The pain, abstract art and the sublime

Before finishing the outline of Taiwanese abstract art in Kantian terms, it is necessary to meet some challenges Avant-garde rises to Kant at its apex point. These challenges are too special to be considered in the introduction (1.2), because they are related to abstractionism rather than to Avant-garde art in general. So, in addition to the material given in the 1.2 and 1.3, I want to revisit the theoretical foundation of this thesis to show that Kantian approach is valid in the case of abstract art.

The first of the two challenges is a pain in abstract art as it is presented below through Kandinsky's experience and as it is given in Kantian aesthetics. The pain seems to be related to interested satisfaction. It is a commonsensical opposite of the agreeable.

The moment of interested satisfaction threatens the possibility of the sublime aesthetics because interested satisfaction has no claim to subjective universality. If I enjoy a taste of tea, it is fundamentally different from my aesthetic taste being gratified by a tea ceremony. I can describe the ceremony to a friend, but the tea in my mouth is for me alone. If somebody else likes the same sort of tea I like, we can never know do we enjoy it the same way or differently. The experience of tea is all about qualia of the tea, which is comparable but not verbalizable. I cannot give my tongue to a friend. But tea ceremony is fundamentally different. I can conceptualize the free play in the tea ceremony as well as involved aesthetic ideas. Thus my experience has much deeper correspondence with an experience of any other witness of the tea ceremony. The tea

603 Hue Ming-tak (2010), ‘Aestheticism and Spiritualism: A Narrative Study of the Exploration of Self through the Practice of Chinese Calligraphy’ in The Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 44 (2), p. 20.

ceremony demands my involvement as a rational being, while we consume tea the same way animals consume food and water. A bug consumes a leaf of tea the same way I drink tea. Moreover, the pleasure is as incommunicable between me and a bug, as it is incommunicable between two human beings drinking tea. And thus, according to Kantian aesthetics, it is possible to discuss the aesthetics of tea ceremony, but the aesthetics of tea is impossible. In Kantian view, tea can only have a standard, which is a much simpler thing than aesthetics.

The pain in the sublime feeling can put sublime on the side of such objects as tea, wine or meat rather than on the side of tea ceremony and other aesthetic objects. The lover of sublime artwork can end up being merely a masochist, or a sort of an adrenaline addict. Unless there is such thing as a disinterested pain. Let us try to look for the possibility of a disinterested pain.

The experience of the sublime is not an easy one. Edmund Burke, whom Kant calls 'the foremost author' in the field of ''physiological exposition'' of the sublime (5: 277) describes how ''the feeling of the sublime is grounded on the drive to self-preservation and on fear, i.e., a pain, which, since it does not go as far as the actual destruction of bodily parts, produces movements which, since they cleanse the finer or cruder vessels of dangerous and burdensome stoppages, are capable of arousing agreeable sensations, not, to be sure, pleasure, but a kind of pleasing horror, a certain tranquility that is mixed with terror.''⁶⁰⁴ The statement is among very few cases, when Kant gives a quote of another philosopher (5: 277), so it should be especially important to Kant. Sublime is 'physiologically' grounded in pain. And the first experience of abstract painting can be painful. Thus, Kandinsky himself says how his first encounter with non-representative art is painful:

604 Quoted as in Immanuel Kant (2000), Critique of the Power of Judgment, (tr) Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, p. 158.

[t]hat it was a haystack, the catalogue informed me. I didn’t recognize it. I found this nonrecognition painful, and thought that the painter had no right to paint so indistinctly.⁶⁰⁵

Why abstract painting meets so much resistance? And why we need art which hurts us? For Kant the beautiful is about forms and the sublime is a feeling from a 'formless object' (ein formloser Gegenstand) in which the 'limitlessness' (Unbegrenztheit) is represented (5: 244). What makes this statement problematic is the fact that Kant has an incredibly rich notion of form,⁶⁰⁶ which cannot be discussed here in all its subtlety.

However, at least the material from the third Critique should be acknowledged. As Howard Cagyl states it, ''the quality of a judgement of taste is abstracted from the matter of the art object, and consists only in its 'form of finality.'''⁶⁰⁷ So, in a sense, what is 'formless' here is the purpose of the object for aesthetic judgment. Later Kant proceeds from merely negative description of the form of the sublime object (formlessness) to a positive one – its 'inappropriateness' or 'counterpurposiveness' (Zweckwidrigkeit). Kant writes how the sublime ''appear in its form to be counterpurposive for our power of judgment, unsuitable for our faculty of presentation, and as it were doing violence to our imagination'' (5: 245).

