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From Van Gogh's museum to the templeat bassae: heidegger's truth of art andschapiro's art historyBabette BabichPublished online: 24 Jun 2010.

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Culture, Theory & Critique, 2003, 44(2), 151–169

From Van Gogh’s Museum to the Temple at Bassae:Heidegger’s Truth of Art and Schapiro’s Art History

Babette E. Babich

Abstract This essay revisits Meyer Schapiro’s critique of Heidegger’sinterpretation of Van Gogh’s painting of a pair of shoes in order to raise thequestion of the dispute between art history and philosophy as a contestincreasingly ceded to the claim of the expert and the hegemony of the museum asculture and as cult or coded signifier. Following a discussion of museum culture,I offer a hermeneutic and phenomenological reading of Heidegger’s ‘Origin of theWork of Art’ and conclude by taking Heidegger’s discussion of the strife betweenearth and world to the site of the ancient temple of Apollo Epicurius at Bassae asan example of the insistent foreclosure of the ancient work of art and the conflictsof the pervasive efforts of modern conservation.

I

Art is, to say the least and to begin with, a contentious topic. Traditionally,philosophy seeks to demarcate art and truth. Varying such demarcationalefforts, asking what art is, today’s analytic aesthetic philosophers ask when isart and where art is to be located. The what and the where of art are also thesubject of art history, which is likewise concerned with demarcation inaddition to the conditions and circumstances of the genesis of the work of art.Without touching too much on the sphere of art criticism or cultural theory,the place of art is defined as the museum, and the study and criticism of themuseum and its culture has a history, a logic, and is accounted a theoreticalsubdiscipline all its own. (After Malraux 1978 and Merleau-Ponty 1964, seeO’Doherty 1976, Crimp 1993, Preziosi 1996, Danto 1997, McClellan 1999,Maleuve 1999, Korff 2002).

Yet, there is not a little dissonance in these correspondences and this samedisharmonious communicative circumstance occasions this essay. For whilethere is much talk of inter- and cross-disciplinary practice and althoughboundary crossing is routine enough in effective or working scholarship,disciplinary transgressions are still corrected the old-fashioned way with thecharge of incompetence.

A classic example is the widely cited expert claim of Meyer Schapiro’s(1968, 1994a, 1994b) critical engagement with Martin Heidegger’s (1971)hermeneutically informed – but apparently art-historically faint – inter-pretation of a pair of shoes in a celebrated painting by Vincent Van Gogh(Figure 1).

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Not only challenging art-historical expertise, Heidegger’s reflection onthe origin of the work of art challenges traditional philosophic categories byshifting the question of judgment to that of Heideggerian or aletheic (earth-grounding, world-opening) truth. It is not only that Heidegger mistakes theartwork in the process, as Schapiro charges, but Heidegger’s judgment fairlybristles with philistine sensibilities. Worlds away from Parisian or New Yorksophistication in aesthetico-cultural matters, Heidegger’s talk of the greatnessof ‘great works of art’ seems – shades of authenticity – to echo his lamentablelanguage endorsing the ‘inner truth and greatness’ of National Socialism(Heidegger 1959: 199).

Jacques Derrida’s well-known discussion of the conflict between thefaculties in question locates Heidegger on the side of the ‘truth’ of art andfinds Schapiro on the side of historical and dialectical, even materialistaccuracy. The resulting ‘haul’, as Derrida names it at the end of his ownevaluation of Schapiro’s original assessment, ‘is a meagre one for the picturepolice, for this discourse of order and propriety/property in painting’(Derrida 1987: 325). ‘Meagre’ is a typical understatement on Derrida’s part,where Schapiro’s critique has thus far inspired not only Derrida himself(1978–1989) but a vast, and still ongoing, range of commentary. (See Owens1979, Gilbert-Rolfe 1995, Elkins 1998, etc.)

Figure 1. Vincent Van Gogh, A pair of shoes (F 255), Paris 1886. Amsterdam, Van GoghMuseum (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

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Heidegger’s Truth of Art and Schapiro’s Art History 153

In spite of this abundance, it is not the case that all important dimensionsof this debate have been explored. In what follows, I shall suggest nothing lessthan a hermeneutic (and phenomenological) correction of Schapiro’s ownhistorical presuppositions. Secondly, because the more complex question ofthe certification and localisation of art is at issue, I advert to the relevance ofthe museum as the privileged locus of art (and art experts). Ultimately, I arguefor the imperative necessity of rethinking both the museum’s mandate as wellas the conservationalist ethos of art’s caretakers and defenders in thebroadened context of what Heidegger called the conflict between earth andworld, where the vulnerability of a world is what tends to go without remarkprecisely as it may be found ensconced within the frame of the museum.

