Immanuel Kant (Kritik
der Urteilskraft, 1790) analyses the experience of beauty
as a property of the perceptual process, which occurs when it
does not yield a definite concept but nonetheless displays a meaningful
coherence. He maintains that this can only occur in the case of
disinterested perception, which does not serve any ultimate
practical goal. In Kant's aesthetics, art made by humans has therefore
a dubious status – it cannot fail to involve the spectator
in the often all-too-human motivations of the artist. (Kant's
examples of aesthetic experiences all involve natural phenomena:
crystals, flowers, jungles, stormy seas and starry skies.)
Immaterial art may be a way around this. Since it cannot be exhibited
or traded, it may "viewed" (by the mind's eye) in a
more disinterested way.
More than ever we have
to question whether it is really necessary to execute the
artwork, and inasmuch as we do, we have to take steps to ensure
that art will not be fetishized any further. Thus I have often
elected to realize works for a limited period of time only.
It may be preferable, for obvious reasons, to limit artworks
to the mind, to allow them to exist in thought only. Dematerialized,
planted in consciousness, they would exist solely in the imagination
and might survive untarnished.
Lothar Baumgarten: "Status quo", 1987. Artforum 7 (1988), p. 108.
A less radical move, with a similar motivation,
is to make material art which is impermanent and perishable.
This leads to temporary installations and performance art.
Having rubbed a window with a soap film,
Bochner drew numbers onto the glass, transforming the window
from a material through which to look into one at which to
look. The piece cannot be moved, and so cannot be sold as
an object. The work must instead be considered the manifestation
of an idea, which could be again created elsewhere, any future
incarnation necessarily made inexpensively and temporarily.
Michael Delahunt
about Mel Bochner's "To Count:
Intransitive" (1972).
In:
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