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

In: Vinzenz Brinkmann, Matthias Ulrich, and Joachim Pissarro, eds. Jeff Koons. The Sculptor (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2012), pp. 50, 58-69.

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

50

THE AESTHETICS OF THE BETWEEN ON SPACE AN 0 BEAUTY

Babette Babich

Phen omenological aesthetics invites the viewer to pay attention to his or her own experience, judging, so Immanuel Kant observes, that others share thi s experience. " Isn'tthat beautifu l l " A phenomenological aesthetics articulates obj ective subjectivity, always from the first-person perspective. Phenomenologically, the "I" is what linguists call a shifter: the reference in every ca se depends upon the one who speaks. As I stand, you stand . As I claim, you claim objectivity, insisting as you do upon the differ ence of your own perception-"Stand here, instead!" A phenomenological aesthetics is thus always perspectival. In this way, we explore the aesthetics of the between as the dynamic of engagement between subject and object of experience, reflection , knowledge . In question is the between of the encounter, the between as it is met. The locus for our investigation here is the museum, but it can also be a courtyard or a garden, a boulevard. And in an important sense , it is also the nowhere, the non-there ubiquity of being online, being "on" Facebook, being "on" Twitter. I stand between the where, where I find myself, and the there of the there of all that is around me. Space. I can feel the around ; I feel the nothing of the emptiness between me and a given object. As I draw closer to a wall, a gate, any boundary marking, even a velvet rope, I am faced with, confronted by, what is near me. I begin to catch sight of distance-and as Martin Heidegger reminds us, as Aristotle had already observed, echoing Homer: the nearer I am to things, the more perspicuity seems to suffer. We do not, we cannot, see things whole that are too close. Coming still closer to the wall I can, even if I do not, touch it . Thus the visual sense begins to border the haptic , the sense of touch. As I draw near to a painting in a museum , I begin to place myself-I am warned not to touch-to situate myself. And Heidegger is right when he repeats Aristotle'S reflections on proportion: I need to take a step back if I wish to see the painting whole, if I ambition, and here I give myself away, to see it "as it is." There is where I am; there is where the painting is. Stand here, the art expert tells us; listen to Rudolf Arnheim , expert on art and vision and perception as thinking, and note that it is best seen from this position. There are those who, violating their art-history backgrounds, nevertheless insist on creeping closer than they "should." Indeed, the museum visitor, precisely where the quotidian is what dulls the expert, is able to marvel at the surface of the artist's work, the working ofthe artwork. See! The paint is thick here ; there colors change in hue . There one sees the texture of different surfaces that vanish into the work's distance , matt board, canvas, wood. The proper form of the work with draws, as Arnheim reminds us , like Kant, like Heidegger-it does not announce itself as form . Walking in the presence of sculpture, things are immediately different: I am on edge. Nam ing sculpture "an instance of frameless art," Arnheim reminds us that "the figure determines its own fulcrum." What is around me, where do I find myself? Phenomenologically regarded , I am attuned to the where. There is balance ; there is mimesi s. I am mirrored by, taken by this statue, brought into its place, into my own space: here and there. All of this presupposes some presence of self, to self; all ofthis presupposes the dynamic of the visit and the visitors around one , a grou pled li ke a crew of trai ned seals by a docent barki ng the truth; a pai r of lovers mo re intrigued by one another than by anything around them, laugh i ng at this and then at that, catching joy, sometimes, infectious to those around them, sometimes merely embarrassing. And there is more than that . There is what Arnheim , quoting Rudolf Otto, calls the mysterium tremendum . This phe nomen ological aesthetic sense is the seeing that for Arnheim-after Friedrich Nietzsche, after Martin Heidegger, after Edmund Husserl-is always also a thinking.

