The Artwork as metaphysical rebellion
EXCERPT
The following is a short philosophical vignette, originally intended as an excerpt from an ongoing of Aesthetics. In it, I explore the interesting idea that any artwork is a living paradox, one in which an attempt is made to use finite means to convey infinite ends, that is, to express the inexpressible.
…Art is, by its very nature, bound to its material form, conditioned by the restraints of its finitude, and yet all true art struggles to overcome this, so that there is always a tension between the inner and the outer, the artwork’s limited finite externalities and its inner correspondences that refuse to be contained by them. A great work of it is, therefore, that which wrestles to overcome itself; that must, at once, use the particularities of this world to express itself message, but whose meaning must at the same time be that which cannot be expressed by means of itself. A inherent tension is born along with the artwork, thus, and would appear to be co-surgent with it, proper to its very nature. The artwork, from its very inception, strives to be other than what it is, other what it is objectively bound to be, and thus to be ever restless, ever dissatisfied with itself. Presenting itself infinitely to the world through the finite, the only medium it can, it spontaneously declares its shortfall: “I am an expression of that which cannot be expressed, and I express myself by the very medium that embodies this ‘cannot’; I am using this self-contradiction to attain the very goal this contradiction ensures is impossible”. The artwork is, at its core, an infinitude that presents itself, inescapably, as an finitude; an imperfection heaving urgently and necessarily as a perfection; it thereby at the outset sets itself as a phenomenological impossibility; a living, aesthetic contradiction. And it is precisely the therefrom resulting structural tension that gives it its internal energy, its forward momentum. The struggle to overcome itself is where it understands its own freedom, so that a true work of art, when it surges, will surge, not as an finitude that has escaped the confines of its underlying conceptuality, but rather the contrary: an infinitude that has, quite unexpectedly, risen up and asserted itself as such over the concrete bounds of its materiality. It is this metaphysical act of rebellion against the material that characterises true art from false, and the greater the rebellion, the greater the force of its meaning. Great art thus always ends in a victory of the formal over the material, the infinite over the finite, the transcendental over the empirical.
