When we first started college we were given a number of texts to read for future seminars. I was excited to start reading, until I came across Theodore Adorno (cue scary music). His writing seemed almost impenetrable. I spent quite some time re-reading sentences and coming up at a loss! My art theory knowledge could certainly be improved upon so I persevered and decided to learn a little more about this peculiar writer.
Born in Germany in 1903, Adorno became part of the Franklin School of Critical thinking. His contemporaries included Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer and Enrst Bloch. They all had strong associations with Freudian and Marxist thinking. Adorno became known for his work in areas of sociology, critical theory and musicology. Generally his writings focus on the Arts, which he viewed as a vehicle for indirectly thinking about and discussing established types of cultural thought. Contrasting this, he saw the cultural industry, which turned art into commodities, as a means by which critiques of society were neutralized. He is essentially a utopian thinker.
The piece of writing we examined was called “Aesthetic Theory”. After a few pages you realise he spends most of his time talking about the same thing, when I pointed this revelation out to my seminar tutor she laughed at me and said, “What do you expect, he is a philosopher!” Hmmm.
Aside from the philosophical repetition, I began to understand his thoughts little by little. Adorno felt that through our interaction with an artwork (be it visual arts or music) we see it move, develop and live. It is more than a static object when we immerse ourselves in it. He believed in the processual qualities of an artwork. He believed that all art works are going through a process between the whole and their parts.
“Artworks synthesize ununifiable, non identical elements that grind away at each other; they truly seek the identity of the identical and the non identical processually because even their unity is only an element and not the magical formula of the whole…. Even objectified the work remains a developing process by virtue of the propensities active in it”
Considering, in my own work I am very interested in the idea of process and the making and unmaking of artworks I found much of his writing poignant and relevant. On that note I shall leave you with the one line that is uncrackable. I will buy you lunch if you know what he is talking about….
“That whereby art’s existence is constituted is itself dynamic as an attitude toward objectivity that both withdraws from and takes up a stance toward it and in this stance maintains objectivity transformed.”
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