Itinera

A. Boissière, L’Art et le vivant du jeu, Presses Universitaires de Liège, Liège 2023

Serena Massimo — Wed, 10 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Anne Boissière’s last book, L’Art et le vivant du jeu inscribes the study of the experience of playing within a methodological challenge: to take seriously the “aisthetic” nature of philosophical inquiry, namely its emergence from our “way of feeling”. Offering descriptions rather than definitions, perspectives rather than theories, Boissière undertakes a philosophical “gesture” which, instead of imposing a “conceptual cage” on the subjects analysed, assumes the affective origin of language, and thought. Indeed, it is the feeling of the “lack” of the pathic dimension of experience within contemporary society that leads Boissière to focus on the “living” dimension of the experience of playing (le “vivant” du jeu), in a way that rehabilitates this dimension from the very way in which the philosophical study of it is carried out. This begins with a way of writing – characterised by the use of the first person and other stylistic choices – through which she “claim[s] the necessity” of a way of doing philosophy that is not “guided by rational argumentation”, but by the “situated” nature of the reflexive and writing experience – an experience that includes that of being “a woman in a theoretical universe, that of philosophy, that is almost exclusively shaped by men”.

Editoriale: Mimesis come conditio humana

Valeria Maggiore, Salvatore Tedesco — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The concept of mimesis originates in the Greek context in the 5th century BC, and since then, it has been at the heart of Western aesthetic reflection. It finds its best-known formulation in the Aristotelian affirmation that “art imitates nature”; however, as C. Wulf has emphasised, the mimetic faculty plays a role not only in the art domain but also in almost all areas of human action, representation, speech and thought:mimesisis aconditio humana. Thus, alongside the passive-imitative meaning of mimesis, we can also identify an active meaning of the term since it indicates a process that leads us to encounter external reality aesthetically and to reproduce its traits creatively, even in our bodies. The topicality of the question lies in this complexity, which connects mimesis not only to the terms of imitation but also to those of individual plasticity and autopoiesis.

La mimesi come conditio humana

Cristoph Wulf — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This contribution aims to review the contemporary debate on mimesis, opening perspectives of considerable topicality. Due to our very anthropological constitution, we become human beings only because we can implement processes that allow us to enter mimetic relationships with other human beings and the world around us. However, to speak of an authentic "social mimesis", the meaning of the mimetic act must not only be considered from an aesthetic point of view because mimesis is also (and perhaps above all) an anthropological concept, as already demonstrated using the term by the ancients. Thus, it is crucial to understand that the mimetic act is not a mere imitation in the sense of merely "making a copy", drawing attention to its cultural and social role through the staging of the body and the "culture of performance".

Development and Natural Selection, the Historical Foundations of Mimesis in Animal and Plant Form

Alessandro Minelli — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In biology, mimesis includes imitation between individuals of the same species – the study object of behavioral sciences and neurophysiology – and mimicry between different species through traits or behaviours generally common to all individuals – to be analyzed from an evolutionary and morphogenetic perspective. Mimicry is widespread among representatives of many animal lineages, but has been also recorded among plants. Mimicry is very often adaptive, e.g. because of protection produced by the similarity of a harmless animal to a poisonous or otherwise dangerous one (Batesian mimicry, e.g., false vs. true coral snakes, or hoverflies vs. wasps), or by sharing of closely similar livery by animals protected by different weapons (Müllerian mimicry). Less conventional kinds of mimicry include the aggressive behaviour of some fireflies imitating the flashing of a different species on which they prey; the intraspecific Müllerian mimicry between larva and adult of some ladybirds; and the presence of identical compounds in the sexual pheromone produced by a female wasp and in the fragrance of the orchid species pollinated by the male. Morphological and biochemical similarity cannot be explained by selective advantage only. Even in cases of adaptive mimicry, shared developmental constraint may facilitate the evolution of similarity between model and mime.