Schapiro’s critique depends upon his ‘expert’ judgment contra Heideg-ger’s incursion into what Schapiro regarded as his own province. For its ownpart, as may be observed from the outset, Schapiro’s critical vision turns upona fetishistic conception of art and the dominion of the museum, even as themuseum itself, postmodern and experimental, comprised of changeablecollections of inherently transportable and reconfigurable gallery space hasincreasingly come to stand as its own self-immolating ruination. And therebyand with the same assertion of ruin, one encounters the museum’s stubbornperpetuation of itself as the privileged locus of art altogether, be it classical ormodern art, minimalist art, conceptual art of all kinds, video art, Earth art, theshock art of formaldehyde sharks (Hirst 1991) or the anatomical scientist-cum-artist Gunter von Hagens’ duly patented ‘plastination’ of ‘real bodies’(von Hagens 2003).1 So far from Heidegger’s strife between earth and world,the world today, as Malraux anticipated, is increasingly fitted to theprescriptions of the museum.

II

It is a commonplace to note that Heidegger’s 1936–37 essay ‘The Origin of theWork of Art’ (1971) does not offer a discussion of art as such. And Heideggerwould contend that his question with regard to art was a singular question forthought: the question not of art but of the work. Accordingly Heidegger’sreference to, and his analysis of a painting by an artist no less famous thanVan Gogh, is not properly referred to in the context of Heidegger’s essay as‘art’ at all, much less art qua art. Instead, and curiously, Heidegger chooses thepainting as an illustration not of painting but of the kind of thing that theartwork is qua manufactured or poietic thing. Not only does Heidegger discuss

1 In the spirit of a concept imitating the now-lost technique of the eighteenth-century veterinary surgeon, Honore Fragonard, von Hagens’s ‘plastinated’ cadaversare denuded of skin to expose the striations of muscle and nerve and displayed instartling tableaus of inevitably high pathos. (See Mayer 2003 and, more generally,Petherbridge and Jordanova 1997.) Using cadavers originally donated for thepurposes of medical research, von Hagens’ derivative reenactment of Fragonard’sspecimen exhibitions is an automatically if also incidentally postmodern conceit. It isimportant to add that apart from the question of whether such displays are art or not,none of von Hagens’ installations could work as such in the absence of the cult venueof the exhibition hall or museum of art – or else of natural history.

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the painting as a kind of techne, he considers the work of art as liable to bestocked as things can be – as Beethoven’s musical scores are stored in thesame way potatoes in a cellar might be preserved for future use, just as thegreater part of a museum collection can be on reserve in the same way. Andfor Heidegger, the virtue of Van Gogh’s painting in particular is that it is nota work by Malevich or Pollock but a post- and so more-than-impressionistwork of nicely representative art. Van Gogh’s Shoes (Figure 1) representsthings of an everyday kind, as Heidegger expresses it: a pair of shoes as theartist had seen them, which Heidegger proceeds to read from a hermeneuticperspective as a revelation of things exactly in terms of their thingness as suchand in the view of the artist.

Heidegger thus overleaps the privilege of the museum definition, that is,the art-historical definition and description of art. Nevertheless it remains thecase that it is the museum that serves (and I argue that it has always served)as the de facto locus of art, whatever, and increasingly wherever ‘art’ may be.This is the reason we are not presented in a museum with ‘things’ (asHeidegger or as anyone else might name them) but rather with exactlycertified works of art. If Heidegger differs (as he does) from many professional,and particularly analytically inclined, philosophers of art or aesthetics infailing to define art qua art (or even to say ‘when’ art might ‘be’), the museummakes it clear enough for most of us just ‘where’ art can be found at will. ThusChristo’s installations constitute a movable museum, complete with thesignifier of the gallery as museum, as exhibit, as display. In Christo’s case thiswill be a draped and temporary easel-cum-gallery space2 complete with theblocked access to the work that focuses an ecstatic exhibit by excluding access.This same obstruction incidentally installs desire not for the object or the workof art as much as it invites the desire for the space of, as well as the spacebeyond, the exhibition. In the same way, the desire or the captivation thatfollows upon this same bodily inaccessibility is also a characteristic of DanielLibeskind’s void as architectural construct in the Holocaust Museum inBerlin. And the same explicitly untouchable abyss is a constitutive aspect ofLibeskind’s prizewinning design in his projected rebuilding of the locus of thedevastated ruins of New York City’s World Trade Center after the September2001 terrorist attack.3

Whereas the work of art Heidegger which invokes is one that can lose itslocus or place in a sustaining world or as situated upon earth (and thisvulnerability is the contrasting point of my reference to the heights of GreekArcadia and my final recourse to the temple at Bassae), it is important to notethat the museum or art historian’s artwork cannot be so deprived of its world.Rather, as Malraux emphasised – and as any gallery owner and as any up-and-coming artist knows – the museum-certified work brings its world (itspedigree, its history) along with it. Art is eminently transposable and in

2 Puttfarken (2000) muses that the age of easel art is said to be at an end – aprovocative judgment offered only facetiously and in the context of the circumspec-tion of his scholarly vision.

3 Libeskind’s designs tend to repeat this dynamic with some frequency. SeeLibeskind 2000 and Rodiek 1998.

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Benjamin’s sense that is tied to its replicability in the catalogue: the work moveswithout auratic decay. This resilience is also a corollary of its restriction withinthe museum context. Out of place in a museum, the work of art in question mayhave been stolen or lost to a natural disaster, or might be on loan, as a marker inits former locus will indicate, but because art moves from one fetishised locus toanother, it ‘remains’ within the museum even in its absence.

