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Chiasms in Art
Roberto Terrosi
In this essay, I would like to underline some chiasmatic aspects of the discourse1 of art, particularly related to particularly problematic and crucial questions concerning the definition of art. A rhetorical figure consisting of two pairs of terms in which the second pair is simply the inversion of the first, the chiasm, is based on inversion, and this inversion can be used to describe an abstract situation, but also a historical one. In this text we will briefly describe three chiasmatic historical inversions in which art value appears. The three chiasmatic inversions we will illustrate are each based on a major historical shift. More precisely, we could say that we will describe a main chiasmatic inversion, combined with two collateral chiasmatic aspects. The first basic chiasm regards the passage from religious art to art-religion (Kunstreligion), which is fundamental in clarifying the nature of art value. The second chiasm regards the shift from the artist of the image to the image of the artist. We want to show an axiological inversion from a situation in which the anonymous artist serves the more important image, to a situation in which the image (or artwork in general) serves the artist, because it has meaning only as an expression of the artist (thus the image illustrates something of the artist). The third chiasm regards the passage from art as work to the work of art. It shows a fundamental change in the very meaning of the concept of art, first understood as mere technique (something everyone can learn), and later as a domain of valuable objects (made by gifted individuals). I. First Chiasm: From Religious Art To Art-Religion (Kunstreligion) At the beginning of western civilization religion was a field of values, and art was (with respect to religion) merely know-how employed to make religious representations for worship. So, we find a first chiasm: from religious art to artreligion (Kunstreligion).
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David Freedberg2 and Hans Belting3 have described many examples in which images had religious power. These images were usually anonymous, as their makers were not important. From the fetish to the icon, the work of the individual maker was not considered to have any influence on the power of image. Freedberg describes a situation in which an American scholar travelled a great distance to visit the holy statue of Notre Dame de Rocamadour. When she saw it, the impression she had was terrible. In fact, she was very disappointed because she found the sculpture small and ugly. David Freedberg also notes that the ancient holy xoana wooden sculptures used by Greeks were ugly as well. So, holy images need not be well-made and beautiful. They must be magic and, sometimes, the more insignificant they are from an aesthetic point of view, the more significant they are from the religious or magic perspective. The sacred image need only present or make present the powerful religious entity to which it is connected. Thus the artisan must simply make an artefact that responds well to religious needs. He cannot invent anything personal to make it more beautiful. For example, in archaic cultures, such as that of the Sumerians, statues represented the houses of gods. Once a statue had been completed, a consecration ceremony was performed to make the god enter the statue. The second step was to carry the god and the statue into the temple in a procession. In order to host a god, the statue needed to have some specific features that made the god recognizable.4 If the craftsman acted too imaginatively, the statue might not be a good house for the god. Thus, ancient craftsmen had to simply be faithful to the canonical representation of the god, applying a nomos thought to be chosen directly by the god (or by the mediating figure of the priest who represents his power) and not by the executor of the image. The executor was merely a tool or an instrument. But what exactly does this qualification mean? To give another example, a singer who is not the author of the song he sings is just an instrument. He may be a good instrument, he may become famous, but he remains an instrument and so, rich and famous though he may be, he is essentially a servant. In ancient Greece, where a craftsman could be famous without being properly the author of the message he physically produced, he was considered nothing more than a precious instrument. He was precious, but he was not free, because in Greek culture, to be free meant not to have to depend on others, but to be the owner of oneself.5 Consequently, this precious instrument (the meaning of instrument being that which serves something else) was not considered a free person, but rather a servant. If we want to find a free subject in Greek culture in what we now call the arts, we have to refer to another figure, more strictly connected with the divine: the aoidos.6 He was considered to be directly inspired by the gods, and thus belonged not to the class of technikoi but to the class of priests. Moving further ahead in the history of religious art, we find a similar, and perhaps more extreme situation in the cult and production of Byzantine icons.7 In fact, for theological reasons, each aspect of the Byzantine cult was strictly regulated in a dogmatic structure. To understand this viewpoint, we can use the example of a common contemporary practice: driving. When I am driving a car, I have to refer to signs to know what I can or cant do on a given road. The signs have to be