What is real in hyperrealism? Pictorial representation and layers of the visible

Krešimir Purgar — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

American hyperrealist painting is one of the most famous phenomena of American culture in general, but also one of the most difficult to fit into the art-historical canon. Hyperrealism causes difficulties in interpretation because it is placed between traditional mimetic painting skills and the imaginary of American popular culture. In this article, we will suggest that hyperrealism may be evaluated as primarily a philosophical problem of the understanding of reality and its transformation into a pictorial surface. We will try to foreground the neglected possibility that the “excess of the real” in a painting can be in some allegorical function: as the opposite of reality, in other words, as an absence rather than a presence. Moreover, we will point out the twofold contingency of the hyperrealist pictures: as a philosophical platform for the study of pictorial representation on the one hand and as an evidence that there is no universal theory of pictorial depiction that would establish a connection between extra-pictorial reality and representation on the other. The article will analyze why hyperrealism as an artistic style is not crucially defined by the problem of mimesis, but rather by the problem of (dis)continuity in regard to reality. Instead of asking why hyperrealist paintings are so close to human perception of the world, we try to unveil consequences of its playing on the edges of complex systems such as representation, depiction, similarity, imagination, simulation and recognition. Referring to the aspects of reality in painting, photography and conceptual art we will consider to what extent theory can influence a seemingly straightforward artistic phenomenon to gain a different kind of relevance, while providing insights into the possibilities of viewing hyperrealist paintings as both part of the cultural imaginary and philosophical objects.

La mimesis dell’esperienza quotidiana. L’influenza del pensiero di John Dewey nella socially engaged art statunitense

Emanuele Rinaldo Meschini — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The text aims to analyze the concept of “mimesis” as an artistic practice of transformation of the ordinary within the so-called “socially engaged” and “community-based art practices” in the United States since the 1990s. As a theoretical reference, the text explores the concept of experience expressed by the American philosopher John Dewey in his Art as Experience (1934), subsequently taken up by various curators and artists such as Mary Jane Jacob, Mark Dion and Pablo Helguera.

Since the 1990s, within the world of contemporary art a social and participatory trend has developed founding its place of action in the urban space and with marginalized communities as active participants. Given the collaborative attitudes, these actions soon took the name of practices moving away, even in a theoretical way, from public art and from any other type of authorial intervention in the public space. In the 2000s the critical discourse moved to the field of the value of social action (Kester, Bishop), or how to judge or not the artistry of a process that does not produce authorial works, has no spectators and takes place outside the artistic system proper. This is because these practices are based on an interdisciplinary theory which, moving from pedagogical and activist foundations, found in the thought of John Dewey its first moment of conjunction with artistic theory to the point of being recognized as a direct source for several artists and curators who worked between the 90s and 2000s. The geographical centre of this discourse is the United States as the role played by progressive education formalized in the early 1900s laid the foundations for an educational model that has also permeated artistic practice.

Finding the conditio muliebris in Postmodernism: Mimetic exploration and aesthetic understanding of female nature

Diego Mantoan — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The paper addresses the exploration of women’s nature, intended as a peculiar conditio muliebris, focussing on woman artists that reflected on the female body with Postmodernist artistic means. Starting with an analysis of the theoretical propositions of Art Feminism practitioners such as Lucy Lippard, Valie Export, and Mary Kelly, who highlight the alterity of female nature and, thus, of woman’s art, the paper later discusses three art installations addressing bodily explorations by woman artists belonging to different generations: Mary Kelly’s Post-Partum Document (1973- 79), Mona Hatoum’s Corps étrangers (1994), and Sondra Perry’s Wet and Wavy Looks—Typhon coming on (2016). The paper argues that these installations substantiate the mentioned theoretical propositions and form a thread of bodily awareness that allows woman artists and the wider public to ascertain female nature by means of a fully aesthetic mimesis. The relationship between art and nature thus becomes one of mimetic exploration of the female body that leads to the acknowledgment of a gender-specific corporal feeling.

