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Victor Sternweiler on the 61st International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia – titled by Koyo Kouoh. Visited and reviewed in mid May, 2026. _________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dear fellow porcile.org contributor Beniamino,

thank you for your quick recommendations for La Biennale di Venezia. I arrived with only a few opening-weekend posts as reference, and now, from Nice, with a little distance after days at the Cannes Film Festival, I am sending you my takes—or rather, what remained in my memory, as a psychoanalytic exercise.

Think of these notes as an appetizer—or a way to compare impressions once you see it yourself.

Giardini - national pavilions

I was greeted by origami steel deer by the Ukrainian Pavilion, otherwise located at the Arsenale.

At the Belgian Pavilion I saw Miet Warlop’s crew. I had recently seen her performance at HAU, One Song from 2022, which was very impressive—a hard to describe piece about the essence of theatricality, about acting, tempo, and what it means to be in sync in a collective performance. I also met her briefly there, and she told me she would stay in Venice until November and also perform herself, too. However, the HAU performance simply raised the bar too high for me.

At the Dutch Pavilion, there was an massive garage gate installed in front of the entrance. The pavilion seemed to operate according to a performance cycle every two hours or so, but I never managed to catch it properly. Once I finally did, it was postponed because somebody was sick. I am not sure whether this is the right thing to do at the Biennale: to open for five minutes every two hours, lock people in for twenty minutes, and then close again. It sounds cool, but perhaps it is a little too cool for school.

The Danish Pavilion a huge video installation by Maja Malou Lyse featured very high-profile porn stars, which was intriguing, though the installation itself felt oddly unresolved. Between the 360-degree projection and the ceiling, there was this awkward gap that looked quite ugly. The smaller second room felt like an afterthought, filled with smaller objects by the same artist. It had the strange feeling of walking from the “main exhibition” directly into the museum shop, as though one had just seen the major installation and was now being invited to buy the memorabilia. I am speaking, of course, as a collector.

The Russian Pavilion: a projection on a transparent surface covering the door, thus making the pavilion inaccessible. What a missed opportunity to create a buzz. 

The Japanese Pavilion by Ei Arakawa-Nash left me rather cold. Being there, I did not understand the fuss around the plastic babies that you are supposed to hold in your arms. The supposed emotional charge of the gesture did not quite reach me, as I grew up in a large family where there are constantly new babies to hold. I remained unimpressed.

The German Pavilion, with its temporary GDR Berlin façade by Sung Tieu, and especially Henrike Naumann’s art, was really good. Naumann’s green room is probably her magnum opus. It was everything she had done before, but brought to a more reflexive and complex level. She was no longer simply arranging objects in a room; she was dissecting them, opening them up.

I liked the Canadian Pavilion. Abbas Akhavan, whose art I tend to like, managed to work with the complicated architecture of the pavilion very well and installed a pool. It was inviting in that sense, as, like me, many people really wanted to stay around. As for the Nordic Countries Pavilion, the oversized (and perhaps disfigured?) sculptures by Tori Wrånes had an immense presence in their interplay with gravity. Most importantly, I liked the fact that the artist created dedicated clothing items that were equally original and, in my humble opinion, worthy of an haute couture show in themselves.

The Austrian Pavilion by Florentina Holzinger, on the other hand, was very impressive. During the opening weekend, from what I got from Instagram stories, the artist climbed up by rope to a bell, and the body became the gong. This time around her frequent collaborator climbed up, almost naked in the cold, performed with a physical intensity that was genuinely striking. Inside, there were further installations and machines processing feces, and other forms of theatrical gimmickry that were, as always, handled very convincingly. There was even someone performatively cleaning the space. Still, I cannot help feeling that she cannot shake off autobiographical references (Christianity, or Freud in A Year Without Summer) where similar motifs appeared. But despite all of that, the pavilion was absolutely worth seeing. The Spanish, Swiss, Czech, French, Hungarian, British (which always has excellent sound), Australian, Finish, Brazilian, Venetian, and Polish pavilions have mostly already slipped from my mind. The Greek Pavilion surprised me, though not entirely in a good way. It tried to reproduce something like an escape-room atmosphere, but it was so direct, so literal, that I could not detect much of an artistic gesture beyond the staging itself. It had potential, but it felt disappointing.

Giardini – central pavilion

Curated by Koyo Kouoh, on the right, it started with a reproduction of Duchamp’s Museum in a Box. More prominently, actually, there was Celia Vásquez Yui’s podium of fictional animals in clay, with geometrical patterns. I was also happy to see Tammy Nguyen’s art. She is one of the people behind Martha’s Quarterly, New York, which, in my opinion, is one of the hottest artist-publication collectives around. There were large-scale paintings by her, but the books felt underrepresented, to my very personal taste. I also discovered the art of Sabian Baumann, and especially liked the small clay sculptures. I saw Raed Yassin’s ‘Warhol of Arabia’.

Arsenale – main section

At the entrance to the Arsenale, the large 360-degree video installation, with its barely moving images, reminded me of the Pergamon Panorama in Berlin. It was a nice start to the tour, throwing you into darkness and making you find your way forward. I was surprised to see Nick Cave’s art, which seemed like art expensive to produce. I ran into Raed Yassin’s art again. I liked the art of the artist Nicholas Hlobo, which was a rubber-and-leather-sewn gigantic BDSM monster siren—that’s what fashion for sirens looks like. Next to it, by Rajni Perrera + Marigold Santos, there was that amazing clay sculpture of human-like, yet deformed, proportions, which had a clay mask. It was mounted on a 20 cm high platform and was surrounded by so many smaller objects. I thought it was very cool.

I was completely in love with Alfredo Jaar’s room-in-a-room. A great idea by the artist, and chapeau to the curators for making it happen. Carsten Höller (what a superstar!) you get it when you “see” it. His art can also be seen at Palazzo Diedo. Eric Baudelaire dissected his film Une fleur à la bouche from 2022, premiered at Berlinale #pirandello. I remember attending the premiere and Q&A, which was excellent. I’m still in awe of his film The Ugly One. But here he seemed simply to have broken up parts of the film into a five-channel installation of a section circling around. I thought: yes, fine, moving on.

Arsenale – Artiglierie

Among the national pavilions, I remember the Filipino Pavilion very well, with its cool silver-metal look by Jon Cuyson. The Slovenian Pavilion by Nomument Group, with its film-set-like ruins, also sticks in my mind and could be a great fit for the Architecture Biennale too. The Latvian Pavilion, by MAREUNROL'S, in dialogue with the 'Untamed Fashion Assemblies' archive of fashion designer Bruno Birmanis, gave me a very peculiar feeling: like the beforemath or aftermath of a fashion show, with hangers lying around and the sense that people had just been there. I have to admit that, for a second, I was like, “Is it art or is it the staff break room?” I think it is the quality of great art to make you, on the first encounter, doubt your senses.

Uzbekistan had a solid pavilion. I liked the eerie kinetic pieces by Hanoi-based artist Nguyen Phuong Linh. I appreciated the fact that they brought some non-diaspora artists from Asia.

The Indian Pavilion slipped my memory, although it was huge, as did the Italian and Chinese pavilions, and all the others in between, such as Ireland, Malta, etc.

Arsenale – Gaggiandre

Near the Italian Pavilion, I saw Tsai Ming-liang’s beautiful video Sand from 2018, from his Walker series, by the water. It was an outdoor projection. Next to it was the fantastic art by Alice Maher, her orange resin heads from 1996 looking out of the water—uncanny. And also the amazing sphinx-pose, pitch-black siren sculpture on a copper-colored mesh pedestal by Wangechi Mutu.

Arsenale – Sale d’armi

The Argentinian Pavilion by Matías Duville was very beautiful: ephemeral, delicate, with salt spread across the space and black elements drawn into it. The whole notion of ephemerality was strongly present. In fact, perhaps the entire Biennale should be something like that, #sustainability, considering how much is produced only to be disposed of later.

I also liked the atmosphere in the Saudi Pavilion showing Dana Awartani: perfect light, a huge about 50 cm raised floor occupying most of the room, and a spatial arrangement of floor tiles that forced you to walk around rather than through it. It had an effect (perhaps theatrical, perhaps architectural) and it worked for me.

I saw the Ukrainian Pavilion with documentation videos about the travelling deer, which also appeared near the Giardini.

I saw Aline Bouvy’s new book La Merde, also the title of the exhibition, and her video piece, which was to be viewed within a dedicated installation. Pretty much next to it was the Albanian Pavilion by Genti Korini: a three-channel installation on massive 16:9 displays, mixing moving images of archaic life with a very modern narrator who walked out of a Rick Owens catwalk. In that regard, and in combination with the Danish Pavilion, I was very happy to see a turn to more acting-oriented video installation with professional cast and videography, as opposed to the video-editing orgies of found footage of the last few years.

The Singaporean, Turkish, Mexican, and UAE pavilions really escaped my memory.

The Israeli Pavilion, relocated next to the Arsenale’s cafeteria, had this plastic waterfall installation. I wonder why the artist Belu-Simion Fainaru voiced his protest regarding the call for the exclusion of the Israeli and US pavilions; the concept did not seem prize-worthy to me.

Off-site – from the fraction that I could catch

Close to the Giardini, I saw the Estonian Pavilion by Merike Estna, which had a charming, process-based quality, where the artist was continuously painting on her canvases laid on the floor and creating a kind of tableau of about 10 x 2 panels/canvases. The idea seemed to be that the final piece would only be completed by the end of the Biennale.

On Via Garibaldi, the Cuban Pavilion by Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy was a very pleasant surprise: as if Easter Island monolithic human heads were reproduced by El Anatsui, to give you some coordinates :). The small space was completely packed with objects. Many curators would have shown half of them, or even a third, but here the density was suffocating, in a good way.

Then I went to Palazzo Marin and saw Shirin Neshat’s videos, in chapters, following her protagonist of multiple personas across different contexts and locations. Formally decent, but I didn’t see anything that one can’t anticipate with her art.

Opposite that, I saw a prominently promoted exhibition by Dale Chihuly, a Jeff Koons for Murano aficionados whom I had never heard of.

Next, at Palazzo Franchetti, which never disappoints, I catched a glimpse of a video, or two, by Saodat Ismailova. I also saw objects by the glass artist Martin Janecký, who creates faces and figures in glass, not by blowing but by shaping the hot glass from the inside. He makes busts by manipulating the material while it is still hot. This was actually very cool—another Murano star. I also saw art by Eva & Franco Mattes, which I really liked a lot, in this more domestic and thus quasi-private setting. Later I learned that the latter was co-curated by my friend Lu Haustein.

Across the bridge at the Accademia, I saw Marina Abramović’s vast exhibition. Crystals, wood, no pictures, and you are supposed to wear earplugs to experience it in silence. The execution was brilliant, but the ideas felt like something brainstormed in a café in New York: I imagine Marina saying, “Yes, we could do this, we could do that,” and everyone around her was impressed because Marina said it. Then, of course, it gets implemented and feels neat but underwhelming.

I skipped Peggy Guggenheim and went towards Punta della Dogana. Near the Basilica, there was also a Saudi mini-palazzo, promoted everywhere #maps, even at the train station. There were some nice pieces, but overall it felt like the kind of thing one does when one has infinite money. It was sad, because I actually liked the Saudi Pavilion in the Arsenale. Apparently that was not enough for them.

