Documentary Value and the Event and Work of Art

Ron Day, Wayne State University

We tend to associate the term “information” with statements of fact. Our common assumptions about the nature of documents come out of this tradition, as well. Suzanne Briet (1951) in the beginning of her small book, What is Documentation states, “A document is a proof in support of a fact.” Bernd Frohmann in his article on indexing (Frohmann, 1990), among other places, has challenged this view, arguing that the correlation of documents with both statements of truth and with prepositional forms of statements in general is unwarranted.

Besides these very important objections, however, writing that documents are “proof in support of facts” is an ambiguous statement. Are documents to prove a fact, or in the case of Briet’s antelope example in her book, do they “document” or as we say, “represent” a fact? In addition to this ambiguity, many documents can also be facts in themselves in the sense that primary historical documents not only represent, but more primarily, constitute facts. This performative aspect is important. Briet was not blind to this performative aspect since she discusses documents in the context of institutional production, but her analysis seems ambiguous, unsure whether to suggest that documents are descriptive or performative.

The problem is that documents are both, though sometimes more one than another. Sometimes documents help prove facts, sometimes they are representative of facts, other times they themselves constitute facts by the very fact that they are read or used, and other times they are creative of facts within the context of their being read or used. At all times what joins facts and documents is language so that it is not possible to speak of either fact or document outside of discourses and rhetorical techniques.

In this paper I would like to look at documents in the sense of the creation of facts, or to be more accurate, in the creation of facticity or the conditions of factual possibility. I am less interested here in claims of truth and more interested in the construction of material surfaces—including in language--through which the real can appear. I am interested in the problem of the relationship between art works and documents, not only in terms of art, but also in terms of probing what the work of art can contribute to understanding documents generally. And I am interested in arguing that the evidence of art is that of work per se, not solely that of its placement within discourses of knowledge.

My emphasis is upon those works of the avant-garde that appear particularly in the 20^th century because of their interest in production and emergence rather than in positivist interpretations of representation. I will touch upon Heideggerian understandings of art, less because I feel secure with their reduction of meaning in art to truth, and more because his work enacts a necessary historical destruction of technological inscriptions of art. I have elsewhere engaged his work more fully (Day, 2001), and must be pardoned the brief interludes that time allows here.

For Russian Formalists, who gave voice to much of the 20^th century avant-garde, literature, particularly poetry, though also inclusive of all the arts as well, was characterized by the term ostrananie—defamiliarization or “making-strange.” As Victor Shklovsky pointed out, art was characterized by technique and it used technique in this method of defamiliarization.

The view of seeing art as technique in Western culture is ancient, reaching back at least to the Greeks. And while the evolution of these concepts—art, technique, and the encompassing notion of techne--is complex, they help reveal what the avant-garde art work self-reflexively documents, namely the art or techne of work itself.

Beginning with Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten’s Metaphysics and, later, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgment, the term “aesthetics” left its Ancient Greek roots signifying feelings or affects in general and came to refer to a certain domain of affects, namely, those that involve the “fine arts.” As Heidegger argues (1977b), in Ancient Greek, the term, techne referred to the technique of bringing something forth or creating (poiesis). Techne was the human means of creating (poiesis) in distinction to other natural means. According to Heidegger, both “fine” and “practical” arts referred to the “technical” creation of affects by humans. In this sense, “technique” was understood by the Ancient Greeks to be a general, peculiarly human (as contrasted to “natural”) means of creating objects and their affects. Heidegger (1977b) argues that the modern notion of “technology” lies in a metaphysically specific appropriation of the Ancient Greek notion of techne according to teleological principals, most explicitly demonstrated in the importance of modern technology for not only the means, but the governance, of modern human life. In the modern appropriation of techne, “technique” is redefined as a moment within a governing method that determines the activity within a teleological design (as echoed in Kant’s Critique of Judgment in his division of the arts into ‘purposeful’ versus non-purposeful arts). Around the time of Baumgarten and Kant in the latter half of the 18^th century the concept and activity of “technique” in the modern world becomes distinct from technique in the fine arts by virtue of the “thesis of the precedence of method” governing the former (see, Heidegger, 1977b and 1977a), leaving the ancient sense of techne (and its contextual relations of respect or “care” and its lack of teleological structure—see the beginning of Heidegger, 1977a) to the domain of the fine arts.

For Heidegger, poiesis is the event of truth (alethia) within which correspondence or this sense of representation, then occurs. For Heidegger, the Latin understanding of truth as veritas follows from this event of truth as alethia. Alethia is more “primordial,” both historically and ontologically than veritas for Heidegger. Heidegger characterizes the modern technological worldview in terms of the forgetting of alethia and a valorization of veritas as the standard for truth itself. The consequence of this, for Heidegger, is that the event of truth is largely forgotten by correspondence, including technologies of reproduction. Briet (1951) wrote about the veiling of the event of truth—the naming of her previously unknown animal—in terms of its being “buried under a veil of documents.” What is buried under the veil of documents for Briet is the simultaneous veiling and unveiling of the thing in terms of language. The evidence of truth, as an event, is hidden by what follows its appearance.

Heidegger’s argument was that art, as techne, brought about poiesis for man, parallel to the poiesis that occurs in nature. What is documented in the artwork, today, as “purposeless” activity, is the trace of the work itself, as work, and not as teleological completion. Knowledge, thus, is not only statements of fact, but also, more primordially, the opening up of both statements and fact within sense or aesthesis. Knowledge, in the way of correspondence is a production that begins with this opening up of what can be.

