Hans Heinz Holz

Gue Schmidt

Hans Heinz Holz

HANS HEINZ HOLZ
COMMENTS ON TO HEAR AND SEE

1. Encounters of the senses
Nihil est in intellectu, quod non fuerit in sensu – nothing is in the intellect which has not been in the senses before, proclaimed John Locke. And even if Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz was right to argue: nisi intellectus ipse – apart from the intellect itself, Locke’s dictum
is still valid in so far that the material used by the intellect to create a selective view of the world as we see it is provided by the senses.
However, not all the material, since the senses already select what to take in from the world matter; not everything that exists arouses sensual perception; we don’t hear ultrasound and we don’t see infrared. What we want to perceive physically has to be transformed into something perceptible – this is what sophisticated, scientific experimental equipment is used for.
Our senses break down our perceptions of the world into areas of their physiological competence: what can be touched, what can be heard, what can be seen etc. In this way our perception is preassigned. However, perceptions are merging and can superimpose each other. In this case we speak of synaesthesia. When the leader of an orchestra is directing, we see the movement of his baton and hear the sounds; the optic and the acoustic field are aligning with each other. According to Helmut Plessner the human mind is emerging form the union of the senses realised in the body. ”All the diversity of what is actually possible, i.e. of what makes sense, creates a system which aligns with the system of the modalities of the senses in a certain way. By identifying the qualities of the senses we have identified the ways in which the mind creates sense from matter, in which mind and body are being connected.” (1)
In the arts these areas emerge and show themselves paradigmatically each in their own way. The idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk (an all-embracing art form) reunites them – a quasi metaphysical concept of the sensual unity of existence. The fact that this idea started its success with Richard Wagner’s neo-German pathos and generated the art bastard of Bayreuth does not eo ipso argue against it. (2) The concentration of the achievements of the senses in the arts represents, so to speak, a normative optimum of their function as a force to elucidate the world and therefore is necessarily prone to a convergence of perspectives.
Two of the sense organs distinguish themselves in a special way: the eye and the ear. They are called ”distant senses” because they do not physically touch the perceived object directly like the touch and the taste (which, however, reaches beyond the contact with the smell). It is only through the distant senses that we can perceive the world, they create spatial structure as a connection of perceptual contents, objects or sounds together with their respective properties and it is not by coincidence that psychologists have created the concept of Gestalt from objects and sounds. The shapes of bodies and sequences of sounds show us the structure of the elements they are made of, their unity is a synthesis which, as a whole, can be perceived analytically as a process of addition and integration and corresponds to the functioning of our mind. It is possible to reconstruct visual and acoustic conditions conceptually. The essence of art is the reconstruction of structures from reality so that a given fact is provided with the outmost intensity of perception. This constitutes the ontological significance of the work of art. (3)

I said ontological. This means: by revealing themselves the senses and their corresponding genres do not give us the objects but their logos (logos tôn ontôn), our relationship to them. They definitely show themselves in the way they are, but in the perspective in which we perceive them from our point of view (point de vue). The fact that we are bound to our position determines our relationship to them – for us mere objects change into circumstances. These circumstances mean something to us; they align with one another to form meaning. Heraclites said that all human beings share the same world (B89) and what is meaningful for one person is therefore also meaningful (albeit in other respects) for the others. This constitutes the over-individuality of the work of art. The meaning given by the artist to what he deals with in his work of art, makes it possible for the viewer to comprehend the meanings of circumstances which he would otherwise not have realised. The work of art broadens his horizon. By thinking about the differences between his perceptions and the ones of the artist, the work of art becomes a medium of reflexion.
Within his work the artist reflects on his experience of the world, by means of the work the viewer reflects on the fact that any experience of the world is subjective and depends on one’s point of view.
A work of the visual arts or a work of music inspires insights into the area, which is picked up by the corresponding senses. Ludwig van Beethoven’s ”Pastoral” evokes in us other meanings that Sandro Botticelli’s ”Primavera” although we are able to correlate the two thematically. The problem of ”intellectual interpretation” by means of different sensations becomes particularly evident when confronting works from different genres, which, however, have thematic similarities. If what is ”in intellectu” used to be ”in sensibus” (plural!) before, it should also be possible to translate from one language of the senses into another. What do Johannes Itten’s paintings of the four seasons have to do with Antonio Vivaldi’s ”Four Seasons”?