Stadi sul cammino della mimesis: Kierkegaard e la dialettica tra introflessione ed estroflessione

Nicola Ramazzotto — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The aim of this paper is to explore some existential possibilities that the concept of mimesis has in Kierkegaard. To this end, mimesis will be analyzed in two moments of his: in the life of the aesthete in Either-Or, where mimesis is related to the notions of poetry and fantasy, and in relation to the figures of the lily in the field and the bird in the sky. Two different notions of mimesis will then be studied in their dialectic between introspection and alienation. The aesthetic stage of mimesis will reveal the paradox of aesthetic life: on the one hand, the aesthete is apparently introflected, living in a world constructed of mimetic phantasms in his own image, but on the other hand, trapped in these reflections, he is unable to grasp his own self as a real possibility and is thus hopelessly alienated from himself. The opposite happens in the religious stage of mimesis, in which it is revealed that only in the apparent extroversion of imitating the absolute other is it possible to grasp one’s own self.

To Shudder in the Sign of Mimesis: Towards a Recovery of Unreduced Experience in Theodor W. Adorno

Elettra Villani — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In the last decades, an enthusiastic and undivided attention has been firmly dedicated to Adorno’s notion of mimesis. Highly enigmatic and resistant to an easy comprehension, this concept has often been regarded as a fundamental cornerstone of Adorno’s philosophy. In actual fact, the meanings and uses he has endowed the term with are so pervasive and diffuse that its imbrication in Adorno’s main philosophemes transcends the strict realm of art, showing a substantial entanglement between the aesthetic dimension and the epistemic, the anthropological and the social ones. More precisely, this paper aims to investigate his specific conception of mimesis as that faculty that could contribute to heal that historical process of experiential impoverishment that affects modern life. To the mimetic comportment Adorno associates a productive openness to the other that allows the subject to touch and to be touched by the object, without coercively subsuming it. Thereby, through a renewed interplay between mimesis and rationality, Adorno hopes to restore the possibility of a full and unreduced experience.

La puissance satanique de la mimesis chez René Girard

Stéphane Vinolo — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Since 1961, René Girard has built a complete fundamental anthropology based on a single intuition: the theory of mimetic desire. While philosophical modernity had made us believe that the fundamental category of the subject was autonomy, Girard reminds us on the contrary that we are mimetic animals. However, mimesis is paradoxical. It is because we all have a desire for differentiation that we are condemned to imitate one another. In doing so, by rethinking mimesis and taking it out of its simple traditional representational field in which it was often confined, the author shows how it reveals all its ambivalence, both pacifying and violent, and allows Girard to place it not only at the heart of humanity but also at the center of the process of hominization.

Il sistema della mimesis in J. Rancière: tra estetica e politica

Imma De Pascale — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The article proposes a re-reading of the concept of partage of the sensible in the light of the relationship that regimes of identification of art maintain with mimesis. In this regard, the article retraces the analysis proposed by Rancière of the ethical regime of images, of the representative regime and of the aesthetic regime with the aim of showing the terms in which the system of mimesis intervenes in the definition of the aesthetic-political space we inhabit.

Corpo, mimesi e montaggio nella produzione di Pippo Delbono

Augusto Sainati — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Delbono’s production lends itself effectively and almost emblematically to a reflection on the active character of mimesis because it is characterized by a sort of duplicity: both his cinema and his theatre are marked by an apparently documentary or performative manner, a flagrantness and immediacy that allude to the presence, to the being of the actor “here and now” – a here and now expressed differently in cinema and theatre – without however being reduced to a purely testimonial attitude. Pippo Delbono’s entire life and performing arts journey can be read in the light of an incessant montage practice. In this sense, montage is the most vital manifestation of active mimesis as a conditio humana.