63

How do you find yourself in your world? What happens to you "in" a church, wandering down a city boulevard , exploring a museum? This play with space and the playing of space on the observer is one of the reasons one popular philosopher has issued a call for "temples for atheists ," as if museums were not al ready such temples. As if shopping malls were not such temples, as if our public squares were not already such temples. Where indeed can we not find them today? Temples for atheists? Las Vegas is full of them. The phenomenological philosopher of aesthetics , Giuseppina Moneta, reflects on " forms of emptiness." These forms are seen in " the shaped spaces designed by human dwelling and the architecture of all ages, cristalli di rocca, as Andrea Palladio called them, more solid than volumes." As Moneta recalls, these "spaces speak in between columns in the Greek temple, in the vaulted vacuum of the Roman arch, in the rhythmic emptiness of the baroque." Perhaps the most dynamic experience of visiting a museum is the space, the space where you find you rself in thattemple in the midst of the everyday, the space of the between. These are not just the spaces of temporal intervals, the time of our lives . Rather, these are spaces between yourself and the display, and, in the case of a special exhibit, the space between that special exhibit and the visited space. What is always there to be seen wins new light and one sees it as if for the first time. Nor is the visitor supererogatory. As Walter Benjamin's analysis of the floneur shows, the visitor, too , is part of the where, is part of the there. Thus we recall Walter Benjamin's reflection on Charles Baudelaire-and this is an importantly romantic theme: "Empathy is the nature of the intoxication to which the flOneur abandons himself in the crowd .... Like those roving souls in search of a body, he enters another person whenever he wishes." The fl6neurtakes, as Benjamin writes, the very notion of marketability, self-marketability, for a stroll. Thus some go to galleries and to museums, for love, for beauty, for the erotic , as beauty is the promise of happiness. Thus Alexander Nehamas quotes Nietzsche, who ac cordingly gives Nehamas's book its punch inasmuch as Nietzsche quotes Stendhal in just this erotic direction, contra the same Arthur Schopenhauer and the same Kant Nehamas en gages. Out for the day, attuned to culture, one is up for the experience or life of the spectacle. Thus the visitor, too, like the goods in a wi ndow display or car or fu rniture showroom, is there to be seen. And how better-this is the lonely-heart's advice-to find a like-minded friend or companion? Or as a Twitter colleague in Manchester cried, " I look fucking sexy' Anyone wanna go look at art this afternoon maybe? In London ." Indeed, such an association is perhaps the most immediate effect of art, if also the most conflicted, as Alexander Nehamas carefully dissects this point: "The erotic has always been essential to our love of the arts, but, for complicated reasons, it has come to seem deeply inappropriate." KOONS AND THE CLASSICAL AESTHETIC Jeff Koons (*1955) is difficult to classify. Part of the problem has to do with the same classi ficatory tension that makes exhibiting his work such a performative event. The museum itself becomes the working of the work. Koons's work works against, with, in dialogue with its spaces. At the very least, this brings those same spaces into relief. It does something more than this, however, because what Koons's work can do is to remind us of several sculptors, perhaps with the exception of Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957), Alberto Giacometti (1901 1966), but also Umberto Boccioni (1882-1916), that is, to bring us to think about what it is that a sculptural work of art does. One could argue that this is David Hockney's (*1937) ambi tion for himself. What Koons does that is perhaps most significant is that he does not make his work him self: he is the artist, not the fab ricator; there is in th is case no poi nt to a particu lar in sc ri pti on, an N.N. fecit. There is, as there was with Rembrandt (1606-1669), and Tilman Riemenschneider (1460-1531 ), and indeed with Polyclitus, a workshop, an entire factory of workers. Who is the artist? Good question . We began by pointing out that the question of the space of the artwork is similarly relevant. What does one visit the Liebieghaus to see? What does one see when one visits New York's Frick Collection? Versailles? And there is an exact parallel to the question, still more difficult, differently difficult: what does one see when one travels to Colmar to visit a Gruenewald on site? What is the site?

