent years) to give a sense of the original, as canbe seen in Georg Romer's now destroyed reconstruction of the Doryphoros in Munich (ill. 4) .Perhaps it is significant that the contemporary reconstruction of Romer's original and nowlost reconstruction is less successful than was his effort, as if all copying were condemnedto a loss of resolution, certainly a failure of resolve.

Indeed, Koons's 1988 Michael Jackson and Bubbles (ill. 5) with its colors of ivory and gold,comes vastly closer to antiquity, not unlike Antonio Canova's Paolino Borghese (ill. 2) -if oneconsiders no t the marble figure but the gold border and tassels of the couch on which shereclines. So, too, does the forty-two foot Athena Parthenos (ill . 6) by Koons's contemporary,the American sculptor Alan LeQuire, publicly commissioned and begun in 1982. We do well,while we are on this metonymic subject, to note in this age of high capital speculation, in theage of ar t as what sells and can be sold and thus of art as investment, that this same publiccommissioning fo r the interior of the civic project of the recreation of the Parthenon inNashville makes LeQuire's monumental sculpture ye t more convergent with the mores ofstatuary in antiqui ty. Where Koons works in the medium of porce lain and gold, LeQuire modeledhis Athena in clay and cast it in gypsum assembled on a steel armature, no t of gold and ivorylike Phidias's original statue, where cost, among other limitations, did prohibit a completereproduction of the ancient chryselephantine statue.

When it comes to the sculptures of antiquity we have trouble thinking of them in color, le talone mixed media, although Canova himself was well aware that this material dynamic andcounterpoise was characteristic of ancient sculpture and it is reflected in his work, most notably his La Maddalena Penitente (ill. 9).And it is indeed the color of ancient sculpture, no matter whether in wood or marble orterra cotta or bronze, et cetera, that tends to elude us. What is worth reflecting is that nomatter how often scholars tell us of the rich and even garish intensity of ancient works ofsculptural art, we continue to be reluctant to associate color, especially rich and vibrantcolor, with ancient Greek sculpture (ill. 7).

Lilac.Actually : magenta . This is the putative color of Koons's Balloon Dog (ill. 10), made of high

chromium stainless steel and recently, wonderfully exhibited at Versailles . It is al l about thecontrast.

Not the color of the blossom, a tonality of color, as one sees the flower itself and one thatalmost inevitably carries the scent of spring along with it, Koons's magenta is of the gleaming,65


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2Antonio CanovaPaolino Borghese, 1805-1808Galleria Borghese, Rom / Rome

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5Jeff KoonsMichael Jackson and Bubbles, 1988(Banality)

6Alain LeQuireRekonstruktion der Athena Partheno s des Phidias /Reconstruction of the Athena Parthenos of Phidias, 2002The Parthenon, Nashville

7Panzertorso, um 470 v. Chr., Akropolismuseum, Athen /Cuirassed Torso, ca. 470 BC , Ac ropolis Museum, AthensFarbrekonstruktion B des Panzertorso /Color Reconstruction B of the Cuirassed Torso, 2005Stiftung Archaologie, Munchen / Munich

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8Antoni o Ca novaAmor und land Psyc he, 1788-1793 Musee du Lou vre, Pari s

Anto nio CanovaLa Maddalena Penite nt e, 1796 Palazzo Bianco delle St rad e Nuove, Genua / Genoa

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10Jeff KoonsBalloon Dog (Magenta), 1994-2000(Celebration)Installa tion sansicht! Installation view, Salon d'Hercule,Chateau de Versailles, 2008

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metallic kind, evocative of middle-class birthday parties for young children, parties thatcome complete with a balloon twister who works his magic as a clown, a poet of spatial form.

Koons, too, is such a poet, and he sees such spatial poetry in the balloons any child'sparty entertainer can make by the dozens or else, in Koons's case, writ large like the Mylarballoons, massive floating airships, that grace New York City's annual Macy's ThanksgivingDay Parade.

This recidivist Classicism is the point Nietzsche was already highlighting in 1870 as he reminded his audience in Basel of the then already-well-known (this was his point) vision ofantiquity, highlighting the resistance to its reception, "Was it not until recently seen to be anunconditional artistic axiom that al l ideal plastic ar t had to be colorless, that ancient sculpturedid not permit the application of color?"

Public perception, including the ar t historians and professors of aesthetics themselves,tends to revert to the "classic" view of antiquity. Nietzsche himself goes on, using a Homericmetaphor, to contrast the man of marble with the man of gold: naming "golden" humanity to gether with the October sun as "Goethean ." Here Nietzsche alludes to the statue within, theinner ideal of what he here calls "ancient humanity," articulated by way of " the coloredsplendor of that old master" (ill. 7) .