The museum is in play as the locus of art (or its display) and this is trueeven of conceptual and physically evanescent earth projects illustrated by thecatalogues and books documenting and analysing these Earthworks (Shapiro1997), monumental environmental and conceptual projects now to becommemorated in place in an old Nabisco factory recast as the Dia: Museumin Beacon, New York (2003). Nor is it irrelevant that the museum plays a keyrole for Hans-Georg Gadamer as he recalls the ecstatic and nearly sacralaspect attending the displays of new archaeological discoveries as witnessedby the ‘celebratory silence’ observed by a characteristically reverent public athis visits to the Hellenic Museum in Athens (Gadamer 1986: 40).

For Heidegger, no matter whether archaeological discoveries or artworkson display however defined, we are speaking of things. And it is to explorethe nature of things, the thinghood of things, that Heidegger invokes VanGogh’s painting of a pair of shoes. For writers like Paul Crowther (1988:53–57), such a review constitutes so much extended prelude to the real workof Heidegger’s essay and this impatience with the focus on things as such isshared by more than a few Anglo-Saxon readers. By contrast, the reference tothinghood is revelatory for Gadamer who had earlier reminded us that inaddition to the traditional relevance of the thing as such to the science ofaesthetic sensibility, Heidegger’s reflections on the ‘Origin of the Work of Art’exceeded neo-Kantian aesthetics and its relativistic contradictions in ascientific age, an age forbidding us to conceptualise either ‘the thingness ofthe thing or the instrumental quality of the instrument’ (Gadamer 1960:256).

III

If what we noted above as Heidegger’s ‘philistine’ characterisation of ‘great’art unsettles philosophical aesthetics – a dissonance attested even by scholarsas sympathetic as Robert Bernasconi (1993a: 102) – it was Heidegger’sexample of Van Gogh as a well-known (ordinal) painter and his depiction ofshoes, ordinary things, in their ordinariness, that disturbed Schapiro. As JacobTaubes, Schapiro’s then-colleague at Columbia University, emphasized for thepresent author (in the course of conversation in 1984–1986), if the Heidegger–Schapiro conflict today bears Derrida’s imprimatur, Schapiro’s originalcritique was more devastating than simply a hermeneutic difference ofacademic opinion. For by discounting its objective legitimacy or accuracy,Schapiro conclusively discredited Heidegger’s essay.

Schapiro’s ‘devastating’ proof contra Heidegger turns on nothing morethan Schapiro’s assertion that Heidegger (in Taubes’ words) ‘had got theshoes wrong’. For, and in spite of the dramatic and enduring conclusivenessof Schapiro’s critique, his lack of demonstration in his 1968 essay is striking.Only surmise, only subjective preference on Schapiro’s own part are on

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display in the claims presented against Heidegger (and this art-historicalissue is quite distinct from the philosophical issue that has been made of thetheoretical circumstance that Schapiro’s claims were, of course, never ofrelevance to the concern of Heidegger’s essay in the first place). Thecontentiousness of Schapiro’s 1968 text is impatiently colloquial, and at leastthis reader misses the art historian’s otherwise careful rigour. For exampleSchapiro states: ‘They are clearly pictures of the artist’s own shoes, not theshoes of a peasant’ (Schapiro 1968: 205). Schapiro modifies the passage in re-printing this essay: ‘They are more likely pictures of the artist’s own shoes, notthe shoes of a peasant’ (Schapiro 1994a: 136). Indeed, one is inclined tosuppose that Schapiro’s ‘Further Notes on Heidegger and van Gogh’(Schapiro 1994b), an essay written more than 25 years after the first, betraysSchapiro’s own end-of-the-day awareness of this same insufficiency.

I have been arguing that Schapiro’s expert judgment errs in the case ofVan Gogh over the question of the function of the shoes which Van Gogh infact purchased. I neither claim nor dispute the claim that the shoes do notform a pair, for or contra Derrida; nor indeed do I seek to contest Derrida’sargument in support of Shapiro’s more fundamental observation that, asDerrida summarises, ‘nothing proves that they are peasant shoes’ (Derrida1987: 364), uttered on behalf of city shoes vs. country shoes, the shoes of aDutch bourgeois, or a Parisian intellectual, or the shoes of an Allemanic-Swabian rustic.

Rather I contend that in the case of Van Gogh’s shoes to claim that heowned them hardly resolves our problem (and with this contention I mean tosubmit only a more plausible suggestion than Schapiro’s vision of the same).For it is more than likely that we have to do with shoes that were purchasedfrom the start not for the artist’s personal use or wearing (as Schapiro ratheruncritically simply seems to assume) but precisely as an object: a sujet to bepainted, acquired precisely for that purpose. Van Gogh’s several such studiesof shoes confirms this latter function, particularly one (Figure 2) depictingthree pairs of the same (where, pace Derrida, it is clear that we have to do withpairs just because the three are matched as such pairs).

