The enjoyment of the lost innocence

Just like James, with just another twist of the bolt, Anne Caulequin turns once again to art. This time around with a new revised edition and the update of The Theories of Art that brings along the same desire to show –as the note in the back cover reads– that “nobody is innocent when he or she looks at a work of art.” With that view in mind, the director of the La nouvelle revue d’esthétique comes back to the field of conceptualizations and sows the seeds with practices, principles, daily knowledge and rules.

The volume is split in two parts, each with a couple of chapters and a question as foreword: “What can be made of art theory?” Don’t expect to find a hackneyed explanatory mechanism of what seems obvious and recapped. In turn, there’s an approach to the usefulness of theoretical action in the art field and how it’s articulated in the preoccupation of the work. They ways in which all of the above is expressed is this edition’s clear-cut goal.

Anne Cauquelin, professor emeritus of Esthetic Philosophy, said in a interview she gave to Thierry Paquot, a professor at the Paris Urbanism Institute back in 1999, that she had joined the Faculty too late –in the 1970s– and she had studied there in an “on-and-off” fashion –if we accept to put it that way when referring to maternity, marriage and separations.

It’s not a “delay” –that eventually made her move in strides later on– what actually prevails in her open reflections on The Fundamental Theories and the need for nonstop “refoundation” that came in later to assess the latter and let them build on in a permanent manner. This is a part in which she makes clear that the oldest is not necessarily the most genuine foundational element.

Cauquelin begins with Plato, who broached this issue episodically. She sketches the philosopher’s speculative path by pigeonholing him in the so-called environmental theories; her analysis on the two-pronged Platonian speech, generator of an environment in which spirituality, wisdom and beauty melt into one another to shed art light on mankind and make way for an art analysis as a symptom of Hegel. For he, the Lessons on Esthetics penned by this thinker is a period, a moment of the spirit’s route toward knowledge as she labels them as a steppingstone with the contemporary concerns of those who wonder about the death of art.

The romantic halo, the Greek myth, the spirit of Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy, her admiration for the classic world and for Schopenhauer, the origins and her returns as entities that prevail above the work of art and that claim some heed for themselves when it comes to the conditions of the artistic creation. Those are the conclusive axes of the first part’s chapter one. Readers can pick up a few environmental theories that have churned out a cartography, a landscape where art finds a place for itself.

Chapter two (part one) slides into the realm of the forewarning theories that deal with the ambience in which the artworks are made, the public and the activities those works generate as vital elements for the mere existence of that piece of work. Her analysis on Aristotle’s poetic touches the right chord, a man this professor always bows to for his interest in concreteness and is quasi-constant practice of the doxa, as well as the lines the philosopher used to draw in the course of that doxa practice.

The usefulness of such tools as taxonomy, metaphors, analogies and ways to explore the field of Kant’s art knowledge hold water here. She uses a few lines to wrap up her reflections on what she considers one of the latest foundational theories: the Decoration Esthetic Theory, a major contributor to the formation of the contemporary esthetic site in which the reviewed subject, the interpreted, summarized and clustered subject that has marked the conception what must be done (or not) in terms of a work of art and its comprehension.

The meaning of these practices as a “theoretical rumor” teeming with mixtures is made out accurately as a series of experiences that play an active role in the preservation and conservation of the artistic site. It’s important to bear in mind that Cauquelin herself had previously defined the “site” as something that stands halfway between the place and the space, but being none of the above but rather some sort of hybrid.

The second part of this volume opens with an explanatory resource on the theories of accompaniment, construed as those secondary theorizations tacked on art in its different forms of expression. She comes up with a few proposals to explain away the overall artistic phenomena, no matter if it’s a work or just a particular movement. These actions –not secondary as far as significance is concerned but rather as elements that came along, assist and help– are regrouped in two different axes. The first one tends to question the meaningfulness of the works and the artistic effort, while the second one leads to an inquiry of the layout of signs whereby the work is expressed and singled out as such.

The theoretical apparatus in this chapter triggers proposals on the need to “comprehend” and around the hermeneutical axis and its outreach. Once again the cycle that Cauquelin establishes around art as a game and the permanent confrontation between itself and the other, between the being and time, is revealed. A game that is not a game without players and in which both sides are transformed and that active ludicrous engagement reaches its effective pinnacle through an interpretation. It’s just a game that’s only a game when is being played.

The truth of the language spoken from the work of art, its interpretation as it evolves into words and it sets a trailblazing path with the help of metaphors that make up our nonstop representations, leads to philosophical reflections on both the going of Dufrenne’s work and the steps toward the dialogues between spectators and paintings just the way Duchamp used to conceive them. Analytical and historic allusions, interpretations of the enigma, semiotic deviations are all mustered up in the remaining of the chapter.

The end is devoted to those theoretical practices conceived after the work of art or almost like a simultaneous discourse that seeks to unravel the enigma in the fields of museums and the theories of the art galleries, the effects of technology and the common places.

These essays round up a considerable chunk of what’s been written –or not– in the pantheon of memory, the constructions of the imagery, the upshots of the thinking that’s whipped into shape out of the contact with practice and that –to put it in the author’s own words– sidle up once again to “our unbreakable creed of art.”