64

This is the question that makes a Martin Heidegger different for his part on the theme of the Sistine Madonna than many art historians on the same issue. For Heidegger, notoriously and seemingly reactionary, the claim is that "The Sistine Madonna belongs in the church of Piacenza, not in a historico-antiquarian sense, but with respect to its pictorial essence. In accordance with this, the picture will always long to be there." Heidegger's claim is always a crucially, critically local claim, a claim of place, of the world-historical playing together of time and space (Zeit-Spiel-Raumes). We get some of this play of space and time in Koons. Although Koons's work lends itself to a certain comparison to the classical, such as most patently his Bourgeois Bust-Jeff and Ilona (ill. 1) from his series Made in Heaven (1991), any such parallel cannot but be postmodern: one creates in homage to another world; a decidedly white world. In fact, as we continue to be bowled over by Antonio Canova (1757-1822) or ab sorbed by the Classicist era (or else by the late-Renaissance Benvenuto Cellini) , we are, like the ancients, and should be moved by a different sensibility: such as, for example, what to us is probably the most unfamiliar world of antiquity, which is lost to us. Thus, we are confused by what we imagine it to be and what it once was . As Friedrich Nietzsche warns us , we should be on our guard against our inclination "to over-Hellenize the Hellene and conjure up for our selves a work of art that was never at home anywhere in all the world." We know that the marble copies of the Doryphoros of Polyclitus (ill. 3)-so influential, even in antiquity, that it is supposed to exemplify the proportionality of the sculptural "canon" as such (although it is also argued that "the" Canon refers to a specific statue)-are copies of a bronze. The original Doryphoros looked nothing like the marble Roman copies, as we have them and admire them in Naples and in Minneapolis, and so on. Modern bronze recon structions attempt (with less success in recent years) to give a sense of the original, as can be seen in Georg Romer's now destroyed reconstruction of the Doryphoros in Munich (ill. 4) . Perhaps it is significant that the contemporary reconstruction of Romer's original and now lost reconstruction is less successful than was his effort, as if all copying were condemned to a loss of resolution, certainly a failure of resolve. Indeed, Koons's 1988 Michael Jackson and Bubbles (ill. 5) with its colors of ivory and gold, comes vastly closer to antiquity, not unlike Antonio Canova's Paolino Borghese (ill. 2) -if one considers not the marble figure but the gold border and tassels of the couch on which she reclines. So, too, does the forty-two foot Athena Parthenos (ill . 6) by Koons's contemporary, the American sculptor Alan LeQuire, publicly commissioned and begun in 1982. We do well, while we are on this metonymic subject, to note in this age of high capital speculation, in the age of art as what sells and can be sold and thus of art as investment, that this same public commissioning for the interior of the civic project of the recreation of the Parthenon in Nashville makes LeQuire's monumental sculpture yet more convergent with the mores of statuary in antiquity. Where Koons works in the medium of porcelain and gold, LeQuire modeled his Athena in clay and cast it in gypsum assembled on a steel armature, not of gold and ivory like Phidias's original statue, where cost, among other limitations, did prohibit a complete reproduction of the ancient chryselephantine statue. When it comes to the sculptures of antiquity we have trouble thinking of them in color, let alone mixed media, although Canova himself was well aware that this material dynamic and counterpoise was characteristic of ancient sculpture and it is reflected in his work, most no tably his La Maddalena Penitente (ill. 9). And it is indeed the color of ancient sculpture, no matter whether in wood or marble or terra cotta or bronze, et cetera, that tends to elude us. What is worth reflecting is that no matter how often scholars tell us of the rich and even garish intensity of ancient works of sculptural art, we continue to be reluctant to associate color, especially rich and vibrant color, with ancient Greek sculpture (ill. 7). Lilac. Actually : magenta . This is the putative color of Koons's Balloon Dog (ill. 10), made of high chromium stainless steel and recently, wonderfully exhibited at Versailles . It is all about the contrast. Not the color of the blossom, a tonality of color, as one sees the flower itself and one that almost inevitably carries the scent of spring along with it, Koons's magenta is of the gleaming,