Artists in general (and here I hardly imagine myself to be sayinganything that would have been a revelation for Schapiro) hire women they donot necessarily seduce. In the same fashion, artists do not necessarily acquirethe fruits depicted in a still life to consume them themselves – they may even,as Cezanne famously did to excess, record the specific superfluity of doom:letting apples and other fruit go uneaten and, again, and in general, artistsselect likely objects for the sake of drawing or painting them. The plain factthat Van Gogh purchased the shoes does not justify the conclusion that hebought them in order to wear them himself as his own shoes, as Schapiroclaims.

To raise the question we need to begin by asking not, as Derrida does toadmirably and typically exhaustive extremes, about the shoes of peasantwomen, be they from the South of France or Germany, or even Holland, butonly, because Schapiro’s contention only concerns them, about Van Gogh’sshoes. We might ask what shoes Van Gogh acquired, whether for painting orfor wear, and this question takes us to the question of what shoes Van Goghwore, an element of biography important for the critical sake of being sure

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what sort of shoes, qua painted, we are indeed talking about. From a fellowstudent’s report we know that Van Gogh purchased just such a pair of leathershoes in Paris (not to wear per se, but as attested in this case, for specific usein a still-life). This is the reason that it is imperative that we keep in mind, asHeidegger duly underlines, that Van Gogh painted several of these still-lives.We also know from a letter Van Gogh wrote from Arles in 1888 to his brother– as Schapiro’s source, apart from and in unnoted conflict with the letter hehimself had from Heidegger – that he had in his possession a pair of oldshoes, ‘une paire de vieux souliers’ (Vincent van Gogh, letter no. 529, cited inSchapiro 1994a: 136); and we know too from Gauguin’s powerful account thatin Van Gogh’s ‘studio was a pair of big hob-nailed boots, all worn and spottedwith mud; he had made of it a remarkable still-life painting . . .’ (Gauguin1894 in de Rotonchamp 1925: 33; cited in Schapiro 1994a: 140). Schapiroquotes this report at great length because of its association with his claim thatthe shoes were the artist’s own, revealing in Knut Hamsun’s words asSchapiro quotes them: ‘a portion of the self’ (Schapiro 1994a: 140). And tothese same, hob-nailed shoes (the shoes which François Gauzi evidently refersto, in a letter Schapiro translates (1994b: 146), and which he confidentlymaintains as confirming his original view), which Van Gogh had worn andwhich he described as ‘caked with mud’, there corresponds a painting thatcan be matched to such a pair of boots (Figure 3). This would seem indeed tobe the painting Gauguin admires as the ‘remarkable still-life’ in question. But

Figure 2. Van Gogh, Three Pairs of Shoes. Paris, 1886. Courtesy of the Fogg Art Museum,Harvard University Art Museums. Bequest from the Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class

of 1906.

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this is not the painting which Heidegger describes, nor does Schapiro say thatit is, and the latter, for his own part, identifies the same painting adverted toin most accounts of Heidegger’s essay.

Still another painting of a pair of shoes (Figure 4) is offered as a contrastwith Heidegger’s example. Yet Schapiro’s description of this last paintingtellingly betrays his disciplinary limitations. For, so Schapiro writes, ‘the artisthas turned them with their backs to the viewer’ (Shapiro 1994a: 139). Invokingonly an observer’s description, it is surprising to see that Schapiromisconstrues this painting of a pair of shoes, shoes that just happen to beleather sabots or clogs. For if we look at this painting from a hermeneuticphenomenological perspective, we see that Van Gogh places the shoes in thispainting not, as Schapiro claims, in frustrating opposition to (or against) theviewer. Here the shoes are presented as a wearer would find them: these areshoes ready to be worn. To take Schapiro’s point against his prior emphases,these are shoes that could have been Van Gogh’s (or the viewer’s or anysubject’s) own shoes.

But neither this painting of a pair of clogs nor the painting of yellow,hobnailed, encrusted boots matches the description Heidegger gives of aworn pair of leather shoes, not sabots, not hobnailed, not encrusted with mud.To identify the painting in question, of the shoes in question, given the varietyof similar shoes which Van Gogh painted, we further need to attend to Van

Figure 3. Van Gogh, A Pair of Boots, Paris, 1887. The Baltimore Museum of Art. The ConeCollection of Art formed by Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone of Baltimore, Maryland

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Gogh’s paintings and to do that we need to return to the question of the sortof ‘things’ (in Heidegger’s sense of the word) which Van Gogh painted.

Heidegger’s account of the painting not only refers to an identifiablepainting by a famous artist but it was also specifically invoked due to therepresentative and representational character of the shoes in question asHeidegger describes them. This character conforms with Van Gogh’saesthetic, as an aesthetic some scholars, including the later Schapiro himself,regard as consecrational, whose sacral character is unmitigated by namingthis aesthetic that of the extraordinarily ordinary kind: the preternaturallyordinary. Such an aesthetic, representing the ordinary in extremis, does notmean that the ordinary is made banal but rather that it is made strange,unfamiliar, and so given to be seen for the first time as such as the only wayeveryday things, as Heidegger reminds us of their invisibility or withdrawalin use, can be given to be seen. Estranged in angle and dimension or inperspective, in the thick dissonances of the painter’s medium, and in thechoice of painted colour – this ordinary character is obvious in the choice ofthings to be painted as in The Night Cafe, The Potato Eaters, as well as CrowsOver a Wheat Field and his Self-Portrait(s) as well as his Bedroom at Arles. Inother paintings, the preternatural aspect appears in the force of theirpresentation such as in the Cypresses, Starry Night, Irises and Sunflowers. The

Figure 4. Van Gogh, Leather Clogs. Arles (F 607), 1888. Amsterdam, Van Gogh Museum(Vincent Van Gogh Foundation).