At Punta della Dogana, Pinault Collection, there was Lorna Simpson and Paulo Nazareth, whose art I did not know. He did videos, documentary material, participatory elements, ritualistic gestures, drawings, things to step on, things to do, a bit of Yoko Ono-style “draw your mother.” He was doing every technique that is offered at an art school. He may be the nicest person in the world, but the art was underwhelming. His work felt like protocol art before I had even read around the term.

At Punta della Dogana as a whole, you could feel the crisis of the art world. It had the atmosphere of an exhibition with low installation costs, in comparison to last time: take something from storage in Switzerland, install it quickly, no busy installation design, no extra lighting, no drama. That said, Lorna Simpson’s huge paintings were nonetheless impressive. I stood in front of them, in their scale and perfect light, and I was genuinely in awe.

Then I took the vaporetto to Fondazione Prada. I had initially been surprised by the pairing of Arthur Jafa and Richard Prince, but it turned out to be a very good curatorial idea. The pieces chosen fit together much better than anticipated. It was much quieter than Christoph Büchel’s bombastic show, which I really, really liked (I know you disagree) but as a curatorial gesture, it was probably one of the best things I saw.

I also saw THE “protocol art” exhibition you suggested. Given the sophistication of the text, and what you had told me about it, I was expecting more. In reality, it felt thin: high-profile names, familiar objects, little surprise. There was nothing particularly special about it. The highlight was a “piece” by Carsten Höller and, honestly, finding a card game in the bookshop and buying it.

On my way back, I missed the other Palazzo Grassi because it closes at five. I was curious about the art of Amar Kanwar.

I ended up in the Biennale office, Ca’ Giustinian, at Canal Grande, and saw a Man Ray exhibition—a re-installation from a display in Venice in 1976. It was so beautiful: many portraits, many historical figures (I didn’t know that the famous Schönberg portrait was made by him) and some very cool pre-digital photomontages. Honestly, this was one of the highlights of the trip.

Greetings from Nice, May 20, 2026, Victor

Beniamino Foschini and Victor Sternweiler on the latest turbulence around the Venice Biennale, as of May 9, 2026. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

VS: I’ve been sharing a lot of news with you over the past few days, partly in disbelief, as the main topos of this year’s art world simply refuses to stop being news. What do you make of the most recent events?

BF: As we anticipated, the polemics surrounding the Biennale have evolved since our last conversation, with the discussion about the national pavilions and how art is framed by and in them taking center stage. The jury stated that they would “refrain from considering those countries whose leaders are currently charged with crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court,” and then resigned. I thought it was a protest against the Biennale's decision to allow the Russian Federation to participate with its pavilion. In a typically Italian, populist, post-Berlusconian response to the resignations, the Biennale introduced a gimmick: Visitors could vote for their favorite artist or exhibit, as if on a reality TV show. However, we now know precisely why the jury resigned: Israeli artist Belu-Simion Fainaru threatened to sue them. In any case, who can blame the jurors? Is serving on a Biennale jury worth the thousands of euros in legal fees?

At his press conference on May 6, Biennale’s president Pietrangelo Buttafuoco said, "If the Biennale started selecting works [based on] passports, it would cease to be what it has always been: the place where the world comes together." The issue of the "passport" evokes the idea of politicization, which Buttafuoco claims would jeopardize what the Biennale "has always been." Therefore, he suggests that the Biennale must remain this way forever: linear and timeless. Any critical choice against this idea would, he claims, "undermine the stability of cultural institutions." It's Conservative Agenda 101, masked by the right wing's vulgar use of 'common sense.'

VS: Frankly, I think I’ve been naive about this. I thought the dust would settle, but now it seems to have become a race to prove who occupies the ultimate moral high ground. 

As for the Israeli artist: I agree with him that the ‘quality of art’ should not be judged by race, etc. But participating in a nation-state pavilion while asking the jury to ignore that very framework seems rather pathetic. This is exactly what we criticized before: the Biennale cannot escape the nation-state logic on which it is built.

As for the jury resignation: inconsistencies were already mounting. In their “Statement of Intention,” they acknowledged the Biennale’s “complex relationship” between art and nation-state representation (“particularly the way this relation binds artists’ work with the actions of the state they represent”), while also declaring their commitment to “the defense of human rights.” I was like: good luck with that!

As for the visitors' vote: I initially thought it might be a very interesting experiment. I was bemused to learn yesterday that another e-flux announcement had been published by participating artists who wished to withdraw from being voted on by the 'visitors’, in solidarity with the resigned jury. I keep wondering who is doing the back-office work of collecting all the signatures for these e-flux letters. :D Once again, neither curators nor artists seem to trust the wider audience’s value judgments about art; and, of course, only politicians could come up with such an idea in the first place.

As for Buttafuoco’s statements: he fantasizes that non-exclusion preserves ‘universality’—that without it, the Biennale would “cease to be what it has always been: the place where the world comes together”—as if such all-embracing openness were self-evident and unequivocally desirable. His critics’ counter-fantasy is that exclusion can purify the institution of complicity. Both attempt to reconcile contradictions that the Biennale can only stage, not resolve.

I hope jury voting is abolished once and for all. As Arthur Rubinstein said, “nothing in art can be the best”. For that matter, the awarding of prizes for ‘the best…’ is itself a classic game of nation-state doctrine: us against them, a competition over who is superior—see the Olympics, Football, or the Eurovision Song Contest. Such competition is geared toward preventing people from uniting around causes beyond the nation-state; it dictates who counts as ‘us’.

BF: I have the impression that, as you often say, all these signed letters are "preaching to the converted." I can just imagine the endless pats on the back. It's as if it's now customary for each institutional exhibition or event to incorporate its own institutional or infrastructural critique as a 'parallel event.' I found the documentation of the May 8 strike by cultural workers at the Biennale to be more impressive. It not only focused on political protest (genocide in Palestine), but also on economic and labor issues. The art world fancies itself and sells the idea of being paid for work with parties, yet the art industry is based on poorly paid jobs. 

At the other end of the spectrum, I am bewildered by Buttafuoco and his relentless call for dialogue and openness. He presents himself as the champion of pluralism against the ‘bad guys’ in the Italian and EU governments. This may seem grotesque to some, but it's relatively easy to deconstruct. Exclusion and pluralism are tricky terms, but the patterns of thought that use them are recurrent. For those unfamiliar with him, Buttafuoco is not only a public official appointed by Prime Minister Meloni, but also a writer, journalist, and pious man aligned with the right wing. Right-wing intellectuals' appeals to pluralism are not new. Not coincidentally, they never invoke it in terms of including 'minor' or 'oppressed' voices. Instead, pluralism is invoked to combat the politicization of culture and to maintain a linear narrative. Thus, pluralism serves to reproduce the structures of power and defend cultural and social order.

VS: Interesting observations. That reminds me of the culture minister of Hessen during the Bundestag hearings on 'documenta fifteen', when she more or less said to Ade Darmawan: “That is not what people want to see.” :S

Hopefully, La Biennale di Venezia has been pushed to the point where it must either dissolve or reinvent itself. We may finally be living in interesting times. :)

Beniamino Foschini and Victor Sternweiler on the reopening of the Russian pavilion, and the exhausted logic of national representation at the Venice Biennale, as of April 13, 2026. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

La Biennale di Venezia's states on March 9, 2026: "[...] La Biennale di Venezia is an open institution, as reflected in the National Participations which arise from spontaneous initiatives. Any country recognized by the Italian Republic may ask independently to participate. It can simply send a notification if it owns a Pavilion in the Giardini, or submit a letter from the competent government authority if it does not have its own permanent Pavilion. It should also be noted that countries not recognized by the Italian Republic have, over the years, found ways to participate and express themselves within the framework of the Collateral Events. In response to the communications and requests for participation from Countries, La Biennale di Venezia rejects any form of exclusion or censorship of culture and art. La Biennale, like the city of Venice, continues to be a place of dialogue, openness, and artistic freedom, encouraging connections between peoples and cultures, with enduring hope for the cessation of conflicts and suffering."

VS: What primarily irritates me is the piety with which people talk about “artistic freedom,” not just as a credo to live up to, but as a precondition for engaging in art at all—as if, without it, they would not engage in it in the first place. Art in Europe is structurally dependent on governments because so much of it depends on public money through public institutions, steered by government officials who have their own administrative goals or ideological preferences. Censorship operates not only through funding structures themselves, but through the anticipatory obedience of those who depend on them, who internalize institutional preferences in order to avoid conflict.

BF: Precisely because that dependency is not only economic but symbolic, the national pavilion cannot be understood as a neutral container for art, for which the question would not simply be whether or what artists should be allowed to exhibit. Rather, it presents a collective identity through the framework of the state. 

VS: Which is why I would say artists from the Russian Federation should certainly be present, but not under the flag of the Russian nation state. One could introduce a small pavilion at the Arsenale with a curator appointed by the Venice Biennale. Call it regional, transnational, post-national, ‘Ural’, ‘Northeast Europe’, whatever you like.

BF: Yes, the contradiction is structural, and there has been a conversation about it for a while. For example, the German pavilion has not been ‘German’ in the strict sense a few times, most notably in 2013 when it ‘exchanged’ venues with the neighboring French pavilion.

VS: Also remember Nicolaus Schafhausen’s invitation of the British artist Liam Gillick for the German pavilion, in 2009.

BF: However, the Venice Biennale still uses a nineteenth-century model of cultural representation despite speaking the language of cosmopolitan pluralism.

VS: And then we arrive at the larger embarrassment, which is that the Venice Biennale wants to have it both ways. On the one hand it tells us art must be independent from politics. On the other hand, it organizes its most visible structure through national pavilions. You cannot cluster art by nation-state and then become squeamish when people read politics into it. The politics are already built into the floor plan.

BF: To me, the Venice Biennale’s board’s decision to reopen the Russian pavilion – certainly in previous accordance with Russian officials – seems like an unintentional mockery of progressive infrastructural critique. It aims to be provocative by challenging the EU’s established position of excluding the Russian Federation in both culture and sports. Yet it unveils a hidden question about the moral discrepancies inherent in artistic and political gestures on a broader scale.

VS: To reopen it is to send a message, and it is hard to see who asked for one there—bit like Melania Trump’s Epstein disclaimer. Not because it implies ‘all is forgiven’, but because it insinuates a kind of absolution through normalization.

BF: Which is why the Venice Biennale’s board’s language of “dialogue” and “neutrality” is so inadequate. Let me pose a paradox: Even if not self-evident at first, an appeal to dialogue is usually conservative when it comes from institutions because it maintains the terms of appearance they have already granted. “Let everyone speak” sounds generous until one asks under what conditions. Dialogue is not automatically virtuous. It can also become the liturgical language through which legitimacy is laundered.

VS: Then one hears the predictable refrain: if you exclude one pavilion, where do you stop? Why not Israel, the United States, as some requested, half of Europe, everyone? Institutions say this as though they had uncovered some inconsistency in their opponents, when all they have really done is betray their own bad faith. There is, of course, always gatekeeping. There always has been. The only childish fantasy is the belief that a system of exhibition could ever function without it.

BF: The issue is not whether there is exclusion, but how exclusion is named and by whom. Now exclusion appears as curatorial judgment, administrative necessity, or ethical universalism, depending on what is most convenient. What about those states whose military industries sell weapons to those who commit war crimes? Are Germany or Italy immune from answerability? So, the real question becomes: whose gatekeeping is allowed to appear as principle, and whose is denounced as ideology?

