Farida Youssef

It is more essential for the listener to please the Beethoven
symphony than for the Beethoven symphony to please him.[1]

Today, man both dominates and is losing nature. The general disregard for the environment is a consequence of our growing industrialist and capitalist ventures. This crisis has also brought on a genuine concern for nature in many fields. The environment is a prevalent theme in the works of several contemporary artists who see art as a domain for eco-criticism and for talking about ecology. Is it enough though for these works to talk about nature? How do we experience these artworks? For artistic eco-criticism to be valuable, it need not only talk about the environment but also deliver this concern through our encounter with it. In other words, its aesthetics needs to be informed by ethics, so that criticism becomes an emphatic self-reflection. To find that approach is to look at the experience an artwork lends and allows. The conditions and possibilities that make experience possible. It is to go inside the experience of an artwork.

Now, the Frankfurt School, has been concerned with man’s severed relationship to nature. Since the 1930s, one of its key thinkers, Theodor Adorno, has written about the cognitive roots of this violent relation. Adorno is thinking about experience. That is the story he wants to tell. His work presents a critical examination of the conditions that led to an impoverished experience, those ’reflections from damaged life.’ If concepts led to the domination of nature, perhaps their absence might do us good. Distance is a key term that translates this reversal of conceptual thinking. Aesthetics is one domain where we see this in practice. In Aesthetic Theory, he analyses what it takes for an ethical approach to aesthetics to be possible. Distance becomes not only a theory of knowledge for artworks but also shapes the beholder’s aesthetic experience. Distance unfolds to deliver a subject who is less dominant and more accepting. These artworks might not have a ‘green label’ because they deal with nature in content. Yet, looking at them through the experience they present, especially how that experience happens, is important.

Distance: A Theory of Knowledge for Artworks

**Florian Slotawa, Hotel Citta di Parenzo, Triest, Room 307, from the series *Hotelarbeiten, installation,* 1999.**

Adorno wants to rescue experience. Aesthetics is an occasion for subverting the subject’s mastery and reliance on concepts which actually kill experience.

What can the subject know? Man uses reason to dominate nature. The subject approaches the world around him by way of concepts, capturing objects into neat categories. That is what Adorno calls identity thinking. It makes the unequal equal and debases difference into sameness. This is the object as a commodity, which exists to be used and manipulated by the subject, reducing it to simple functions. In Negative Dialectics, Adorno explains that ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder’,[2] that concepts cannot fully accommodate objects. Now, nonidentity names the relationship between subject and object whereby the object does not fit under the concept and category proclaimed by the subject. Perhaps we can illustrate this point by looking at Florian Slotawa’s work. The German contemporary artist addresses the problem of excess for our ecology. He builds installations from objects, as varied as cutlery, washing machines, lamps, to the entire contents of rooms. In the series Hotelarbeiten (1998-99) Slotawa re-arranges the contents of various hotel rooms, photographs his intervention, then he brings things back to where they were. None of the objects we see in these installations perform the functions they were made for. They cannot be identified through the categories we associate them with. Instead, they exceed them. As if Slotawa’s artworks were displaying the remainder that use and function concepts repress. In Besitzarbeit I: Gesamtbesitz (1996), we see an inventory of the artist’s apartment. From the smallest to the biggest objects. Perhaps the excessive form that this work takes is an illustration of that remainder as well, which usually goes unnoticed.

**Floran Slotawa, *Besitzarbeit I Gesamtbesitz*, installation 1996. Image: Künste Hamburg**

Against a logic which debases the object, Adorno promotes the preponderance of the object. The practice of nonidentity is an aesthetic exercise whose end is taming the subject and giving primacy to the object. Adorno reminds us that we must be clowns when we approach objects.

