STEFAN ARTENI

Otherwhere Otherwise

SolInvictus Press

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Note:

The illustrations of this

essay reproduce paintings
by Stefan Arteni

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 The example of the literary
genre of ‘utopia’, with its
(reluctantly admitted )
poverty…demonstrates
what… the opening created
by negation really amounts
to.

Hans Blumenberg

Nostalgia for the modernist utopic (dystopic?) western

metanarrative/expropriated eschatology – disapproved in practice –
gives place to simulated liberation.

The post-modernist game, speed as countermemory, becomes a

space of con-fusion, insulated discourse of artist and critic,
uninterrupted interruption (Lafountain), where incessantly
repackaged difference – the routinely ‘new’ – stays the same: the
context of no context, the age of the provisory (Burckhardt). In
the post-modern episteme man has become the absent
subject (Foucault).

History reveals its ironic essence: dis-location. Why does globalism

generate tribalism?

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 To live meaningfully we
project fictions by
which we order life,
the fictions have no
truth, but they have
a truth function.

Hans Vaihinger

Art un-veils through dissimulation. A linear outline is already an

artifice, a memory image (Read).

The world is admired, feared, before being verified: wonder, then

imagination, recalling, rites that control the multifaceted world
around, a canon of operative choices and evaluative criteria
founded on its functionality in regard to a form of life, a
preconceptual grasping (Heidegger), life experience metaphorically
projected onto potentially organizable domains (Corradi-Fiumara),
the figural, the haptic (Riegl) as preconceptual (Lyotard).

Art is dependent upon everything which the community, tradition, and

history, transmit to the body and mind. By its roots, art belongs to a
time and place (Maritain).

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 …the spirit of a world without
spirit…

Karl Marx

Culture (cultura,colere,cultus) is a spiritual cultivation just as the

cultivation of the earth is agri-culture, it is the forming of the formless.

Culture is a set of rules, collective representations (Febvre, Bloch),

structures of belief, judgements and intuitions of aptness, etc., of
persons within the community (Goodenough). Formal structures
of a culture have the character of ‘cognitive maps’ (Polanyi,
Werner) that are understood when they reveal the source’s
conventions.

Life-community beliefs are not objects of knowledge. They are

experienced in life as time-duration (tradition unreflectively
experienced as alive in the present) not succession (Scheler).

A justificatory canon balancing value beliefs by the formulation of

codifications can be either a list of works/artists or it can be a
complex of accepted rules of practice (Bonazzoli). The work makes
the rule evident, even if there is no other work of its kind.

The post-modernist canon is empty (Descombes). The work

becomes deliberate small scale iconoclasm, pranks, puerilism
(Huizinga), a limitless paralogy (Lyotard).

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 In the planetary
imperialism of
technologically
organized man, the
subjectivism of man attains
its acme, from which point
it will descend to the level
of organized uniformity.

Martin Heidegger

After the Renaissance – a rebirth of occult sciences, not the

resurrection of classical philology (Peuckert) - , after the censorship
of imagination that followed the Reformation and Counterreformation,
and after the Enlightenment with its mythical irrational structure
(Adorno, Horckheimer, Weiner), have all flowed past the adjacent
category of mankind located on the margins and byways of history
(Couliano), the post-modernist alliance of power and technology
results in an accumulated momentum which is about to overrun all:
the brave neomodernist world which C.S.Lewis characterizes as ‘the
abolition of man’.

The discourse of the peripheral survivals is caught between

Quinean indeterminacy of the cultural translative act – without a
commonality of context emic belief webs/concepts never receive
full articulation – and ongoing homologation/homogenization,
where dialogue becomes insignificant and superfluous, the
dominated playing along unwittingly with the technology of
control (Foucault): Bruno’s De Vinculis, the prototype of the
impersonal mass media, indirect censorship, global manipulation.

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 Difference is the
object of a practical
affirmation
inseparable from
essence and
constitutive of
existence.

Gilles Deleuze

The hermeneutic filter of an era acts through emphasis or

suppression and systematic distortion or semantic inversion of ideas
which pass through the interpretive grille (Couliano).

The alterity of the periphery is reduced to the collage/inventory of

difference that merges into the metacategory of the
interchangeable, while the organization of consensus by the
media becomes a rhetorical experience (Vattimo) obeying the
principle of insufficient reason as its axiom (Blumenberg).The
levelling out is no longer even a matter of indifference, but
rather is simply forgotten : structural amnesia, organized
oblivion (Peter Burke).

The con-text is being silenced. The global cultural contamination of

cultures existing at the margins represents a vast site of traces and
residues (Guidieri) – a mixed reality, an in-authentic encounter, a
dissolution of the locus of alterity – where even the Western
modernist model loses its cogency and becomes part of the same
contaminated site (Vattimo).