Painters have often dreamt of being able to let images resonate into sounds. Kandinsky’s first non-representational compositions, mere colour impressions, are inspired by musical associations. This relationship can be accounted for. In 1911 he created the ”Improvisation III”, which has got the sub-title ”The concert”, after a Schönberg concert. However, one area of the senses still dominates in these experiments: Talking about a ”triad” when referring to
colours (Itten) gives priority to optics; and when in music a melody allows to identify the lively trout acoustics prevail.

Gue Schmidt on the other hand strives for a balanced synaesthesia in his project. The sound leads the image. The image awakens the sound. Reality creates itself similarly in two different qualities of the senses, but it is in either case aroused in a completely different way.
Activated sensually in two ways complexes of meaning are formed in a sort of base scaling: being in the world on one level becomes the correlative of being in the world on another. The accuracy of this correlative determines the subjective texture of our relationship to the world. Leibniz gives us a methodical hint: ”One thing expresses another if there is a stable and regular relationship between what you can say about the one and what you can say about the other. In this sense a perspective projection expresses the geometric form projected into it.”
The projection of the areas of the senses is a condition for the world to emerge from the environment. The individual sense gives situational environment, the coordination of the senses representational world. The word ”ghost” does not refer to some immaterial being but the transparency of the sensual areas of meaning in relation to one another: so in Plessner (see above), so already in Hegel. Synaesthesia has got a metaphysical dimension.

2. Dionysus and Apollo
The important physiologists of the 19th century, first of all Hermann von Helmholtz, have led the way in the scientific and later psychological exploration of the senses and their performances. Not to forget Gustav Theodor Fechner who was an experimental scientist and one of the founders of physiological psychology as well as a late-romantic philosopher and who, in a charming and definitely pre-scientific way, put the synthesis of seeing and hearing at the beginning of his philosophical reflexions.”One morning,” he writes, ”I was sitting in the Leipzig Valley of Roses on a bench near the Swiss Cottage and was looking through an opening in the shrubbery on the beautiful meadow spreading out before it to refresh my sick eyes on its green. The sunshine was bright and warm; the flowers were sticking out of the green in a colourful and cheerful way. Birds were chirruping in the branches above me and I could hear the sounds of a morning concert in the distance. In this way all my senses were engaged and satisfied… For the day view the world is lightened up by seeing, resounding by hearing.” (4)

Twelve years after Fechner’s scientific chief work, ”Elements of Psychophysics/ Elemente der Psychophysik” (1860) and seven years before the ”Day and Night Views/ Tages und Nachtansichten” a young classical philologist published a work which was received rather derogatorily at the time but should become epoch-making later on, ”The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music/ Die Geburt der Tragädie aus dem Geiste der Musik” (1872) The author was Friedrich Nietzsche. He enlarged the perception of seeing and hearing, which had until then been based on sensual and physiological considerations, to an ontological and anthropological theory of attitudes towards the world from which he drew dramatic consequences for his view of the world. Going far beyond the scope of an aesthetic analysis he has laid the foundation for the ontological object relation of aesthetic attitudes and was the first to trace back the big antithetic worldviews to a diverging development of the areas of the senses. In this way he has put into question the dependence of our awareness of reality on the sensual experiences mediating it. Nietzsche ties the difference between visual and acoustic experience to two deities, which are said to be the mythological agents of diverging configurations of experience. The difference between the Dionysian and the Apollonian is first of all one of attitude. Yet, the artistic activity generally becomes a paradigm of world interpretation. Both modes of experience are originally sensual ways of experiencing the world, which in each case make it accessible in a special way. The point is if one experiences the world from within looking at its form or from without looking at or better listening to its emotional qualities. ”Tied to their two deities of art, Apollo and Dionysus, is our conclusion that in the Greek world there is an enormous difference, relating to origin and to aims, between the art of the visual creator, the Apollonian, and the non-visual art of music, the Dionysian.” (5) Nietzsche has expressed this Apollonian - Dionysian antagonism the most clearly in an aphorism from his philosophical remains, ”There are two states in which art itself appears in man like a force of nature, commanding him whether he wants it or not: on the one hand when it enforces visions, on the other when it compels him to behave orgiastically. Both states also exist in every day life even though in much weaker forms: in
the form of dreams and intoxication.” (6)
The origin of everything visual lies in the experience of visibility. The light in which the world appears makes it assume a definite form in the eyes of man. Apollo, ”who is by origin the shining, the deity of light, becomes the mythological expression of the visual world.

