Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Zachary Braiterman is Associate Professor of Religion at Syracuse University and the author of (God) After Auschwitz: Tradition and Change in Post Holocaust Jewish Thought (1998).

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The Shape of Revelation

Stanford University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments..................................................ixAbbreviations....................................................xiPreface: Revelation and the Spiritual in Art.....................xviiIntroduction.....................................................11 Form...........................................................232 Abstraction....................................................633 Pathos.........................................................974 Time...........................................................1355 Space..........................................................1676 Eros...........................................................207Epilogue: Mutations..............................................245Notes............................................................267Index............................................................293

Chapter One

Reading Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art, the northern expressionist sculptor and dramatist Ernst Barlach complained: "I will believe this honest man when he claims that for him, points, spots, lines, and dabs ... create profound spiritual shocks, i.e., they have effects that are more than ornamental. Yes, I will believe, and then-good by." Barlach did not share the nave trust in graphic or linguistic form that was an essential component in the work of Kandinsky, Klee, Buber, and Rosenzweig. He failed to see how the transposition of bare formal elements into complex compositional networks might take shape as the human correlate of supersensual creativity. In the lines drawn between the graphic and verbal nodes of expression, our own definition of "form" as found in the discourse of revelation and the spiritual in art refers to two discrete phenomena: the isolated points, spots, lines, and dabs parodied by Barlach versus the broader form pattern, the Gestalt into which they morph. Formation is genesis. Points, spots, lines, and dabs do not "represent" the world of visible objects. In Klee's Memory of a Garden (fig. 3), they are world-creating, the elemental building blocks of what Rosenzweig called a super-cosmos (berwelt), the transfiguration of this empirical world.

The difference between Barlach and Kandinsky about the spiritual status of form and form-creation reflects the foundational dispute in German philosophy between Kant and Hegel. For Kant, human cognition relies upon aesthetic forms of intuition (space and time) to receive sense impressions, which are organized by concepts of the understanding and ideas of reason into an ordered whole. Form-the points, spots, lines, and dabs of human consciousness-has no determinate reference apart from its own operation. Time and space, concepts and categories, are not real per se. They are only forms of intuition. As for the ideas of reason (God, world, and soul), these are referents whose existence we can only postulate, since they stand beyond the limits of possible human experience. Hegel placed much greater faith in form than Kant did. Spirit unfolds logically through art, religion, and philosophy. The third term in Hegel's dialectic always combines the partial truths that precede it into a more complete Idea. Intermediary cultural forms, even those said to be one-sided, are thus necessary for truth to present itself-qua simple sense impression, qua religious imagination, qua philosophical reason. Graphic and linguistic marks are not just decorative. Their significance oversteps into the truth of Spirit's self-unfolding. After Kant, all claims regarding revelation and the spiritual in art presuppose, to one degree or another, Hegel's second navet.

The free shape of form in twentieth-century aesthetic theory enjoys this advantage over its predecessors. In German idealist aesthetics, intellectual and the spiritual form ride roughshod over empirical reality and content. Creative activity dominates physical content. "In a truly beautiful work of art," Friedrich Schiller writes in the Aesthetic Education of Mankind (1795), "the content should do nothing, the form everything.... Therefore the real artistic secret of the master consists in his annihilating the material by means of the form." The "unrestrained freedom" of the formal impulse allows the artist to "join what Nature sundered ... and sunder what Nature combines." Twentieth-century aesthetics is inflected by a more fluid tension between form element and form pattern than Schiller's strict opposition of spirit to nature and freedom to necessity. There is no fast and firm distinction between form and content. Individual and isolated elements can be epistemological (sense impressions, concepts, judgments), historical (drawn from art, religion, philosophy, politics), theological (God, world, soul), dialogical (I, YOU, IT), or painterly (points, spots, lines). In a formal analysis, one looks at how they combine, splinter, and recombine into "compositional" frameworks (cognitive, institutional, pictorial, textual, sonic, performative).

Fluid, transactional conceptions of form dominated early twentieth-century German culture. Anxious to distinguish the humanities and the social sciences (Geisteswissenchaften) from the natural and mathematical sciences, German scholars at the turn of the century used the freedom of "form" to establish their own work on a firm but nonpositivist basis. As understood by Georg Simmel, form is not static and thinglike. Based upon flowing lines of relationship, form is an activity, not an object. Central to Simmel's sociology is an overriding interest in formal acts of sociation that organize elemental physiological and psychological drives, interests, purpose, inclinations, and movement. Focused upon the Fluidum created between form elements, not the individual element itself, society "certainly is not a `substance,' nothing concrete, but an event-it is the function of receiving and effecting the fate and development of one individual by the other." Seen as such, form is "the mutual determination and interaction of the elements of an association."