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 The function of the painter
is not to reconstitute an
anecdote, but to
constitute a
pictorial fact.

Georges Braque

anekdota – unpublished story/narrative

A lexicographical mapping of basic formal and material constitutive

elements within traditional , predelineated , horizonal, artistic belief-
webs [textbooks and pattern books that communicate the vocabulary
and syntax, e.g.:
- the Chinese “Mustard Seed Garden” painter’s handbook/ Far
Eastern calligraphy traditions and how-to handbooks;
- Greek/Byzantine painter’s handbooks]
suggests a kinship/analog character of structure on the periphery that
ties up with a paradigm shift, an alternative emic formulation of the
“modernist” canon, that substitutes a paradigmatic code centered on
askesis (training, practice), tacit knowledge (Polanyi), and the
pictorial fact, for the dominant Occidental model, exposing the latter
to its other:
the later Renoir, Degas, Bonnard; the later Braque, Gris, Derain,
Dufy,Vuillard; Villon, Modigliani, Sironi,Morandi, Marini; Avery,
De Stael,Poliakoff; the later Zao Wu Ki.

What one sees depends not only upon what one looks at, but also
presupposes a perceptual and conceptual experience that taught one
what to see (Kuhn) – not only does one see differently, one sees
something else (Wolfflin).

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 Inasmuch as we appropriate past
experiences with an orientation to
the future, the authentic present is
preserved as the locus of continuing
tradition and of innovation at once.

Jurgen Habermas

syntakt(os) – ordered/arranged together

syntassein – to arrange together
syntasso – ordering troops

The turn-over/deconstruction of Kunstwollen is undertaken in order

to assert the subversive difference – alterity – of the defeated,
forgotten, and excluded, and their referential categories, by opening
up the horizon of a repetition that repeats forward (Kierkegaard), of
repeatedly different possibilities actualized (Deleuze), of paths that
weave and interweave, re-placing, linking, fusing horizons.
Fragments/scattered pieces of ruins reach into a concealed whole
containing parts that no longer address us.

The field of anamnestic redemption/re-membering/re-cognition

recaptures a radical inward retrieval, fully reactivating and
releasing the fading, elusive, marks in their spatial simultaneity –
a syntax structuring the flow -, into the hitherto latent play that
unfolds in manifold ways: recurrence of the possible. It is
because nothing is equal, because everything bathes in its
difference, its dissimilarity, even with itself, that everything
returns (Deleuze).

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 The new comes to be as the old is
recollected in dissolution.

Friedrich Holderlin

The idiolect forms when reenacted, altered, extended: no longer

‘cultural’ replication but affirmation of the deracinated individual,
becoming, real-ization.

Methods and standards are an inextricable mixture, implying an

unbuilding/ overturn of implicit hierarchies [e.g. content and form]
inscribing one’s appropriative strategy: to appropriate means to
impose, to create forms (Deleuze).

One produces the new only on condition that one repeats –

reminiscence – within forgetting, a past that was never present.
History – the present traces of a past – should play a role
analoguous to that of collage (Deleuze).

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 Rhetoric in execution: calling
forth the reserves of beauty of
forms and colors, result of
personal observations or
observation of the masters,
evoking themselves under
one’s eyes as the brush place
the brushmarks.

Pierre Bonnard

The idiolect/idiopraxis is simultaneously an allolect/allopraxis opening

up to borrowing, appropriating, and rejecting: a destructive retrieve.

Prior to any sign , what is given is the network. A Gestalt appears

as functionally more than the sum of its parts. The will to form has
to recognize the laws of pictorial space. In adapting to their
dictates, freedom is produced. The most significant aspects of
paintings lie not in their apparent content but in the handling of
the medium. Marks conserve for ever their status as signs or
traces of the human action that engendered them (Ortega y
Gasset).

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 The dike or immanent game: the
polemos which is its place, the
whole envisaged as a game; and
judging the whole, the creative artist,
himself identical with his work.

Friedrich Nietzsche

dike – custom/usage/way/order/judgement
iter [itara (sanskrit) – other] – once again

Marks, free from truth and objectivity through a radical

reduction/suspension/withholding of meaning (Caputo) so as to touch
upon an unutterable mystery, have the power to create beyond
themselves – as the play of the arbitrary infinite iteration
(Blumenberg)/ as a repetition which alters/as formants of iterable and
alterable signs – an abyss of latent graphic associative links, a deep
play of irrepressible pseudomorphic operations, metamorphosis,
synecdoche: the strange path of the hand (Matisse).

El Greco uses Byzantine schemata in Counterreformation Spain:

pseudomorphosis; esoterism (Mondrian, Kandinsky, Malevitch)
meets French Art and uses its pictorial ways for different
purposes: pseudomorphosis (Besancon).

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 The hermit and the artist are
reflections of one another as the
Taoists knew.