The musical leads into other dimensions where unity is experienced with one sense. (7) This is the realm of Dionysus, the dark deity, seemingly inebriating and close to earth, which suspends any experience of form. Speaking in mythological terms Dionysus is not a deity, which facilitates man’s encounter with the world, like Apollo does, but one, which seizes and possesses him. The optic-visual (Apollonian) experience makes it possible to encounter world as physical; the acoustic-musical (Dionysian) suspends the world’s autonomy and merges it with the subject. What exists within our world is visually perceived as an individually created apparition; from a musical point of view the exterior appearance is neglected and we abandon ourselves to a stream of impressions.

In this way Nietzsche distinguishes the visual and the musical as different approaches to concept formation as far as the theory of objects is concerned and thus as different approaches to a classification of world into the intellectual system of understanding. The musical alone, however, is not enough for a constitution of what ”worldliness” signifies: the creative, visual moulding of our view is needed to make us perceive the world as an object. Only when an object appears in our view it can become material for our ”treatment” so that the comprehensive unity of subject and object is realised in practice.
Thus a polarity of ”inside” and ”outside” (8) becomes evident, which manifests itself as an expression of the sensual areas of hearing and seeing as well as a duality of base musical mood and visual perception in the artistic creation.

There is, however, no ”inside” of consciousness that does not rely on the impression from without to be filled up. Without external reality mirrored in us and making us react our ”within” would be empty. Neither do we produce the sounds, which we associate in the face of an external visual reality by ourselves, but process them from previously heard sound material. Detached from their origin as a signal from the exterior world, relieved from the task to carry situational meanings, they can appear together with the image as a subjective emotional response. They absorb the image in an ”existential orientation”. By opposing sound and image the object is ”conveyed” with the subject. The relationship between the two areas of the senses does not remain an additive juxtaposition but passes into dialectic integration. The significance of this construction depends on the question whether the formal structure denoting the artistic act of imagination becomes comprehensible to others and accepted as something general. The acceptance of the artist’s association proves his sensibility to worldly circumstances.

3. Sighted hearing.
Today’s technological possibilities of sound reproduction have made it possible to simultaneously associate the sensual experiences of hearing and seeing and to realise the reciprocal representation of one experience in the other. What, in former times, only the opera used to be able to realise since stage design is on of its indispensable constituents and what is realised in gestural symbiosis (9) in dance, can today be realised in manifold variants of the art form ”installation”. It seems as if astral constellations were connected to a spherical sound: Goethe might have imagined such a sort of Pythagorean vision when he put the choir of angels at the beginning of his ”Faust”: ”The sun resounds in ancient ways” – the light of seeing is hearing.

In the 20th century technical media were first strictly bound to a separation of hearing and seeing. Film started out as silent pictures and for a start lost some of its quality when the sound of spoken words and of integrated music was added. Radio plays had become a literary genre of their own long before they were overtaken by television plays. However, just these two examples show that the isolation of one area of the senses is only a less-than-ideal solution wherever technical possibilities would allow both main senses to come into play. Compared to the theatre as a place of talk the pantomime will also remain an artificial limitation and is appreciated just because of this artificiality.

However, it is mostly a case of audible language, not the transport of sounds as such but of verbalised meanings. Using the pure, non-conceptual sound as a medium of reflexion has certainly been prepared by supplementing the object-related, representational subject matter in the visual arts with the non-representational, pure abstraction, which had developed its principles of form resorting to geometry and not constrained by material, descriptive guidelines. Without any semantic connotation ”the human spirit has developed in the pure element of the optical mode only the geometric, in the pure element of the acoustic mode only the musical interpretation of meaning.” (10) There is an interior correspondence between the forms of abstraction in the visual arts, music, theory (constructivism, structuralism) and social forms of organisation, which constitute the unity of the style of an epoch.

The fact that an installation like ”To hear is to see” has travelled around the world for ten years can prove that the concept has had some reverberation among art consumers. Against the object fetishism of object art as well as pop art (11) and the ascetic lack of sensuality in conceptual art this work offers a possibility for reflexion which feeds from sensuality and challenges the viewer to make a double effort: the effort to emotionally reconcile sound and image and the effort of the concept to see thinking in the act of viewing (12), that is to say to use the mutual reflexion of two areas of the senses – seeing in hearing and hearing in seeing – to track down the logos of things.