Come perenne metamorfosi. Orazio Costa e la mimesi

Tiziana Bonsignore — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Orazio Costa, theater director and teacher for over thirty years at the National Academy of Dramatic Arts in Rome, is the author of a pedagogical system called mimic method. It consisted of a theory and a practice aimed at revitalizing the concept of mimesis. The practice included exercises on identification with natural phenomena, necessary for staging dramas respectful of human nature and poetic inspiration. While Avant-gardes rejected art as imitation of an object, and the new theatrical forms refused the value of the dramaturgical text within the performance, Costa defended the role of literature and the representation of human events in the theatrical ritual. Despite the accusations of traditionalism, his idea of mimesis is absolutely in line with the twentieth- century reception of the notion. Like authors such as Benjamin, Adorno, Ricoeur, the director has analyzed mimesis as an innate behavior, and he based his aesthetic positions on this conception. For Costa, art is the wonderful metaphor of the encounter between the individual and nature, which pushes towards forms of expressions comprehensible to the community.

Sulla continuità tra arte e gioco: mimesi e finzione tra Gombrich e Walton

Teresa Schillaci — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Mimesis is a key concept in the debate that led to the dawn of analytic aesthetics, namely that of the ontology of art. In particular, Kendall Walton's reading of mimesis follows Ernst Gombrich's insights, and it radicalizes the line of continuity between art and play. Walton identifies a cross–cutting form of representationality which is common to many practices, such as play, art, and sports. The purpose of this essay is to highlight the divergences between Walton and Gombrich on the object of representation. Besides, the aim of the paper is also to investigate whether Walton's claim that representationality in games and artworks is identical and not merely analogous may underlie artistic practice.

The Homo mimeticus and the need for a mimetic turn. Interview with Nidesh Lawtoo

Nidesh Lawtoo, Valeria Maggiore — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The present interview with Nidesh Lawtoo (lecturer at the University of Lausanne, Johns Hopkins University and KU Leuven and holder of the ERC project re-titled Homo Mimeticus: Theory and Criticism from 2017 to 2022) wants to highlight the “broad” and “complex” character of mimesis. The guiding idea is that mimesis – understood not simply as a copy or representation of reality but rather as a drive that leads humans to imitate other humans – provides us with a rich, wide-ranging, and paradoxically original perspective to knowing ourselves better. Thus, in a constant confrontation with the Greek roots of the term and the reflections of some modern and contemporary philosophers, the interview intends to clarify the scope and breadth of that mimetic turn proposed by Lawtoo in contemporary aesthetical debate.

Editoriale: abitudine e letteratura

Sofia Sandreschi de Robertis, Marco Piazza, Alessandra Aloisi — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Starting from antiquity, the concept of habit has traversed the entire history of Western philosophy and has represented one of the great themes of modern and contemporary literature. The reflection on habit has raised questions concerning the relationship between body and mind, the problem of time and the (re)construction of identity, the conscious and the unconscious, and the role of memory.

This dossier addresses these questions from an aesthetic perspective, at the crossroads between the history of philosophy and the history of literature.

Stendhal and Rousseau: Habit, Interiority and Exception

Barry Stocker — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Le Rouge et le Noir is taken as an example of a novel in which the hero, and some other characters, experience strong tension between inner consciousness and social habits. Stendhal’s novel is a particularly significant example because it is shaped by the immediate afterlife of the French Revolution and the writings of Rousseau. The revolutionary rupture with habit intersects with the themes of a consciousness looking for inner existence and the role of inner passions. The Revolution was an exception, prolonged by the rise of Bonaparte which appeals to a hero frustrated by the habitual conformity of anti-revolutionary France after the fall of Bonaparte. He seeks a great career, and he seeks grandeur in love, always combining passions with strategy in an unstable mix. He moves from love with a comparative innocent to love with a woman who shares his obsessions though they have different objects. The final crisis of the novel leads to a breakdown of the hero’s habitual self, in an ending in which passions becomes both destructive violence and an idyllic solitary resignation. The journey into an interiority, through exceptional breaks with habit finds a culmination. This achievement rests on Stendhal writing in a world after Rousseau and understanding the full extent of this requires a rounded understanding of Rousseau, along with his context.