The un-naive thinker knows how far he remains from the object of his thinking, and yet he must always talk as if he had it entirely. This brings him to the point of clowning. He must not deny his clownish traits, least of all since they alone can give him hope for what is denied him.[3]

**Florian Slotawa, *SG.08.05*, installation, 2017. Exhibition view Galerie Nordenhake, Stockholm**

Considering Slotawa again, he exercised this clownish playfulness by being attentive to the objects in his installations. He uses his imagination to re-create a world that distorts our concepts. Then, he places a trashcan on top of a dishwashing machine, as if the two were naturally connected. What these associations manifest however is the denied possibilities, the invisible qualities of objects that could, if only we’d let them, infuse the world. Nonidentity, as an aesthetic practice, rescues the invisible remainder, so that ‘objects would start talking under the lingering eye.’[4] Slotawa’s artwork itself enacts Adorno’s primacy of the object, not because it is made of objects, but because it makes the nonidentical a principle for our relationship to the artwork. To clarify this point, we can compare Slotawa’s work to a readymade. The latter are much too preoccupied with raising a paradox of an object turned artwork. It’s a serious question about the nature of art. However, Slotawa’s installations use a different paradox, of an object turned concept, and this brings out a question about life and experience. These works usher the defamiliarising nonidentical which pairs with the clowning playfulness. Only then can these installations usher something about denied experiences, the remainder and the nonidentical. Adorno reminds us, ‘Art is magic delivered from the lie of being truth.’[5] In other words, Slotawa’s installation of dishwashers is delivering them from the lie of washing.

Artworks unfold by leaving their own remainders. But what are these remainders? For Adorno, artworks are not hermeneutical objects meant for contemplation and interpretation. They are also nonidentical by keeping knowledge, the conceptual, at a distance.

Art is preemptively mediated by its as-if character. If it were completely intuitable, it would become part of the empirical world that it resists… modern art has undermined the dogma of intuitability… art militates against the concept.[6]

Rather, artworks are like puzzles and enigmas whose task is to always keep their enigmatic character alive. ‘It is their incomprehensibility that needs to be understood’ says Adorno.[7] If an artwork ceased to be enigmatic, that would imply its reduction to concept. Artworks resist by being enigmatic, ciphers that keep the reader at a distance from the solution. The nonidentical artwork bothers us because neither can it fit into the concepts we so confidently mustered together, nor does it want to. It keeps hiding. For Adorno, ‘artworks say something and in the same breath conceal it.’[8] This cheeky distance decides the possibility and the very conditions of knowledge. His aesthetics is a theory of knowledge that purports the unknown. The enigmatic enacts distance as the shaping principle of the artwork.

To challenge mastery is to champion distance. He wants us to be clowns which is to be as far away as possible from our rational selves. Distance, as a shaping principle of Adorno’s aesthetics, also forms the artwork. It is enacted as the enigmatic character of the work which dissolves a subject habituated to the confidence of his conceptual capacities.

Mimesis: A Nonidentical Representation of Nature

To bring back this conversation around the theme of art and ecology, we can look at the genre of still lifes or nature morte. From the forefront, they seem like Adorno’s prime example of commodified artworks or bourgeois art. He even criticises them directly in Aesthetic Theory. They seem to be only copies of nature. What could be enigmatic about them? Where is the nonidentical in them? Do they keep us at a distance? Yes, through their treatment of objects and, paradoxically, their mimetic behaviour.