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difference between human subjects and the traditional scenes of nature (still-life and landscapes) adumbrates this same focus. None of Van Gogh’spaintings show the perfection or extraordinary precision of everyday thingssuch as the earlier tradition of Dutch painters exemplified by Vermeer and thedifference is more than an encounter between the north and the light andmores of the south in the eyes of a perfectly immortal Dutch master. Insofaras they are emblematic of such a representational everydayness, Van Gogh’sShoes are extraordinarily ordinary. Without the sharp divinity of detail: theyare redolent of the earth which swirls duskily around them, the dullness ofworn leather glowing and highlighted against the dark echo and damp offatigue. The shoes are as plain and as forcefully centred as Durer’s more rusticdrawings that work in the same way to site, situate, institute or found a worldas Heidegger describes the standing efficacy of the temple work: opening aworld and simultaneously setting ‘this world back again on earth, which itselfonly thus emerges as native ground’ (Heidegger 1971: 42. See also Bernasconi1993b).

It is in order to discover the equipmental character of equipment, thenature of equipment, in truth, that Heidegger undertakes what must then beregarded as a properly, if irrecusably hermeneutic, phenomenological analysisof Van Gogh’s painting. The reference is one of convenience for Heideggerwho had declared his project from the start in settling upon a pair of shoes asan example for the sake of its very redundancy. In the context of the lecturecourse on the origin of the work of art, the advantage was deliberatelydidactic: just as everyone knows the painting, everyone knows what shoesare, ‘everyone is acquainted with them’ (Heidegger 1971: 32). But we knowHeidegger too well simply to trust his didactic preludes or concession offamiliarity, particularly where he goes on to suggest the fateful ‘pictorialrepresentation’ of a pair of shoes found in a ‘well-known painting by VanGogh who painted such shoes several times’ (33) to present the reader with afamiliar painting of familiar objects. He thus turns cliche upon cliche. ForHeidegger, the cliche corresponds to the representational equivalent of theobviousness and intimacy of the example: ‘Everyone knows what shoesconsist of’ (33).

The phenomenological continuity of Heidegger’s analysis of the equip-mentality of the shoes qua equipment turns upon and into the same evidentialquality of the obvious – what is made manifest via Heidegger’s earlierphenomenological analysis of things in use in Being and Time. Equipmentrecedes, disappears, withdraws or vanishes from conscious intrusion in use:this is the intentional utility of equipment as such. (One cannot use a hammerin construction and contemplate the hammer qua hammer, as philosophersseem wont to like to do: the preoccupation with hammerness as such wouldget in the way. And as Wittgenstein reminds us in this same context, not onlyphilosophical contemplation but even full grammatical sentences seemequally intrusive). Only when the peasant wears them (whether woman ornot, whether the shoes were the shoes of the artist – or philosopher – asaspiring peasant) ‘are they what they are’. Shoes ‘serve’ or work only whenthey are in use, and when in wearing they are beneath notice, when they donot intrude as such – when they are worn and when they are wearable – andnot when they are contemplated, regarded, or noticed. Until, and of course,

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the artist represents them (and this very use for the artist does matter), asutensil, like the rough beer steins Van Gogh also collected, and also in orderto paint them, in painting the work of art.

Plainly, given this interpretive phenomenological context, on Heideg-ger’s account and in the context of Heidegger’s own early tool analysis, thepainting can be read as yielding manifest access to the equipmental characterof a pair of shoes as such. By bringing himself before the painting, Heideggeris able to trace every aspect of the wearer of the shoe, in the character of wear,in the painting of the leather of the shoe, its look and character, thus retracingthe lost person of the wearer herself, as Heidegger pretends to know herthrough Van Gogh’s painting. The phenomenological analysis does notproceed as a detective works or as the art historian might do. Anti-Platonic,quintessentially non-theoretical, the phenomenologist adverts to the usecharacter of a tool, an item of equipment for beings like ourselves who haveto be, who need to be, shod. For Heidegger, the work of art is in the placewhere truth comes to stand. This perspective on art is opposed to thetraditional aesthetic view of art and hence opposed to the philosophy of artfrom Plato onward. On the traditional view, philosophy does not find ‘truth’in the work of art or in any way coincident with art. Philosophical aestheticsdoes not dispute this perspective, it simply assumes it and drops the focus tothat of the task or rule of judgment. Art and truth are related as negative (art)and positive affirmation (truth). Plato, as a lover of truth, condemns art asillusion and thereby as opposed to truth. And the philosopher of art followssuit, even going as far, as seems patent in Nietzsche’s case, to condemn truthitself for art’s sake.