Abitudine, contingenza, oralità: per una letteratura “viva” a partire da Leopardi

Mariagrazia Portera — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What is the relationship between habit and literary creativity? What role does the notion of habit play in the process of composition and, in general, in artistic productivity and the aesthetic experience? How do the terms habit and improvisation, habituation and contingency relate to each other? To answer these questions, crucial for aesthetics, this essay moves from the discussion of some significant passages in Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone. On the one hand, the notions of habit and habituation will be discussed, understood – in the specific case of their application to poetry – as the poetic work of giving oneself a form; on the other hand, I shall analyze the notion of environmental or contextual contingency as the input that activates the poetic composition, in terms of a so-called “deliberate improvisation”. Against the background of these interconnected concepts the issues of the relationship between book and orality, performativity and recitation, lowbrow culture and highbrow culture will emerge, in a dense web of cross-references that defines, at least in its general lines, one of the axes of Leopardi's theoretical thinking around the 1820s.

Il ruolo dell’abitudine nella costruzione dell’identità morale in The Mill on the Floss e Middlemarch di George Eliot

Sara Gasponi — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

What is the boundary between unconscious habits and conscious actions? This is the question that drives all of George Eliot’s poetics centered on the importance of habit in the construction of her characters’ moral identity. The aim of this article is to analyze the author’s answers in this regard through two of her formidable novels: The Mill on the Floss and Middlemarch. In the first work, recovering the image, of philosophical- psychological origin, of the mind as a channel and making use of the analogies between animal and human behavior, Eliot proposes imaginative experience as a means of developing new cognitive capacities. But it is in Middlemarch that Eliot adds a further piece: unhinging the misogynistic prejudices attached to the concept of habit typical of the strongly patriarchal culture of the Victorian age. Pointing her satirical pen at the habits of her characters, Eliot invites readers to a critical attitude toward their own habits. Reading thus becomes an opportunity to reflect on our pervasive habits and achieve that gradual change towards the construction of a more mature and conscious moral identity.

A Minor Subject: Habit and Subjectivity in Modernist Literature and Philosophy

Federico Bellini — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this essay, I intend to investigate some of the aspects of the resurgence of habit at the dawn of the twentieth century by touching upon a series of paradigmatic texts of the modernist canon and by investigating their debts to and consonances with the contemporary philosophies of habit. My thesis is that during those decades – seen as a mere chapter in the longer history of modernity – the philosophical and literary theme of habit served not only as a way to understand and represent the ordinary dimension of life, but also as a means to develop an idea of human subjectivity that could mediate between the centrifugal and the centripetal tendencies that permeated the competing ideologies of the time. The crisis of subjectivity that characterized modernism and which has often been simplistically represented as a disintegration of the subject into irredeemably broken fragments, should rather be seen as the development of a dialectical idea of a “minor subject”, that is, an open, dynamic, multilayered subjectivity still endowed by a certain malleable consistency. Both modernist literature and its philosophical counterparts found in the “minor subject” (here in the sense of “subject matter”) of habit, the opportunity to investigate and represent the porosity between activity and passivity, volition and determinism, individual identity and social structures, that characterize this idea of subjectivity.

I focus on three different representative – though not exhaustive – facets of the issue. In the first section, relying on Virginia Woolf's work, I highlight how some of the narrative techniques developed by Modernist writers can be seen as an attempt to give a plastic representation to the blurred boundaries of subjectivity as captured in the everyday existence of their characters. I then connect these innovations to the theory of habit of Samuel Butler, whom Woolf identified as one of the harbingers of modernity. In the second section I focus on Marcel Proust to discuss how modernist writers proved to be able to combine two opposed views of habit: on the one hand, the view of habit as purely mechanical and leading to inauthentic life; on the other, the idea of habit as essential to the human being's potential for self-perfecting and creativity. The third section is dedicated to addiction, seen as a form of habit in which the subject is radically torn between opposite forces. Following insights from Sigmund Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, I interpret Italo Svevo's Zeno's Conscience as a meditation on how such a torn subjectivity manifests the essential incompleteness of the human subject and life's insuppressible nostalgia for the inorganic.