**Adriaen Coorte, *Still Life with Asparagus, oil on canvas,* 1697. Image: Rijksmuseum**

While many of the seventeenth-century European still lifes were celebrations of a leisure society, there are a few exemptions. These demonstrate a serious commitment to the object, the preponderance of which is birthed from distance. In some of the still lifes of the Spanish Juan Sánchez Cotán and the Dutch Adriaen Coorte, the object is painted alone. For instance, the latter’s Still Life with Asparagus (1697) is exactly what its title says it is. When the objects are in a group, especially in the case of Sánchez Córtan, they are presented separately, not as an assemblage like in his Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber (1602). Again, the title does not add anything conceptual to the painting. In each of these cases, the object is at a standstill. This is also Coorte’s gesture towards the asparagus. In this small painting, there is simply asparagus. Not the one we plant, not the one we cook and eat. Even the size of the painting makes it feel like a fragment, incomplete. To enact the Fig stillness of the genre, Coorte also suspends our definition of the asparagus. He asks us to accept a fragmented and temporary and representation of the plant. Because of this, we do not revert to tautology. Now, Adorno’s negative dialects sides with the object, the particular. In fact, in Minima Moralia, he looks through small things like toys or children’s stories.[9] The choice of writing in aphorisms, a form of fragmentary writing, also champions the particular and the small. Each of them is like a thought image. His attentive Benjamin-like microscopic gaze, suspends definition to produce its own images at a standstill. Just as Adorno was caught up in the toy shop, we are caught up in the Coorte’s asparagus.

Interestingly, Adorno does not narrate or describe the relationship between subject and artwork in discursive terms. Aesthetic Theory as a philosophical project itself resists the return to identity. In fact, Adorno lists very few examples of artworks that encapsulate what he means. And rightly so, he is the first to keep his distance. He suggests mimesis as an expression of an encounter that is thoroughly shaped by his concept of distance. Mimesis, Greek for imitation, is a process in which the subject is transformed as it imitates. Think of the child imitating his parents, or an actor taking on the role of Hamlet, or even an audience member watching Hamlet, he becomes like that other entity. These moments of genuine engagement are mimetic. Thinking through this almost theatrical term allows us to flesh out the intricacies of Adorno’s interest in experience. He invites us to explore an encounter that is itself nonidentical.

If artworks are not going to say something through their content, how else would they express it? They speak through their form. The latter registers the fractures and experiences of the past, mediates them rather than represents them. This is a second instance where the trope of mimesis comes to introduce an expression of the encounter. In a basic understanding of the term, it is imitation. When children learn by imitating, they imitate gestures before understanding the meaning behind them. For Adorno however, he is concerned with qualifying this assimilation, making sure it remains non-appropriative, nonidentical. Autonomous art does not seek to represent or imitate the tragedies and suffering. Instead, it only gestures towards the form of these experiences. Presenting itself as a recollection which starts with the recognition of a similarity, mimesis aims to remind us of what was lost. ‘While art does not reproduce those clouds, dramas nonetheless attempt to enact the dramas staged by clouds’.[10] Mimesis is therefore the experience of denied experience. Mimesis is, literally, a nonidentical representation. Like a dizzying experience of a déjà vu that makes us pause.

Now, still lifes are, at their most basic, realistic depictions of life. They are imitative in many ways, trying to keep to the dimensions and colours we would see in real life. In French, they are even called nature morte, literally ‘dead nature/life’, an oxymoron which might describe Adorno’s reservations about conceptual thinking which itself kills life and experience. Can a still life compare to this déjà vu? Perhaps the still life’s imitation can be seen in light of Adorno’s mimesis which seeks a nonidentical representation. ‘Art is not nature… but it wants to keep the promise of nature.’[11] There is a distinction Adorno draws between nature and second nature. Conceptual thinking has meant a separation from nature and its experience. Second nature is a redemption of nature, the promise that art wants to keep by not directly representing nature.

Authentic artworks, which hold fast to the idea of reconciliation with nature by making themselves second nature, have consistently felt the urge, as if in need of a breath of fresh air, to step outside themselves.[12]

**Juan Sánchez Cotán, *Quince, Cabbage, Melon, and Cucumber,* oil on canvas, 1602. Image: San Diego Museum of Art**

A nature morte is like second nature, stepping outside itself. That is all what art can aspire too. If it sought nature directly, it would be an iteration of conceptual thinking. Instead, it must exercise distance and step outside itself. Then, the mimesis of nature becomes nonidentical. The austerity present in the works of Coorte and Sánchez Córtan does the same. It is imitation at a remove. While the melon and quince share the colours of those we encounter in the fields, their removal from that context brings forward a different perspective. By making the sense of displacement central to the artwork, the artists acknowledge that this not man’s attempt to hold life still. Rather, it points to at the experience of nature as damaged life. In fact, the table on which the asparagus is placed has several cracks. Far from copying, the artwork ‘incorporates nature’s wounds’ to avoid a fetishsim of nature.[13]