Bani Shorter

dromenon [related to “drama”] – rite, a thing done

One grasps perspectives beyond the structure of a given vocabulary

when that structure is no longer firm (Kenneth Burke). The
reoccupation of functions (Blumenberg) resembles ritualization: an
ingrained mode of activity has lost its intelligibility, so that the schema
is available for a retrospective interpretation and integration into a
new context – an alternative social memory and myth define identity
(Peter Burke).

Understanding means mastery of a technique, possession of a

capacity,participation in a custom, and exercising this know-how
by acting in accordance with a rule. Following a rule is
unreflective, rationally ungrounded (Wittgenstein). Ritual
transforms the objects of memory into the experiences of
present time events. The paradox of festivals: to repeat an
“unrepeatable” (Deleuze). If we agree with Victor Turner’s
opinion that a given ritual, as a dramatic unity, is a work of art, the
reverse should be true as well: a given work constitutes a sort of
shadowy rite (Girard).

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Syntax, meter, chant, are partly ritual or have a ritual origin, syntax is
older than semantics and most in need of explanation. This is why
there is syntax in ritual, an independent level of syntax in linguistics,
why language is so unlogical and roundabout: language as a playful
activity (Halle). There are instances when the words are not
intelligible to the listeners.

Ritual is a system of acts, sounds, etc., related to each other in

accordance with rules without reference to meaning, a self-contained
and self-absorbed pure activity functionally ambiguous – it is
essentially execution, it is not a “language”. The absence of goal or
effective action – Indian tyaga or Chinese wu-wei - is similar to
games. Its meaninglessness explains the variety of meanings
attached to it. It is a remnant or resurgence of a prelinguistic stage
where the sound, the gesture, the visual – for numerous image
constellations there is no verbal equivalent (Berlejung) - are used in
a syntactic manner. Ritual is often transmitted without the help of
language, by demonstration. School affiliation and lineage are
concepts with ritual overtones (Staal).

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 Iocari serio et studiosissime
ludere (joking seriously
and playing assiduously)

Marsilio Ficino

graphein – Moira’s tapestry weaving/ the weaver appears later with a

scroll (Onians)/ to draw or write, simply seen as graphic
form, including the void as shaped spacing

Understood anthropologically, form is a means of self-preservation

and stability in the world (Blumenberg).

Palimpsest, multiplied, superimposed, crossed out marks: the

grapheme/pictur-eme, formant of the sign, refers within itself to
traces of traces (Derrida) – vestigium, trace (Nicholas of Cusa),
the reference marking a path, the mediating process of
transmission, the trace as signal, the enactment without imitative
quality at the place where marks give form (Merleau-Ponty).

The rule dominates through the ritual (Baudrillard). Games originate

in rites that have been divested, to a greater or lesser extent, of their
sacred character (Girard).

Play, mark, dispersion, ludus mundi, and the insistent question

“what does it mean?” pitted against dispersion and play (Krell):
Velasquez pinta pintura (Ortega y Gasset) – Velasquez paints
paint-ing. Pictoric signification: the paint-ing.

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 The nothing has no
middle, and its limits
are the nothing.

Leonardo da Vinci

telos – wrapping/circling around (wheel of fate): the ritual form of

gathering/bond of fate causing fulfillment (Onians)/goal,
end-point in the sense of perfectedness that determines the
essence of something

Marks have their autotelic games significance (Nishitani), oriented

toward the play of art and its rules, including the violability-in-principle
of rules (Feleppa). The authorial act is incorporated in the event, it is
an end in itself.

The final form of art is contingency, an atelic telos

(Kuki, Merleau-Ponty). A painting is about painted surfaces,
self-referential, auto-figurative: look at, and not just through, the
painted surface. Pictorial space is constructed as a combinative
arrangement, a manifold of interacting strokes and areas, and the
constitutive nothing of spacing (the moment of the syntax system),
a configurational Gestalt.

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 Just as a work of painting gradually
unfolds itself on account of the
several colors [with which it is
painted], so Brahminhood is similarly
brought about by samskaras
performed according to prescribed
rites. [sam (integrative prefix), kr-:
to do, to make; ritual forming of the
formless]

Parasana Smrti

eikon (eiken – to be like) – likeness, image

eikonismos - delineation/rough draft/sketch/ to draw as on a map
imago (same root as imitor/imitari) – death mask of an ancestor/
imitative re-presentation in the death-mask of an
ancestor(Przywara)/ imitation, copy, semblance
picture (same root as pictorius – pictorial) – painting

A pictorial image ( skhema) is not merely a replica of an external

object, but a unit of a structure (Frye), seen as part of a total pattern
or rhythm [rythmos – to articulate, impress, fit, form /meter – to
measure out as giving form].

Looking away from the “what”, the meaning-content oriented seeing

(Habermas), one can grasp the interconnected structures that make
the whole into a painting, without it being a mimetic image. A content
is an accompaniment. The “how” characterizes art: ars latet arte sua
(art lies in its own art).