Kandinsky shows autoagressive complex when he feels pain near an artwork he cannot view as a purposive one: his powerful imagination attacks his own understanding in a pain which is reminiscent of 'shaman's illness' Kandinsky has witnessed in his ethnographic expeditions. The aggression in the feeling of the sublime comes from

605 Quoted as in David W. Galenson (2008), ‘Two Paths to Abstract Art: Kandinsky and Malevich’ In Russian History, vol.

35 (1/2), p. 237.

606 See Robert Pippin (1982), Kant's Theory of Form: an Essay on the ''Critique of Pure Reason', New Haven and London:

Yale University Press. For a more recent approach see Rodolphe Gasche (2003), The Idea of Form: Rethinking Kant's Aesthetics, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

607 Howard Caygill (2000), ‘Form’ in A Kant Dictionary, (ed) Howard Caygill, Oxford and Malden: Blackwell, p. 204.

overdemanding faculty of imagination, which gets an 'enlargement' ('Erweiterung' 5:

249) in the sublime feeling. It is introverted violence, since the human subject of the feeling willingly seeks for it. The subject can at any moment turn his back to 'something too big or too powerful'. Instead, some subjects choose the pain of the sublime. Kant in fact discusses an indirect duty to experience such pain in self-educational purposes.

Taken as a form of autoagression, the sublime feeling can be put amid vivid psychological and psychiatric research on so called 'self-harm' phenomenon. The most common form of self-harm is ''the intentional and direct injuring of one's body tissue without suicidal intent.''⁶⁰⁸ But self-harm can also include emotional and even cognitive perspectives, such as instances of intense self-criticism. Klonsky presents seven functions of self harm, such ''as affect-regulation, anti-dissociation, anti-suicide, interpersonal boundaries, interpersonal-influence, self-punishment, and sensation-seeking. (...) It is important to note that these functional models are not mutually exclusive since different functions may co-occur and overlap conceptually.''⁶⁰⁹

Speaking of the self-harm and the sublime, there is one more moment, which seems to shed light on two kinds of pain, 'interested pain' and 'disinterested pain': one of the most popular therapies for the patients with self-harm is dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) created by Marsha M. Linehan.⁶¹⁰ The therapy includes practices of mindfulness based on oriental spiritual practices, as one found in Chan Buddhism. In a sense it is an attempt to relocate self-harm from the zone of bodily practices into the intellectual realm. Linehan tries to replace cutting of the body by the patient with cutting of the understanding with imagination in the meditation, where the subjects are supposed to stop conceptualizing. Thus, in a sense, medical practice sees two kinds of pain.

608 David E. Klonsky (2007), ‘The functions of deliberate self-injury: A review of the evidence’ in Clinical Psychology Review, vol. 27 (2), p. 227.

609 Ibid.

610 Ibid., p. 228.

Klonsky summarizes the functional model in a table⁶¹¹:

Function Description of function

1 Affect-regulation To alleviate acute negative affect or aversive affective arousal

2 Anti-dissociation To end the experience of depersonalization or dissociation

3 Anti-suicide To replace, compromise with, or avoid the

impulse to commit suicide

4 Interpersonal boundaries To assert one's autonomy or a distinction between self and other

5 Interpersonal-influence To seek help from or manipulate others 6 Self-punishment To derogate or express anger towards

oneself

7 Sensation-seeking To generate exhilaration or excitement

3, 5 and 6 seems to be away from general aesthetic problems, while other four models fit fine arts quite clearly. Especially close is the 7^th functional model, the generation of exhilaration or excitement is of course one of the chief functions not only of the pain in the instance of self-harm but also of the art world. It is basically a form of a free play. Not all of the functions, which are in fact motifs from Kantian viewpoint, stand in the sphere of the interested satisfaction. For instance, such functions as 'to end the experience of depersonalization or dissociation' seems to be not interested at all, but rather a fulfillment of a particular necessity of an injured (possibly even schizophrenic) subject.

The category of shock has been for the first time introduced into art practice in the

611 David E. Klonsky (2007), ‘The functions of deliberate self-injury: A review of the evidence’ in Clinical Psychology Review, vol. 27 (2), p. 229.

age of Avant-garde art. It can be found as an exception earlier, but as a rule, as a dominant strategy (Shchukin's 'experience a shock — buy the painting') it comes in the early years of the 20^th century. The complex conditions of modern life have made self-injury 'a mainstream psychiatric problem,' to the degree that, as Graff and Mallin put it in 1967, ''[nonsuicidal] wrist-slashers have become the new chronic patients in mental hospitals, replacing the schizophrenics''.⁶¹² The same complex conditions can first affect more sensitive people of the art world, and help them to deal with existential anxieties and the horrors of the World War One. The parallel with the shaman's illness and self-mutilation in shamanist initiation can be another connotation for the disinterested pain in the sublime feeling. The contemporary classification of the self-harm allows not only to understand deeper the sublime aesthetics, but also helps to see the possibility of the disinterested pain.