65

2 Antonio Canova Paolino Borghese, 1805-1808 Galleria Borghese, Rom / Rome

58

5 Jeff Koons Michael Jackson and Bubbles , 1988 (Banality)

6
Alain LeQuire Rekonstruktion der Athena Parthenos des Phidias / Reconstruction of the Athena Parthenos of Phidias, 2002 The Parthenon, Nashville

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

60

8 Antoni o Ca nova Amor und land Psyche, 1788-1793

Musee du Lou vre, Pari s

9 Anto nio Canova

La Maddalena Pen ite nte, 17 96
Pala zzo Bianco delle St rad e Nuove, Genua / Genoa

61

10 Jeff Koons Balloon Dog (Magenta), 1994-2000 (Celebration) Installation sa nsicht! Installation view, Salon d'Hercule, Chateau de Versailles, 2008

62

metallic kind, evocative of middle-class birthday parties for young children, parties that come complete with a balloon twister who works his magic as a clown, a poet of spatial form. Koons, too, is such a poet, and he sees such spatial poetry in the balloons any child's party entertainer can make by the dozens or else, in Koons's case, writ large like the Mylar balloons, massive floating airships, that grace New York City's annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. This recidivist Classicism is the point Nietzsche was already highlighting in 1870 as he re minded his audience in Basel of the then already-well-known (this was his point) vision of antiquity, highlighting the resistance to its reception, "Was it not until recently seen to be an unconditional artistic axiom that all ideal plastic art had to be colorless, that ancient sculpture did not permit the application of color?" Public perception, including the art historians and professors of aesthetics themselves, tends to revert to the "classic" view of antiquity. Nietzsche himself goes on, using a Homeric metaphor, to contrast the man of marble with the man of gold: naming "golden" humanity to gether with the October sun as "Goethean ." Here Nietzsche alludes to the statue within, the inner ideal of what he here calls "ancient humanity," articulated by way of " the colored splendor of that old master" (ill. 7) . Nietzsche, of course, is the anti-classicist classical philologist par excellence. And this status makes him a fitting thinker to inaugurate the twentieth century with his death in 1900. But where do we find ourselves now, in the twenty-first century? How do we see statues and how do we see color? THERE

is NO PLACE THAT DOES NOT SEE YOU

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

Rilke's Archaic Torso of Apollo seems written to emphasize the mimetic claim of the statue. One is engaged by the torso, by the head one cannot know, the eyes one cannot see that nonetheless underscore that one is seen. In the museum, even if the task in question is for you to see, one seems to be more than a subject observing, but also a subject and sometimes even an object seen. Hans-Georg Gadamer foregrounds this same poem in his discussion of the exemplarity of the work as the very that, the sheer fact that, as Rilke writes, "once such a thing stood" among mortal, changeable, human beings. Gadamer echoes both Heidegger and Nietzsche, who for their part also echo Friedrich Hblderlin for this archaic claim. Thus, in a telling section of his iconically beautiful Only a Promise of Happiness : The Place of Beauty in a World of Art, Alexander Nehamas reflects that "the pleasure of making a new acquaintance may seem an anemic parallel to the fervid power of art. Imagine yourself, then, on a street, in a restaurant or a gallery, at a party, during a lecture, a concert, or a game. You cast your eyes around, recognizing perhaps some people you know, stopping for a moment to glance at an outfit or two, lingering when you notice people talking to one another, distin guishing, so to speak, foreground from background, those you are explicitly aware of from others who mean nothingto you. And then, all of a sudden, everything becomes background everything but a pair of eyes, a face, a body, pushing the rest out of your field of vision and giving you a moment of awe and a shock of delight, perhaps even passionate longing. For a moment, at least , you are looking at beauty." Nehamas's book concerns the friends one makes with the gallery itself, with its objects to which one returns, with those who visit the gallery, a kind of non-BenjaminianArcades Project, as one wanders, seeing the items on display, seeing the visitors seeing the same, seeing dif ferent items. Where do they stay? Where do they go? The point here is to remind us that the risk that goes along with what it is to look at beauty is also a reticence : " perhaps out of shyness or fear of rejection," or-and here Nehamas is a touch more sensitive than Jacques Derrida (at least as some of his more enthusiastic followers have read Derrida on the topic of friendship and its promises)-"perhaps out of concern for