Virginia Woolf’s blurred boundaries, Marcel Proust’s ambiguous authenticity, and Italo Svevo’s split selfhood are three interconnected facets of the modernists’ interest in the “minor subject” of habit. Investigating the interaction between the philosophical and the literary discourses on habit at the dawn of the twentieth century can contribute to a more nuanced reconstruction of a pivotal moment in the history of thought but also to the contemporary philosophical debate. Almost exactly one century later, the renewed interest in the theme of habit mirrors a situation in part similar to what characterized the ideological landscape of the time, as now too it is concerned with the attempt to reimagine a “minor subject” that mediates between the postmodern pulverization of identity and the temptation of reaffirming anachronistic forms of strong subjectivities.

Il fallimento di una vita inabituale: Henry James e la costruzione della «nostra eroina» Isabel Archer

Simone Bernardi della Rosa — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article aims to raise crucial aspects of the philosophy of habit found in late 19th-century literature, particularly through an examination of Henry James’ portrayal of his character Isabel Archer. This goal is pursued through the analysis of two interconnected aspects forming the theoretical core of this contribution. Firstly, the focus is on Isabel Archer’s psychological depiction as a fundamental contribution of the English and American literature on the theme of habit, especially during the latter half of the 19th century. By contextualizing James’ work, exploring links to Peirce’s pragmatist philosophy and habit theory, the centrality of habit reflection in the psychological structuring of characters, interwoven with philosophical and narrative theories of individuality, is revealed. Furthermore, this reflection provides interpretative keys to understanding Henry James’ narrative choices concerning Isabel’s fate in the novel. Then this article directly specifically examines the construction of Isabel’s self which unfolds through the entire narrative events. The interpretative hypothesis guiding the investigation focuses on the connection between Isabel’s attempts to conduct life without habit and the resulting errors in judgment. To support this hypothesis, the importance of comparing key characters such as Gilbert Osmond and Madame Merle is highlighted. Through the narrative, it will emerge a peculiar ontological structure of the concept of habit. Moreover, through the psychological portraits in the novel, a critical exploration of James’ idea of individuality arises — acknowledging social dynamics and the ontological force of habit, rejecting the dichotomy represented by an optimistic individualism and a degenerate conventional life. The conclusion asserts that Isabel’s pursuit of an unhabitual life inevitably leads to failure. The solution does not lie in a rigid, conventional, dichotomous view of habit. Instead, James argues for a dynamic, relational view of habit: a fundamental aspect of being that must be acknowledged to understand the mechanisms that lead us from the variety of possibilities to the limited “actualities” of life. Through these two interrelated perspectives, the article aims to illuminate the psychological depth of Isabel Archer’s character, demonstrating how her story represents a cornerstone in the broader discussion of the nature and evolution of habit in 19th- century literature. From that, it sets the stage for a more comprehensive discussion on habit’s role in shaping characters and narratives during this historical period.

Distrarsi: abitudine storico-naturale?

Carmen Guarino — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This article delves into the phenomenon of distraction as a cluster of habits that underlies the nervous lives of literary modernity and holds a potentially counter-canonical conceptual significance by haunting daily and scientific practices like reading. On one hand, these habits of distraction could be considered as a part, perhaps even the common denominator of those highly routinized activities that may constitute the natural history of the human forms of life. On the other hand, they may serve as a lever to rethink the natural-historical conceptual tradition itself. Starting with an analysis of the thematic and methodological literary relevance of this phenomenological area in Moravia’s major existentialist novels, this article will further explore its philosophical and anthropological importance by contrasting De Martino’s interpretation of Moravia and Benjamin’s idle materialism with Gehlen’s concept of “second nature” as based on James’s psychology and Heidegger’s stigmatization of

everyday life as inauthentic.