The expressionist generation was to make greater claims about form than did Simmel. In line with Kant, Simmel restricted his analysis of it to strictly intellectualist terms. A very important essay, "Religion" (1912), indicates no metaphysical interest whatsoever. Attention shifts from doctrinal elements and ritual contents to what Simmel calls "religiosity," an organic rhythm based on formal relationships that lack a fixed set of objects. Simmel made it clear that "his intent was [to] show the structural meaning of religion as a mental-spiritual phenomenon." Following Kant, he would not discuss the suprapsychological existence of its objects outside the subject's own apprehension of them. While there is much to be said for Phillip Hammond's claim that Simmel was religiously musical, especially in comparison to Weber, he was positively tone-deaf compared to the expressionists, whose creative work was based upon the almost occult conceit that every form-each individual element, and the patterns they shape-resonates with a spiritual presence whose reality transcends the real world of visual objects and form-creating human subjects in which it is seeped.

In early twentieth-century Jewish thought in Germany, form represents the vital medium that embeds revelation in the creaturely character of physical existence and symbolic expression. Form is central to the spiritual status ascribed to material objects, myth, ritual (i.e., law), the aesthetics and anti-aesthetics of creation-revelation-redemption, and the linguistic form of Scripture and its translation. Buber and Rosenzweig were distinctly modern, rejecting romantic and postromantic totalities and tonalities that fuse individual parts into a larger, rhythmic harmonization of opposites dominated from one single point in the system. The picture that emerges from their work is one in which existence breaks down into autonomous elements, which are reconstituted into a complex, even jagged, relational unit. An irreducible stress situated between the total whole and the individual element interrupts the extremes of objectivity and subjectivity represented by totalitarianism and nihilism. Form constitutes the linchpin of encounter, the in-between place without which there is no revelation in this world. Trust in form brought Buber and Rosenzweig close to art and lends sensual shape to the image of revelation in their work.

I

Form/Gestalt, Composition, Creation

The sarcasm Barlach directed against Kandinsky works only by isolating each point, spot, line, and dab as a set and separate form-element; as if to say that each black line or color volume constitutes an absolutely autonomous object bearing no relation to any other formal element. In fact, the emphasis placed in Kandinsky's art upon the unique and free single detail in its relation to a larger form-totality is much more ambiguous. Kandinsky defined pictorial composition as the "creation of the individual forms that are related to each other in various combinations, while remaining subordinate to the whole" (CWA, 167). However, the whole also remains subordinate to the part. The slightest change in composition, the act of altering one single form element, affects the spiritual sound made by that very same whole. With its own lithe life, form is not a static monolith. "The same form always produces the same sound under the same conditions," Kandinsky argued. "Only the conditions always differ; which permits us [to conclude]: [1] the ideal sound changes when combined with other forms. [2] It changes, even in the same context ... if the direction of the form changes." Composition depends "upon the variability, down to the tiniest detail, of every individual form."

Each separate color form or geometric shape is said to register its own unique sound. The reader learns in Kandinsky's On the Spiritual in Art that the sound of blue is bold and spiritual; yellow, warm; green, peaceful; red, intense, immense, and powerful; white resonates with a great spiritual, silent "other" that is alive with possibility; black sounds a dead nothing, without possibility; and so on (CWA, 177-88). Geometric forms later come to constitute the elements of composition, combining and recombining into more or less complex patterns. In Kandinsky's Point and Line to Plane, the process begins with the "point." An introverted element, it burrows into the surface, alienated from its general environment, establishing itself for all time. Ultimately, it takes an unnamed force to break open the point and to force it to emerge. In the process, a new life is formed, a new entity created: the line. The direction that a line takes within the picture frame conjures up different possibilities. "Above" and "left" reflect rarified, free, and spiritual movement. "Below" and "right" signify a state of being that is dense, bound, and material (CWA, 639-45).