The still life keeps the promise of nature. Its mimesis is representation at a remove. It makes the encounter between subject and artwork itself nonidentical. ‘If a life fulfilled its vocation directly, it would miss it.’[14] To encounter or experience things directly would be missing them. There is an aesthetic distance at work that makes an encounter with nature possible in a non-dominating way.

Stillness: An Ethics of Aesthetics

How do we behave during the encounter? What is the relationship between such an artwork marked by distance and a subject whose identical impulse is still alive? What happens in this aesthetic experience? What is this experience of denied experience?

Aesthetics encourages a heightened appreciation of the world we lost. In fact, mimesis, as a nonidentical representation, makes for a meaningful encounter between artwork and subject, and makes for dynamic interpretations. As mentioned before, Adorno laments man’s mastery and appropriation of nature. These are based on a clear separation of the two. Now, another possible model for the relationship between man and nature is dialectics. The German thinker’s primacy of the object ushers in the interconnectedness between subject and object. Mimesis also reflects art’s attentiveness to the object, an openness to the other. This intersubjectivity is

the attempt to recreate, through gesture and overall attitude, a state of affairs in which the relation of similarity, that is of relatedness [similarity] between subject and object, was prevalent, rather than the antithetical separation of the two that we have today.[15]

As a child imitates, there stops to be a difference between him and the person he is imitating. This ‘overall attitude’ which Adorno mentions above an openness towards and engagement with the other. A thoroughly intersubjective encounter because it is delivered through a qualitatively different aesthetic experience. Then, and ‘under patient contemplation artworks begin to move.’[16] We encounter the object as subject, like our encounter with the asparagus or the washing machine.

Adorno’s description of aesthetic experience is also very vivid. He speaks of the experience as a shudder. In Aesthetic Theory, the shudder is the feeling of being shaken, like having goose bumps.[17] This description of the experience is not only bodily, but also cognitive. If consumer art distracts, authentic art can shock. Its enigmas leave us without understanding and this is what actually shocks, shudders, the subject. This premises his dissolution, ‘the moment in which recipients forget themselves and disappear into the work’,[18] a subversion of his mastery. Now, his concepts are irrelevant, and this is the moment he becomes conscious of that. More importantly, the shudder allows the subject to be touched by the other which he had once repressed and forgotten. In other terms, the shudder is the subject's capacity to be touched by the reality of the denied experiences.

It is important to consider the aesthetic experience of the shudder as a corrective capacity or a disposition that the subject acquires, amending his previous faults. The shudder is the consequence of the subject’s openness made possible by art’s mimetic comportment. If man had repressed his fear of nature through rationality and domination, art is the domain that preserves the shudder and reminds him of his fear, but from an aesthetic distance. Hence mimesis’s role. It allows the subject not to experience nature directly, for that would be representation, but rather to experience the lost experience of nature. The shudder humiliates the subject. He cannot resort to conceptually mastering the artwork. He has learned to keep his distance. Now, he enters the encounter with the artwork, openly and humbly.

This humility as a mark of perception and cognition presents itself as a stillness. Now, artworks are always at a remove from empirical reality. They are enigmatic. An enigma stops a train of thought and adds a pause. Appearance is the visual manifestation of that temporal pause. There is a standstill. Here, Adorno borrows directly from Benjamin’s concept of images as ‘dialectic at a standstill.’

