Extract from:
Author:Grant H Kester
Title:Learning from Aesthetics: Old Masters and New Lessons
Source:Art Journal. Vol 56. Spring 97. pp20-25
(The full text of this article and others by Grant Kester, can be found and printed off via the RGU Library Website. Click ‘Resources’, click ‘Databases’ and search via ‘Art Full Text’. Use your standard RGU User Name and Password when requested)
‘The political dimension of the aesthetic is explicit in the work of Schiller as well as Hegel. Their concern is not merely with works of art, but with political and cultural subjectivity on a broad social scale. In, On the Aesthetic Education of Man’ (1793), Schiller provides a prescient diagnosis of the effect of a market-based society in which “material needs reign supreme and bend a degraded humanity beneath their tyrannical yoke“. It is a society in which “we see not merely individual, but whole classes of men, developing but one part of their potentialities, while of the rest, as in stunted growths, only vestigial traces remain”. The effect of this society is to fragment and divide human nature. Schiller advocates a therapeutic turn to the aesthetic to “restore the totality of our nature”. Aesthetic knowledge has the redemptive capacity to imagine and figure a more holistic and humane set of social relations.The aesthetic can be taken as an implicit criticism of the existing social system, which has failed to realise the utopian potential contained in the relationship between the viewer and the artwork. However, in order to achieve this perspective the aesthetic must stand “outside” existing society.
In his Philosophy of Right, Hegel uses the concept of aesthetic distance to describe the function of the state as a “disinterested” observer, attending not to the “various parts” of society, but to the larger patterns formed by the interrelationship of these parts, and ultimately to society as it could be, rather than as it is. This is the utopian moment of the aesthetic as that mode of knowledge that can transgress existing boundaries of knowledge and transcend the here and now to envision a most just and equitable society. The aesthetic grasps the complex totality of social relations and is thereby able to recognize the effect of the market in generating systematic inequalities. It combines both a unique form of knowledge and a desire for social improvement. Our perception of works of art here and now allows us to glimpse the possibility of an Ideal future in which all of our social relation ships would allow for the simultaneous and non-coercive expression of the individual and the universal. The aesthetic functions as a token (to be redeemed at some unspecified future date) of a more integrated relationship between life and labour, and as a symbolic embodiment of a world that could be.’