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 What use is there in trafficking in
something that, may be, should
not be sold, especially when it
does not sell?

Stephane Mallarme

The artist builds around himself his own solitude , such is his fate
(Ortega y Gasset). To paint is to decide for silence. While the
discourse of religion – cult and ritual – undergoes demythologization,
the “communicative rationality” (Habermas) becomes remythologized:
the linguistic turn of modernity, fetishization of media-created
discourse and images.

In art, one is not besides oneself, but remains simply and totally
in communion with oneself. To be exiled even within one’s
community (Kierkegaard, Ortega y Gasset) is to be separated
from the mass – “my” circumstance” - , from the “crowd that
is untruth” (Kierkegard), it means to recover“the flesh of the
world” (Merleau-Ponty), it is a transgression of modernism,
logocentrism , logophilia, and the herd, a transgression of
plurality that eradicates difference.

The leveling of pasts, uncontrollable multiplication, the copy of

copies which allows neither original nor origin to exist (Deleuze), the
“absolute fake” (Eco), are offsprings of a present without depth and a
vacuum of memories: the eternal return as parodic (Deleuze), the
modern and neo-modern age and its consummation as a self-
perpetuating arrangement (Heidegger). The main value of a mass-
production is rather iconographic than artistic, a charade of copies
(Zimmer).

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 Meaning…becomes a central
concern precisely at that stage
when a given system of
meanings is fallen into
decay. In periods of
firmly established meanings,
one does not study them,
one uses them.

Kenneth Burke

Forms/shapes have physical pregnance: de-formed but structurally

stable form resists the noise of perturbation (Thom). Theodore of
Studion underlines the peculiarities of pictorial space: even when the
various appearances of shape are not identical in detail, the
configuration continues to exist as such.

A pregnant/imprinted shape emerges from the diffuse surroundings of

probabilities (Goethe, Burckhardt). Time does not wear away
instances of pregnance: it brings things out that were not “in them” all
along (Blumenberg).

The investment of form with “sense” is what painting brings to the

fore, a structural articulation and play, outstripping and eroding
mimetology [impressing itself with an alien shape – mimesis -, it is
no longer itself and is also not the other (Schmidt, Gadamer)]. A
texture/context/structure of distances, absences, and possibilities,
pressuposed/preconceptual understanding, creates significance:
possibilities lived as possibilities molding any presence.

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 Signs are instantaneous,
ephemeral concentrations of force.

Jean-Francois Lyotard

Significance – a pointing, lifting up into a definite context of

reference - is part of being-in-the-world, it is related to finitude:
signification as configuration that makes sense as such.

Intention is more primitive that meaning (Luhmann, Husserl).

There is nothing to understand, as the word “understand” is
commonly used. One simply obeys a rule or sees something in a
certain way without thought: understanding is a practical skill,
custom, know-how (Wittgenstein).

Every understanding of meaning is suspect of having been

enforced through pseudo-communication (Habermas). Meaning
is an ambiguous and inconsequential accident (Baudrillard). The
primacy of interpretation over the sign is the decisive feature of
modern hermeneutics (Foucault).

Metaphoric possibility of meaning arises from formal qualities, a

stratum of schematic aspects in which relations on the level of form
lead one to believe that a relation should exist also on the level of
signification (Eco): man’s semiotic potential of giving signification
(Gombrich).

In the historical world of culture things have valences different from

the objective world of science where the distribution of subjective
value tends to zero (Rothacker). The hominid has to deal with the
failure of the indicators and determinants of his behaviour: he sets up
“significances” over against meaninglessness of the world
(Blumenberg). The form-alism is assigned meaning (Weizsacker).
Man lives while giving meanings to his world (Heidegger).

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 Every utterance is deficient – that is,
we never manage to say entirely what
we mean to say…
Every utterance is exuberant – that is,
our pronouncements always manifest
much more than we intend.

Jose Ortega y Gasset

contentum – that which is contained in anything/subject matter

subjectum - subject matter
subicere (sub-jacere) –to throw/cast/subordinate/in state of
dependence

The price of freely chosen rules/no rules is that they have not the
least fertility – if rules are reduced to subjective habit, they have no
objective grounding.

If there is no more to painting than what one arbitrarily defines into

it, there is no more than a multiplicity of private symbol systems
(Bachelard).

If painting is a “mirror image”, the subjectivity of the viewer is a

distorting mirror.

If “meaning” is “mattering” (value, purpose, intentionality) plus

“signifying” (signs intelligible in local contexts), as Caws writes, then
contents, the figurative shapes incorporated into the pictorial
structure, are signs and symbols commissioned by/for the viewer and
manipulated by belief states, a society’s or period’s imaginary
(Castoriadis).

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