After getting over how many times the word ‘thing’ could be used in various forms throughout a text, I found that there was a few key parts of this text that I could pick out which related either to my practice or my dissertation. It is odd how completely the two of those combine for me, sometimes it is difficult to separate, therefore I tend to not try, the two work well together in relation to my practice and this is not something I should try and change.
The first part of the text for me was the most confusing, Heidegger establishes the circle, the circle of ‘art’ you could say. He then goes on to try and distinguish what a ‘thing’ is for the most part of the essay. However, I think the circle needs to be addressed, as in relation to my dissertation I am questioning whether the artist remains an important part of the creative act (Duchamp, 1967), and the role of the artist, the viewer and the critic. Heidegger states: ‘The artist is the origin of the work. The work is the origin of the artist.’ The artist is the creator of the work, without the artist there would be no work. On the other hand, without the artwork, how can the artist be called such? This is the question that Heidegger raises and he links these with a third attribute to the circle: ‘art’. Again he states that art is the origin of both artist and artwork, but art would not exist without the latter. This leads you to believe that in this circle, neither is of greater importance, they are all codependent. However, Heidegger also suggests that it is the artwork that needs to be examined in order to establish the origin of the work of art, he states that: ‘Art essentially unfolds in the artwork. But what and how is the work of art?’ What is the essence of the work of art? He discusses how we establish that a work of art is what it is, we compare it to other examples we have in order to conclude whether it is in fact art or not (he later goes on to discuss why it is that we feel the need to do this.) After acknowledging the existence of this circle, Heidegger asks what is a work of art? To find its origin we first need to work out what it actually is. He talks of how the artwork is a ‘thing’, but with something else, something that gives it that artistic edge. It says something more than itself, there’s the concept of the work.
Heidegger sets out to define a ‘thing’ in this text, that ‘thingly’ quality, however after reading it through a few times I felt that he never really defined what a thing was, and just made lots of different suggestions as to what it could be. He states a summary of the three main concepts he thinks work as an explanation for a ‘thing’: ‘These three modes of defining thingness conceive of the thing as a bearer of traits, as the unity of a manifold of sensations, as formed matter.’ The first for me was the explanation that held the most weight, I had not thought about this much before and so I found this a very interesting idea. ‘A thing, as everyone thinks he knows, is that around which the properties have assembled.’ This is the idea that traits, or properties of an object for example, surround the thing itself, making it recognisable to us, he talks of how we acknowledge its characteristics. However, the ‘thing’ itself is being assaulted by these properties we place upon it, but it needs to remain contained. He talks as well of how these properties exist: ‘What seems natural to us is probably just something familiar in a long tradition that has forgotten the unfamiliar source from which it arose. And yet this unfamiliar source once struck a man as strange and caused him to think and wonder.’ This is an interesting idea, how everything was once new to us, and now as the years go on this is less so, we take the properties and traits for granted, they are not at all surprising. This is still not a particularly solid explanation of a thing, and Heidegger goes into many more different possible explanations however, I feel that this one is the strongest. He talks also of matter and form which would help to explain the physical quality of objects and works of art, however, this idea of given traits and properties also links with how we establish a work of art as ‘art’. We look for other examples we may have of a work of art, we compare the new to the old, to establish connections and similarities in order to define it, yet the slight differences are what make the work ‘new’.
I read through this text because my tutor Jane mentioned Heidegger’s discussion of Van Gogh’s painting of the peasant shoes. He first talks of the shoes themselves and then goes on to mention the painting that depicts the shoes and why it has become so important to this argument, how its not just a pictorial reference. I was interested in looking into this specific part of the text because I have been looking into objects and photographs, and how they tell a story. I took some photographs of my Nan’s house and one of them was of a chair in my Nan’s room where she hung her coat. The chair symbolised my Nan in many aspects and it wasn’t till after I had printed the photograph that I realised this. I was aiming to capture the essence of my Nan in the space, the chair was strong, yet soft, and stood alone in the room, it had a sense of comfort that I connected with my Nan even without her surrounding room. It was because of this that I questioned the way in which we can link objects with people and memories. Jane suggested reading this example, as it would be beneficial to my research for the work. Van Gogh’s painting depicts a pair of peasant shoes, Heidegger talks of how there is nothing else in the image, we cannot see someone wearing them, or where they are located. Yet in those shoes you see the peasant woman wearing them, her pain, her tiredness, her relief when she takes them off after walking all day. You can see the soil that she treads on and the marks she makes. The shoes become so much more than just a pair of shoes, they have a history and a story behind them, one that we see in the painting. It is important to question why this is. Heidegger mentions that the women would think nothing of her shoes other than that they do the job well, whereas we, as we look upon this painting, see everything in them. Is it because of the painting? These shoes have been picked out for a reason, they have been painted to tell that story, not just simply to look like a pair of shoes. When they were chosen in this way they become more than a pair of peasant shoes. The fact that they have been depicted in this painting, in this art, it makes them more than what they first seem to be. Heidegger emphasises this idea when he states: ‘But then, is it your opinion that this painting by Van Gogh depicts a pair of peasant shoes somewhere at hand, and is a work of art because it does so successfully? Is it your opinion that the painting draws a likeness from something actual and transposes it into a product of artistic-production? By no means.’
The rest of the text I felt was quite confusing and complicated, it wasn’t until the section titled Truth and Art that I again became interested in what Heidegger was writing. Heidegger writes more clearly of the connection between the work of art, art and the artist by summarising some of the previous points he has made. He mentions that we need to see the piece of art as something worked, effected, or we will never be able to see the origin of the piece. He states again more confidently: ‘The workly character of the work consists in its having been created by the artist. It may seem curious that this most obvious and all-clarifying definition of the work is mentioned only now.’ After going through and discussing many different explanations for the origin of the work of art, Heidegger arrives again at the artist. He talks of how it is important not to forget that the work of art was worked by someone, it is intentional, everything you see has been done for a reason, and as it was mentioned before, this is what makes a work of art more than just a ‘thing’. He talks of how you cannot just define the work by itself, you need to look to the artist also. This is relevant to my dissertation where I argue against Roland Barthes The Death of the Author when he states that the artist is dead, and it is only in the art work that we need to look, that the work is completed in the viewer. Heidegger here suggests quite the opposite: that the origin of the work of art must be discovered within the activity of the artist.
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