PILARES MISIONALES

bists have cultivated against Impressionism's agitation and naturalism, the attempt will be completely impossible by Cubism's definition as pure, pictorial composition in terms of surfaces and weights, and in a larger sense conceivable only insofar as a cube as ornament is no ornament at all, that is, no broken one, but is rather the one which most helpfully reaches across toward the

figure of meaning.

In accordance with a formal transparency that only ensues with the formal actualization, without co­ inciding with it or being even somewhat continuously accompanied by its stylization, by the constructional pleasure still available in Impression­ ism and once again totally geometrically hypertrophied in Cubism.

But is it even still possible to build, to vault upward? Here our intro­ duction of a higher artisanal logic must prove itself, as was shown by our earlier example of the Baroque chair. It is probable that, in accordance with the extraordinary search for expression, certain artisanal and then sculptural and architectonic realizations will triumph over the till now purely painterly element. Whereby in other words, under the aspect of the future, beyond applied art in its narrower, socially subservient sense, in the stylistic sense, beyond ornament in its unilinear, untranscendent sense, a Sheraton chair or the unearthly curve of certain Baroque cabi­ netry could contain more aesthetic character and significance than the loveliest Perugino or even more famous historicist illusionisms, Much al­ ready points in this direction, and much that had long been forgotten or never understood at all is now reemerging: thus the ceremonial masks, the totems, the carved beams, the banding, the sacristies; thus the notion of a sculpture carved from the inside out as well, whether of Negro,

Nordic, Gothic, Baroque type, the nameless body of a sculpture as archi­

tecture. Because of all this, the architecture now so threatened by barren­ ness and functionalism, by which it may indeed even have been lost, can always be explored as the interior of the space of home, which art must furnish and approximate well. With painting, sculpture in an increas­ ingly anthropomorphic space of construction that must repeatedly, and

today more than ever, be broken as the anticipatory expression of a

tat

twam asi,

"Thou art it toO."6 As the self-encounter within painted objects

and w"tth them; and music, no longer frozen, nearby.? OUR SECRET SIGNATURE IN ART

SO we seek the artist who lets us approach ourselves purely, encounter ourselves. His novel gaze molds unrecognizable new shapes and moves

like a swimmer, like a cyclone through the given. There is something beautiful about flowing water, an old tree, even a dark, elevated alpine lake. It suffices to possess all this in nature, however, where one can also enjoy what art cannot represent, such as air, calculable physical distances, and so on, better than any of the pleasures of art appreciation ever could do. In any case the cinema now provides an exemplary substitute; one can even say that for anyone who would like the impression of nature with­ out any deformations through the medium of the image, the cinemato­ graph is the best portrait gallery, the substitute for all the world's great general art exhibitions. Everyone should keep this in mind who demands to know of an Expressionist image what it represents: by what means, in other words, hell can shrivel down to a street corner before their eyes which resemble mere photographic plates. For things have been different ever since van Gogh; we are also present in the painting, and precisely this presence is what is being painted; true, there is still visible turmoil, still railings, subways, girders, brick walls, but it suddenl� peculiarly under­ cuts itself. the rejected cornerstone strikes sparks all at once, and the ele­ ment within all appearance which was already drawn, which is incompre­ hensibly akin to us, lost to us, near, far, the Sais-like quality of the world, suddenly emerges into the light in van Gogh's paintings as it otherwise does only in Strindberg.8 In Cezanne as well, though more latently, and concealed somewhat under the more powerful, purely painterly fa<;ade that makes Cezanne the last great modern stylist, but perhaps even more deeply than in van Gogh, the Expressionist revolution is evident: for this is no longer fruit, nor is it fruit modeled in paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they were to fall, a universal conflagration would en­ sue, to such an extent are these still lifes already heroic landscapes, so loaded are these paintings with mystical gravity and a yet unknown, nameless mythology. The still life does not appear groundless here, for the major events of this world, as well as the world presented by self-enclosed cultures, are past, and cannot properly be adapted again to some Roman­ tic model or zodiacal theosophy; whereas the "still life" not only persists as painting's almost sole object, but in its having-escaped, its intensity in small things, is or can be higher than any culture. Precise in this new tableau, then-be it nevertheless and at best only a seal at first, like the conceivably ultimate music and conceivably final metaphysics, and not ideogrammatically equivalent to our inmost intensity, the mystery of the We and of the ground-even in the new tableau the thing becomes a

, 32.

The Production of the Ornament

muk.

Il "concept," the deformed, denaturalized manner of secret teleotro­

pllmsi the human interior and the world's shift together. Suddenly I see

my eyes, my ears, my state: I myself am this drawer and these fish, I am these fish of a kind that lies in drawers; for the difference vanishes, the distance lifts between the artistic subject and the artistically represented object that is to be reborn to a different materiality than a mere thing's, reborn to its essence as the inmost principle of its potentiality, of all our

potentiality. My dance, my morning stars sing, and everything so trans­ parently formed attains the same individual structural horizon as well as'

the same subjective ornament of its entelechy-a trace, a sign of the

ma­

canthropos,

the seal of its mysterious figure-to be of the soul's Jerusalem concealed from itself.9

Here there is nothing more to be borrowed from outside; the soul need no longer accept alien dictates. Rather, its own need is strong enough to attract whatever husks and markers it needs for support, and images become just our

own

reemergence, but at another place. If van ,Gogh guided us out of ourselves, if things still speak in his work, however em­ phatically, apparently just of themselves and not as echoes of man, then we suddenly hear only ourselves echo back from them; then, conversely, after Expressionism man has only a Kaspar Hauser kind of nature that uses objects solely as keepsakes of its ineradicable lineage or as pointing marks for keeping and conserving its progressive anamnesis.10 Things thus become like the inhabitants of one's own interior, and if the visible world seems to be crumbling anyway, to be increasingly emptying itself of its own soul, becoming uncategorial, then in it and through it the sounds of the invisible world correspondingly want to become pictorial­ ity: vanishing obverse, intensifying fullness, a becoming-the-forest, an in­ flux and reflux of things into the self's crystalline forest, creative, deepest outburst, pansubjectivism within the object, beyond the object, as object itself, so that the external object disappears to the extent that it returns like one of the 500 deities in the forbidden temple of Canton. Here the pictures, strangely familiar, can appear like magical mirrors where we glimpse our future, like the masked ornaments of our inmost shape, like the finhlly perceived, adequate fulfillment, self-presence of what has eter­ nally been meant, of the I, of the We, of the

tat twam asi,

of our glory vi­ brating within mystery, of our secret divine existence. This is the same as

the longing to finally see the human countenance, and the only remain­ ing dream streets, even for the magical picture, will be like those where

Sesenheim's experience of riding toward himself could occur, and no other objective correlation but one that mirrors throughout the world the mysterious outline of the human countenance, and thus connects the most abstract organicity with the longing for our own heart, for the full­ ness of the manifestation to oneself. 1 1

In document PLAN DE DESARROLLO. IVALDO TORRES CHÁVEZ, Ph.D RECTOR (página 31-42)