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clear and standardized. If the maker decides to add his imagination and creativity to signs, accidents will occur. Hence, a good craftsman in this case does not create strange or novel signs, but makes perfectly standardized signs. In these signs, it is impossible to recognize the hand of the craftsman. In information theory, Shannon8 claims that in order to make a message (such as a traffic sign) we need a code and we need different possible choices to select from. The author of the message is the one who makes the choices and not the one who applies them, modulating the sign. If I dictate a message to a secretary, I will be the author of the message even though the secretary is the one who types it. But if the secretary wants to add something creative, she risks losing her job. The Byzantine painter was like a secretary or a road sign painter. He was not permitted to add anything personal to the message. God himself (or priests on his behalf) chooses the message. In this sense Byzantine culture shows us the extreme situation of the craftsmans submission to religious entities through the example of Achiorpita, in which the role of craftsman was not only anonymous but was in fact totally negated. Indeed, the Achiropita, which means not painted by [human] hands, was believed to have been made directly by god. Actually, the only real original Achiropita was the so-called Mandylion, or little cloth: tradition holds that Jesus used it to dry his face and that the image of his face remained impressed on the cloth. From that moment on, the cloth had medical and miraculous powers.9 Therefore, the Mandylion was not a painting but more precisely a print. So, the goal for icons was to be a print of the divine world. Any personal mark of the craftsman was merely noise in the transmission of the message. Coming to the Middle Ages in Italy, we find the very turning point of the chiasm, in which the inversion of terms between art and religion begins. In Italy as elsewhere, religion continued to be dominant in painting. The first painted tablets, in Europe, had as their subject only religious images.10 But, in Italy, we find many differences with respect to the Byzantine situation. With the growth of cities, culture was no longer elaborated in monasteries. Now, there were other actors, craftsmen who belonged to the rising middle class and were the owners of the first enterprises. They were no longer considered servants, but masters in both senses master craftsmen and their own masters. Giotto had his employees, and he rented his tools for money. He was not inspired by God, he was a businessman. In this new situation, popular tradition came into the culture of painting, bringing a new instance of realism. Belting refers to the introduction of laicism, quoting De Lagarde.11 This laicism meant a new interest in applying rhetoric to images. In Padua, Giotto offered a new rhetorical structure of the representation. We must also consider the importance of the schism. Starting from this breaking point, the western church became more and more interested in promoting a typical western sensibility, different from the eastern one. This is the mutation that Cennini pointed to when he wrote that Giotto had changed the language of painting from Greek to Latin.12 This change was well accepted, because the Roman church did the same. Finally, there was the question of the rising of new religious movements such as the Franciscans. In that context, the painter had to tell new stories without

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previous institutional models. So, new models had to be invented, but this time using the collaboration of painter who was no longer considered merely a hand or a simple instrument, but an expert in the rhetoric of imagery. Hence, the introduction of rhetoric, the change of idiom, and new religious movements, in conjunction with the craftsmans new status as a protagonist of life in the city, gave the painter the chance to collaborate in composing the message itself, and not simply to execute it. Lorenzo Ghiberti wrote: Vide Giotto nellarte quello che gli altri non aggiunsono. Arrec larte naturale e la gentilezza con essa non uscendo dalle misure (Giotto saw what other [painters] did not add. So he added naturalness and kindness, without transgressing measures).13 So, Giotto could decide to add something personal to the message, albeit while restraining himself from overstepping certain limits. Thus the craftsman was no longer a mere instrument, but became the author of the images he created, although only in part. In fact, he was only the author of the technical choices and formal composition. The painter continued to refer to Byzantine icons, no longer copying them entirely, but finding in them ideas that he was free to select or reject. So, the relationship with Byzantine tradition became dialectic rather than binding. Belting says that in the rise of Italian painting we see the end of the power of images and the beginning of the power of art. But, how can we call it art? Indeed, if we only use the notion of art without any other specification we might provoke many misunderstandings. Art, as we conceive it today, did not yet exist in those times. We can agree with Belting only if we consider art exclusively as synonymous with technical compositive choices.14 But we have to keep clear in our minds that arts in the age in question were still the arts described by Hugh of St. Victor (who distinguished artes liberales from artes mechanicae). Painting was not the whole of art, but only a very small part of it. In fact, Hugh does not mention painting as a separate discipline, but considers it, among artes mechanicae, as a part of military activities.15 Painting was still far from coinciding with art. But a significant revolution occurred nonetheless. From that moment on, in painting, we find less and less of the voice of God and more and more of the painters. People went to an anonymous icon of the Virgin to pray, but went to a Giotto fresco to admire it. This is the power of painting: the power to obliterate the religious power of images of the past. The coexistence of the power of the religious image and the power of painting technique can only happen in one case: when holiness and technique coexist in the same person. For this to be the case we need to have someone along the lines of a saint/painter. We find a first example of this in Russian orthodox culture, and a second one in Italy. Andreij Rubliev and the Saint Iconographers expressed precisely this kind of coincidence.16 However, in Italy, which was a more secular country, some painters were considered special, as if they were saints. NewPlatonist theories maintained that the painter must represent his own ideas and not nature.17 In fact, they suggested, the human mind can achieve Gods idea better