This offer has also been accepted by theoreticians. The number of those who have advanced their reflexions (13) is prodigious . The relationship between the kinetics of the sound (14) and the static of the image (which will always function as a still in an installation) irritates and fires the imagination. The medial ”transposition into time” of the work referred to by Burkhart Schmidt and the intention directed at a conceptual conversion resulting in the determination of one meaning have to be put into a Hegelian-dialectic correlation. Poststructuralist disintegration into fluctuation would disperse the communication content, which is meant by the claim of descriptive thinking.

More than 140 artists participate in the project. This seems to be a sign that the state and the meaning of reality have again become a subject for reflexion; that it is no longer enough to put oneself on display or to hang a motorbike on a wall. The compilation of a hundred individual encounters of the senses is certainly not a Gesamtkunstwerk yet. However, I could imagine that an artist or a group of artists deal in form of an entire cycle with a topic that has manifold motives – quasi the stanzas of the 21st century – and that they can then arrive at a non-selective but systematic socio-critical conclusion. In comparison to the volatility of video and television sequences installations have the advantage that they allow a more considerate contemplation. This gives them an epistemic and critical sustainability of socio-political relevance.

Notes

(1) Helmut Plessner. The Unity of the Senses. Collected Works, Volume III. Frankfurt am Main 1980, p 302
(2) Compare the catalogue to the exhibition ”The leaning towards the Gesamtkunstwerk”. Zurich - Dusseldorf - Vienna 1983. This catalogue, however rich in material, should be used with critical reserve since it presents the manifold concepts and forms of the Gesamtkunstwerk in an undifferentiated way without any ideological characterisation.
(3) Hans Heinz Holz, Strutture della Visualità, Milano/Varese 1984. In contrast to this Italian edition, which is endowed with extensive illustrative material, the German edition, Strukturen der Darstellung, Bielefeld 1997 (Philosophische Theorie der bildenden Künste II), restricts itself to a small number of illustrations. – Also compare Hans Heinz Holz, Seinsformen. Ueber strengen Konstruktivismus in der Kunst, Bielefeld 2001.
(4) Gustav Theodor Fechner. Day and Night Views/ Tages und Nachtansichten, 1879
(5) Friedrich Nietzsche. Works/ Werke. Ed. Karl Schlechta, Munich
(6) Ibid., volume III, page 788
(7) I have adopted the term ”empathy/ Einfühlung” from Max Scheler. Character and Forms of Sympathy/ Wesen und Formen der Sympathie.
(8) On the relationship between inside and outside as an anthropological structure compare Helmut Plessner Organic Steps and Man/ Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, Collected Works/ Gesammelte Schriften, l.c.,/ Volume IV Band IV. - Hans Heinz Holz, Man-Nature/ Mensch-Natur, Bielefeld 2003.- Ontological Foundation/ Ontologische Grundlegung: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Science of Logic/ Wissenschaft der Logik, Collected Works/ Gesammelte Werke Volume 11/Band 11, Hamburg 1978/1992, p. 364 et seqq.
(9) However, opera and dance have subjected what has to be presented visually to the primacy of what evokes emotions and thus tend to belong more to the ”Dionysian” aspect of the Gesamtkunstwerk (all-embracing work of art).
(10) Helmut Plessner. The Unity of the Senses/ Die Einheit der Sinne. l.c. page 296
(11) Compare Hans Heinz Holz. From Work of Art to Merchandise/ Vom Kunstwerk zur Ware. Neuwied und Berlin 1972. – Idem, The Collapse of Meanings/ Der zerfall der Bedeutungen (Philosophical Theory of the Visual Arts/ Philosophische Theorie der Bildenden Künste III). Bielefeld 1997, p. 193 et sqq
(12) The art theoretician Rudolf Arnheim has introduced and justified the term ”Descriptive Thinking/ Anschauliches Denken”: Descriptive Thinking/ Anschauliches Denken. Köln 1973. Tying in with this term but essentially starting out from the material and work experiences of a sculptor Jürgen Weber has pursued this line of thought: Form, Movement, Colour. Art and Descriptive Thinking/ Gestalt, Bewegung, Farbe. Kunst und anschauliches Denken. Braunschweig 1975. See also Hans Heinz Holz. Recension to Weber. In: Tendencies/ Tendenzen 17th annual edition. 1976, issue 106, p. 56 et sqq.
(13) See catalogue to the exhibition To Hear is To See. Vienna 2002.
(14) For sound sequences Edmund Husserl analyses their relationship to the constitution of time and temporality: Lectures on the phenomenology of the interior time consciousness/ Vorlesungen zur Phänomenologie des inneren Zeitbewußtseins. Halle 1928.

Hans Heinz Holz