EARTH & WORLD: ART & ARTIST
“The earthly aspect of the work of art juts out into the meaningful world.”
Martin Heidegger’s philosophy is difficult to decipher, whether in his unfinished magnum opus Being and Time, or his essay The Origin of the Work of Art, from which the above sentence is taken. But reading Heidegger draws out perspectives from the reader that are helpful in rearranging and reconfiguring institutionalised habits and beliefs about making art towards seeing art anew.
What I have gathered from this sentence, helped by multiple sources, including Sean Kelly’s Harvard lectures and Hubert Dreyfus’ written commentary on Heidegger, is the “earthly aspect of the work of art” is not exactly contrary to the “meaningful world”, but dynamically connected and integrated. “World and earth are essentially different and yet never separated.”
When we read this sentence aloud — “The earthly aspect of the work of art juts out into the meaningful world” — we can recognise the world being defined by ‘meaning’, as the adjective “meaningful” points towards. But what of the “earthly”? What does the “earthly” point towards in Heidegger’s sentence without an adjective to describe its essential characteristic? Where I think the “earthly” can be defined is in the odd verb “juts”, which Heidegger uses to describe how the earthly “juts out into the meaningful world” to reveal both itself and conceal itself all at once, like a feeling or mood that is enigmatic and mysterious, but present. The earth is to enigma what the world is to meaning, and “[i]n its resting upon earth [that] the world strives to surmount it.”
Earth below world, world upon earth, why is this tendentious duet between earth and world, mystery and meaning, helpful to a commentary on art today? The art world of today is a distant, incestuous cousin to the Greek Temple from which Heidegger’s definition of the origin of the work of art emanates, pervades and arranges the cultural practices of the world around it. The dance between earth and world is helpful due to an evolving questioning (I personally have and perhaps you have) for art practices that sway either too far in the direction of the earthly in their rejection of the world, or art practices that sway too far in the direction of the world in their rejection of the earthly in their work.
Too much earth detaches the artwork from the world to position itself in enigmatic exile beyond the periphery of meaning; too much world removes all formal and intellectual enigmas and mystery from the artwork so it becomes indivisible from the world it is meant to signify, represent and stand out from. The balancing act between earth and world determines what is good and what is mediocre in art. At its best grips onto the explicit world with one hand while veiling it’s grip with the other via the material earth that comprises its essence.
Heidegger's philosophical prose is sometimes all earth and no world in his enigmatic use of familiar words and unfamiliar neologisms, not to mention what is lost in the translation from German to English. That said, his reflections on the work of art and its relationship to earth and the world that rests and tries to surmount it, is symptomatic of what determines and reifies art in the world today. The artist is an agent in the world who is both enveloped by the world and empathetic to the world’s fears and anxieties in the formal and intellectual choices the artist makes in their work. Art making ought not be a retreat from the world for the artist, or the artwork an escape from the world for the viewer of artwork, but a slip and jab confrontation with the world.
“Anxiety is the philosophical mood par excellence, the experience of detachment from which I can begin to think freely for myself. ”
The artist of today has the difficult task of confronting a hyper-anxious world. A world wherein mood has been commandeered and internalised by the individual. The mood of the technological age is a private mood that only becomes public through the over-share confessions of the anxious-ridden on social media. Heidegger’s mood is a public mood, one that is all pervasive and already there in the world. Mood in Heidegger is something we can’t control in virtue of our receptivity to it in the physical world. Mood is so pervasive that it becomes transparent so we are unable to articulate it in a worldly way.
I believe art at its best — outside the devoid-of-mood reception of images of art in the virtual field — has a physical and public mood. Mood being something that both presents a recognisable world while also concealing that world through cleverness or formal means. Luc Tuymans’ painting Superstition (1994) achieves this earthly vis-a-vis world mood in both namesake and form, presenting the recognisable body as an unsettling setting in a deathly outline for the lively silhouette of an insect to rise up uncannily before it.
If contemporary cultural sensibility is one determined by indeterminate fear and anxiety, between what Heidegger describes as “nothing and nowhere”, then artists should be committed to the expression of this cultural sensibility. Their expressions ought to give with one hand and take away with the other. The artist of today has to be generous before they can be greedy; committed and critical of the world while uncanny in their sensory articulation of the earth that bears them and the world they are part of and apart from—James Merrigan