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than nature can. In this way, the painter does not imitate things existing in nature (making a copy of a copy of ideas), but directly shows his ideas, producing a responsive figure existing in competition with nature itself. In this sense, poets and then painters came to be considered in the XVII century by Sarbiewski as quasi creators.18 Along the way, the artist became more and more akin to the saint. While the aoidos (ancient Greek poet-singer) was part of the sacred world, the painter was not, because he was a craftsman, and while a saint did things by means of divine power, a craftsman did things by means of technique. So, to become more similar to the saint, a painter had to assume the skills of the aoidos, i.e. of the poet. Indeed, beginning in the Renaissance, painters and sculptors began to compete with poets and writers. Inspiration became more and more important for this purpose. Painters were connected to saints by two links. The first link can be described as contiguity with the sacred: in fact, painters described holy characters and holy actions, thus creating the condition for a metonymic relation with the sacred world. The second link is similarity19 to saints and prophets, in that painters also fixed their gazes on the intangible and eternal world. Like the augur and the aoidos, the painter had a special, God-given gift, not for seeing the past and the future, but for seeing the forms of the divine world what Florenskij, discussing Byzantine culture, calls mundus imaginalis.20 He also had another God-given gift which allowed him to appropriately depict those figures. In this sense, the painter had a metaphorical relationship with the saint. Nevertheless, the artist in the western world was not properly a saint, but an analogue representation of a saint (or, we might say, a rhetorical image of a saint) in the lay world. This is why, during Romanticism and Post-Romanticism, he became the object of moral (as opposed to merely aesthetic) admiration. Exemplary here is the Van Gogh case, studied in this perspective by Natalie Hainich.21 Van Gogh is the most representative example of a holy lay figure, the scapegoat of bourgeois society. His expiatory role also went beyond the plans and conceptions of the romantic Kunstreligion. Kunstreligion is the symmetric opposite extreme of Achiropita in this chiasm, because it is the accomplishment of the emancipation of the painter as an artist, the acme of a climb from a servile position to a free one. Unfortunately, this success arrived when painting had already been undermined by photography. Suddenly, visual art became pure poetics, even more so than music and poetry itself. Thus visual art became an abstract game in which someone like Duchamp could take an ordinary object and legitimize it as a work of art. Art was born as an institution only after it had become a sacred field through Kunstreligion, because the sacred space is a space based on the very principle of separation: each and every thing can become sacred; sacredness only comes through consecration intended as a cultural act of separation. Mary Douglas explained this principle in relation to the concept of the saint or the holy person or object. This principle of valuable separation is what remains of the essence of art when the technical principle has faded away.22

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II. Second Chiasm: From the Artist of the Image to the Image of the Artist Now, let us consider another chiasm situated within another shift, the shift from the artist of the image to the image of the artist. Until the Middle Ages, the term artist was used to indicate a person who had a high level of competence particularly in the liberal arts (such as astronomy, rhetoric, music, mathematics, geometry). In ancient Rome, the painter was not an artist in this sense, but a mere craftsman. Nevertheless, he needed an ars to realize his paintings, because he needed a technique. The Roman poet, on the other hand, was an artist he was not a mere decorator, because he decided what important things he wanted to say. The Roman painter was limited to copying previous models, especially Greek ones.23 The role of the painter as an artist began when his status reached the same level as the poets that is to say, when he started to compose and to choose the topics and the style of his works. This long passage began with Giotto and ended in the XVIII century late Academy.24 This shift was due to the fact that the painter started to interfere with or intervene in the message through the manner (maniera) in which he painted. Eventually, manner became so important that the message imparted is by now solely the painters message. The real age of the artist was Romanticism, when the work of art was nothing more and nothing less than the expression of the painters feelings in forms. So, the subject of a painting became a mere pretext. The fulfilment of this attitude and the turning point of this chiasm was concrete art in which painters elaborated nothing but pure forms, and sculptors pure volumes. Therefore, the artwork became less and less important, because importance was entirely focused on the artists spirit and purpose. In fact, the artist became a lay prophet who could consecrate everything he did (or took), even provocations. From Duchamp onwards, form was abolished as well. Art needed only the sense of the operation connected with the artists intervention in the artistic debate. Art became a debate, and it made no sense to repeat the same things someone else had already said. Things were no longer important in themselves; any thing or action that was outside of art could be inside art, and vice versa. The only difference was the debate: anything could be brought into this debate. The artist is the protagonist of this debate, the main actor, although there are many other actors in this play. In recent times, we have seen a number of super-artists who are not super-art-makers, but proper super-stars. Thus we are now seeing another transformation. The super-star artists are not famous for the important things they say. Their artworks are conceived to be merely advertisements for their own self-promotion campaigns. Today, the artist takes care of his own public image. His name is like a brand or a logo. The archetype of the super-star artist is Andy Warhol. As he himself claimed, all he wanted was to become famous.25 In the eighties pop art was rejected, but we saw many painters who no longer based their work on a program, nor on poetry, but