66

the feelings of others." It is enough to take note of what Plato means, what Aristotle means by the desire to know, the scopic urge "to keep looking" turns out for Alexander to be "an effort to learn what can be known about you from a distance," and it is this that becomes "a desire to draw near, to look and talk and get to know you better from up close." We match ourselves to one another, and this, too, belongs to the aesthetics ofthe between. I recall a long conversation, a long time ago between Ale xa nder Nehamas and myself. There was talk of Plato, Nietzsche, Heidegger, literature, sculpture, and a bit of the politics of phi losophy, analytic (Alexander), continental (myself). And there was the promise of happiness . Everyone who has come to have a friend or lover has a similar story to tell. The point, Ne hamas's point is that something starts a friendship, and that something we call beauty. Beauty catches us, it compels our attention, claims our presence, even if, even when we cannot find time for it. Gadamer points to just this impatience in his The Relevance of the Beautiful, where in the progression of souls and the turning ofthe cosmos in its great year, in place of the chaotic in constancy characterizing "our so-called experience of the world down here on earth, we per ceive the true constants and unchanging patterns of being. But while the gods surrender themselves totally to the vision of the true world in this encounter, our human souls are dis tracted because of their unruly natures. They can only cast a momentary and passing glance at the eternal orders, since their vision is clouded by sensuous desire . ... These are souls who, so to speak, have lost their wings." That is why Plato's Phaedrus is as powerful as it is with its appeal to the seductive claims of the lover, betraying both the vanity and the fears of the beloved (Alexander also talks about such anxieties), but withal, Plato sidesteps both the seductive claim and the anxious concern to highlight what beauty is able to do for us in the service of the good. For Gadamer, this is the heart of astonishment, the mortal intimation of what might yet last or endure: the very that, as the poet says, that "something can be held in our hesitant stay." We , who come too late, as Holderlin also reminds us, are consummate, as it turns out, in nothing so much as our inability to be-this is where the eastern philosophers find us vulnerable-to be still, to wait. Beauty catches us in our impatience. It is the one thing that can, as Gadamer says with Nehamas, after Plato, cause our wings to grow again (ill. 8). For Nehamas, Stendhal's promissory word is the key here. Thus the "experience of beauty is inseparable from interpretation, and just as beauty always promises more than it has so far, so interpretation, the effort to understand what it promises, is always a work in progress." SU PERFICIALITI ES: SKI N The reflective element is key to ancient Greek art, both literally and mimetically, interpretively, hermeneutically, the last in the spirit of Nehamas as we quoted him above, whose book sub titled The Place of Beauty in the World of Art is, as we have seen, all about reminding us that contra Kant and Schopenhauer, and specifically contra Susan Sontag's claim that "In place of hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art," it is essential to remember that " hermeneutics and erotics, as Plato knew, do not exclude one another." The literally reflective element was also part of that and it is this, together with color as it is related to these same surface values, that so often goes missing. In the case of the Greeks this tends to be overlooked, because what remains to us today is not as it was when it was first made, and Aristotle makes much ofthis difference even from the start, along with Plato and Pliny too in his Natural History. The significance of the first skin of new bronze or new silver, before the air begins to interact with and to transform the look of bronze or silver, th e surface of gleaming metal is a subject of discussion, witness to which can be found in the extraordinary significance of "polishers" employed by the city, whose function was to pol ish-a cosmetic kind of dermabrasion-public statues. Koons's work gives us important variations on the surfaces of materials in our day, not only in marble , but also in a chromatic array of glass; yellow, blue, violet, lurid plastic; and intensely lifelike polychromed wood; but also in porcelain, as we have seen with Michael Jackson and Bubbles as well as in hi s 1987 Kiepenkerl (plate p. 133), stainless steel itself: the last sculpture being a high metallic reflection on the sculptor's traditional absorption with the folds of cloth ing, here a gleaming contradiction belying the rumpled roughness of a traveler's life.