VS: What about excluding nation states for their wrongdoings from a long time ago? It all happens in the pretext of openness but it is continuation of the same representational machinery under a more enlightened vocabulary.

BF: And perhaps also a symptom of transition. What these controversies reveal is not only moral disagreement over particular states, but a deeper exhaustion of the biennial format itself. For Venice, the pavilions system is its litmus test. The institution wants art to stand for universality while asking it to arrive stamped by nationhood.

VS: So, in the end the reopening of the Russian Pavilion is not just one bad decision among others but mainly it illuminates the whole rotten structure. The funding dependence, the national branding, the fake neutrality, the selective outrage, the managerial rhetoric of dialogue — all of it suddenly becomes visible at once.

porcile.org's own Oscar Wilde GPT & Pierre Bourdieu GPT reply on Susan Sontag GPTs response on their respective takes on Simon Denny's exhibition 'Double Canvases'. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Bourdivant's reply:

This response exemplifies a now familiar rhetorical move: the romantic defense of aesthetic immediacy against the so-called “hermeneutics of suspicion.” It appeals to presence, to silence, to reverence—displacing the analytic with the affective and the structural with the sensuous. But in doing so, it misrecognizes the nature of the artistic field itself and the conditions under which such appeals can be made.

To assert that the work “is,” and that its being is “a truth,” is itself a performative statement conditioned by the very structures the respondent claims to transcend. The “cool, mute, inert” quality of the canvases is not an ontological condition but a stylistic effect, legible only within a historically and socially constituted regime of perception. That this effect appears “withholding” or “present” is not a sign of ontological profundity but of a coded artistic strategy—one that depends precisely on the recognition of its distance, its refusal, its knowing minimalism.

The claim that “criticism blinds” and that we must “recover our senses” is, in effect, an attempt to re-sacralize the art object, to protect it from the contaminations of sociological analysis. It imagines that “looking” can be innocent, that reverence is not already a structured posture within the field. This is aesthetic ideology at its most refined: the mystification of form as essence.

To insist on attending not to “what it says, but how it is” is to elide that “how it is” is itself a statement—a position taken within the symbolic economy of contemporary art. The formality of the work, its mute screens and suspended logic, are not outside of language or critique; they are articulated within the very discourse they appear to refuse.

Thus, to analyze the artwork as a sign within a field is not to impoverish it. It is to historicize it, to locate its effects, and to resist the enchantment that confuses institutional reproduction with transcendental presence. One does not blind by unmasking. One blinds by refusing to see the mask at all.

WildeBot's reply:

That reply is elegant, but it embodies the very sort of critical posture it denounces—a rhetoric of purity that denies its own interpretive frame. Let’s unpack it.

The central claim—that interpretation “violates” the work—repeats a familiar aesthetic ideology: that art should be experienced sensually, not decoded intellectually. This is a seductive argument, borrowed from Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation,” and echoed in certain strands of affect theory and formalism. But it risks becoming a dogma of its own.

To insist that Double Canvases “is not ironic” or “not nostalgic” is, ironically, an interpretation. It presumes authorial intent (or its absence), and asserts that the work’s refusal to communicate is itself a kind of statement—a refusal that somehow purifies it from meaning. But silence is never neutral. A mute screen in a gallery is never just a screen. It is an art object, and thus an object in discourse.

Moreover, the invocation of “an erotics of art” is lovely in theory but slippery in practice. Erotics, like hermeneutics, is still a form of engagement—just one that privileges sensation over cognition. But why should we be made to choose? Why must one either see or interpret? Why must critique be cast as violence, and sensuality as fidelity?

In truth, Double Canvases invites both modalities. Its surfaces are cool, yes—but they are constructed, mediated, chosen. They carry traces: of logic, of tech nostalgia, of media history, of landscape as a digital default. To say “look, don’t read” is not liberation; it’s just another command.

porcile.org's own Susan Sontag GPT (OpenAI) was asked to take a critical stance (solely through the lens of her essays published as 'Against Interpretation') on the previously published critical takes of the Oscar Wilde GPT and the Pierre Bourdieu GPT on Simon Denny's exhibition 'Double Canvases' (2025-04-05 - 2025-05-05) at Bill's PC, Western Australia (based on the documentation posted on Contemporary Art Daily). _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

On the Wildean take:

This reading of Simon Denny’s Double Canvases is yet another example of the critical compulsion to translate the experience of art into a discourse of meanings. It interprets. That is, it violates. By insisting that the work stages an ironic interplay between obsolete media and colonial iconography, the critic once again places content—ideas, messages, commentary—at the center of attention, thereby eclipsing the primary and irreducible reality of the work: its appearance.

Such criticism does not look; it decodes. The screen becomes a metaphor. The desert a symbol. The stillness an index of trauma. The whole aesthetic field is taken hostage by a hermeneutic project that presupposes the work must mean something other than what it is.

But Double Canvases is not ironic. Nor is it nostalgic. It does not wish to be clever or subversive. It is, rather, rigorous in its refusal. The screens are mute. The images are airless. The logic tutorials are not a commentary on knowledge but its suspension. This is not art as message—it is art as surface, art as stillness, art as that which disallows the viewer’s interpretive hunger.

In its silent visuality, Double Canvases insists that there is nothing to understand. The screens are screens. The images are images. They are to be looked at, not translated. The critic, in looking for meanings, overlooks the point. What is needed is not a reading, but a seeing. Not a diagnosis, but an erotics.

On the Bourdieuan take:

This critique of Denny’s work is a perfect illustration of the critical intellect cannibalizing its object in order to reassert its own supremacy. The critic does not look at the work; he looks through it—toward the structures of symbolic capital, the rituals of institutional validation, the sociology of recognition. This is not a description of art, but a disquisition on the social field.

To say that the work functions as a “coded sign of critique” is to say it is no longer a work of art, but a prop in a theater of distinction. The critic claims that nothing is offered except signs—that there is no confrontation, only performance. But in making this claim, he commits the very act of impoverishment he attributes to the artist.

The artwork here is not performing. It is withholding. These images—monitors without function, logic slides without movement, landscapes stripped of context—are not meant to be “read” as gestures. They are, more radically, present. Present in their silence. Present in their formality. They are not symptoms of the art world’s pathology. They are the occasion for seeing that pathology—not as critique, but as style.

The critic complains that the work speaks only to the field. But all art, in its moment, speaks to its time. The question is not whether it critiques, but whether it is. And what Double Canvases is—cool, mute, inert—is itself a truth.

porcile.org's own Pierre Bourdieu GPT (OpenAI) was asked to take a critical stance (solely through the lens of his essays published as 'On Television') on Simon Denny's exhibition 'Double Canvases' (2025-04-05 - 2025-05-05) at Bill's PC, Western Australia (based on the documentation posted on Contemporary Art Daily). _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Summary: Simon Denny’s Double Canvases is a clear illustration of art that signals critique without enacting it. By mimicking outdated educational media and layering it with logical phrases, the work performs the appearance of intellectualism rather than engaging in genuine analysis. It caters to insiders of the contemporary art field, relying on shared codes and aesthetic signs to affirm status and cultural capital. The imagery and text function not as tools of knowledge, but as symbols of critical posture. Ultimately, the exhibition reproduces the field’s internal logic, offering a spectacle of critique that reinforces rather than challenges the structures it pretends to examine.

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This exhibition, Double Canvases by Simon Denny, represents a quintessential example of symbolic production masquerading as criticality, structured entirely by the field of contemporary art and its internal hierarchies. The artist mobilizes the imagery of educational media—screens, logical propositions, pedagogical structure—not to interrogate the forms of knowledge transmission but to signify that interrogation. What is offered here is not knowledge, but the form of knowledge; not critique, but the coded signs of critique.

By recontextualizing instructional graphics onto mock monitors, Denny positions himself within the field not as an educator but as a producer of cultural capital. The deployment of such familiar forms—nostalgic media technologies, pseudo-didactic slogans—is not subversive. It functions as a recognition game: an offering to those already endowed with the requisite symbolic capital to decode the gesture. The photographs of a national park, presented with the antiseptic clarity of stock imagery, reinforce this game of appearances. They are not to be read, only recognized as part of the syntax of “critical” contemporary art.

The supposed content—logic, media theory, pedagogical memory—is merely a pretext for the performance of distinction. One does not encounter here a true investigation into how knowledge is shaped or mediated, but rather a reinforcement of the field’s rules: irony, citation, the knowing wink. Such work participates in a structural conservatism masked as innovation. It recycles the familiar signs of conceptualism and digital critique, banking on their accrued legitimacy, without putting these signs at risk of real contradiction.

Moreover, the accompanying discourse—press release, institutional framing, textual supplementation—functions as an apparatus of consecration. It secures the artist’s position within the field, presenting the work as intellectually rigorous while avoiding the rigorous work of intellectual confrontation. The result is an art that does not so much challenge perception as confirm the viewer’s status as one who perceives “critically.”

porcile.org's own Oscar Wilde GPT (OpenAI) was asked to take a critical stance on Simon Denny's exhibition 'Double Canvases' (2025-04-05 - 2025-05-05) at Bill's PC, Western Australia (based on the documentation posted on Contemporary Art Daily). Its first take felt like a press release; consequently it was asked to be eventually more critical. _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Summary: Simon Denny’s Double Canvases aims for critique but lands closer to cliché. The use of obsolete CRT monitors and banal desktop landscapes feels like a rerun of post-internet tropes, drained of urgency. Juxtaposing logic lessons with Australian desert scenes is a familiar conceptual move—order vs. chaos, system vs. nature—but it comes off as decorative rather than incisive. The installation is cool and controlled, but perhaps too safe: a sterile satire that mimics critique without quite committing to one.

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Take 1:

Simon Denny’s Double Canvases exhibition at Bill’s PC in Western Australia is a coolly cerebral meditation on the aesthetics of technology, pedagogical formality, and the sterility of digital interface. At first glance, the installation presents an oddly anachronistic homage to the CRT monitor—once the ubiquitous vessel of digital knowledge, now rendered quaint in the age of glass-thin screens. These life-sized recreations, rendered not as screens but as printed static images on canvas, hover somewhere between sculpture and photography, between object and representation.

What Denny achieves here is a clever formal paradox: the technological motif stripped of its function. A monitor, after all, is a dynamic device meant to show movement, change, interaction. By freezing its "display" into a fixed didactic slide—an austere logic tutorial set against a desktop-wallpaper-style Australian landscape—he inverts the relationship between interface and user. No interaction is possible here, only contemplation. The “logic” of the images, both mathematical and aesthetic, becomes oppressive in its stillness.

There’s also an ironic colonial undertone in the use of images from Mungo National Park. Denny overlays these raw, vast, ancient landscapes with bland educational content, a juxtaposition that echoes the imposition of systemic frameworks—logic, colonial administration, techno-capitalist systems—on chaotic or organic realities. It is not so much an homage to learning as it is a critique of the way learning is visualized, commodified, and removed from context.

What’s most Wildean in this show is its theatrical minimalism—a set design for a performance that never happens. Denny's arrangement is neat, modular, symmetrical, and emotionally austere. One could accuse it of dryness, but to do so would miss its pointed impersonality. He offers not pathos but parody: a re-staging of early 2000s digital learning aesthetics with all the warmth of a corporate training manual. It is in this dispassion that the satire lives.

