Manfred Wagner It is high time to remember that any practice of art is inseparably linked to the human senses, no matter what medium is involved and in which time or in which society this takes place. This is true for the production of art, because it is about the transfer of some content or the other to the senses, and it is also true for the reception of art, because any information that has been sent out can only be taken in and understood by using our senses. In the end, this fact can neither be changed by the new markets for art theories which, together with the scientific treatment of human lifestyles, are sprouting up all over the place, nor by power struggles between media representatives who use disavowing terms (old and conventional, un- fashionable Š) in an attempt to dissociate themselves from one another to such an extent that each of them can create their own market niche. Neither art nor the general understanding of art have profited from the tendency of leading modern philosophers to determinedly throw themselves into the field of aesthetics, in many cases out of a frustration caused by the lack of consequences that their ideas have had for society in general. In their manic search for the novelty of the day, they rally supporters and, admittedly, also artists in a way that reminds one of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. The attention attracted by the persuasive charms of a machinery designed to produce understanding under false pretences, or by the longingly awaited arrival of a guiding mechanism, must certainly also be put down to the catastrophic educational deficit as far as art is concerned, which has almost reached rock bottom in the normal situation of human experience. This is due firstly to the rejection of modernism by politics in the first place, the continuation of this policy by National Socialism and (among other things) by society's subsequent reaction to the latter. It is no comfort to discover that the development of a technologically oriented civilisation is accompanied by a weakening of our sensory powers: our sight is weakened by the flood of pictures racing through all channels, by the huge amount of colours produced by the machinery of advertising and by the speed at which pictures follow each other; our sense of hearing is damaged by the permanent 15% increase in the decibel level and by electronic blaring everywhere; our capacity for verbal expression is reduced by restricting ourselves to abbreviations and sibilants, by the simple-mindedness of the language produced by the media and by small-talk; our sense of touch is impaired by a ban on touching anything that does not belong to us and by a misconception about sexuality; our sense of smell is weakened by the summation of naturally and artificially produced mixtures; our sense of taste is reduced by air-pollution and addiction to drugs, to name but a few facts. If, at least in those urbanised areas which today reach far beyond the cities, all theses senses are damaged or partly underdeveloped, or at any rate at least irritated, then it is understandable enough that the arts, which are founded on their effectiveness, are having a harder time of it than in previous times. Furthermore, it is an essential characteristic of our electronic media society that there is almost no mode of expression which, within its field, stands out as being from one sense alone; rather, there is always more than one sense involved, even to the extent that this phenomenon is not noticed by a recipient who does not reflect on it and who therefore makes a relatively arbitrary choice when examining his sensory impressions. How else would it be possible that, even though cinemagoers are definitely being confronted with contemporary avant-garde methods in composition, they do not perceive them as such, as manifested in the rejection of specific events involving a relatively similar aesthetics? How else could it be conceivable that some models are accepted as part of an electronics dominated by engineering, but meet with nothing but rejection in an exhibition which is definitely analogous to these models? Certainly there have in the past been disputes, at least verbally, about the question of priority among the arts, although on closer inspection this was intended more pars pro toto or, as in the case of Leonardo, was due to a hierarchy of interests. All those who have worked on the two concepts of hearing and seeing - and until the 20th century those two systems were usually linked by conjunction only, because it was not until electric transmission that the dream of a complete equation arose have regarded the message to the senses as the way in which an "inner spirit" existing in the world expresses itself. Beethoven called it "a higher revelation than all wisdom and philosophy" and for Kandinsky it was "the inner sound" that could find its place in music as well as in painting. It does not matter whether this inner intellectuality is seen as "a Platonic reminiscence" (as it was by Stockhausen) or as a sentiment in the form of self-perception (John Cage), whether this "inner spirit" is confided to a programmed machine or its emanation is left to chance by opening a microphone. Neither does this principle depend on what an artist wants to convey with his actions or what the recipient may make of them - insofar as he is able to perceive them at all. Representation and perception are poles which only go well together if there is a correlation between signal and recipient; to put it in more conventional terms: if the specific dimension of the "inner spirit" encounters the best understanding possible. However, the senses have powers of their own, which may be artfully hidden, changed, or even apparently denied, but which in fact remain a part of their substantial being. Hearing becomes a certainty through a sequence of information in a given period of time, regardless of whether whole scales are being covered or only the vibrations of a single sound (LaMonte Young). Even when the negative sound, i.e. silence, is called for (at least from the producer's side), the recipient perceives it as a sequence of time, virtually as a piece (Cage's 4'33''). The sequence of time in music is a phenomenon which the listener cannot