The Silent Animals. Loving and Staging Animals in Jean Baudrillard’s Thought

George P. Pefanis — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

In this paper, George P. Pefanis discusses the presence of animals on stage from the perspective of French philosopher Jean Baudrillard. Baudrillard examines animality in relation to reason and the division between humans and non-humans. He presents four broad categories based on their relationship to humans. This article analyses the Baudrillardian concept of ‘somatisation’, which includes both the corporeality and physical vulnerability of animals, as well as certain psychic traits. The article explores the sentimentality projected onto animals and the implied superiority of humans in such sentimentality. Additionally, it enquires how the principles of ‘love for animals’ can be integrated into a performance featuring animals on stage from an ethical and ontological perspective. To support this discussion, the paper examines two examples of performances: ‘Embracing Animal’ by American artist Kathy High and ‘The Other’ by American artist Rachel Rosenthal.

Tra forma e senso. Kandinsky e Bergson. Correlazioni fenomenologiche verso una fisica dell’anima

Ivania De Vito — Thu, 11 Jan 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The mode of evolution from figurative to abstract and from abstract to concrete in Kandinsky’s work seems to follow the path of a Bersonianan creative evolution. From the first melodic paintings to the explosion of his improvisations, the aesthetic material contracts and condenses itself in a pure shape with no connections with the representativeness. This eidetic shape is also the result of a phenomenological approach and analysis, revealing correlating meanings in an interesting living time of perception. Oscillations between shape and content, color and sound in resonance space will become for Kandisnky scope for the constitution of a possible aesthetic phenomenological experience, that looks for unveiled qualities. For Kandinsky and Bergson the quality in which an element contracts or thickens itself is in fact a new spiritualized value.

Kandinsky looks for a real intense time of perception, of creation, of fruition that finds in the real movement and the Bergsonian durée réelle his theoretical confirmation. At the same time his creative act seems to be able to fit into the dual modality of Bergsonianan life of consciusness: frist like an élan vital and explosive action of abstract expressionism and subsequently as a work of qualitative contraction and condensation of vibrations that create a new kind of material. Tensions for the philosopher and the painter are the material established to ensure continuity between real and ideal. The experience in the field of sensibility for Kandinsky follows the paths of intuition and intelligence in the dual Bergsonian modality of a double vital and evolutionary movement : listening the melodic curvature of soul that exposes and explodes sense and forms and contracting itself in a rhythmic tension of Bergsonianan durée, so that tension will be an orchestral partiture where the flow could be read. The aesthetic object presents itself as a movement towards the fullness of a eidetic unity, paying attention to its morphogenetic movement towards the possibility to take shape of that movement.

In fact, the artist’s gaze is a grasp on the movements of being, it is a gaze that doesn’t leave the movement of Sense, and like music tends to guarantee its continuity, The flow that he follows is the flow of music that he tries to become more and more concrete. The form of the Sense is instead correlation of contracted quality understood as expressive density, like a quantum. Sense and form objectify themself to create abstract art. Shape that can condense a flow of a special time of consciousness letting move its inner sound and contracting and diluting itself in a vectorial sense that can orchestrate forms and write scores. Sense insinuates itself into material and the same material reveals, redefines, redirects. The Sense of the form is pure quality in progression, vibranting eternity in the first expressionism period, and expressive density in the following Bauhaus period until it becomes an organic complete unveiling resonant shape. Unveiling qualities flow as a bridge between spirit and material, speaking about a deep interesting space-time that suggests a hidden and special physics of soul. The bridge that can reveal and connects possible inner worlds is a space-time experience of a living inner time of perception that make sense in the music. Space and time vibrate and grow in rhythmic resonance until becoming an organon, a pure body. Space time will become correlation and redefinition scope of essence, form and soul.