IV

Van Gogh’s shoes are as morosely frozen as the sepia tone of the photographicimage and infinite reproducibility that was already at work in forever alteringthe face of the working of art (Benjamin 1969). The artistry of Van Goghexemplifies that ideology precisely as it exploits it: all artists are merchants, oftheir products and of themselves. But the truth of art is not to be reduced tothe merchandising impulse exemplifying what Nathalie Heinich (a socialanthropologist of art exploring the limits of Malraux’s characterisation of theworld) analyses as the ‘glory’ of Van Gogh (Heinich 1996), a glorification (orfetishising) of the artist that continues today as much under negative aspositive guises (Koldehoff 2003, Van Gogh Museum 2003). For Heidegger, thetruth of art ‘speaks’ in the work of art as the truth originating in the work,holding as the earth, hyle, or matter of the work of art. It is this, not the formthat announces itself in the duskily enshrined leather of the shoes themselves.This holds no matter, I maintain, whether Van Gogh himself painted them, asSchapiro thinks, after wearing them himself, or whether indeed, as Heideggerseems content to imagine, they were worn by the field workers Van Gogh sooften celebrated.

It is by wearing them that Heidegger’s farmer relates to the shoes and itis the way shoes serve throughout such a lifetime: ‘the peasant woman ismade privy to the silent call of the earth; by virtue of the reliability of theequipment she is sure of her world’ (34). Not nostalgic recollection as

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Schapiro and also Derrida, if differently, would claim, and not via aphenomenological bracketing of an actual pair of shoes, but only via ahermeneutic encounter with the work of art: ‘only by bringing ourselvesbefore Van Gogh’s painting’ can we ‘read’ a life in this way. For – and this isthe reason Heidegger’s approach to the work of art corresponds to aspecifically hermeneutic aesthetics only thus related to Merleau-Ponty’s moreclassically phenomenological aesthetics – Heidegger calls us to attend to whatwe thereby encounter in the presence of the work: ‘This painting spoke’. Andwhat it says tells us ‘what shoes are in truth’ (35). Claimed in this way by ourencounter with the work of art, we are brought before what is as such: ‘VanGogh’s painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasantshoes is in truth’. Thus Heidegger defines the nature of art as ‘the truth ofbeings setting itself to work’ (36).

This claim concerning the work of art as the work of truth is Heidegger’sdynamite of a completely art–philosophical kind, where philosophy sincePlato and through to Nietzsche has always set art in opposition to truth. ForHeidegger: ‘Truth happens in Van Gogh’s painting. This does not mean thatsomething is correctly portrayed, but rather that in the revelation of theequipmental being of the shoes, that which is as a whole – world and earth intheir “counterplay” – attains to unconcealedness’ (56).

But Heidegger’s gambit contra the philosophical tradition is com-pounded by an ambiguity. For us, which is why we wait for the expertjudgment, in order to have ‘value’ the work of art must be a genuine or truework of art. This truth of art thus has to do with its authenticity as art, itsauthentic identity as a genuine work of art. To use Heideggerian terms toarticulate a non-Heideggerian problem, such a ‘free occasioning’ of a genuinework of art would be its true (or authenticable) derivation from an original(authentic) artist. The modern tradition determining true art is preoccupiedwith authenticity, and authenticity (and correlative value) is determined withreference to authority, accurate representation and the proper reception ofaesthetic value-attributions. The art expert assumes the truth or untruth of thework of art as corresponding to its genuine character, its authenticity orinauthenticity. Yet, like the logical truth of science, the aesthetic truth ofmodernity is not Heidegger’s truth: the aletheic occasioning of truth, whichHeidegger names the origin of the work of art.

Heidegger’s challenge to this expert tradition adverts to the mastery ofthe art-work precisely as it is able of itself to elide factitious detail, preciselyas its presence remains ‘as the happening of truth’. In this way, Heidegger’santi- or post-aesthetic perspective offers a hermeneutic phenomenology of artin truth and may yet yield a more vital experience of art as the working of thework upon us (see Gadamer 1986 and, in particular, Jahnig 1977, Babich 1989and Harries 1991.) Thus Heidegger declares the working of the work of artagainst the fetishising ethos of the museum itself, as against the preoccupa-tions proper to art history and the auratic concerns of criticism. ForHeidegger, just as the poem in its own voice can ‘deny’ its author, who theartist ‘is remains unimportant’, the work of art can deny the artist’s ‘personand name’ (65).

The truth Heidegger which restores to art as its proper and ownmoststate is the truth Plato sought to withhold in his charge that the work of art is

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illusion, deception, not truth. Hence Heidegger reverses the refusal of art’struth (which is for the expert nothing but the erring truth and which for thephilosopher is what aletheia means) from the inception of philosophy. ForHeidegger contends that ‘art lets truth originate. Art, founding preserving, isthe sprit that leaps to the truth of what is, in the work’ (77). Thus art ‘by nature[is] an origin’. Art is ‘a distinctive way in which truth comes into being’, thatis to say, ‘becomes historical’. Thus the place of art will be the locus of thecomposition of the true wherever a work comes to be, wherever creators findtheir way, and, perhaps even more importantly, wherever preservers findtheir own place. As much as the artist, qua creator of art, the preserver is co-important, for Heidegger, even the co-originator of the dynamic working ofart as such. Not a correlative counterpart such as that ideal spectator imbuedwith the right/wrong way of ‘appreciating’ a work, that is to say, not via aprogramme of art education or the training of the connoisseur or art historicalexpert, what Heidegger names ‘founding preserving’ is the coeval originationof the work of art itself: ‘To each mode of founding there corresponds a modeof preserving’ (75). So far from a conservative element, the preserver is thusneeded in advance, before the work of art can come into being at all as itsenabling co-condition.

