Margherita Moscardini

ART AND DIALECTICS (1971)

Language is the first and last structure of madness.
Michel Foucault

Late modernist art criticism has for some time placed all its emphasis on art as an order of particular things, objects that exist by themselves removed from what surrounds them. Art as a distinct thing is not supposed to be affected by anything other than itself. Critical boundaries tend to isolate the art object into a metaphysical void, independent from external relationships such as land, labor and class. For instance, a painting may be said to have the quality of “openness”, when in fact it is only representing openness. One might as well tell a prisoner facing a life sentence that he is free. The freedom is metaphysical, or in art critical terms “esthetic”. A shrewd esthete can turn a prison into a palace with the aid of words- one has only to read a Jean Genet novel to see that.
Dialectical language offers no such esthetic meanings, nothing is isolated from the whole- the prison is still a prison in the physical world. No particular meaning can remain absolute or ideal for very long. Dialectics is not only the ideational formula of thesis- antithesis- synthesis forever sealed in the mind, but an on-going development. Natural forces, like human nature, never fit into our ideas, philosophies, religions, etc. In the Marxian sense of dialectics, all thought is subject to nature. Nature is not subject to our systems. The old notion of “man conquering nature” has in effect boomeranged. As it turns out the object or thing or word “man” could be swept away like an isolated sea shell on a beach, then the ocean would make itself known. Dialectics could be viewed as the relationship between the shell and the ocean. Art critics and artists have for a long time considered the shell without the context of the ocean.

Margherita Moscardini is an artist

www.margheritamoscardini.com