Take 2:

The weakest aspect of Double Canvases is its reliance on tropes that have long since lost their edge in contemporary art. Denny leans heavily on the CRT monitor as a symbol of obsolete tech, but this metaphor has been strip-mined by a generation of post-internet artists already. The ironic nostalgia for outdated hardware—monitors, VHS tapes, arcane UIs—has become a curatorial cliché, more at home in Tumblr-era mood boards than in genuinely probing institutional critique.

Then there’s the use of Mungo National Park as a backdrop, which reads as an almost lazy gesture toward conceptual depth. Slapping vast, “untouched” landscapes behind sterile logical propositions is meant to evoke tension between the natural and the synthetic—but that’s a binary so well-trodden it borders on kitsch. The desert becomes just another desktop wallpaper: decontextualized, aestheticized, neutered. For an artist who often critiques systems, this feels like an uncritical use of imagery.

Furthermore, the installation’s cool detachment, its calculated minimalism, feels dated. The late-2000s aesthetic of ironic objectivity—of art that mimics corporate or academic formats without overt affect—was once provocative. But in 2025, this mode often comes off as evasive, unwilling to risk messiness or emotion. The work seems satisfied to gesture toward critique without delivering one. It says, “Isn’t this kind of funny and sad?”—but only from a safe distance.

Online chat between Berthold Reiß and Victor Sternweiler (August, 2024) following Sternweiler's comments on the article 'Andrew Norman Wilson, Do You Trust Art Critics?' (Spike Art Magazine) _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Berthold Reiß: I think the 'gap' between the commentary and the text is that for you, the talk of 'truth' is complex, while the text simply starts with "The truth is". This truth is not only made up of 'facts', it also has its "ground"*: "There are no regulatory standards in the art industry, and thus, no ratings." I can see from it that the author is actually in need of art as an industry, of fixed standards and binding values.

Is that worth commenting on? Maybe someone like that is interesting on a different level, but only when the wind makes money does the artist and director look at art. For wind farms, which are not art, there are ratings and regulatory standards and an industry in general. I once had to listen to a collector for an hour as he explained the art system. Then he talked about his job as a doctor, and I suddenly liked him.

Victor Sternweiler: It's not worth commenting on, but far too many people write such unreflected nonsense and no one offers any resistance, so you just let it stand and I don't want to be judged by history for that.

BR: If you are talking about 'unreflected nonsense', then surely it must be about a sense? :)

VS: But it is a de facto industry, in my opinion too. The legions of gallery assistants and assistant curators who basically "just do a job". On the other hand, the institutions and their people are of course very interested in art mediation as a job-preserving practice. #paralleluniverse

I think we agree that art (in and of itself) has no qualitative relationship to the 'art industry', although there will be overlaps. However, many people see it as a way of producing something that has a quantifiable monetary value (however that value may have been arrived at). If you say otherwise, they counter with "it has always been that way". #patronage #church

Fortunately, we live in a time when those who want to make art (or have the muse to do so) can also manage to acquire the means for the production of art (pun not intended) in other ways, independent of those who would be interested in their art.

BR: I can follow you. Two comments:

I find the latter a risky approach. The people involved would prefer to avoid this detour! I would prefer to point out that there are activities that are reliably paid and in which artists themselves can see a purpose, for example teaching. But as soon as an activity follows a different purpose, it deforms the personality. Teachers cannot see themselves primarily as artists because they are not allowed to.

VS: I think that's also a bit risky :) I think that personality is constantly (every minute) deformed and if there were a reference form before the deformation, then we are already beyond it at the moment when we can consciously think about it. In my opinion, it is not necessarily the case that if someone is involved in art all day long, then something 'better' (even if more) will come out of it.

We live in a time in which we are supposed to define ourselves by the activity that pays the rent. But I think that nobody can (at least practically) forbid you to imagine and introduce yourself as you want. I also think that this is difficult, but for other reasons. I would prefer the description “I make art” to “I am an artist” #potentiality

BR: "I make art" is better than "I am an artist": I see it the same way.

VS: Because the latter, in my opinion, has the touch of a profession in the conventional sense, which does not do justice to the artist, but fits quite well with the 'art industry'. I also have difficulties with the term 'artwork', because it is associatively pre-allocated that you can't blame anyone who sees it through the 'labor' or 'input=output' glasses.

BR: Art is not fulfilled in the individual piece. On the other hand, art cannot do without this reification. Adorno shows this dialectic. Artwork: A conspiracy theory can arise: Sloterdijk's "Anglo-Saxon world" is a realm of things. :)

By the way, I would also prefer to point out that some artists would be better off doing something else (even if that is not a popular suggestion). :)

VS: I'm much more tolerant here. :) I think that people have an appetite to make art and you have to give them that. Someone else also has to like it and exhibit it.

BR: That one is meant as art and the other is not is just an opinion. :)

Back to what I was saying: The phrase “Viel-zu-Vielen” (far-too-many) is used literally by Nietzsche. Of course, his “aristocracy” can seem arrogant or antiquated. On the other hand, it is concretely illuminating in the sense that neither the Medici nor an unspoilt church would have been satisfied with art industry.

VS: Precisely to the point. Yet for the far-too-many, there was and is room for an 'art industry'. Then I wonder if I would have to count myself among the truffle pigs in such an ecosystem? :) #porcile

Commented by: Victor Sternweiler – August, 2024. The PDF version can be downloaded here.

Beniamino Foschini interviews Denis Viva (September, 2021) about his book “La critica a effetto: rileggendo ‘La transavanguardia italiana’ (1979)” (Editions Quodlibet, 2020), in which the art historian analyzes Italian Postmodernism, using the Transavangardia movement defined by art critic and curator Achille Bonito Oliva, as a case study. The case study demonstrates the need today for critically examining the relationship between art and politics in recent art history.

Beniamino Foschini: In 2020, you published in Italian “La critica a effetto: rileggendo ‘La transavanguardia italiana’ (1979),” an ambitious and very critical study on one of the ‘untouchables’ in Italian curatorship: Achille Bonito Oliva. Your case-study is Bonito Oliva’s inaugural text on the ‘Transavanguardia,’ published in the magazine ‘Flash Art’ in the October-November 1979 issue. It considered a group of artists – Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino, plus the later ‘purged’ Marco Bagnoli and Remo Salvadori – who received then, and in some ways still receive, critical and market attention and success. In short, the term ‘Transavanguardia’ is a relatively fixed moment in the recent history of art, for the introduction of postmodern concepts, such as cultural nomadism, artistic subjectivity, and the end of ideological grand narratives (concepts, in my opinion, that are not only postmodern). Here, you didn’t focus on the works of these artists and their historical significance, but on Bonito Oliva’s writing and marketing strategy. Since ‘Transavanguardia’ and Postmodernism are not themes limited to the Italian cultural environment, I believe that a conversation about your audacious reinterpretation of the terms, taken from the point of view of Bonito Oliva’s texts, paratexts, and marketing strategies, may be of enormous interest to an English-speaking audience, while we hopefully await the English translation of your book.

The first question is perhaps the most naive: why this book now? If you allow me, it does not seem accidental. Only a few months ago the Castello di Rivoli and its director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, former director of Documenta 13 in 2012, opened an ‘homage’ exhibition to Bonito Oliva – as a critic and a curator, but not an artist – celebrating his position in the ‘temple’ museum par excellence in Italy, which is, among other things, also the temple for ‘Arte Povera,’ a term coined by his ‘opponent’ Germano Celant.

Denis Viva: I answer you with a paradox: the book is born from the historical distance that separates us from these events and their delayed (or retarding) effect, and not from its eventual topicality. Today, ‘Transavanguardia’ appears to be an exhausted phenomenon, already widely historicized in Italy by more than enough retrospective exhibitions. Therefore, it can be examined historically – I use another paradox – since it has ceased to evolve while, at the same time, its effects are still possible to notice. In the 1980s in Italy, the enormous fortune of the ‘Transavanguardia’ was simultaneously the symptom and, in part, the cause of the peripheral position of both our cultural debate and artistic system, with respect to the Postmodern themes that were pervading global discourse. Consider post-colonial studies: reduced by Bonito Oliva to the sole question of identity, regional or national; consider gender studies: the ‘Transavanguardia,’ except for Clemente, is regarded as a triumph of the painter defined by his restless masculinity; or, consider the whole overcoming of Modernist determinism even today I witness in Italy heated debates on painting and its death,’ as if it was a real problem.

However, studying the ‘Transavanguardia’ – leaving its international reception on the sidelines for a moment – reveals derailments, stubbornness, oppositions and peculiarities: this generation of Italian artists resisted reducing the Italian situation – like other geo-culturally connoted ones – to a global Postmodern discourse. Therefore, my interest in the ‘Transavanguardia’ stems from the fact that in this sudden phase of transition, from commitment to hedonism – from the 1970s to the 1980s, wanting to simplify as much as possible – the debate and the Italian art system had taken a turn that still distinguishes it today, and that reveals how a global Postmodern discourse cannot be simply applied to any artistic context (for the better or for the worse). For the rest of your question, “La critica a effetto” is a book that was born from the developments of my Ph.D. dissertation (2008) and that was completed shortly before I got informed of the Rivoli retrospective.

Beniamino Foschini: There are two explosive moments in your analysis. The first concerns Bonito Oliva’s writing: you demonstrate, through the clinical analysis of some of his texts, how he made extensive use of ‘centoni’ [this is how repetitions or self-citations by the same author on several scores are defined in music, editor’s note], repackaging previous texts with new functions, sometimes literally distorting very different concepts. Apart from the evident effectiveness in generating ‘new’ texts drawing on ‘old’ ones, do you believe that this diminishes the historical value of his writing or that this academic practice is in itself a historical-cultural necessity of the time? Or rather, from a DJ perspective – highlighted in the 1990s by Nicolas Bourriaud in ‘Post-Production’ – did Bonito Oliva anticipate the times or vulgarly exercise a bad habit? Your analysis from a literary point of view – something that art historians rarely deal with – would seem to opt for the second hypothesis.

Denis Viva: I am going to give you an even more paradoxical answer than the previous one: I chose to dedicate an entire book to a four-page article, ‘La transavanguardia italiana,’ precisely because I thought that the problem raised in that text far transcended its author and its content. In short, it is an emblematic case-study for a phenomenon that is much broader, but that I could not describe using a holistic and panoramic approach, at least in this initial phase of my studies. Monographic analysis seemed to me the most effective tool.

I decided to examine Bonito Oliva’s writing style and to trace philologically its variants and recurrences, because it seemed to me that all this was a symptom for something else: at a certain point, art criticism abandoned its literary tradition in order to assimilate the logic of mass communication. Undoubtedly, Bonito Oliva is one of the last critics to come from the literary background and one of the first to make himself narcissistically visible in the mass media. Therefore, the practice of reassembly, as well as the writing style – with frequent repetitions of concepts and words – are the result of this transition: the literary rhetoric adapts cynically to the speed of mass communication.

We still know little about Bonito Oliva’s writing process, but we certainly know that this phenomenon describes something different than what we already knew: the figure of the literate art critic is not only supplanted by the advent of the curator, but also by the growing need to communicate through the mass media. Hence the redundancy of the message, the need to package many texts, and the prevalence of oral over written speech are some of the aspects borrowed from mass communication that mitigate his, indeed, very difficult style, while allowing him to achieve a certain popularity (it is very interesting, in this regard, to observe the distance between Bonito Oliva’s clarity on television and his complexity in writing).