In addition to painting, the expertly named and certified ‘Aeginasculptures in the Munich collection, Sophocles’ Antigone in the best criticaledition’ (40) also offer us remnants or traces of art. But for Heidegger,although the truth of art holds in an historical context, the work of art canonly work in a still real and present world. To note the passing of a world isalso to admit the eclipse of the working power of art otherwise than as a trace.Journeying to the site of the work itself, to meet, as Heidegger did, ‘the templein Paestum or the Bamberg cathedral on its own square’, what we find andwhat that same encounter cannot retrieve is a vanished world, emptied out orlost: ‘the world of the work that stands there has perished’ (40).

The loss of world cannot be undone. Bereft of preservers, the works‘themselves are gone by’ (41). This does not mean that we cannot come toan encounter with works of long past times, but it does mean that weencounter such works as antique, as eclipsed and closed, abandoned anddesolate. The phenomenological description of the Greek temple so impor-tant for the dramatic expression of the strife between earth and worldshows the force of such an eclipsed or vanished world by contrast with theorigin of the work of art. It is the working of the temple that ‘first fitstogether and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those pathsand relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory anddisgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for humanbeing’ (Heidegger 1971: 42).

This world endures only ‘as long as the work is a work’, that is, only ‘aslong as the god has not fled from it’ (Heidegger 1971: 43) does this hold. Forthis reason, what works today in the temple as art can only reveal a world inabeyance, a world utterly lost to us. What remains is a site for travellers andthe increasingly destined locus of a museum. This is not merely so in the tacitwake of forgotten cults (mourned in Nietzsche’s cry: ‘2000 years! – and not asingle new god!’) but in the new world cast by the temple rebuilt, reworkedunder the aegis of preservation. Gadamer’s moment of what he reported as a

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celebratory silence (‘feierliches Schweigen’ (1986: 40)) – a festive mien that mayalso have reflected Gadamer’s own wonderful spirit – gives way to a tacitisolation from not only the everyday world.

Apart from poetry and literature, it is revealing that Gadamer’s aestheticexamples are examples of occasional art events such as opera, concerts,museum exhibitions and even including his examples of play, recalling asthey do the sport events of European soccer matches, rather than, say, chess,as for Wittgenstein or MacIntyre. And what characterises events of culture orsport is their discontinuous punctuation of everyday life.

In the case of the gallery or the museum, we have to do with precincts ofconfined isolation, set apart from the quotidian. By contrast, for the Greek (likethe parallel example of the Bamberg cathedral), the temple belongs to the life ofthe people who built it for the sake of the integrative festive character of life,exactly understood in time as Gadamer describes the quotidian function of thefestival as a sacred punctuation of everyday life. For the successes and failures,birth and death, war and peace of such a people, as Heidegger details it, thetemple is consecrated. When it loses this same central, centering, essentiallysacred and world-gathering focus as a temple for a people dedicated to it, thetemple is deprived of its consecration. Then, although it continues as a trace, aruin, a remnant of this vanished world, although it may be visited on specialoccasion, for tourism or adventure or, more soberly, for the purposes of researchso familiar to us as academics, the temple stands emptied of its character as asite around which time revolves: that is the encounter between mortal beingsand the divine, earth and sky. Nor indeed do other cultural events, such asconcerts or museum visits, offer the occasion for such an encounter as that lostin the origin of the temple work in question, neither for the highly cultured inthe art and customs of the past nor a contemporary enthusiast of the art of thepresent and the world to come.

An example for this is the temple at Bassae, huge and looming buthidden – no accidental juxtaposition – by the mountain approach of the roadone must follow to find it. Today the temple is completely blocked by a hugetenting structure (Figures 5 and 6), the massive steel struts of which vie withthe mountaintop against the sky, eliding in an ever more dramatic way theworld of truth as the world of the temple in truth that Heidegger couldinvoke.

The conservationist’s tenting over of the temple at Bassae outlines theworld of today’s preservers as the curator’s or conservationist’s world, as theworld of the archaeological expert of modern Greece, where the prime naturalresources for development in this land, however ambivalently regarded inthis same modern world, are the remaining structures and objects of Greekantiquity. This is the world of the modern exhibit and this is the world cometo distinctive presence on the Arcadian mountaintop where once one found atemple.

Blocked by a weirdly circus-like structure of ungainly proportions, thecovering tent builds the closed space of modern vanity – a permanenttemporary scaffolding – around the temple: a mindless gesture of affectedprotection from the elements, secluding and so refusing them as the elementswhich the temple was first set up to articulate in the truth of what Heideggercalls Da-sein. Prior to such a conservative blockage, occlusive beyond the

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Figure 5. Temple at Bassae: external approach. Greece, 1998. Author’s Photograph.