avoid. Pursuing this sequence he can deliberately or involuntarily (sleep!) find release, but this means giving up any chance of receiving the information that he has missed. This might be the reason why many composers have felt the urge to make their communications structurally repetitive so as to make sure that their messages will arrive safely. Basically, hearing means an active reception of what is on offer; 'to listen to'; a predominant opposite to biological hearing (daily life) or even to physical hearing (microphone). Therefore hearing means insisting on a highly dynamic process of sensory perception, which attracts spontaneous attention and leads to orientational reactions. Hearing identifies objects of perception as figures, prototypes of musical events and structural models, and at the same time evaluates what is perceived by gathering together existing knowledge about correlating patterns and establishing the significance (in the sense of memories) which can be attached to it. Within the complex range of its dynamic course, hearing also evokes perceptions through other senses, directed partly individually, partly collectively, and thereby embeds the 'informed person' in his or her direct surroundings, previous experiences, emotional spectrum, i.e. historically and synchronously horizontally in what may be termed human experience. The degree to which this experience can also change into deformed areas of life (blindness), shows itself in this way, since people's orientation through hearing bears the promise of the experience of space and this, together with the experience of time, makes three-dimensional activities possible. Even if the existence of human sight can only be proved at the moment of birth (i.e. comes three months later than the faculty of hearing) and is at first limited to the essential, namely to human faces in immediate vicinity, it has nevertheless already attained the level of social 'smiling back', which has been defined as an unambiguous potential for cognition, by the age of six to eight weeks, and by the seventh month at the latest develops that co-operation of both brain hemispheres which makes it possible to distinguish between different patterns and individual faces, as well as their grouping and categorisation. Therefore it is evident that art will always and in any society remain thematically interested in the perception of the face and the body, even if their replacement is requested under the influence of abstraction or other conceptual systems. Accordingly, seeing means visual perception of one's surroundings, built up slowly with respect to developmental history and logically with respect to function, yet in contrast to the faculty of hearing it is never directed by time, even if it is oriented towards space. As sensory perception this seeing is in general determined by the consumer, which frees it from the machinery of time, moving images being an exception to this rule. The direction in which we read is in the end also only determined by convention and can be arbitrarily changed any time, as can the agreement between monovocal or polyvocal reality of images, which might be relevant as far as the history of art is concerned, but which is nevertheless subject to the arbitrariness of consumer sovereignity. Accordingly, seeing means the will to see, the will not only to perceive but to read a meaning into this perception or to abstract from it (Rudolf Arnheim). The center of interest is therefore not only a more or less lifelike reproduction of the material of perception, but on the side of the producer also perception and its transfer to representation, i.e. the task of finding its specific form in a given structure. On the part of the recipient, knowledgeable seeing is an agreement with or an approach towards this way of thinking. The recipient does not comprehend the process accomplished by the producer in the sense of temporal availability; does not perceive "how it is made", but "what it is" (Arnold Schönberg). Understandably enough, this recipient needs a high amount of information when his perception encounters material that he is not able to classify. On the other hand, he does not need more information than a person who can read chemical formulae, knows the rules of tennis or uses mathematical symbols. In this context it is not enough to rely on emotional intelligence, because the criteria of emotion within the visual arts do not appear in a globally standardized form; rather, their expression varies according to different cultural settings. An easily comprehensible example for these variations would be the different meanings attributed to colours in different cultures. Moreover, a visual work of art always deals with the dialectics between an integral whole and its isolated details (Werner Hofmann). In the course of time, at least since the eventful beginning of modern history, attitudes have changed from holding on tight to coherence to a multiple view of things; what used to be regarded as a vertical continuum has changed into the discontinous polyvocalism of the 20th century, which deals with the "basic mysteries of reality" (Hans Küng). The recently deceased philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, a stimulating exception to others in his league, has summarised this in the following way: "The work of art is only a hollow form, a mere nodal point within a possible majority of aesthetic experiences through which alone the aesthetic object comes into existence." The onus and obligation then unequivocally rests with the recipient to rise above his subjective dimension in order to divest the self-relatedness proclaimed by the producer of its noncommittal status, so as to promote an incomplete and constantly restarting process to the rank of an epistemological process. Given the imponderables mentioned above, which have at times developed into human deficiencies in the reception of art, the rift opening up between producer and recipient ought not to be a surprise to anyone. To Hear is To See represents an attempt to stop this process of distancing, or even to devise countermeasures against it. In the end it will be up to the consumers to decide if this attempt has been successful.
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