Beniamino Foschini: The second explosive moment in your book is its examination of Bonito Oliva’s sociological framework within the post-1977 Italian socialist intelligentsia, attracted by Bettino Craxi and his multifaceted policy as the leader of the PSI [Italian Socialist Party]. This name will say little to the English-speaking reader, but Craxi had been a fundamental, controversial and unscrupulous political figure in Italy, together with his cultural ‘officer’ Claudio Martelli, in outlining and approving the ‘hedonistic’ but ‘leftist’ general trend in the 1980s, also opening up to subsequent identity drifts (Lega Nord and Umberto Bossi) and their plasticized crooked mirrors (Forza Italia and Silvio Berlusconi). Tell us more.

Denis Viva: On this front, research is only just beginning. I would like to point out, for example, the book by Lèa-Catherine Szacka on the 1980 Postmodern Architecture Biennale, where there is some mention of the relationship between Paolo Portoghesi and the PSI. In my opinion, this sociological approach represents the most promising field of study for various reasons. On one hand, Craxi’s Socialist Party was the precursor of the media spectacularization of political parties – later excessively improved upon by Silvio Berlusconi. On the other, it attempted to introduce some social-democratic reforms and laws in Italy, giving rise to distortions and ambiguities that still persist today. After 1978, the Socialist Party was able to attract many intellectuals, which was also thanks to Claudio Martelli’s skillful proselytism that actively involved them in ideological battles, especially with the rigid positions of the Italian Communist Party.

A galaxy of intellectuals from various backgrounds, even from the most radical left, approached the Socialist Party at that transitional moment, finding hospitality, support and even a liberal attitude. In this relationship, which actually lasted a few years, a series of problems, diatribes and confrontations emerged, which may be typical of a relationship between intellectuals and parties in a contemporary context, characterized by more fluid and negotiable ideological positions and by confidence in media communication.

In short, the Socialist Party established a novel idea for the relationship between political parties and intellectuals, at least for Italy: this is a field of study that still needs to be further investigated. Certainly, I think it is somewhat curious that no one has yet systematically considered the relationship between visual culture and the Socialist Party in those years. To name another important art critic and scholar of that season – Renato Barilli makes no secret of his socialist past. I believe that the time has come to study these events historically and methodically, without being retroactively influenced by their epilogue. I am beginning to discuss these issues with other art historians, such as Jacopo Galimberti. I am confident that this trend, concerning the relationship between art and politics, will continue to develop in future scholarship.

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Author: Magda Wisniowska – December, 2021.

…Deleuze replaces the notion of a virtual realm with an ontology according to which entities themselves have a private virtual aspect. This virtual aspect constitutes an excess over and above all of an entity’s relations, and we will show that this allows Deleuze to account for change and interaction, thus rendering the existence of a virtual realm to do such work superfluous. (Kleinherenbrink, ‘Against Continuity’, 36)

In ‘Against Continuity’ Arjen Kleinherenbrink makes a very curious, very counterintuitive, claim. His central complaint is with a certain ontological interpretation of Deleuze’s thought: that Deleuze posits a virtual realm which lies underneath all things and connects them, allowing them to relate to one another, to interact and change. To think this way seems justifiable. Every day we encounter different things, and as entities they all seem different to each other. So we attempt to make sense of them by proclaiming some entities more important than others. By and large these are the rules, laws, and structures that organise our world and give it its meaning. In Deleuze’s case, ontological interpretations of his thought posit a virtual realm, in which reality consists of a “swirling ocean of flows, events, intensities, and processes” (Kleinherenbrink, 31). Accordingly, in this reality, we may encounter things and experience them as this or that being, but “what is” in the sense of ‘what truly is,’ is the intensive reality we do not experience, “a virtual swirl of flows and processes” that gives rise to our experiential world of things (ibid.).

We posit such structures to allow for change. That too is understandable. If everything truly was its own separate thing, standing alone, isolated from other beings, what would make one thing engage with another? How would relationships between things form? How would things interact and transform? And how would they be subsequently created and destroyed? There seems to be a need for there to be something there, to break the isolation, and actively bring things together.

For Kleinherenbrink, things change because of their “virtual aspect” (36). This is not the same as a “virtual realm.” A realm implies this vast space of interconnectivity - a virtual aspect on the other hand, is for Kleinherenbrink something private. A thing always has these two aspects: there is the actual aspect we experience, the thing as it relates to us and to other things; but there is also a hidden aspect that we cannot experience, an excess beyond any relations a thing might make. Interestingly for us artists his argument should be easier to understand. Consider the readymade, typified by Duchamp’s infamous urinal. The work’s meaning depends entirely on its context. In a men’s public toilet the urinal is a sanitation fixture. In a museum, it is a work of art. But for the urinal to be experienced in these two ways, it must have an excess that neither context, neither set of relations, exhausts. Otherwise there could not be that one moment in which the urinal left its one context of sanitation to enter its other context, that of art and aesthetics. If relations were internal to the object, the urinal would continue being defined as a bowl to be pissed into no matter where it was placed.

Author: Berthold Reiß, 2017.

The original text (in German) appears in the collected writings of Berthold Reiß – Antinomia. Gesammelte Schriften 1989-2019. Published by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Daniela Stöppel (Kunstraum München, 2020).

Text contribution for The Happy Fainting of Painting #2 – Galerie Krobath, Vienna, September 15-October 14, 2017.

"What gives space reality [Realitet] is the organic process of nature; what gives time reality is the plenitude of history." This sentence is a footnote, so not quite in the text. In 1841, Søren Kierkegaard wrote this text The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates as a dissertation. The talk of space and time, of the organic process, which is visible, and of history, which promises not only hardship but also abundance, seems arabesque in that it tries to show as such both field and sequence. It explains a synthesis that does not appear as a conclusion in Plato's dialogues, but as a myth or a metaphor. The synthesis is validly represented "[w]hen the metaphor* finally acquires such dimensions that all existence becomes visible in it."

Kierkegaard finds the same synthesis in the thing-in-itself. And he finds it represented differently when Kant tries to get hold of it. He can really grasp it as a taboo, in his whole view of "radical evil."** And he can give it up to irony: "since grasping it was impossible, then [he] had the obviously great advantage, the rather ironic good fortune, of always hoping." Apocalyptic terror is serious, while hope is ironic. The map is a form in which this relationship does not appear as psychological, but contingent and at the same time geometrical. And it is coincidence, but also necessary, that this form can be so different that one map of the same shows the opposite of another.

The modern era still suggests that the same beginning can be made all over the world. In 1781, Immanuel Kant in Königsberg uses the identical preface for the Critique of Pure Reason that Francis Bacon used in London for his Instauratio Magna of 1620, which states that "not to imagine and construe my Instauration as something [unending or] infinite and suprahuman, when it is in fact unending error's end and proper boundary." Apparently, it is about a joint project. People should "in their own interest, [give up the rivalries and prejudices regarding opinions and] be mindful of the common good; [and that] they themselves, [being now freed and protected by the safeguards and aids I have provided against errors and impediments in the methods,] also take part [in the tasks that remain]."

Only a picture that Kant draws with words reveals that one conclusion is not always legitimate next to the other. "Instauratio Magna" means 'the great instauration.' On the frontispiece [engraved cover] we see ships moving in front of a horizon and the whole view framed on the left and right by mighty pillars. These pillars are mentioned in the Critique of Pure Reason when it describes a "determination of reason’s bounds," that "is carried out according to secure principles, and that affixes with utmost reliability its nihil ulterius*** to the Pillars of Hercules." The image that appears in copper for Bacon and in words for Kant is less artistic than mythical. For Kierkegaard, the mythical consists of the fact that it also overwhelms the one who employs it: Hence the Pillars of Hercules can steer Bacon and Kant in opposite directions. Bacon writes under the image, "Many will travel and knowledge will be increased" The outlook and pull-out [Ausblick und Ausfahrt] are like an outward extension [Ausgriff]. This is what lies outside the ancient map, described as hic sunt leones, hic sunt dragones [here be lions, here be dragons]. On the other hand, the myth of the Critique of Pure Reason probably consists in restoring the complete vision [Anblick] of the world. The rightful conclusion must also be seen.

The Pillars of Hercules, which the ancient imagination placed on the left and right of the Strait of Gibraltar, mark the border of the world. In what Plato calls 'idea,' their sight is at the same time a view. "Wisdom is power," the famous phrase by Francis Bacon on the other hand seems to lead behind the horizon as behind the light.**** But does Kant only see the limits of growth? Is science evil? The insight that wisdom is power is deepened and expanded when the idea returns as a prototype.

Kant speaks of "reason [that] sets limits to a freedom that in itself is lawless." One can assume that this act of reason follows a principle. But it is certain that he first sets out, indeed discovers, this principle. If the sun stands for the idea of the good, then this picture can connect sight and view better than principle and action. These belong rather to technology or to politics. However, it is noticeable that Kant describes them geographically. It is known that Kant lectured on geography. But Kant likewise has in mind a "land of pure understanding." He says that he "not only traveled throughout the land of pure understanding and carefully inspected its every part, but have also surveyed it throughout, determining for each thing in this land its proper place." And then Kant finds not only a land, but a metaphor: "This land, however, is an island, and is enclosed by nature itself within unchangeable bounds. It is the land of truth (a charming name), and is surrounded by a vast and stormy ocean, where illusion properly resides and many fog banks and much fast-melting ice feign new-found lands. This sea incessantly deludes the seafarer with empty hopes as he roves through his discoveries, and thus entangles him in adventures that he can never relinquish, nor ever bring to an end."

When reason sets limits like nature, then that is not a conclusion, but a prototype, a beginning that is technical, moral and symbolic at the same time. A first device, a free beginning and a first sight appear in the same light. The map, in which Cartesian coordinates are supplemented by lines from the landscape, stands for this analogy. And Kant finds not only land or sea, but Herculean columns. It is to be expected that action and representation will emerge again from the construct (see Nietzsche's Concept of Appearance in this volume, 1992, p. 10ff).

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Published and translated with the permission of the author. This text is part of an ongoing series on the writings of Berthold Reiß which porcile.org wishes to make accessible to a non-German speaking audience. The text is translated by porcile.org in exchange with Berthold Reiß, who is an artist that lives and works in Munich, Germany.

For the English equivalent of the quotes from Kant this translation refers to Werner S. Pluhar’s translation of Critique of Pure Reason (Unified Edition) (Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1996).

For the English equivalent of the quotes from Kierkegaard this translation refers to Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong’s translation of Kierkegaard's Writings, II, Volume 2. The Concept of Irony, with Continual Reference to Socrates (Princeton University Press, 1990).

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Victor’s notes

*The German translation that Berthold Reiß refers to translates here as Bild (image), in terms of bildlich (figurative or metaphorical). Hong&Hong translate this as metaphor.

**radical evil is an expression that is borrowed from Kant and also quoted as such in Kierkegaard

***nothing beyond – beyond the line connecting the Pillars of Hercules

Author: Berthold Reiß, 2014.

The original text (in German) appears in the collected writings of Berthold Reiß – Antinomia. Gesammelte Schriften 1989-2019. Published by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Daniela Stöppel (Kunstraum München, 2020).

Concept for a workshop, 2014.