Figure 6. Temple at Bassae: internal view. Greece, 1998. Author’s Photograph.

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passing of the antique world itself, the original work of the temple had beenthe work of exposure, a place of wrought encounter between earth and sky,that is the mortal and the divine. After so much antiquity, the tented gestureat Bassae intends to keep the temple safe from the ravages of the light and theair of the industrial world, calculatedly foreclosing the thing which the templebuilders put all their energy and all their resources to assure.

Tented over and so shaded from the sky (Figure 6), the temple at Bassaeillustrates the conservative force of the modern isolation of art in the locus ofthe museum or the tourist exhibition, duly labelled, properly ‘illuminated’ –not so that it may be seen as what it is, but like an old parlour, in an oldfashioned style, so that it may not ‘fade’. The museum as such, the conserver’simpetus, secures and in so doing seals off whatever trace of the temple worldheretofore had remained.

The temple, for Heidegger is not incidentally but essentially the site ofworld-withdrawal and decay, as a world in abeyance or retreat that onlythus can show itself to us in a world without the temple’s cult and thuswithout temples.4 This withdrawal alone shows us what has been lost. ‘Thetemple in its standing there, first gives to things their look and to men theiroutlook on themselves’ (Heidegger 1971: 43). And even where the templestill stands in perfectly preserved glory, under the open sky, this look ofthings and this human outlook are foreclosed. The view of the temple only‘remains open as long as the work is a work’ –that is, as long as the templeis a working or real temple for a real people, only as long as the cult andthe life of the cult remains real: that is, and only, ‘as long as the god has notfled from it’ (43).

We recall that Gadamer’s account of the celebratory aura surrounding theexhibition of one or another recovered treasure of Greek antiquity over thecourse of many years in his regular visits to Athens’ Hellenic Museum,testified to an exactly aletheic moment of revelation. The work, as Gadamersaw it, was brought to light out of its long concealment in the depths of theAegean sea. But for Heidegger, as we have seen, what is thereby restored tosight is not the work itself as it once ‘stood among men’, be they its creatorsor its original preservers as Heidegger speaks of these.

Astonished and wondering, in the silence Gadamer recounts as charac-teristic of such special exhibitions, what we see in the space of a newlydiscovered work is a revelation, a discovery. The sheer act of recovery fromthe sea anticipates the contours of museal conservation: a found artifact, agenuine antiquity, glorious when large enough to attract public attention butof equal importance with the meanest shard for the antiquarian values of thearchaeologist. In Heidegger’s sense, the gesture of recovery is the same as thegesture that covers over only that rather than being brought up from the sea,Bassae is withdrawn from the sky. A similarly revelatory occultation, as thestatue is recovered from the sea, the temple is closed off from the heavens andits setting into the Arcadian mountainscape, the institution of an exhibitionfor the scholar, for the tourist, under the watchful mediation of expertconservancy.

4 See for a discussion of this unsurpassable indigence, Babich 1993, 1989.

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In the same way, when we travel to the site of the temple at Bassae, whatwe encounter is not even the space of disappointment. Left open to the skyand on its original locus, as in Heidegger’s examples of ‘the temple inPaestum or the Bamberg cathedral on its square’, if even the pristine temple,if even the Christian church is occluded as the locus of revelation of a worldfor us, then what is to be found on the heights at Bassae is precisely not thelocus of an emptied world. We do not find a world in eclipse. Howeverparadoxically, the conserving force of the tenting enables only the withdrawalof such world-revealing occlusion.

The struggle between earth and world might have remained as theencounter with the elements themselves. The same after thousands of years:the wind and the dry air, the trees and their purchase on the rocks, the earthitself, the sky, the passage of day and night, all that is there still speaks to thevisitor. But in the absence of a world of preservers, consecrated to the cult ofthe temple built to situate the crossing of the mortal and the divine, the templework does not and cannot speak. In this sense, conservation elides and doesnot correspond to what Heidegger would name the preservers’ task; we havelost even the ruined testimony that once, at least, ‘such a thing stood’ anddrew the space of destiny around it.

Like the lions that for so many millennia stood as silent witnesses tothe long military and mythic history of Delos which have now been shiftedto a more commodious housing in a climate-controlled, duly monitoredmuseum, all under the authenticating observance of the expert, Bassae hasbecome a tourists’ resource, a world-historical resource. And it may be thatall such things ought to be displaced for the good purposes of research andcultural preservation. But maybe, as Nietzsche says, whatever is poised tofall needs no more than a helping hand. Pondering death, pondering theessence of Christianity and pagan light, Poussin made an enigma ofallegory: et in Arcadia ego.

And in Arcadia I visited a temple, famous in antiquity, celebrated byPausanias for its symmetry, recounted to me by friends who spoke of theirvisits. But, like the mystery of Poussin’s tomb, in Arcadia I too found thatwhat I sought was not there.

Arcadia is like nothing one imagines. Nothing apart from themountains.

Acknowledgments

For encouragement and helpful suggestions, I am indebted to Holger Schmidand to Robert Bernasconi as well as two anonymous reviewers. Thanks arealso due to the editors, Mark Millington and Richard H. King.

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