67

Koons's inflatable balloons executed in metal are also realized beyond the essential value of tensile support, just where metal holds its own weight as stone does not. This is why the Roman arch can be spoken of in the terms Moneta uses to speak of its "vaulted vacuum," and it is why the arches of the gothic cathedral amaze when seen from within. But beyond this, Koons is as aware, as Constantin Brancusi is, of the difference that is made between the stuff of the work of art and the way that art works on us, however reflective. Indeed, Brancusi helps us to make this point: the same form is utterly transformed not only by med ia changes but also by color (i lls. 11, 12). THE JAR THAT "TOOK DOMINION EVERYWHERE"
"The jar was grey and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee."
Wallace Stevens, Anecdote of the Jar

In the spirit of phenomenological aesthetics, we have been attending to the power of place ment, the claim that things have over their world, a power as Heidegger would say, as Niet zsche would say for beings like ourselves, Da-sein, characterized by being there, by ou r being there as we find ourselves, fragmented or lost, thrown, scattered, dispersed, or solidly located, in place, at home, all locative modalities and moods, as Heidegger reminds us: moods of place that catch us up in time and placement, foundation, building or setting out or setting up, is part of that, it is part of the poetic way, making, forming, instituting, that we beings on this earth dwell on this earth in our lives, in the spaces in which we find ourselves, wherever we go. Wallace Steven's glass jar, like a wreath or a flower arrangement, is an indication, pointing perhaps to no significance except that significance that it itself gives, precisely in what it does not give, yielding nothing "of bird or bush," unlike the world around it, "like nothing else in Tennessee." Or, and this is related to such withhol.ding, meaning what any man-made object placed or even discarded somewhere, anywhere: this made thing came to be, this object, and even found artwork can function in this way, shows or indicates the presence of others who make and use or gather and find such things. Such signification is likewise not limited to humans only, and animals, too, use placements as signs, some more specific some less specific think of bower birds, or the deliberate breaking of trees by elephants and primates, and so on. Or posturing if we recall that even the body can be poised and then we will have to include almost all animals, down to lizard's stilting, down indeed to the smallest ant, as even ants pose for one another. And so on. For human beings, this we know, this we are, all that is needed for outlining the entire world is a jar, the placement of a rock on top of a mountain, telling oneself (mostly), telling other climbers, here, once, was another. If a jar placed on a h ill can do th is, if a rock out of place, a rock set by a cli m ber to mark ac cession to a place, can do this-what might Koons's sculptures do to the spaces around us? The better question is always: what can we let them do?

Bibliography

- Arnheim, Rudolf. Art and Visual Perception: A Psychology of the Creative Eye. Berkeley, 1974. - Babich, Babette. "Greek Bronze: Holding a Mirror to Life." Yearbook of the Irish Philosophical Society. Volume 7 (2007), pp. 1-30. - Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge, MA, 2006. - Brinkmann, Vinzenz, and Raimund Wunsche, eds. Bunte G6tter- Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur. Exh. cat. Glyptothek, Munich, et al. Munich, 2004. - Heidegger, Martin. "Uber die Sixtina" [1955].ln id.,Aus die Erfahrung des Denkens [1910 1976}. Frankfurt am Main, 1983,
pp.119-121.
- Moneta, Giussepina. "Profile."
In Babette Babich, ed. From
Phenomenology to Thought,
Errancy, and Desire: Essays in
Honor of William J. Richardson,
S.J. Dord recht, 1995, pp. 205-207.
- Nehamas, Alexander. Only the
Promise of Happiness: The Place
of Beauty in a World of Art.
Princeton, 2007.
- Nietzsche, Friedrich. Kritische
Studienausgabe. Berlin, 1980.

68

11

Constantin Brancusi Muse endormie, 1909 Hirshhorn Museum and Sc ulpture Garden, Washington, DC

12

Constantin Brancusi Muse endormie, 1910 Centre Pompidou, Pari s

69