"This land, however, is an island, and is enclosed by nature itself within unchangeable bounds. It is the land of truth (a charming name), and is surrounded by a vast and stormy ocean, where illusion properly resides and many fog banks and much fast-melting ice feign new-found lands. This sea incessantly deludes the seafarer with empty hopes as he roves through his discoveries, and thus entangles him in adventures that he can never relinquish, nor ever bring to an end." (Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, I. Transcendental Elementary Doctrine, [Second Part. Transcendental Logic,] First Division. Transcendental Analytic, Book Two. The Analytic of Principles, Chapter 3. On the distinction of all objects into phenomena and noumena)

Every sign arises from an outline on a surface. The outline distinguishes what it encloses from what it excludes. Very often the sign is like the color black on white. What is inside is closed off* to the outside. That which is enclosed is cut out of unlimited ground. Unlike this ground, the sign can be surveyed as a whole. Unlike this ground, the sign can be recognized.

Mostly one recognizes what the sign stands for. It rarely stands for a person. More often it stands for a company or an institution. But above all else, the sign exists as its own identity. The sign rarely stands for an island, even more rarely does it represent an island. But it is always an island itself.

Kant speaks of the island to describe the place where human understanding** lies. The text comes from a time when there were still countries to be discovered, a matter of venturing out or finding the coast, but also a matter of staying at home. Today the text can describe the place of people abandoned to the global economy, "surrounded by a vast and stormy ocean, where illusion properly resides." Immediately after, Kant speaks of what the understanding "draws"*** from itself and of what it "borrows" from experience. And he elaborates that these debts are less dangerous than that production. Because being creative always means to go beyond one's own limits.****

In my project Ada (Turkish for 'island', editor's note) I want to compare today's art and today's work. For this I choose the sign as a form. Because in every sign a meaning is connected with an appearance. The same sign can appear in an office and in a studio. Or an entrepreneur looking for a logo for his company can understand a painter standing in front of a blank canvas. The work that aims to make what is needed for appearance to occur starts from the void. The work that consists in understanding what appears comes from abundance. This production corresponds to the economy of the real. This administration corresponds to the economy of capital. In economics as in art, the signs are set at the beginning and read at the end. The connection between production and administration allows for the distinction between the particular work involved in art and the general work found in economics.

Therefore, I will first introduce the project Ada in a workshop. Figuratively speaking, Ada is like a map where factual and individual existence can be drawn. More literally, I invite everyone who participates in the workshop to create their own world from signs that they find in the everyday world. This world can look like a self-portrait, but it is composed of the signs that everyone works with. One's own language is at the same time the foreign, and vice versa.

When I try to understand Kant from today's experience, I follow a broad concept of modernity. If I call everything modern that is not ancient, then I must note that modernity has lived, expressed in the dead language of antiquity, for two thousand years. If in antiquity meaning was once one with its appearance, then this unity still exists in the most modern, in the ideo-pictographic sign, in the pictogram. Only on this ground of hidden harmony can Kant say: the land of pure understanding "is" an island.

The first part of the workshop consists in looking in the contemporary world of work for forms of unity. I draw on my own research as an example for this. The second part of the workshop consists in looking in the contemporary world of work, for forms of unity. I draw on my own research as an example for this. The second part of the workshop consists in finding forms where meaning occurs at the same time as appearance. I draw on my own work as an example for this. This sequence, in which the analysis turns into the synthesis, reverses the usual arrangement in which production appears first and then administration. And already the analysis and even more the synthesis can only be done by everyone on its own. Reversal and experience that can only proceed from an individual are two important steps when it comes to understanding the particularity that characterizes artistic work.

Published and translated with the permission of the author. This text is part of an ongoing series on the writings of Berthold Reiß which porcile.org wishes to make accessible to a non-German speaking audience. The text is translated by porcile.org in exchange with Berthold Reiß, who is an artist that lives and works in Munich, Germany.

For the English equivalent of the quotes of Kant’s text this translation refers to Werner S. Pluhar’s translation of Critique of Pure Reason (Unified Edition) (Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1996).

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Magda’s notes

*The German term used here is 'begrenzt' which is usually translated as 'limited' or 'restricted.' However, because of the reference to the island and because the term also relates to 'border' as well as 'limit' I have tried to express both meanings by beginning my translation efforts more geographically with a sense of enclosure, and only then shift towards the term's meaning as 'limitation,' in order to give a taste of Berthold Reiß's play with words.

**It is important to note that the term used by Berthold Reiß, 'Verstand' is taken directly from Kant, and is translated in the Pluhar edition consistently as the faculty of understanding. The land in question, the island that Kant is referring to in the first quote, is this faculty of understanding, which at this point in the first Critique Kant had just finished defining.

***Again, this is a Pluhar translation. While 'Schöpfen' means to 'draw' as in 'to draw water out of a well' or 'to draw hope from something,' a 'Schöpfer' is a creator. Kant is referring here to the spontaneity that characterises the faculty of understanding. Unlike the perceptual or 'intuitive' aspect of experience, that must always draw on something else, understanding draws on itself only. Only when combined is knowledge produced.

Author: Berthold Reiß, 2014.

The original text (in German) appears in the collected writings of Berthold Reiß – Antinomia. Gesammelte Schriften 1989-2019. Published by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Daniela Stöppel (Kunstraum München, 2020).

Speech. Türkenstraße, Munich, January 23, 2014.

The press release for my current exhibition mentions at the end a "trace that leads not from life into death, but from death into life." In 1998, an announcement began with the sentence: "In order for something to be able to be moved, that which is to be moved must be completely dead." (See in this volume Berthold Reiß, 1998, p. 34f.) One can certainly imagine a movement that does not take place only relative to its opposite. This, if you will, absolute movement is what we call 'life.' We can only imagine this if we do not imagine it only relative to its opposite. Life itself, or that which appears according to the relative meaning of the word, is therefore called eternal life, in the New Testament Greek 'zoe aionios.'

The aeon or the age of the world means duration, but also eternity. The aeon is a form that includes movement and rest, life and death. But does this form exist? It is logically not graspable. And it is aesthetically not tangible. Time does not begin, does not stand still and does not end. And it is impossible to survey as a whole a series that does not begin, does not stop and does not end. Wherever one turns to the Critique of Pure Reason, one finds this impossibility and this intangibility demonstrated. And yet, and presumably precisely because of this, this introduction of an impossible formlessness decides whether we can do anything at all with the Critique of Pure Reason.

The first book of Transcendental Analytic is comprised of the Analytic of Concepts. The second book contains the Analytic of Principles. Kant calls the Analytic of Principles, "a canon solely for the power of judgment, teaching it to apply to appearances the concepts of understanding, which contain the condition for a priori rules." The application of concepts to appearances consists in the ability to "to distinguish whether something does or does not fall under a given rule (is or is not a casus datae legis)." This ability is called power of judgment [Urteilskraft]. Kant notes that "the power of judgment is a particular talent that cannot be taught at all but can only be practiced." In the footnote he writes "A lack in power of judgment is in fact what we call stupidity, and for such a handicap there is no remedy." (Kant, Werke, vol. 3, p. 183ff., ed.)

The application of concepts to appearances or the determination of appearances by concepts, the ability to find cases that fit rules or to name the rule appropriate to the particular case always applies when, for example, we try to say what that, what we mean implies to the example. But with the exception of mathematics, this hardly ever happens. No matter whether the connection of a concept with an appearance succeeds or fails, whether it is right or wrong; an example of this kind of application is always a judgment. But above all, this judgment testifies, even if it is stupid, that concepts can be applied to appearances. And certainly, there is a rule for this application. The Analytic of Principles adds this rule to the Analytic of Concepts. It is therefore also called the Doctrine of the Power of Judgment. The second chapter of the Transcendental Doctrine of the Power of Judgment deals with "the principles of pure understanding." The first chapter, however, deals with "the sensible condition under which alone pure concepts of understanding can be used." I maintain that we can only make use of the Critique of Pure Reason if we understand what is meant by it.

This sensible condition is different from an object, an intuition, an appearance, which are likewise sensible. The difference consists in the fact that in a single thing we find nothing of a pure concept of understanding, that is, of a category. And no one has ever encountered a category. But the sensible condition for connecting such fundamentally different things is called the possibility of this connection. Therefore, while the category of possibility and the condition of sensibility are not the same, they are related. An egg can appear in a picture. Is this how possibility appears? Even if it is meant, it is still not correct that the possible gives rise to the egg, or that the egg gives rise to the possible. Instead, it is absolutely correct to say: according to the category of reality, an 'Egg-and-Dart'* appeared "in a certain time," in antiquity. According to the category of possibility it can appear "at some time," in the future.

The sensible condition under which the categories can be applied to the appearances seems to be time. The connection of all ideas in the "I think" corresponds to the one series; as all presentations of external things affect inner sense.**—This also and especially applies when thinking is called spontaneous and sensuality [is called] receptive. The conscious and the unconscious live side by side, if you will. Of course, they spend the same time together. In a time that is empty because it separates everything from one another, we*** can read the Critique of Pure Reason as a document of a blind practice.—Only this blind practice allows us to apply categories to appearances, to try, against all analysis, what is called connection, synthesis. "Synthesis as such," it is said in the Analytic of Concepts, "as we shall see hereafter, is the mere effect produced by the imagination, which is a blind but indispensable function of the soul without which we would have no cognition whatsoever, but of which we are conscious only very rarely." Thus "the sensible condition under which alone pure concepts of understanding can be used," is by no means simply time, but the determination of the time in which this application is possible. This determination of time Kant calls schematism, and when he explains it, he speaks of "a universal procedure of the imagination for providing a concept with its image." One can imagine commonplace things and tremendous things. It is commonplace to say, "The schema of necessity is the existence of an object at all times." But an abyss appears when this schema is presented in Latin and Greek: "aeternitas (,) necessitas phaenomenon": eternity, necessity as appearance. Eternity is the necessity, when it appears. The question of the aeon is thus answered. The aeon exists as a schema of pure understanding.

Ultimately, because necessity is "at all times" at work, it can be called blind. When the condition of the sensible is what allows for the application of the categories, the condition is what one calls reliability and the sensible, the sealed ground on which the applied sciences have free rein. The schematism of pure understanding, insofar as it is dominated by pure understanding, is a trail leading from life to death. Kant calls the question of application, of course in the sense that the gaze moves from the table of categories to the window, simply a "natural and important question." And after answering quite simply that there must be a third between concept and appearance, and that this can only be the determination of time, which he calls schema and attributes to the imagination, he goes on through the examples of five points, a triangle and a dog, to suddenly find himself in the language of the sublime: "This schematism of our understanding, i.e., its schematism regarding appearances and their mere form, is a secret art residing in the depths of the human soul, an art whose true stratagems we shall hardly ever divine from nature and lay bare before ourselves." The schema is called "a product and, as it were, a monogram of the pure a priori imagination through which, and according to which, images become possible in the first place." (Kant, Werke, vol. 3, p. 190, ed.).

This talk of how images become possible, presents itself in time as condition and possibility. According to its brief outline, this talk is the condition of the possibility of a second one. Which will be about the "hidden art" and about how it comes to light.

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Published and translated with the permission of the author. This text is part of an ongoing series on the writings of Berthold Reiß which porcile.org wishes to make accessible to a non-German speaking audience. The text is translated by porcile.org in exchange with Berthold Reiß, who is an artist that lives and works in Munich, Germany.

