J.F. Lyotard vytvořil rovněž řadu filosofických prací o umění a estetice. Zde vycházím z jeho esejů - "Návrat a jiné eseje", "Putování a jiné eseje" a knihy "Čo mal'ovať?".
Středem Lyotardových úvah o umění, zejména výtvarném, je reprezentace, prezentace a především neprezentovatelné (v návaznosti na Wittgensteinovo "nevyslovitelné"), jež má být smyslem umění vůbec.
Vyzdvihuje tedy uměleckou avantgardu, díla umělců vymykajících se své době. Mnoho prostoru věnuje P. Cézannovi jakožto zakladateli moderního malířství, dále se zabývá abstraktním uměním, v čele s B.B. Newmanem.
V souvislosti s avantgardou zdůrazňuje pojem vznešeného v návaznosti na estetiku I. Kanta. V diplomové práci se pokusím nejen o analýzu děl těchto umělců, ale o jakýsi exkurs do dějin výtvarného umění "po stopách"
neviditelného...
Lyotard a avantgarda
(přejato z:
http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContDavi.htm; DAVID, A.
Lyotard on the Kantian Sublime)
The Avant-GardeLyotard articulates the connection between the avant-gardes in the arts and the sublime in "Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism," where he states that "it is in the aesthetic of the sublime that ... the logic of avant-gardes finds its axioms." (28) But it is in this same aesthetic that the avant-garde finds its relevance to postmodern culture, and so the sublime ultimately mediates between the avant-gardes and postmodern culture in a way which, interestingly, parallels its supplementary status (as a species of reflective judgment) in the critical enterprise.
In so far as a work of art resists or confounds sense-perception and thus enables reason to become the primary means of enjoyment, it borrows from the aesthetic of the sublime. In this, says Lyotard, Kant himself shows the way when he names 'formlessness, the absence of form,' as a possible index to the unpresentable.... He cites the commandment, 'Thou shalt not make graven images' (Exodus), as the most sublime passage in the Bible, in that it forbids all presentation of the absolute. Little needs to be added to those observations to outline an aesthetic of sublime paintings. (29)
Painting, then, will avoid representation: "It will be 'white' like one of Malevitch's squares; it will enable us to see only by making it impossible to see." (30) Literature (Joyce, for example) will challenge conventions of narrative unity, even of grammar and vocabulary, so that the reader's preconceptions are blunted and pain is felt-only to lead to greater pleasure in the free play of the text.
But Lyotard points out that there are modes of sublimity in art, different ways of emphasizing the unpresentable alluded to by means of technique. On the one hand, emphasis is placed on "the powerlessness of the faculty of presentation, on the nostalgia for presence felt by the human subject, on the obscure and futile will which inhabits him in spite of everything." (31) Lyotard labels this mode "melancholia," in which a Romantic striving for communion with Nature or Absolute Spirit always falls short but nevertheless persists. Regret is the characteristic feeling of the melancholic sublime, and therefore Lyotard considers this mode of sublime sentiment as not the "real" sublime sentiment "which is an intrinsic combination of pleasure and pain." (32) and which underlies the avant-garde. So, on the other hand, we have the mode of sublimity in art which Lyotard calls "novatio," which places emphasis on "the increase of being and the jubilation which result from the invention of new rules of the game, be it pictorial, artistic, or any other." (33)
The melancholic and novatio modes of the sublime are distinguishable in a related, yet slightly different, way. Both, says Lyotard, allow the unpresentable to be put forward, but it is the recognizable consistency in form of artworks in the melancholic mode that "continues to offer to the reader or viewer matter for solace and pleasure" (34) and thereby reinforces the Romantic nostalgia for Nature or Absolute Spirit. But genuine sublime sentiment "denies itself the solace of good forms, the consensus of a taste which would make it possible to share collectively the nostalgia for the unattainable." (35) In this way, the avant-garde is analogous to reflective judgment; in situating the critical schema while being outside of that schema, reflective judgment goes in search of rules which it does not presently have. Lyotard picks up on this connection when he says, A postmodern artist or writer is in the position of the philosopher: the text he writes, the work he produces are not in principle governed by preestablished rules, and they cannot be judged according to a determining judgment, by applying familiar categories to the text or to the work. Those rules and categories are what the work of art itself is looking for. (36)
Avant-garde art, exemplifying the novatio sublime, is the possibility of infinite experiment and development which, by virtue of being infinite, is itself unpresentable. The nature of art, in other words, becomes problematic. Painting, for example, is no longer a mere reflection of the socio-political and religious order of things; rather, it becomes solely a reflexive endeavor to determine what painting is. (37) In this way the avant-garde resonates with the larger situation of postmodern culture. Postmodernity, says Lyotard, "cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the 'lack of reality' of reality, together with the invention of other realities." (38) Proceeding at a dizzying pace of change which is simultaneously a collapse of metaphysical, religious, and political certainties, postmodernity becomes a quest for what's next and in itself lacks any stability.
The impact of one product of technoscience, photography, is an interesting, if not paradoxical, source of the postmodern sensibility. Images produced mechanically, like photographs, achieve a degree of verisimilitude that outmatches practically anything hand-produced, and for this reason one might conclude that photographs reinforce a sense of stability or reality to cultural forms better than "realist" styles of painting since the quattrocento. Yet photographs also have the potential for infinite production, and it is this sublime gesture itself which undermines any stability that their "hardness" of imagery might suggest. (39) Before mechanical reproduction, it could reasonably be claimed of a hand-produced painting like the Mona Lisa that it is absolutely unique and tied to a certain context of meaning, thus unambiguously authoritative. But after mechanical reproduction, leading to the Mona Lisa's appearance on billboards, magazine advertisements, and T-shirts, unity and stability of meaning are no longer possible. This is emblematic of what Postmodern culture has both lost and found. It has lost its sense of presence or originating certainty, and it has gained infinity. Therein lies its sublimity.
The aesthetic of the sublime, then, serves as a mediating link between the avant-garde and postmodern culture. Lyotard also portrays it as the means by which art may find its true destiny in a way similar to how thought finds its destiny in criticism.
The aesthetic of the sublime, first of all, reclaims art from its merely documentary function. Rather than reflect the accepted order of things and dodge what Lyotard calls "the question of reality implicated in that of art," (40) avant-garde art acknowledges and plays with the constructed nature of perception and worldview.The aesthetic of the sublime also recovers art from its more melacholic mode. Rather than emphasize human lostness and yearning for presence employing regular forms that indeed reinforce such nostalgia, avant-garde art delights in constantly challenging received forms: it "flushes out" the "artifices of presentation" which attempt, in bad faith, "to present the unpresentable." (41) Though initially painful, the rebound to pleasure, so characterisic of sublime feeling, is all the more intense and is felt as an "increase of being" and "jubilation." (42) So in the avant-garde, as in critical thought in general, the "supersensible" destiny of thought in absoluteness is fulfilled. Therein lies its legitimation.
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