If, as images, artworks are the persistence of the transient, they are concentrated in appearance as something momentary. To experience art means to become conscious of its immanent process as an instant at a standstill.[19]

Elsewhere in Aesthetic Theory he even calls artworks fireworks. Indeed, ‘they are things whose power it is to appear.’[20] They are also enigmas. Here, Adorno develops their enigmaticalness by insisting that they are appearance. They are momentary, have something fragmentary about them. Here again, we are reminded of the size of Coorte’s still lifes, like Still Life with Asparagus which is roughly the size of an A4 paper. As if something was frozen in time and just stood still. In return, these images are set by a fleeting motion and arrest or shock thought to a standstill. Unable to resort to familiar concepts and go on thinking, thought just stands still.

A nature morte does not sing the song of affirmation and identity that Adorno despises. The genre also encourages stillness. There is a different pedagogy of perception, owed to the still life’s treatment of objects. In the case of Coorte and Sánchez Córtan, the hyperrealism with which they depict the fruits and vegetables does not make them particularly desirable. These were not made for the bourgeois life. There is a lot of intensity and sobriety in these depictions, given how dark the background is. They are distant and inaccessible. These artworks ask us to look at them with a more open mind; perhaps there is more to the asparagus than meets the eye is the mindset Coorte invites in his study. It amounts to a beholder at a standstill. Its experience penetrates thinking and gives a sort of somatic thinking where thought itself feels its suspension from interpretation. Here is the value of the still life. It is that stillness of thought. The stillness of the object is also the stillness of the subject. That is also the practice of Adorno’s negative dialectics.

Contemplation without violence, the source of all the joy of truth, presupposes that he who contemplates does not absorb the object into himself: a distant nearness.[21]

Stillness, the suspension of interpretation is defined in terms of distance. Adorno also defines this stillness as ‘without violence’, it marks the ethical dimension that belies distance. It creates an occasion for us to liken ourselves to a state of openness, acceptance, and incompleteness. This aesthetic distance is an exercise of patience. More open to the object, these works make us better subjects when we stand in front of them.

To rescue experience and retrieve our lost relationship with nature, we must learn to keep our distance. Adorno’s aesthetics is a practicum for this theory. The artworks discussed above while not claiming to be about the environment keep the promise of nature and Adorno’s promise of distance. Their preponderance of the object is a first instance that marked enigma as a suspension of concepts. These enigmatic artworks themselves function by being nonidentical representation through mimesis. Like a déjà vu, they are always at a remove from nature or reality. Then, in the experience of such artworks, we are also at a remove. Our concepts at a standstill, we might shudder. That is a good thing.

Authentic or nonidentical artworks give a different experience. They imbue us with a sense of what it would mean to be ethical. When we see them, we see a representation at a remove, the nonidentical in action. The stillness of a still life teaches us what Adorno means by suspending our concepts, putting them at a standstill. Distance, as the artwork’s theory of knowledge, mandates our critical self-reflection where ethics and aesthetics inform one another. Adorno gives primacy to the artwork. He suggests this ‘distanced nearness’ as a practice or exercise that will form the self-reflective subject, building patience or stillness, with the artwork. Only then can we become a better listener and please the Beethoven symphony.

June 2024, Cairo

Farida Youssef is a writer and curator based in Cairo. She is interested in the value of spatial theory for artistic inquiries. As a Merut fellow at the British Museum she researched the Egyptian collection through the lens of contemporary philosophy. In 2023, she curated ‘The Valley of Walls’ for apexart, an exhibition about the artistic intervention of four artists in the apartment of Egypt’s previous minister of irrigation. She holds an MA in European Philosophy with distinction from UCL.

[1] Theodor Adorno, Nachgelassene Schriften, vol. 3, Current of Music, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, forthcoming).

[2] Theodor Adorno, Negative Dialectics (London: Routledge, 1990), 5.

[3] Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 14.

[4] Ibid, 28.

[5] Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. by E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), 143.

[6] Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 96.

[7] Ibid., 118.

[8] Ibid., 20.

[9] See Minima Moralia, 18, 20, 146.

[10] Aesthetic Theory, 71.

[11] Ibid., 85.

[12] Ibid., 63.