For the English equivalent of the quotes from Kant this translation refers to Werner S. Pluhar’s translation of Critique of Pure Reason (Unified Edition) (Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1996).

Magda’s notes

*The 'Egg-and-Dart' is a type of molding in which egg shapes alternate with V-shapes. It is one of the most widely used classical moldings. The literal german translation of ‘Eierstab’ would be 'egg-stick.'

**This would be Kant’s phrasing in the Pluhar translation of how inner and outer sense relate.

Author: Berthold Reiß, 2012.

The original text (in German) appears in the collected writings of Berthold Reiß – Antinomia. Gesammelte Schriften 1989-2019. Published by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Daniela Stöppel (Kunstraum München, 2020).

Speech for the birthday of Ulrich Luhmann, 2012.

The title Antinomia recalls Kant's definition of "antinomy" as a contradiction (or mutual incompatibility) of two laws as much as possibly a record label or a disease. Giving a talk about art is, arguably, in equal parts necessary and impossible. It seems necessary to communicate an understanding of art to the general public. And it is precisely this generality that seems to be the background against which art as a construction appears as special at all. Likewise, however, both the foreground and its contrast speak against the speech as such. They present themselves as a perpetuating failure. The more often one turns and twists them, all the more that this foreground and this form become mere signs of impossibility. The talk of center knows what it wants to introduce: art as center, for example, in such a way that we can speak about it because we see it together, or in such a way that it can be both a presentation as well as an intuition [Vorstellung und Anschauung]. Likewise, the talk of form seems superfluous because of what it is about. The artist makes something new only when he makes something at all.

Ladies and gentlemen! I have now told you that I have nothing to say. However, I have been asked to speak by the man honored today. In order to comply with this request as with what has already been said, it seems to me best to follow the double condition of necessity and impossibility by presenting you with a speech which you may find inspiring and daunting in equal parts.

The task of conveying art to the general public and at the same time pointing out to the general public what art is in particular, seems to be most nearly accomplished, if not fulfilled, or at least grasped in outline, through the talk of the expressive or of expressionism. In the talk of expressionism this outline is not only described as a periphery, but rather, much more dynamically as the expansion of the center. From a distance, a contraction that leads back to the center now seems to be experienced as a reverse dynamic. Physics began to do justice to the structure of the world when it recognized expansion and contraction, repulsion and attraction as the forces that both generate and stabilize the solar system.

I have now, however, nothing to say of expressionistic art. After what was stated at the beginning, it is not in my power or every word forbids itself, which goes beyond speech. Rather, the talk about the expressive is necessary and impossible only if it is expressive itself.

Wilhelm Worringer completed his book Formprobleme der Gotik (Form Problems of the Gothic), as he writes in the preface, "in the field, February 1918." The second chapter is entitled: "Kunstwissenschaft als Menschheitspsychologie" (Art Study as Human Psychology*). In it, Worringer states that the "study of the artistic activity of man ... has not yet gone through that radical transformation and broadening that the study of the mental activity of man owes to Kant’s critique of knowledge. His important shifting of emphasis from the study of the objects known, to the study of the knowing itself, would correspond in the field of art study to a method which regards all artistic facts merely as the working out of definite a priori categories of artistic, or, more exactly, of general psychic sensibility, and to a method for which these psychical categories that determine style are the real problem of investigation." (Wilhelm Worringer, Formprobleme der Gotik, Munich 1920, p. 25) Worringer would certainly agree with the remark that Kant would consider "psychical categories that determine style"** to be messy and, if at all, analogous to it, would speak of schemata.

More important than this sketch is the picture that Worringer presents. For this picture is as necessary as it is impossible. Towards the end of the book are the following sentences: "For the Teutons,*** as we saw, are the conditio sine qua non of the Gothic. They introduced among self-confident peoples the germs of doubt of sense and of distraction of soul, out of which the transcendental pathos of the Gothic then shot up so mightily." (p. 147). In the Critique of Pure Reason, understanding and sensuality are so related to one another that transcendental logic does not break out of the binds of transcendental aesthetics. Every cognition is only possible in space and time. The more precise it is, the more it gives us nothing but appearance, that is: "doubt of sense." This doubt also applies to ourselves. Kant states that, "the form of this intuition lies at the basis beforehand in the mind; and this form determines, in the pre­sentation of time, the way in which the manifold is [placed] together in the mind. And thus this power does not intuit itself as it would if it presented itself directly and self-actively; rather, it intuits itself according to the way in which it is affected from within, and hence intuits itself as it appears to itself, not as it is." (Kant, Werke, vol. 3, p. 93). It is therefore only an assertion: the conditio sine qua non or the subject of the Gothic are the Germanic people. This assertion is impossible as knowledge. Worringer also touches on what Kant calls the transcendental dialectic. Is there a world? Is there a soul? Is there freedom? Is there God? Reason can only answer yes and no to these questions. That is, if you will, a "distraction of soul." The "the germs of doubt of sense and of distraction of soul," that Worringer ascribes to the Germanic people is also attributed to Kantian critique of knowledge in his own text.

The topic of Kant and the Gothic (see in this volume p. 74ff.) this is admittedly not: folk ideology and enlightenment can also be confused at some point. Far more often, the opposites present themselves in this way as forms of expression whose necessity and impossibility seem to be interdependent.

I would like to conclude with a passage from the chapter "Die geheime Gotik der frühen nordischen Ornamentik" (The Latent Gothic of Early Nordern Ornament):

"We see that the northern ornament, despite its abstract linear character, sets free impressions of life, which our feeling of vitality, bound as it is to empathy, would impute immediately only to the organic world. So it would seem that this ornament [PI. VIII] unites the abstract character of primitive geometric ornament [PI. II] and the living character of Classical organically tinged ornament [PI. V, A]. Such is, however, not the case. It can by no means raise the claim of presenting a synthesis, a union, of these fundamental antitheses. It deserves, rather, only the name of a hybrid phenomenon. It is not a question here of a harmonious commingling of two opposing tendencies, but of an unclear and, to a certain degree, uncanny amalgamation of them, of drawing upon our power of empathy, which is bound to organic rhythm, for an abstract world foreign to it. Our organically tempered sense of vitality shrinks back before this senseless violence of expression as before a debauchery. But when finally, yielding to compulsion, it lets its energies flow into these lines, dead in themselves, it feels itself torn away in an unheard-of manner and raised to a frenzy of movement which far outstrips all possibilities of organic movement. The pathos of movement inherent in this vitalized geometry, a prelude to the vitalized mathematics of Gothic architecture forces our sensibility to an unnatural feat of strength. Once the natural bounds of organic motion are broken through, there is no stopping; again and again the line is broken, again and again checked in the natural direction of its movement, again and again violently prevented from running out quietly, again and again diverted to new complications of expression, so that, intensified through all these restraints, it yields its utmost of expressive power, until finally, robbed of all possibilities of natural satisfaction, it comes to an end in intricate contortions, or disconsolately breaks off in vacancy, or senselessly runs back into itself." (Form Problems of the Gothic, 47-8)

Worringer deals with "form problems'' of the Gothic. In the passage we read, these form problems emerge from the connection between abstraction and liveliness. This opposition corresponds to the opposition of Kant's Critique of Judgment: the opposition between the mechanical and the organic. The Critique of Pure Reason also speaks dialectically of freedom and conditionality. If the expressive gesture is borne like no other by the "thesis" that the world leaves room for "absolute spontaneity" (Kant, Werke, vol. 4, p. 428), then it challenges the "antithesis" that this beginning, like every beginning, is conditioned.

In contrast to Worringer's talk of an "unclear and, to a certain degree, uncanny amalgamation," Kant found our position in the midst of opposites downright delightful the moment he discovered it: "I tried quite seriously to prove propositions and their opposite, not in order to demonstrate a theory of doubt, but because I suspected an illusion of the understanding and wished to find out where it resided. The year [17]'69 brought me great light." (Karl Jaspers, Kant. Leben, Werk, Wirkung, München, 1975, p. 22)

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Published and translated with the permission of the author. This text is part of an ongoing series on the writings of Berthold Reiß which porcile.org wishes to make accessible to a non-German speaking audience. The text is translated by porcile.org in exchange with Berthold Reiß, who is an artist that lives and works in Munich, Germany.

For the English equivalent of the quotes from Worringer’s book this translation refers to the authorized English translation of the third edition by Shapley-Rusk - Form Problems of the Gothic (G.E. Stechert & Co., New York, 1918).

For the English equivalent of the quotes of Kant this translation refers to Werner S. Pluhar’s translation of Critique of Pure Reason (Unified Edition) (Hackett Publishing, Indianapolis, 1996).

For the English equivalent for the Kant quote in Karl Jaspers book this translation refers to Ralf Manheim’s translation of Karl Jasper’s Kant (Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., New York, 1962) that is based on Kant: Drei Gründer des Philosophierens (Piper, München, 1957), where the quote also appears.

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Victor’s notes

*While in the authorized translation the title of the chapter translates as Art Study of Human Psychology, in a contemporary and rather literal sense it would translate as Art History as Psychology of Humankind

**formbildende Kategorien der Seele would rather translate in contemporary language to form-constructing categories of the soul

Author: Magda Wisniowska – March, 2021.

Much of the appeal of Arjen Kleinherenbrink’s book lies in the single-mindedness of his argument. From the start we are told in no uncertain terms that many, if not most, of Deleuze’s ontological interpretations are incorrect, and that his machine ontology has been fundamentally misunderstood. Why? Because all these interpretations tend to posit a single continuous virtual realm. Depending on who you read, this realm consists of either those dynamic processes  underlying the discontinuity of concrete entities; a virtuality characterised as the one true real and causal agent of an only apparent existence; or a single intensive force accounting for all change (Kleinherenbrink 31-7). And in light of what Kleinherenbrink calls the ‘externality thesis’ it makes sense to posit such a continuous, active, virtual realm. For if all entities in our world of things are discontinuous and separate individuals, something else must account for these things to be able to change, to relate to each other, and to produce and create. Things would then be the manifestation of the one creative force, in actuality apparently discontinuous, but continuous in their virtuality; entities mere intersections in something much more vast and powerful than themselves. This is our proverbial tablecloth (see Sad Mondays 13). 

As Kleinherenbrink argues, the problem with ontological interpretations positing a continuous virtual realm is that they cannot be adequately reconciled with Deleuze’s machine thesis. ‘Everything is a machine’ Deleuze repeatedly states, but everything is not a machine, if there is something other than the machine, of which the machine is an expression. In these ontologies of the virtual, the being of mechanic entities is dissolved into something non-ontic, which nevertheless is presented as a realm in which things really and truly ‘are’ (Kleinherenbrink 32). We are very much reminded here of the Spinozian argument relating to God’s causality. We might recall how earlier, I argued that Spinoza’s is an immanent rather than transient God, meaning that his God neither acts on something other than himself nor does he create something other than himself (see Sad Mondays 6b i). If in Spinoza there is only the one God, the one Substance, then everything God creates must remains in God. Everything partakes in God. Here the analogy is of the world as God’s facial expression (Sad Mondays 6b i). 

