What is a work of art? Following in the footsteps of Martin Heidegger, let us ask this question while standing before a particular work of art: a pair of peasant shoes, painted by Vincent Van Gogh, who painted many such shoes during his lifetime. What is this painting?
“A pair of peasant shoes and nothing more. And yet—
From the dark opening of the worn inside of the shoes the toilsome tread of the worker stares forth. In the stiffly rugged heaviness of the shoes there is the accumulated tenacity of her slow trudge through the far-spreading and ever-uniform furrows of the field swept by a raw wind. On the leather lie the dampness and richness of the soil. Under the soles slides the loneliness of the field path as the evening falls. In the shoes vibrates the silent call of the earth, its quiet gift of the ripening grain and its unexplained self-refusal in the fallow desolation of the wintry field…This equipment belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting-within-itself”. — Martin Heidegger.
Would this have been your insight into this work of art? What would you have seen in this still life by Vincent Van Gogh…a pair of peasant shoes and nothing more? To see only that is to miss what a work of art is all about, for there is something very different between a simple pair of peasant shoes and a work of art. When the shoes are transferred from the world of the peasant woman to Van Gogh’s canvas, they are transformed…into themselves. It is only in the work of art that the true nature of the shoes shines forth.
Heidegger states it thus: “But perhaps it is only in the picture that we notice all this about the shoes. The peasant woman, on the other hand, simply wears them.” It is the stark simplicity of this particular painting that makes it so perfect for pointing out what a work of art actually does. Two shoes, some shadows and that’s it. In its simplicity, this work of art begs us to dig deeper, to see if there’s something deeper than the visual reality.
So again we ask: what is this work of art?
A work of art, like any other physical entity, is a thing, and thus perhaps the most immediately tangible reality of the work of art is its “thingly substructure”, ie: the fact that it exists, takes up time and space, etc. The oil and canvass are there. The image of the shoes is there. It is a thing.
So our first question becomes: what is the thing? This is the way Martin Heidegger chooses to attack the subject in his work The Origin of the Work of Art. He says that though one might start this inquiry into the being of the “thing” from the principles of matter and form, these traditional thing-concepts are insufficient, because “matter and form are specifications stemming from the nature of the art work and were in the first place transferred from it back to the thing.” What does Heidegger mean by this? First of all, the matter-form structure of an artifact easily presents itself to man, who by his nature is a maker, as a way of grasping all being. Because man participates in the way a piece of equipment is fashioned, his thought process will be attracted to the same structure for other types of non-artifacts. Secondly, since western thought has been steeped in Christianity for millennia, the idea of everything as an artifact, as the ens creatum, permeates our philosophy. He claims that the ens creatum, consisting in a unity of materia and forma, ( which by the way, are Latinized terms that bury the meaning of ειδος and υλη) still remains a force even after the transition from the medieaval period to modern metaphysics. In his words, “the interpretation of “thing” by means of matter and form, whether it remains medieval or becomes Kantian-transcendental, has become current and self-evident.”
So how do we avoid being walled in by this limited ontological concept? Van Gogh’s painting is the answer. Heidegger tells us that in order to keep at a distance the preconception of the above mode of thought, we simply need to let the thing be itself and look at it as it really is. What could be easier than simply letting a thing be what it is? It turns out to be the most difficult task of all, and to accomplish it, only the work of art suffices.
The mere thing avoids our understanding, and perhaps this “self-refusal” belongs to the very nature of the thing. At this point Heidegger admits that it is perhaps no accident that equipment has been used to understand the thing. As a thing that is made, equipment is an intermediate stage between us and the raw thing. So, with open eyes, and holding preconceptions at arm’s length, let us take a piece of equipment and examine what it can tell us about the true thingly character of the thing. Let’s examine a piece of equipment like…a pair of peasant shoes.
Let us re-read together the longer excerpt from Heidegger on the first page of this paper. Let us contrast what is said about the shoes to what the peasant woman thinks about them. She doesn’t. In fact, the less she must think about her shoes, the better they are fulfilling their function as equipment, because the basic nature of equipment is usefulness and reliability.
But in that silent reliability, the peasant woman is made sure of her world. Here is another passage from Heidegger:
“The repose of equipment resting within itself consists in its reliability. Only in this reliability do we discern what equipment in truth is. But we still…know nothing of what we really and solely seek: the workly character of the work in the sense of the work of art.
Or have we learned something unwittingly, in passing so to speak, about the work-being of the work?
The equipmental quality of equipment was discovered. But how? Not by a description of a pair of shoes actually present, not by a report about the process of making shoes; and also not by the observation of the actual use of shoes…but only by bringing ourselves before Van Gogh’s painting. This painting spoke. In the vicinity of the work we were suddenly somewhere else than we usually tend to be.”
So what was at work in the painting? The entity emerged into the unconcealedness of its being: αληθεια. We were able to think about the shoes in regard to their being, but by means of that very same thinking simultaneously let the shoes rest upon themselves in their very own being.
Thus Heidegger concludes that “the nature of art would then be this: the truth of beings setting itself to work.” But is not truth in the domain of logic, while art deals with the beautiful, which is the realm of aesthetics? In the words of William Keats, a Romantic poet: “Beauty is truth, and truth, beauty.” Keep in mind that he says this in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and his words are meant to epitomize the classical Greek worldview. But hold! Are we now hoist with our own petard? Have we been neoclassical-Scholastic-Thomists all along without realizing it? By no means. Heidegger addresses this in the following words:
“Perhaps that proposition that art is truth setting itself to work intends to revive the fortunately obsolete view that art is an imitation and depiction of reality? The reproduction of what exists requires, to be sure, agreement with the actual being, adaptation to it; the Middle Ages called it “adequatio”;Aristotle already spoke of ‘ομοιοσις.”
He goes on to explain that art is not the reproduction of some particular entity but of a thing’s general essence— yet to continue on to speak of the second part of his essay, entitled “The Work and Truth” is beyond the scope of this paper. We have reached the end of our contemplation of Van Gogh’s shoes, and their usefulness in illustrating the nature of art. I hope that they have helped us to deepen in our understanding of what is at work in the work, and why work, equipment and mere thing cannot all be pushed into the same thing-concept “as hounds and greyhounds, mongrels spaniels, curs, shoughs, water-rugs, and demi-wolves are clept all by the name of dogs.”
The painting spoke silently about what it was depicting, far better than any human words could do. I conclude with two extracted stanzas of the poem I cited above, which capture my meaning about a work of art in verse:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear’d,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: (lines 11–14)
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou sayst,
“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. (lines 46–50)
lukeclougher 