Travis Grotewold HUMN 5660 / Paper 1

Hegels understanding of art is informed by a single idea, yet this statement is not as straightforward as it seems. At the metaphysical level, this single idea is absolutely the (absolute) idea, that which determines existence and endows existents with the indelible memory of their origin in it, the idea. This is another way of saying that the absolute idea is a transcendental power that brings into being, and simultaneously structures, reality. At the level of logic, the idea must, if it is to be self-generated or concrete,1 contain within itself its own identity, difference from self and others, and the means by which it approaches other ideas; i.e. thought sublimates or incorporates (the next) thought (which implies the future and a temporal sequence that thought can not think without), and physical artifacts are themselves visual manifestations of an idea or thought while simultaneously being the food for thought of an imminent incorporation (by oneself from a slightly different angle or by an other who always arrives too late). It [the stone, the tomb, the painting] falls in thought, as Derrida says.2 Concerning artworks, Hegels single idea is something of a hinge that binds two panels of a swinging screen, offering structural support to the seemingly disparate realms of material works and immaterial ideas. Insofar as Hegel gives metaphysical and logical priority to ideas, the material significance of (fine) art is never allowed to appear in its own terms. Hegel would grant that if it were able to do so, it would most definitely be there as a singular presence, yet the transition from singularity to universality, from immediate (sensual) experience to meaningful communication (spirit), would not take place, thereby resulting in abstraction, indeterminateness, and forgetfulness. This necessary transition requires sublation, requires an essential maneuver of incorporation that is both metaphysical and logical, in order that something like the temporal thought of art as art history emerge.
1

And this is the aspiration of every idea, hence of idea or thought as a universal, irreducible medium from which presence, absence, art, and non-art emerge. 2 Notably in his bi-columnar work Glas, on Hegel and Jean Genet. 1

Travis Grotewold HUMN 5660 / Paper 1

The Hegelian transition from symbolic art to classical art to romantic art is motivated by the concrete realization of an idea. As mentioned above and as Hegel stresses, the concrete is a logical production of thought, a dialectic production that desires to mirror internal content in external shapes. This art of representation is nothing but the dialectical alignment of thought and reality and it is stressed to such a degree, a degree which founds the historical perception of artworks, that the particulars of an artwork remain in the inessential background.3 Hegel views Greek sculpture as the penultimate expression of classical art because such sculpture expresses the human form, a form that, beyond its sensual embodiment within the lifelike contours of impenetrable stone, is immediately joined to the fluidity of thought, that is, to essential content: expression of independence, of self-repose, and free vivacitythe natural material is permeated and conquered by the spirit. If we join Hegel and, like him, view materiality (and the singularity of artworks as they emerge there, in their own substance and rhythm4) as merely the husk that spirit/thought inhabits for a time, followed by its gradual sloughing off which transitions into the realm of pure thought or philosophy, then an historical understanding of artworks is gained, yet we simultaneously lose the ability to criticize Hegelian freedom, that is, to criticize an ideology that confounds human freedom with an ambiguous, and perhaps contradictory, theo-logical process of self-reflective and self-mastering supplication.

Particulars that range from the pigments on a canvas to the personal history of the artist; for Hegel, such particulars, if pursued for any length of time, may result in interesting anecdotes and fill our lives with days of amusing conversation, yet they are literally the nothing outside essential determinations (related to God, sure, but only superficially; the real essentiality is human freedom in terms of absolute self-possession), outside that historically binding sphere of pure thought free from the (impure) trivialities that serve only to delay the absolute synchronization of (outer) form and (inner) content. 4 See Jean-Luc Nancys The Muses. 2