The avant-garde was exemplary in this opening up in so far as their critique was a critique of representation, or to be more accurate, they critiqued interpretations of representation grounded in correspondence truth and “good taste” or “common sense” by beginning with the material composition and production of the work qua work. In the place of common sense and understanding, the opening up of sense and the possibilities for knowing became important. In the avant-garde techniques were developed for, first, disrupting established meanings through the juxtaposition of material surfaces for its production and, then, the redistributing of meaning along many surfaces (e.g., constructivism) and many series (e.g., abstract art). The avant-garde varied in the range of its critique from simple opposition to the creation of interpretative complexity (e.g., minimalist and conceptual art) and physical emergence (e.g., earthworks). Language itself must be counted, perhaps foremost, in this engagement, leading from Dadaist “word salad” to conceptualist art, which technically engaged language at site-specific and time-valued locations.

The horizons upon which the avant-garde intervened and exploited problems in meaning were material, contextual, temporal, and foremost through differences of scale (Watten, 1984). The techniques varied depending on the genre and upon the horizons that defined the events of interest. In literature, such techniques have long been recognized in the various schemas and tropes of rhetoric, though, of course, their deployment varies depending on the situation and task.

The problem of documentary evidence in regard to the work of art may be thus seen in terms of repetition. If technological understanding, including the technological understanding of truth in modernity, relies upon maintaining “truth” or the commodity in terms of exact reproduction over time and space, the work of the work of art in the avant-garde to the contrary is that of opening up the possibilities for time and space within this repetition. Once again, the approach varied from that of, say, Warhol where technological meaning was repeated to the point of collapse to that of Smithson where surfaces opened up both to conceptual and natural creation. Where the first, unfortunately, tended to end in a fetishizing and even profit from the bankruptcy of truth in commerical reproduction, the later attempted to open up surfaces to the future, creating conceptual “lines of flight” (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase) and attempted to provoke emergence through conceptual and natural complexity.

We may add here, as well, that performance happenings of the 1960s, often with their fetishization of “shock” and “sense” must be counted as failures of the avant-garde when sense because fetishized in terms of the body and thus marks the body as truth, reducing the work, once again, to truth. In this sense, they form the dialectical counterpoint to Heidegger’s philosophical reduction of sense to truth. The event of truth, thought through, however, must be thought in terms of the relation of knowledge and sense within events. The event of the work in the avant-garde reaches its highest levels in conceptual art where knowledge is seen in terms of its production out of sense, which in turn occurs through technical interventions in horizons of knowledge. Heidegger’s failure can be seen, from this perspective, as the failure to think truth truly as an event, and the failure of “happenings” can be seen as the failure to think the event outside of desires for truth.

The evidentiary nature of the work in the context of the avant-garde must be seen in terms of its representing its own site and time specific work without respect to formal teleology. Museum collections and reproductions, of course, attempt to frame the work within discourses of art history and artistic hagiography. But, these are reductions of the work to values of discourses defined by representation. The whole purpose of the avant-garde artwork has been otherwise directed, however, toward the expansion, not toward the fixing or reduction in scale of meaning. In this way, the work has constituted a form of evidence that is essentially performative though it reaches toward possibilities of future descriptions. The reduction of this performativity to discursive values is a narrow way of reading art documents.

The question occurs, though, should we even speak of art works as documents, then, if we mean something else than art works as historical or biographical evidence? This is a good question. It appears to me that while it is not necessary to speak of art works as documents outside of these terms, to not raise this question begs the interrogation of the meaning of documents within the general metaphysics and aesthetics of representation. This, as I have suggested, is particularly problematic when trying to fully understand art works, particularly those of the twentieth century avant-garde, solely in terms of being documents, traditionally defined. The reduction of the work of art to the evidence of art within discourses of knowledge is what constitutes the category of “cultural heritage” and the defining work of museum institutions and much of advanced art education. But the relation of these institutions to technique and the radical possibilities for technique is very wide, forming the exact place of intervention of practicing avant-garde artists in the past 100 years. The wider implications of this divide between the production and the appreciation of art are rarely thought out by cultural and educational institutions, particularly in their use of newer technologies of representation (e.g., digitial libraries). Thus, it seems to me that it is not only necessary to rethink art documents in relation to the problem of the work of art, but, even more importantly, to think this division between documents and work in terms of work or production in general. This was Heidegger’s task in much of his later writings and this has been the task of the modern avant-garde and it marks the importance of art within critiques of modernity.

References:

Briet. S. (1951). Qu'est-ce que le documentation? Paris: Edit. English translation available at: www.lisp.wayne.edu/~ai2398/briet.htm

Day, R. (2001a). The Modern invention of information: discourse, history, and power. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.

Frohmann, B. (1990). Rules of indexing: a critique of mentalism in formation retrieval theory. Journal of Documentation 46(2). 81-101.

Heidegger, M. (1977a). The end of philosophy and the task of thinking. In Basic writings, from Being and Time (1927) to The task of thinking (1964) (pp. 370-392). New York: Harper & Row.

Heidegger, M. (1977b). The question concerning technology. In The question concerning technology, and other essays (pp. 3-35). New York: Harper and Row.

Watten, B. (1984). Total Syntax. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press.