A painting's compositional combinations constitute an act of world-creation, compared by Kandinsky to "a thundering collision of different worlds that are destined in and through conflict to create that new world called the work.... The creation of the work of art is the creation of the world" (CWA, 373). While earlier works such as Composition V (fig. 4) and Composition VI more obviously suggest the semblance of a physical world, allusions to physical space remain in the late work as well. The text Point and Line to Plane, written at the Bauhaus, begins by comparing the picture composition to a street, inviting the viewer to "emerge from one's isolation, immerse oneself in this organism, actively involve oneself in it, and experience its pulsating life with all one's senses" (CWA, 532). Art no longer mimics life, but rather vice versa. The natural world is itself compared to "a self-contained cosmic composition, which itself consists of innumerable, independent, hermetic compositions, getting smaller and smaller, and which-large or small-were ultimately created from points" (554). A discussion of line includes a nod toward crystals, plants, animal tissue, and skeletons (536).

"Art does not reproduce the visible but makes visible," Klee proclaims in his "Creative Credo" (N, 1: 76). Whereas in the art of earlier times visible things appear in visible form, "[n]ow the relativity of all things is made clear, the belief expressed that the visible is only an isolated case taken from the universe and there are more truths unseen than seen" (78-79). The sheer joy of victory is expressed in the green arms and brown-red legs of the Runner at the Goal (plate 12), a bulbous head with no face, inscribed with the number "1," with a geometric pattern defined by horizontal lines from grays to browns and black superimposed on his entire being. These formal features subvert physical semblance even as they suggest it. Rough analogues of the natural order of objects as one ordinarily sees them, they "console the mind, by showing it there is something more than the earthly and its possible intensifications." Klee adds: "[E]thical gravity coexists with impish tittering at doctors and priests. For, in the long run, even intensified reality is of no avail. Art plays in the dark with ultimate things and yet it reaches them" (80).

From the time of his 1914 trip to Tunisia, Klee's Memory of a Garden (fig. 3) speaks to the process of genesis and growth, to the study of creation, to the formation of an ordered cosmos, a liminal space caught somewhere between the invisible world of spirit and the visible world of physical sensation. Robert Kudielka comments that for Klee, "genesis is not just an unlimited flux, but a force continually moving between formation and dissolution. And indeed that interplay can be articulated." As in Kandinsky's composition theory, the symbol of chaos starts with the "point." Neither white nor black, but rather both at the same time, it indicates a state in which particulars cannot be distinguished from each other. The cosmogenetic moment occurs when this point is jerked into the realm of an order that radiates out in all directions (N, 1: 3-4). In the beginning, things moved freely, neither in straight nor in crooked lines, but simply for the sake of moving, without aim or will. The tension between points gradually yields line as objects gradually orient themselves in the distorted, three-dimensional field of pictorial space. Deep beneath the surface exterior, our knowledge of the object's inner being amplifies and intensifies in appearance. In pictorial dimension, the object grows beyond the limits imposed upon it by our optical view of its outward appearance (39-47, 63-66).

Generating growth, the force that jerks "the point" into line is an impetus from without, the plant's relation to earth and atmosphere, and a slumbering tendency toward form and articulation that awakens according to an underlying logos, idea, word implanted from the beginning. Seed and root strike downward, the plant grows upward, driven by "space hunger and juice hunger." Gradually, the plant's articulation grows more and more ramified. To illustrate this process, Klee had his students put sand on a thin plate and then vibrate the plate with a violin bow. The sand rearranged itself according to the rhythmic order set by the bow. An invisible vibration was thus transformed into a material event, into a visible expression that took the form of newly arranged material (N, 2: 25-45). It can be compared to the process at work in Memory of a Garden. The use of color evokes a physical scene that is lush in texture and wildly unmannered, whereas the geometric ordering of blue, yellow, and purple planes and the use of abstract dots, dabs, and lines to indicate plant life remain fundamentally alien to the organic world. Color has transformed the invisible geometry into a material event.

The creative power manifested by Memory of a Garden and the movement of the bow was ultimately metaphysical and mysterious. Klee remained convinced that matter derives its own life from this creative power, acquiring order in its minutest particles. Human beings are charged by it, move toward its source, and manifest it in their physical functions. Klee speculated that this invisible creative power might itself be a form of matter, but one that our senses cannot perceive as they can more familiar kinds of matter (N, 2: 63). Elements are shaped into new order and form, into images that enjoy their own objective existence. Art extends the human eye into other possible worlds, like future worlds and worlds in other star systems. This renders the exterior physical appearance of our own world arbitrary and relative. The artist attempts to apprehend the "central organ" (Zentralorgan) of all time and space, the brain or heart of creation. The act of creation adds more spirit to the seen, more spirit to a garden scene or to a runner at the goal. It makes secret visions visible (MA, 49-51).

(Continues...)

Excerpted from The Shape of Revelationby Zachary Braiterman Copyright © 2007 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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