Nietzsche, of course, is the anti-classicist classical philologist par excellence. And thisstatus makes him a fitting thinker to inaugurate the twentieth century with his death in 1900.But where do we find ourselves now, in the twenty-first century? How do we see statues andhow do we see color?THERE is NO PLACE THAT DOES NOT SEE YOU

.. for here there is no place that does not see you.You must change your life."Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo seems written to emphasize the mimetic claim of the statue.One is engaged by the torso, by the head one cannot know, the eyes one cannot see thatnonetheless underscore that one is seen. In the museum, even if the task in question is fo ryou to see, one seems to be more than a subject observing, but also a subject and sometimeseven an object seen.

Hans-Georg Gadamer foregrounds this same poem in his discussion of the exemplarity ofthe work as the very that, the sheer fact that, as Rilke writes, "once such a thing stood"among mortal, changeable, human beings. Gadamer echoes both Heidegger and Nietzsche,who fo r their part also echo Friedrich Hblderlin for this archaic claim.

Thus, in a telling section of his iconically beautiful Only a Promise of Happiness : The Placeof Beauty in a World of Art, Alexander Nehamas reflects that "the pleasure of making a newacquaintance may seem an anemic parallel to the fervid power of art. Imagine yourself, then,on a street, in a restaurant or a gallery, at a party, during a lecture, a concert, or a game. Youcast your eyes around, recognizing perhaps some people you know, stopping for a moment toglance at an outfit or two, lingering when you notice people talking to one another, distinguishing, so to speak, foreground from background, those you are explicitly aware of fromothers who mean nothingto you. And then, al l of a sudden, everything becomes backgroundeverything but a pair of eyes, a face, a body, pushing the rest ou t of your field of vision andgiving you a moment of awe and a shock of delight, perhaps even passionate longing. For amoment, at least , you are looking at beauty."

Nehamas's book concerns the friends one makes with the gallery itself, with its objects towhich one returns, with those who visit the gallery, a kind of non-BenjaminianArcades Project,as one wanders, seeing the items on display, seeing the visitors seeing the same, seeing different items. Where do they stay? Where do they go?

The point here is to remind us that the risk that goes along with what it is to look at beautyis also a reticence : " perhaps out of shyness or fear of rejection," or-and here Nehamas is atouch more sensitive than Jacques Derrida (at least as some of his more enthusiastic followershave read Derrida on the topic of friendship and its promises)-"perhaps out of concern fo r66


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the feelings of others." It is enough to take note of what Plato means, what Aristotle meansby the desire to know, the scopic urge "to keep looking" turns out for Alexander to be "aneffort to learn what can be known about you from a distance," and it is this that becomes "adesire to draw near, to look and talk and get to know you better from up close."

We match ourselves to one another, and this, too, belongs to the aesthetics ofthe between.I recall a long conversation, a long time ago between Ale xander Nehamas and myself. Therewas talk of Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, literature, sculpture, and a bit of the politics of philosophy, analytic (Alexander), continental (myself). And there was the promise of happiness.

Everyone who has come to have a friend or lover has a similar story to tell. The point, Ne -hamas's point is that something starts a friendship, and that something we call beauty.Beauty catches us, it compels our attention, claims our presence, even if, even when wecannot find time fo r it .

Gadamer points to just this impatience in his The Relevance of the Beautiful, where in theprogression of souls and the turning ofthe cosmos in it s great year, in place of the chaotic in -constancy characterizing "our so-called experience of the world down here on earth, we per-ceive the true constants and unchanging patterns of being. But while the gods surrenderthemselves totally to the vision of the true world in this encounter, our human souls are distracted because of their unruly natures. They can only cast a momentary and passing glanceat the eternal orders, since their vision is clouded by sensuous desire . . . . These are soulswho, so to speak, have lost their wings."That is why Plato's Phaedrus is as powerful as it is with it s appeal to the seductive claimsof the lover, betraying both the vanity and the fears of the beloved (Alexander also talks aboutsuch anxieties), but withal, Plato sidesteps both the seductive claim and the anxious concernto highlight what beauty is able to do fo r us in the service of the good. For Gadamer, this isthe heart of astonishment, the mortal intimation of what might yet last or endure: the verythat, as the poet says, that "something can be held in our hesitant stay." We , who come toolate, as Holderlin also reminds us, are consummate, as it turns out, in nothing so much as ourinability to be-this is where the eastern philosophers find us vulnerable-to be still, towait. Beauty catches us in our impatience. It is the one thing that can, as Gadamer says withNehamas, after Plato, cause our wings to grow again (ill. 8).

For Nehamas, Stendhal's promissory word is the key here. Thus the "experience of beautyis inseparable from interpretation, and just as beauty always promises more than it has sofar, so interpretation, the effort to understand what it promises, is always a work in progress."SU PERFICIALITI ES: SKI NThe reflective element is key to ancient Greek art, both literally and mimetically, interpretively,hermeneutically, the last in the spirit of Nehamas as we quoted him above, whose book subtit led The Place of Beauty in the World ofArt is, as we have seen, al l about reminding us thatcontra Kant and Schopenhauer, and specifically contra Susan Sontag's claim that "In placeof hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art," it is essential to remember that " hermeneuticsand erotics, as Plato knew, do not exclude one another."