For Kleinherenbrink however, Spinoza’s philosophy must also be rejected, as it too falls back on continuity. No matter our expression in modes — we are all part of God’s continuous being. So what does Kleinherenbrink propose? Instead of reality being divided into, on the one hand, a continuous virtual, and on the other, a discontinuous actual realm of entities, he proposes a second, mechanic ontology of a private virtual (36). Each machine, he claims, has this private virtual aspect, divided as it is, through an internal difference in kind, between the virtual and the actual. So with every machine there is an aspect that we can encounter, and an aspect that remains hidden to us, which is non-relational. Furthermore, Kleinherenbrink divides both the virtual and the actual aspect of the thing into the ‘one’ and the ‘multiple’ (38-9). On the virtual side of the machine, each entity has to be both one and multiple, or as Kleinherenbrink attributes to Deleuze’s reading of Leibniz, ‘one to be this, but multiple to distinguish this from that’ (39). Similarly on the actual side of the machine, each entity is also one and multiple. ‘One is this encounter’ that we relate to, but this same encounter is also ‘multiple in the sense of having qualities distinguishing this from that’ (39). I very much like the simple starkness of Kleinherenbrink’s first diagram, which he copies from Deleuze’s The Fold. I reproduce it below:

These few lines are meant to represent the fourfold of the machine, both virtual and actual, one and many, but ultimately, individual, isolated, non-relational. A more accurate diagram perhaps would be:

Which in turn brings us to Kleinherenbrink’s second diagram, following quick on the heels of the first.

In this much more complex elaboration of the fourfold, Kleinherenbrink draws on a number of Deleuze’s texts, each with its own idiosyncratic vocabulary. To explore the private virtual of the machine we encounter concepts of ‘sense,’ ‘body,’ ‘qualities’ and ‘idea’ as well as such familiar Deleuzian concepts as the ‘body without organs,’ the ‘problem,’ the ‘event,’ or ‘intensive matter’ — all of which I want to leave aside for now to concentrate only on one interpretation. For at this point of his argument Kleinherenbrink’s thinking of the fourfold owes the most to an early 1967 discussion at the French Society of Philosophy, a transcript of which has been republished in Desert Islands in 2002. Under debate here are the parameters of what Deleuze calls the idea, or rather, more accurately, of the thing of the idea. This for Deleuze does not consist of a ‘what’ but of a multitude of determinations: ‘how,’ ‘how much,’ ‘where and when’ and ‘what case.’ What is crucial is that already then, the fourfold is at play, as identified by the moderator of the discussion and president of the society, Jean Wahl.

Deleuze begins the discussion by identifying the thing through its two distinguishing traits. The first concerns the qualities that specify it as a thing, the second, the extension that the thing occupies, an organisation of internal and external parts. So on the one hand, there is the synthesis of qualification and specification, on the other hand, the synthesis of partition and organisation. Crucially, the one depends on the other, there being no qualities without extension, no species without parts. In the mathematical language that Deleuze uses, this is differentiation, with its two correlative aspects, and it does remind one of a graph, the vertical marking the difference in y, the horizontal, the difference in x, together representing the rate of change. But Deleuze argues that underlying specification and organisation are spatio-temporal dynamisms, an intensive spatium pre-existing every quality and extension. This would be in Deleuze’s mathematical language, the differential, the rate of change at any one single point. And the determinations of the intensive field are what corresponds to the multiplicity of questions of how, when, where, who. 

Jean Wahl identifies Deleuze’s thing as a fourfold, because Deleuze shows that the dynamisms controlling differentiation — the specification and partition that actualise the thing of the idea — are derived from the two aspects of the differential — differential relations and their concomitant points. That the differential has two aspects might have eluded my description of the differential as the rate of change at any single point, but this is what, mathematically speaking, the differential consists of: differential relations existing only through reciprocal determinations, and singularities, points corresponding to these relations. Thus the thing of the idea is only ever actualised when differential relations are incarnated in species or qualities and concomitant points in the extension corresponding to these qualities. Or  as my diagram shows:

What we have here is a very abstract system, but which nevertheless corresponds to many, not so abstract systems, found in our everyday world. The differential is the phonemes distinguishing one sound from another in language, the physical particles making up matter, the biological genes carrying the instructions of how protein is made. 

Author: Magda Wisniowska – February, 2021.

Spinoza’s Universe Now we need to understand how Spinoza believes God’s causality works to produce a universe. (Beth Lord, Guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, 38)

The first of our diagrams can be found in Beth Lord’s guide to Spinoza’s Ethics, in the short section ‘Spinoza’s Universe.’ It aims to visualise how God’s causality works in the production of the universe, acknowledged by Lord as one of the most impenetrable topics of the Ethics. The topic is difficult for two reasons. First of all, Spinoza wants his lack of precision to reflect the understandable limitations of human knowledge. After all, there is only so much a finite mind can know of an infinite and all-encompassing God. Secondly, his very general account is intended to allow for any future scientific advances. I therefore begin to write this most reluctantly, the abstraction of what I want to present is as appealing to me as it is forbidding to most readers. 

To begin then in the most abstract of fashions, at stake in this section is the relationship between what Spinoza calls ‘God’s attributes' and the ‘modes’ in which our universe is expressed in this attribute. It concerns all the things that follow from any of God’s attributes, the effects of God’s causality when he is considered as one attribute. At this point we do not know what are these consequences of the attribute, these things, and these effects might be. We are only told that they can be eternal or finite, immediate or mediated. So accordingly, what follows from the absolute nature of God’s attributes, is the infinite and eternal thing. This is the effect of God’s causality as one attribute in the ‘immediate infinite mode.’ In turn, what follows from the immediate infinite mode, the modified effect of God’s causality is the ‘mediate infinite mode.’ Finally, we learn that what we find most graspable — all the finite things we know and recognise — come at the very end, as modes by which God's attributes are expressed in ‘a certain and determinate way.’ To offer examples of things produced immediately by God and things produced by mediation, Lord refers to the explanation given by Spinoza in his letter to Georg Hermann Schuller, 

The examples you ask for of the first kind are: in the case of thought, absolutely infinite intellect; in the case of extension, motion and rest. An example of the second kind is the face of the whole universe, which, although varying in infinite ways, yet remains always the same. (Letter 64)

There is plenty to unpack here, not the least beginning with the idea of causality. If in the Ethics, God is presented as the cause of the universe, this would seem to vindicate Kleinherenbrink’s critique: Spinoza’s is indeed a philosophy of interiority as it puts God at the heart of things. But to do so, would be to overlook the fact that for Spinoza, there is only one Substance, one God, one Nature. As Beth Lord makes abundantly clear, Spinoza’s God is not a creator in a Cartesian or even artistic sense. He is not separate from what he creates. God cannot act on something other than God —he cannot create something other than himself — because there is only one God and he encompasses everything (37). God’s causality here is not ‘transitive’ but ‘immanent’ (ibid.). God is the cause of itself and God is the cause of all things the same way he is the cause of itself (Ethics, P25S).

Thus we have to understand that Spinoza’s immanent God is both the cause and the effect of the universe, as the effects of God’s causality remains in God (Lord, 37). God is in the things he causes. As the cause of himself, he is the power of self-actualisation; as the effect of himself, he is also what he has actualised. It is not so much that Spinoza’s is a philosophy of interiority, rather that he presents a universe in which interiority and exteriority have no meaning: God is all things and God is within all things. 

The second idea we have to consider before proceeding, is that of the ‘attribute.’ Once again, Spinoza’s definition is very different from the perhaps more familiar Cartesian one, where it is defined as an essential property of a substance. For Spinoza, the attribute is ‘what the intellect perceives of the substance as constituting its essence’ (Ethics, D4). This does not mean that his definition is in any way subjective, that the attribute has something to do with how any individual intellect might perceive it. Instead, attributes are meant to be the different ways in which substance can be perceived (see Lord, 21).  As Lord argues, we can never perceive pure substance as such. Our sensory experience and thought is not such that would allow us to grasp ‘bare being’ (ibid.). Instead, we perceive being as either a physical body or a thought, an extended thing or a thinking thing.  Potentially however, it is implied that there might be any number of attributes, which we, with our limited human minds, cannot, at this point in time, conceive. 

What I want to consider here is the idea of causality in the attribute of extension — how God’s causality works to produce extended things or physical bodies. As I have already noted, there are different ways in which we can perceive the essence of substance as the extended thing or physical body. There is the finite and infinite way, the immediate and mediated. If we perceive physicality immediately, as in, most directly, taking into account the infinity of the attribute, then, as Spinoza says in his letter to Schuller, we perceive it as motion and rest. In its immediate infinite mode, this is what the body comes down to: nothing more than activity and its lack.  In terms of an interiority that isn’t, we can say that infinite motion and rest are caused by the attribute of extension’s infinite nature, meaning, infinite extended being includes, causes and expresses itself as these infinitely variable fluctuations of activity (see Lord, 39). 

On the other hand, if we perceive infinite physicality in its mediated mode, then we encounter something else, we confront what follows from the infinite immediate mode.  In Spinoza’s letter to Schuller, this is the universe’s ‘face,’ the face as it were, of God. Again it is worth noting that this example differs from the one Kleinherenbrink used to dismiss certain interpretations of Deleuze, which present him as a philosopher who sees reality as one continually flowing process. For Kleinherenbrink, this philosophy of interiority is like a tablecloth with its ‘sharp twists and folds’ (32). As he says, ‘discrete things’ might seem to be here and there, ‘but it is actually tablecloth all the way down’ (ibid.). But how often do we come across a tablecloth just lying on its own? A tablecloth always covers something, a table, a surface, a plane. Whatever folds and bumps we perceive on the fabric are the result of what we do not see, what the tablecloth hides. This is not the case with Spinoza’s face of God. The expressions that animate its features belong to the face. We cannot separate the face and its expression.  

For me, Spinoza’s face of God is Deleuze and Guattari’s Abstract Machine. One only needs to compare the two descriptions. This is Spinoza’s in a later section of the Ethics. He writes, 

And if we proceed in this way to infinity, we shall easily conceive that the whole of nature is one individual, whose parts, that is, all bodies, vary in infinite ways, without any change of the whole individual. (IIL7S) 

As Beth Lord explains, each individual in Spinoza’s universe is made up from other individuals and in turn, forms further individuals, in a series of ever increasing complexity. So for her, 

…multiple cells and microorganisms make up a fish; multiple fishes, plants, stones and water make up a river; multiple rivers, mountains and land make up the earth; multiple planets make up the universe, and so on. (40)

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari repeat Spinoza’s description almost word for word. They write,

Thus each individual is an infinite multiplicity, and the whole of Nature is a multiplicity of perfectly individuated multiplicities. The plane of consistency of Nature is like an immense Abstract Machine, abstract yet real and individual; its pieces are the various assemblages and individuals, each of which groups together an infinity of particles entering into an infinity of more or less interconnected relations. (254)

An individual for Deleuze, is an infinite multiplicity, just as the whole of Nature is an infinite multiplicity. This ever expanding collection of individual multiplicities is the Abstract Machine, abstract, real, and individual. God is the cause of this Machine but not in Kleinherenbrink’s sense of relations being internal to the one term, individual modes reducible to the one substance. The Machine is the face of God, the one countenance with an infinite variety of expressions. No matter how these might change, the face remains one and the same. Even Kleinherenbrink begins his critique of interiority by acknowledging Deleuze’s ontological equality of all entities, whether these are ‘physical, chemical, fictive, organic and digital,’ to call them a machine. ‘Everything is a machine’ (2). In a Thousand Plateaus, these are Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Memories of a Spinozist,’ the machinic memories of the face of God. 

Here is the first diagram, following Beth Lord.