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simply on trends. While the surrealist artist had to reject institutional rewards so as to quash any suggestion that he might care for anything other than his poetry,26 the super-star artist openly admits he seeks worldly success. He is not ashamed for this, but on the contrary is proud of his social rewards. Jeff Koons married the porno star Cicciolina and used this fact to amplify his scandal-mongering high profile. Maurizio Cattelan has planned all his art installations so as to incite the greatest possible scandal. Works like La nona ora (1999), with Pope Wojtyla under a stone, or the three boys hanging from a tree (Mise-en-scene, 2004 a passer-by, aiming to dismantle the piece, fell from the tree, injuring himself and sparking a heated debate in Italian newspapers), were conceived with scandal in mind. Decades ago, Benjamin spoke about the shocking dimension of avant-garde art, 27 but avant-gardes wanted to attack old conceptions of art in order to propose a new one. Now they can no longer attack an old conception, but they still act within this Duchampian conception of art just to promote themselves. Damien Hirst wrote a book28 which is neither an experimental text, like Dadaist ones, nor a programmatic text, like concretist writings29 or the Manifestos of the avantgarde, but rather a self-apologia in the guise of a journalistic-style collection of interviews. This dissolution of meaning in art in favour of the pure image of the artist could be dangerous for the artist himself, because the sceptical, nihilistic and cynical irony that erodes the basis of the special status of art also erodes the elitist assumption that determines the condition of the artist himself. III. Third Chiasm: From the Art of Working to the Work of Art The third chiasmatic situation concerns the very birth of modern art. It consists of the passage from the art of working to the work of art. The term art comes from the Latin ars which was used as the translation of the Greek techne.30 Techne is also the origin of the terms technique and technology. The most proper translation of this word might perhaps be know-how. To know how to do things or to make objects means that you have learnt or have ingeniously developed by yourself a way to carry out a job or to solve a problem. This also implies an allocation of value, based on the fact that things made by techne are better than things made without. The limitation of this value lies in the fact that this techne, based on empirical aspects such as experience, tricks and uses, may not always be true, unlike episteme, the truth of which is based on logos. Plato divided Technai into the main categories of the ctetic (to keep things) and the poetic (to build or make objects), but also fighting, etc.31 Painting is just one minor aspect of poetic techniques intended to imitate things (mimesis). So, at first, the most important aspect of techne was the non-instinctually-based effectiveness of a practice. Aristotle saw this concept as the production of something as nature would produce it, which means that the product is understood to be no longer natural. In this sense the whole of techne is imitative, even when it is not representational, because it

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fundamentally imitates the productiveness of nature at an ontological level. This productive activity is strictly connected to labour. In other words, it is an art of working. While in the art of working the meaning of the word art was clear, it later became mysterious. In fact, art as the art of work meant a group of instructions regarding how something could be made. Those instructions could be passed on from one subject to another, and from one generation to another. Therefore, art in this sense means know-how, but also tradition and, in a certain sense, culture (culture being an amalgamation of knowledge and behaviours). Hence, art is what can be learnt. Cicero thus distinguished ars from natura in the education of the orator: ars is what can be transmitted and learnt, while natura represents the skills that someone has without any kind of education,32 like genius in Kantian aesthetics. So art conceived as technique, is not a problematic concept. It is also clear why painting belongs to the category of art. In fact, there are painting techniques that can be taught, so it is clear that the artist is also a craftsman. The problem arises only when the painter no longer wants to be considered a mere craftsman. In this case, there is no longer an art of working, but only an artwork in which it is not clear what art means. We only know that a work of art should be more valuable than mere work. The fact is that, at a certain moment, technique became significant in itself. Art is no longer a technique used to make or improve something. Art is involved in art itself that is to say, the aim of technique has become the pure development of technique. Technique for techniques sake is what we call virtuosity. But the situation is not so simple. In fact, such a situation hinders us from seeing the passage from technique adopted to improve the way one works, to technique used to explore all its own possibilities. The art of work implies precisely the dimension of know-how, but the work of art aspires to the pure dimension of the sacred object, which is independent from technique and labour. The phrase of art implies valuable, therefore work of art means valuable object relating to a particular history and tradition. There are many axiological fields which depend on their function in society and on their tradition. In economics, social function prevails over tradition, but in art the functional aspect is weak and not clearly defined, while tradition is very strong. So, the concept of artwork is inexplicable without reference to tradition. We can analyse how it works, but we will never understand why contemporary art exists without considering the genealogical derivation of the field of painting. Using a term invented by Stephen J. Gould, we might say that art was born by ex-aptation.33 Foucault offers an example of this when he writes of leper hospitals which, left empty, provided the occasion for the institution of the mental hospital.34 By this same token, the fact that we now have a field called art is a result of a long series of misuses or abuses of numerous past situations. The key to a definition of art lies in this long chiasmatic transformation, which is still in progress.

