Rachele Burgato Matr. 276926 Visual Arts Lab Professor: Marta Kuzma Academic Year: 2013/2014
Mimesis as A Critical Tool within Modernism
Preamble This paper attempts to analyze the relationship between the work of art, reality and mimesis, departing from Theodor Adorno’s concept of mimesis as tool of critique in relation to society, and proceeding in how these theoretical applications relate to mimesis in Robert Smithson’s work.
1. Theodor Adorno’s Concept of Mimesis. Theodor Adorno is the Frankfurt School philosopher, who wrote in Aesthetic Theory about the connections between artistic mimesis and rationality, as an analysis of a dialectic relationship that illustrates how mimesis is a critical tool in evaluation of society, that goes against the grain of the positivist tendency of modern consciousness. To analyze Adorno’s thought, one must first point out the principle of negation and the role it plays in setting up a dialectic between opposing categories, whereby a phenomenon can not be without a connection with its opposite, its negation. Mimesis is a concept central in Aesthetic Theory and Adorno claimed art’s refuge for mimetic comportment as follows: “That art, as something mimetic, is possible in the midst of rationality, is a response to the faulty irrationality of the rational world as an overadministered world. For the aim of all rationality - the quintessence of the means for dominating nature - would have to be something other that means, hence something not rational.”1 Mimesis examined by T. Adorno is described as an intrinsic process in autonomous art. Mimesis is not proposed by the philosopher as a mere copy of reality, but as a tool capable of assimilating the reality that surrounds it, and at the same time going beyond it. Mimesis is a dynamic that operates around the work of art that consists of two components that interpenetrate one another in an ongoing dialectic: rationality (also called construction, as rational process that forms it) and irrationality (expression and creative matrix of artist’s subjectivity). Adorno speaks about these features in terms of an interpenetration of two polarities, through which the work is composed, crossing them continuously. It is the mimetic quality of assimilating reality, whereby art becomes a critical tool against the rationality of the outside world, which wants to hide the false irrationality of the social order, because “art is rationality that criticizes rationality without withdrawing from it.”2 The philosopher writes about two types of rationality and irrationality: rationality and irrationality that constitute the work of art, considered as "positive" elements, and to the other side rationality and irrationality of society, defined by Adorno as faulty rationality and faulty irrationality, because tainted and not spontaneous, a product of capitalism. Art in assimilating reality criticizes the inner workings by which faulty irrationality is concealed and, in doing so, art operates to ”maintain the image of its aim, which has been obscured by rationality
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T. W. ADORNO, Aesthetic Theory, Continuum, London and New York, 1997, (trans. Lenhardt, eds. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Ibidem.
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