Art: eternal play of immanence and transcendence

"It is the observers who make the picture" (Duchamp 1994), and, in a certain way, it is just like that. There is a work of art of any kind, and there is a user, the one who observes it.

In front of the same artistic expression there are actually thousands of versions of the same, as many as the perceptions of those who assist it. It is the infinite world of transcendence, that which impalpably goes beyond the immanence of art, that which inherently composes it.

We could venture the "popular" phrase: "It is not beautiful what is beautiful, but it is beautiful what pleases". But here it is not just about "pleasure", it is about entering into a complex set of dynamics that art triggers. It is impossible to exhaust this scope in an article and perhaps it would be impossible to do so even with a treatment of thousands of pages, due to the "infinite" character of the subject we are talking about.

But the human being has always tried the impossible and hurls himself into infinity with the utopian ambition to conquer, or to understand, at least a piece. And so here we are, entering the powerful and evanescent world of what art emanates. Although often mistreated or not considered as much as it deserves, art officially remains one of the cornerstones of the human being. It is certainly one of the functions that differentiates us from the animal world.

The exercise of creativity, giving visual / perceptual expression to an idea, a dream or one's vision of the world, is typically human. It concerns the blessed or damned characteristic of being the creator of what does not necessarily serve existence in the strict sense. Art (as well as other fruits of ingenuity) is the daughter of that something extra that man has always sought, questioned, created, tried to understand. From a need and an intention, the work of art is born and at that moment the "lookers" are born, as Duchamp said it. The moment it is exposed to the public, the artistic object (or action) begins to act on people, individually and collectively.

Each person filters what he sees with his own sensitivity, his own intellectual and educational level. The work literally enters an interpretative grid that changes from person to person. It is his transcendence, it is like his second existence that is a thousand, a hundred thousand times what he was initially.

But there is more, because the observer will see, most of the times, the same different work at different times of his life and so art is renewed continuously, infinitely in each of us.

The artist is not surprised by this, as he has within him a thousand variations of the work from the first moment in which he conceived it. With enormous effort (or relief) by implementing an endless series of choices and actions, he arrives at the only tangible version, the only possible object in that form of existence. But its author knows well that the thing he gave birth to has a thousand and a hundred thousand lives.

Immanence and transcendence are the two aspects of art that have been debated for decades: what exactly does a work of art consist of? How can it transcend the boundaries of its object being? And how do its immanence and transcendence change in works of different "types", from the unique object to the work reproduced in several copies, from musical performance to bodily performance? These are historical and at the same time eternal questions (particularly topical if you think about digital art and what it implies). In this regard, I recall the text "Immanence and Transcendence" by Gérard Genette, which deals with these issues in a rigorous and suggestive way at the same time.

He also opens the interesting chapter of the difference between the "aesthetic effect" that an artistic artifact exerts and an object already existing, as a natural element. What kind of perceptual difference do they trigger? New abysses of meaning and meaning open under our feet and inside our heads. We are inside what Genette calls the "aesthetic relationship" between the object and the observer, a relationship that is constantly renewed thanks to a virtuous (or vicious) short circuit: subjective perception and the new object that derives from it. In a new light it is different and triggers a new reaction again. Short circuit after short circuit, everything evolves and transforms like a spiral that - allow me the risky comparison - is very reminiscent of human DNA: life.

And here I stop, leaving you to your personal "aesthetic-mental" journey.

Miriam Fusconi