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Conclusion At this point, we can invert the third chiasm. In fact, today, we are moving towards the opposite transformation, from the work of art to the art of work. But this does not mean a return to the original situation. On the contrary, things are becoming increasingly complicated. Indeed, the word art has lost its original connotation of technique, so its meaning has become more mysterious. Arts movement back towards work does not signify a return to a particular culture of making things; it is simply the result of the amalgamation of an indefinable quality with the world of high-level commodities. For instance, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo links art (in the sense, developed by avant-gardes) to fashion.35 Elsewhere, art is linked to design. Moreover, many decorated or decorative objects from non-western cultures are considered to be arts and crafts simply because they are presented as art, but they in fact lack the idea of autonomy and independent experimentation inherent in the modern concept of art.36 Rather than art as autonomous and specialized research, what the market now seeks is a whiff or a suggestion of contemporary art, which is often a whiff of mondanit. In the development of modern art there have been several efforts to re-unite with arts and crafts. The first name to note in this regard is Ruskin, but the mainstream is represented by avant-garde formalism: Bauhaus, concretism, kinetic art, optical art and interactive art. All of these movements, in accordance with a Marxist point of view, sought to establish a new alliance between art and labour, inserted into a plan for a new society free from exploitation and alienation. The situation today is completely different, and more similar to the continuity between art and the world of production proposed by Jugend Stil, Liberty, or Art Nouveau. But in those trends, the major arts still maintained a leading position, to which commercial applications were subordinate. In contemporary times beginning with pop art the situation has often been inverted: now it is art that is dependent on graphic design, commercials, advertising. In Italy the copywriter and photographer Oliviero Toscani has been a model for many artists, including Cattelan. His advertising campaigns anticipated the works of artists like Andreas Serrano, and had a deeper influence on the public, as they were disseminated in magazines and on large posters all over the world. But the field in which it has become most difficult to distinguish art from commercial design on the one hand, or from politics on the other, is internet art. In most cases it is quite difficult to distinguish web art from web design. The form being the same, the difference should lie in the disinterestedness of art, which has been challenged by formalists and other avant-garde artists who judged it the heritage of romantic ideology. On the opposite side we find the political interestedness of hacker art, hacktivism and other kinds of net.art.37 But in the end, two points remain: first, the web artist, the super-star artist, the hacktivist, the web designer and the copywriter share the same goal: to catch peoples attention; and second, as Yves Michaud claims in Lart ltat gazeux,38 we can find aesthetic products more easily in any other place than in art itself. Perhaps this vision is a bit extreme, but it is true that we can find nothing in art that we cannot find outside of art.

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A final chiasm comes to mind, not as a rhetorical figure but as a reference to the original sign used by ancient Greeks: the X. It is a symbol of crossing and exchange, which is why it was adopted for this rhetorical figure. In this sense, art in itself is now a chiasm, in that it is a crossing point where the sacred aspect of culture intersects with commodity and money, where the interiority of the soul meets the exteriority of the show (and show business, as well) or of spectacle. Art today is like a strange party where mysterious and incompatible actors meet one another. It is a non-lieu, a zona franca, an inter-zone. But this inter-zone is no longer a factory in which a community tries to construct a value, but a market where people dissipate their values, or consume their goods. And in this consumption of art, art itself risks being consumed by the flames of spectacle.