The literally reflective element was also part of that and it is this, together with color as itis related to these same surface values, that so often goes missing. In the case of the Greeksthis tends to be overlooked, because what remains to us today is not as it was when it wasfirst made , and Aristotle makes much ofthis difference even from the start, along with Platoand Pliny too in his Natural History. The significance of the first skin of new bronze or newsilver, before the air begins to interact with and to transform the look of bronze or silver, th esurface of gleaming metal is a subject of discussion, witness to which can be found in theextraordinary significance of "polishers" employed by the city, whose function was to poli sh -a cosmetic kind of dermabrasion-public statues.

Koons's work gives us important variations on the surfaces of materials in our day, not onlyin marble , bu t also in a chromatic array of glass; yellow, blue, violet, lurid plastic; and intenselylifelike polychromed wood; bu t also in porcelain, as we have seen with Michael Jackson andBubbles as well as in hi s 1987 Kiepenkerl (plate p. 133), stainless steel itself: the last sculpturebeing a high metallic reflection on the sculptor's traditional absorption with the folds of clothing, here a gleaming contradiction belying the rumpled roughness of a traveler's life.67


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Koons's inflatable balloons executed in metal are also realized beyond the essential valuetensile support, just where metal holds its own weight as stone does not. This is why the

be spoken of in the terms Moneta uses to speak of its "vaulted vacuum," andis why the arches of the gothic cathedral amaze when seen from within. But beyond this,

Constantin Brancusi is, of the difference that is made between theof the work of art and the way that ar t works on us, however reflective.

Indeed, Brancusi helps us to make this point: the same form is utterly transformed notia changes but also by color (i lls. 11, 12).

"The ja r was grey and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee." Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar

In the spirit of phenomenological aesthetics, we have been attending to the power of placement, the claim that things have over their world, a power as Heidegger would say, as Nietzsche would say for beings like ourselves, Da-sein, characterized by being there, by ou r beinghere as we find ourselves, fragmented or lost, thrown, scattered, dispersed, or solidly located,in place, at home, al l locative modalities and moods, as Heidegger reminds us: moods of placehat catch us up in time and placement, foundation, building or setting out or setting up, ispart of that, it is part of the poetic way, making, forming, instituting, that we beings on thisearth dwell on this earth in our lives, in the spaces in which we find ourselves, wherever wego.

Wallace Steven's glass jar, like a wreath or a flower arrangement, is an indication, pointingperhaps to no significance except that significance that it itself gives, precisely in what itdoes not give, yielding nothing "o f bird or bush," unlike the world around it , "like nothing elsein Tennessee."

Or, and this is related to such withhol.ding, meaning what any man-made object placed oreven discarded somewhere, anywhere: this made thing came to be, this object, and evenfound artwork can function in this way, shows or indicates the presence of others who makeand use or gather and find such things. Such signification is likewise not limited to humansonly, and animals, too, use placements as signs, some more specific some less specif icthink of bower birds, or the deliberate breaking of trees by elephants and primates, and soon. Or posturing if we recall that even the body can be poised and then we will have to includealmost all animals, down to lizard's stilting, down indeed to the smallest ant, as even antspose for one another. And so on.

For human beings, this we know, this we are, al l that is needed for outlining the entireworld is a jar, the placement of a rock on top of a mountain, telling oneself (mostly), tellingother climbers, here, once, was another.

If a ja r placed on a h ll can do th is, if a rock out of place, a rock set by a cli m ber to mark accession to a place, can do th is-what might Koons's sculptures do to the spaces around us?

The better question is always: what can we le t them do?

Bibliography- Arnheim, Rudolf. Ar t and VisualPerception: A Psychology of theCreative Eye. Berkeley, 1974.- Babich, Babette. "GreekBronze: Holding a Mirror to Life."Yearbook of the Irish PhilosophicalSociety. Volume 7 (2007), pp. 1-30.- Benjamin, Walter. The Writer ofModern Life: Essays on CharlesBaudelaire. Cambridge, MA, 2006.- Brinkmann, Vinzenz, andRaimund Wunsche, eds. BunteG6tter- Die Farbigkeit antikerSkulptur. Exh. cat. Glyptothek,Munich, et al. Munich, 2004.- Heidegger, Martin. "Uber dieSixtina" [1955].lnid.,Aus dieErfahrung des Denkens [19101976}. Frankfurt am Main, 1983, pp.119-121. - Moneta, Giussepina. "Profile." In Babette Babich, ed. From Phenomenology to Thought, Errancy, and Desire: Essays in Honor of William J. Richardson, S.J. Dord recht, 1995, pp. 205-207. - Nehamas, Alexander. Only the Promise of Happiness: The Place of Beauty in a World of Art. Prince ton, 2007. - Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische Studienausgabe. Berlin, 1980.

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11Constantin BrancusiMuse endormie, 1909Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden,Washington, DC

12Constantin BrancusiMuse endormie, 1910Centre Pompidou, Pari s

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Babich-Aesthetics of the Between